Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Samuel Maddox
It is all but inarguable that students of architecture today will face an entirely new paradigm of practice within their lifetimes. In an increasingly fragile world, what capacity does architecture have for repair and renewal? On an ever-more interconnected globe, what responsibilities do architects have to think and work systemically, not only across disciplines but beyond the traditional realms of the designer? And how does good design resist the entanglement of our profession with uneven development and inequitable urbanizing processes? For the next generation, such existential questions could not be further from hyperbole; they are prerequisite to practice. From the Ground Up: Regenerative Design in the Alabama Black Belt is a senior-level, design-research architecture studio at Wentworth Institute of Technology that has been exploring exactly these questions through its work with the people, places, and processes that define life in the heart of the Deep South. The studio draws pedagogically from a variety of professional practices and design discourses—intertwining landscape-eco-logical sensibilities of placemaking through systems thinking with socio-spatial planning strategies—to empower students to propose large-scale, holistic change through a tactical network of architectural proposals. Along the way, students also engage with critical questions about the countryside: How is the rural inherently tied to the urban through resource extraction, refinement, and flows? Is rural settlement sustainable environmentally, socially, and economically in a hyper-connected world and economy, on a planet threatened by a warming climate? And, very important still, how might design help support the transition away from purely production-based patterns in rural areas?
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.112.40
Volume Editors
Germane Barnes & Blair Satterfield
ISBN
978-1-944214-45-6
