DISC-UC Berkeley Summer Program
This past summer I spent 5 weeks at Berkeley in the UC Berkeley DISC Architecture program. I met some awesome people, learned a great deal, and had a lot of laughs. Here are some thoughts about it.
DISC is an interdisciplinary program run by the Berkeley School of Environmental design. It takes students from all over the world with different educational experiences and for five weeks teaches architecture and urban studies concepts. Each DISC program revolves around an urban problem that the Bay Area region is facing. This year, the program looked at the growing housing crisis and how it is affecting the Bay. In response, our class was divided up into groups to create transit oriented developments around BART stations, the local transit system. Throughout the program we learned ways of looking at this problem, tools used to solve it, and finally how to present solutions in understandable and persuasive ways.
The class was divided up into three parts, all of which revolve around our project. We had lecturers four times a week, workshops where we learned how to use different softwares, and studio work in which we worked on our projects. The lecturers were both inspiring and informative, and included local experts in the region such as the host of the podcast 99% invisible, and professors who both taught at Berkeley while working at impressive studios in San Francisco. The workshops were informative as well, but most of the learning occurred in the studio work.
Studio work was where it all happened. I got to work with two incredibly smart ladies, one from North Carolina, the other from Mumbai, India. It must be understood that I am not an architecture student. I have some aspirations of becoming one, but my knowledge of the subject was almost zero. That was the same of half my class. The other half of the class was at least in their third year of architecture school. Thank the good lord I got put with these guys, as they may have carried my uneducated rear more than once.
We started our project by learning how to and conducting site analysis on the station we were going to build the development on. This included looking at factors such as the slope of the site a where all the major building and infrastructure is located, as well as looking at the neighborhood as a whole; the average density, where the roads are, how high are the buildings, etc. We used all this information to create several different scenarios that we thought could work, and then tested these scenarios with possible events that could occur. For example, how would the site react to a housing crisis. From this we picked a scenario we wanted to continue with, and started to create a housing development based off that scenario. Over the course of the week, we would present our development to our professors for critique on both the development and how we presented it. By the end of the five weeks, we had a development that we were pretty proud of.
Big thanks to the DISC program leaders and to UC Berkeley for having me this summer. To the right you can find the three posters that we used to present our development, as well as a few photos from my time there. I will definitely miss my time there.
