Christopher Bardt has over 25 years of experience as an architect and professor of architecture at RISD. He is founding principal of 3sixØ Architecture, which was named in 2002 by Architectural Record as one of 10 leading vanguard firms worldwide. His extensive professional experience includes furniture design, residential, commercial and institutional commissions and planning studies, ranging from small urban interventions to large-scale metropolitan development. His research on the geometry of sunlight, materials, materiality and tectonics as critical to architectural making and thinking has been widely published and exhibited.

Bardt has been a member of the architecture faculty at RISD since 1988. He teaches upper-level studios, architectural history, the history and theory of projective geometry and foundation courses and has coordinated and authored the curriculum of all three core semesters. He has been a visiting professor at Cornell University and at the National Academy of Design and Art, Slovakia and currently serves on the Board of Governors of the RISD Museum. Bardt holds a Bachelor of Architecture from RISD and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University.

Academic research/areas of interest

Bardt’s research interests are focused on materials and the role they play in our self definition. He is thinking about how materials guide us and how their properties generate insights. Materials resist us and make us aware of their resistance, a necessary condition of creativity. Earlier in his career, he examined sunlight and used the problem of its geometry to “catch” it with a large-scale tectonic construction wholly generated by sun movement over time. He is now researching and writing a book on materials, inspired in part by the mysterious connection between creativity and material engagement in the studio. For the past decade or so he has developed pedagogy based on material engagement and resistance. He is working on a book that will include material-generated student work as well as speculations on the connections between materially generated projects and their transformations into constructed works.

Fall 2018 Courses

• ARCH-21ST-03 Advanced Studio
• ARCH-2350-02 Advanced Topics In Architectural Drawing
• ARCH-8900-02 ISP Major

Spring 2019 Courses

• ARCH-21ST-01 Advanced Studio
• ARCH-2352-03 Advanced Topics In Architectural Theory