Residential Design Studio details the process of how a professional interior designer and an architect plan and design a residence. Taking the approach of an interview with a potential homeowner, students will create a profile of the end user so that decisions can be made on program and budget. The book simulates for the residential design studio the same conditions that a professional designer faces including client requirements, program, budget, existing plan boundaries, and site location, providing a framework for students to do their own thinking and their own design work. Chapters cover everything from single-family detached homes, attached townhouses, and apartment buildings to preliminary design, remodeling, adaptive reuse, and urban design.

Robert Philip Gordon is an architect, planner and designer with an international reputation in multiple design disciplines and as an educator. He currently teaches Architectural Rendering and Design at Columbia College Chicago in the graduate and undergraduate program of Architectural Studies and Interior Architecture. Gordon has previously taught at Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois, Chicago, the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, and the Paris/American Academy of Beaux Arts in Paris. His work has been exhibited in galleries and expositions in Chicago, Paris and San Francisco, as well as on the electronic scoreboard at Old Comiskey Park. Gordon has also written numerous articles on architecture and design for newspapers and magazines.