Northwood Ravin Sponsored Research Partnership

With the generous support of Northwood Ravin, a leading multi-family development firm, we have embarked upon a 3 year pilot study involving Sponsored Studios & Research Internships. This partnership will provide architecture and/or urban design students with significant scholastic and professionally relevant research experiences.

As a sponsored research initiative, the research internship and the sponsored design studio will address emerging issues related to multi-family urban housing through case studies and speculative design proposals for innovative local urban housing models. The year-long (academic calendar) research internship will employ one graduate architecture student as a “project manager” who will work in concert with the Director of the CBL and a representative of Northwood Ravin in order to plan (fall), oversee and manage (spring), and document the pilot study and associated studios.

The semester-long research and design studio will address research, analysis, conceptual/schematic design, preliminary programming and/or guideline development, and preparation of reports and/or presentations. Areas of research and design activities may include:

lifestyle, cultural and demographic trends shaping residential design;
precedent studies focused upon innovative multifamily housing developments world-wide;
analysis of this data in support of housing programming and/or prototype development;
the development of models (both physical and virtual) for use in qualitative and quantitative analysis (surveys, interviews, etc.);
development of schematic architectural and site designs (2 and 3-d, both physical and virtual);
and the development of reports and/or presentation documents.

Topics such as these will enable our students and faculty to address increasingly important research questions focused upon Charlotte’s urban needs as they relate to larger national and global contexts.

The resulting research may result in a number of documents (such as reports, monographs for publication, speculative design proposals, etc.) of both practical value to Northwood Ravin and faculty associated with the City.Building.Lab.