Summer Studio McCall Design Group approaches each spring by seeking students interested in a summer internship that balances professional and theoretical practices. The firm offers the experience of working on a small retail project through all of its phases, paralleled with a studio seminar focusing on issues of urban planning in San Francisco. Members of the firm earnestly anticipate the arrival of the summer interns and the atmospheric shift that they bring.

The interns often expect a traditionally pragmatic experience yet leave the summer with a pride of completing and presenting a complex theoretical project to members of the architectural community.

Three primary directives for the studio are as follows:

1. To “practice” both the theory and practice of architecture in order to further develop each participant’s cognitive, analytical, visual, and architectural abilities and sensibilities.
2. To explore a heuristic design approach that is not methodology, not theory, not practice, but is instead a speculative framework of investigation that guides the design process and enables selection, integration, synthesis, and phase-by phase development.
3. To confront object making, process, and documentation both as tools and as cultural phenomena in themselves—not as art or architecture.