ENVD Expands to Urban Studio

This spring, Assistant Professor Eilís Finnegan is leading seven ENVD students through a series of upper-level courses that allowed the students to expand what they’ve learned in Auburn to a new location.

“When I first asked students to share their goals for the semester, every one of them said they wanted to feel like a true Birmingham resident,” Finnegan said. “Since that first day, they’ve immersed themselves in the city—meeting with community leaders and policymakers, attending invited film screenings, developing design proposals for local partners, trying as many restaurants in town as they can and even hosting game nights at The William. They’ve truly poured themselves into this experience and made the most of every opportunity.”

The students are taking four courses at Urban Studio this spring that fall under ENVD’s Scenographies unit—a lens of design that blends physical and digital translations with an emphasis on crafting environments and spaces through multimedia storytelling, immersive world building and advanced design representation. The students focus on spatial principles and explore how environments shape experiences—now expanding those concepts in an urban context.

In the Civic Futures 01 course, which is supported by the Morris Fund for Design Arts, students are partnering with the Railroad Park Foundation to develop deployable spatial prototypes for celebrating the design and programming of the park. This work is expanded in the Civic Futures 02 course, in which students create physical and digital representations of speculative systems throughout the city of Birmingham.

In addition to a professional practice and portfolio design course, the students are also taking a special topics seminar with local developer Matt Leavell, who is adjunct faculty with the Urban Studio third-year architecture students. In this course, the students go out and about through the neighborhoods of Birmingham to gain first-hand observation of the city.

This summer, six more students from Auburn’s main campus will join six of the students currently in Birmingham to complete their ENVD capstone studio.

“Being part of the first group of ENVD students at Urban Studio has been such an exciting opportunity, and getting to work alongside in an urban setting with incredible partners like the Railroad Park Foundation has made this the best decision I could have made for my education,” said Kim Ha, a student currently studying in Birmingham and is staying to complete her capstone course. “The design opportunities and collaborations here in Birmingham have made for a truly rich and rewarding semester that I am so grateful to have been a part of.”

During the initial launch years, the ENVD program—which is accelerated into six semesters—will only hold courses in Birmingham during the spring and summer terms, with some courses available to Urban Studio Architecture cohorts in the Fall.

“The expansion of the ENVD program into Birmingham presents students and faculty with a unique opportunity to deepen interdisciplinary design within the School while advancing the Urban Studio’s ‘living laboratory’ model,” Finnegan said. “As students continue to develop work that engages the narrative, ecological and material richness of Birmingham through tactile worldbuilding, they help position the city as an active medium—one that invites layered forms of storytelling, critical inquiry and an expanded approach to design practice.”