Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Radu Remus Macovei
When students enter beginning design studios, they intuitively apply ways of seeing, understanding and designing the built environment following dominant practices observed in their neighborhoods. This often results in projects presented as conventional architectural solutions, but which perpetuate the status quo in uncritical ways – ways which do not see the convention as just one of a plurality of architectural options. Beginning design studios need to develop new design processes that do not imply conformity with established ways of designing and inhabiting space. The Inside Out to Outside In pedagogy unsettles preconceived images of buildings and employs a process-driven design method that gets students to loosen up their preconceptions about what a house should look like in its material and formal definition. The following presents a selection of work by students in the first semester of a three year graduate program in architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning. The semester is structured on two projects. Inside Out begins from a spatial representation of an ordinary room and proceeds outwards to aggregate a series of rooms. Conversely, Outside In asks students to work together from an existing block of single-family houses they need to deform to accommodate a denser block and make their way inwards towards the room. Together, the two projects allow students to observe, discover and experiment with design approaches to get to the architectural image of a building without starting from preconceived notions of it, but which eventually lead to socio-economic-environmental and political criticalities (but which are not central to this beginning design studio). The studio’s pedagogy is premised on the following question: How do we unsettle preconceived notions of ‘what a building is’ which perpetuate practices of sprawl and traditional forms of living? Titled Inside-Out to Outside-In, the curriculum addresses these questions in a beginning design studio premised on iterative thinking and making where students come from a variety of non-architectural backgrounds.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.113.60
Volume Editors
Sara Jensen Carr & Rubén García Rubio
ISBN
978-1-944214-48-7
