I started teaching in the fall a year ago at the College of Architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology.

You can find me at my office, located in the lower level of Crown Hall, room 14d.
Office hours: by appointment. Email Address: charles@iit.edu

Teaching

The big "premiere" this fall is the Hong Kong Studio, that Jeanne Gang and myself are co-teaching.

In the fall, I teach a seminar entitled "Process and Concepts" that explores the process of design in an interdiciplinary way.The seminar draws upon the research that I did while studying in Nancy, France and at MIT. The seminar is meant to be a learning experience driven by inquiry and research; beyond reading and discussing texts, students in the seminar research issues they perceived as significant to the design process by setting up and running experiments. We read a little about architects' introspection of their design process, but mostly we enlarge our horizon by engaging texts from cognitive science/psychology, philosophy, computer science, literature, etc. Some of these text help us reflect on scientific methods of acqiring a knowledge of the design process.

The seminar's web page enable us to pursue our relection beyond the discussion in class.We have guests from France and theUS, both from outside and inside the College of Architecture that participate either directly or remotely, by the mean of a discussion board, to our discussion.

In the spring, I am teaching ARC443 "Ecology, Sustainability, Site" to the first year students of the Master of Architecture, program 3.The class is centered around the notion of environment, which we apprehend from both its physical and its cultural dimensions.

Last year, I taught the 3rd year undergraduateStudio together with Tom Brock and Mark Schendel. The studio explored steel in the fall semester and concrete in the spring.

Before teaching...

I am a French architect born in1963, I studied at the l' Ecole d' Architecture de Nancy (EAN), where I was awarded my professional degree, D.P.L.G, with honors in 1990. As a student, I took part in a one-semester exchange program with the University of Miami, Florida. While still at school I was a founding partner of a company providing computer-aided measured drawings and associated databases services for facility management and also distributing and teaching CAD software.

After graduation, I joined the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) in Paris and worked there as a designer for 7 ½ years. The projects I collaborated on are the "Cite Internationale" in Lyon, the "Danton" project in La Defense, Paris and the Daimler-Benz "Potsdamer Platz" project in Berlin. I worked on the Potsdamer Platz Project from the time of the competition in 1992 until its completion in 1998. In the period 1995-1998, together with a small team, I was the architect in charge of a 15,600 square meters Convertible Imax Theater, restaurants & retail building. You can see some images of that project.
At RPBW, I also participated in other projects like the "Stadium of France" competition, the "Seguin Island" in Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris, former home of the Automobiles Renault factories, and the design for the new RPBW's office. Additionally, I conducted independent research/collaboration on a proposal for a new covered market and its exteriors spaces, I lectured on "Movie Theaters of the Future" at the first Colloquia of the European Institute of Cinema (in collaboration with my colleague Misha Kramer). I also prepared text and graphics material for an article [NA] on the use of computer at RPBW for a Spanish architectural magazine.

In 1998, with the Berlin Potsdamer Platz completed, I decided to leave the Renzo Piano Building Workshop to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joining the Design Technology research group at MIT's Department of Architecture. My research focused on design inquiry issues, in particular how new technologies permeate the design studio and on the role of the body in the design process. I received my Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS) in June 2000.

Prior to joining IIT, my teaching experience consisted of educational assistant positions in high schools and teaching assistant positions in descriptive geometry in Nancy and in studio at all 3 levels of the Master of Architecture at MIT. As service to the academic community, in spring 2000 I served on the admission committee for the SMArchS program. I have been an invited guest juror at Harvard GSD, Boston Architectural Center and MIT.

My research/teaching interests include design inquiry, design issues in sustainability, construction and tectonics.

© Patrick Charles, 2001