Student Work

Course Description

Tyler Sprague/Mitsuhiro Kanada

Course Description

This is the 2020 offering of the Barry Onouye Endowed Studio, highlighting the intersection of architecture and structures. With the visiting endowed Chair, Mitsuhiro Kanada, this studio will explore the culture and use of a material common to both American and Japanese contexts: cedar. Cedar has powerful significance as part of a natural landscape, as a cultural material, as a part of communal life, and carries a long tradition of craft on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. As such, cedar can become a language of a cross- cultural conversation linking different places across time, and contributing to our broader understanding of architecture, structure, culture, technique and material processes. The work in this studio will still bring these larger themes in to the design, fabrication, treatment and connection of cedar elements into large scale structures.