Summer Architectural Design Studio in Florence, Italy (Florence)

6 units

Open to all WashU undergraduate students, this immersive architectural design studio brings students to Florence, Italy, and invites them to use the city itself as their primary site of investigation for a creative, research-driven design project. Florence is a place where living culture and deep history overlap—where daily life unfolds within an environment shaped by centuries of architecture, art, and design. Through exploring the city, recording observations, and working across drawing, photography, printmaking, and physical modeling, students engage Florence as a dynamic laboratory for experimentation and discovery. The studio welcomes students from architecture and other fields, offering all participants the opportunity to interpret the city in architectural terms through their own disciplinary lens. While the studio's thematic prompt changes annually, all iterations share core aims: to analyze the city through on-site study; to investigate how place, history, and culture shape the built environment; and to consider how past and future coexist within architectural imagination. Students complete design studies and a final project that synthesizes their research, fieldwork, and creative exploration. Excursions in Florence and across Italy introduce significant examples of contemporary and historical architecture, art, and design. By the end of the course, students produce a cohesive body of work that reflects how the city of Florence in transformation—shaped by its history, inhabited in the present, and imagined for the future.