ARCH 595

This course introduces students to a broad range of materials used in architectural and engineering design. The course is organized as an integrated study of material properties, performance, processing and shape, and cost. Special emphasis will be given to minimizing environmental impacts as a design objective. Materials selection for a project is treated as an optimization problem. The methodology of material/process selection is implemented in a software package that hosts an extensive material database and includes ecological information. Design examples will be drawn from those related to the built environment.