Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Francis Lyn
This paper is the second in a series focusing on the engagement of archival drawings in architectural curricula. The first paper, titled “Old Drawings New Pedagogies: Archival Drawings as Teaching Tools” was presented at the NCBDS conference (2024). This paper presented work that examined how the Dan Duckham Archives, gifted to our school in 2019, was used as a pedagogical tool to provide opportunities for students to learn through the engagement of old drawings. In Spring 2024, a second iteration of this study was offered as the final design studio in our sequence. Students opting into this studio were asked to engage the archives as generative tools for normative and speculative design/research projects. This engagement of archives within the design studio is rare and provided exciting modes of inquiry for both archive and studio. Students were asked to engage archival artifacts as primary source material for the development of theses, design methods and representational strategies. Through this engagement, they developed project proposals that were relevant to their individual research interests. Utilizing documentation strategies learned in the first iteration of the study, students developed digital models of selected case study houses, that became the foundation of their semester’s work. Subsequently, students produced a diverse set of design solutions that presented a depth of exploration that was rich in content. Many students consider project research and precedent study a necessary (or for some, unnecessary) hurdle that must be completed because it has grading point value, and often set it aside once the design process begins. Within this studio, the immediacy and tangible nature of the archival documents allowed them to engage the subject more deeply, and provided a vehicle to address individual interests while requiring responses to rules-based design methods that were derived from their study of the original archival drawings. Engagement of archival drawings as generative tools re-pairs design studio research and project and helps to repair a studio process. This paper seeks to demonstrate how the incorporation of archival research positively impacted student learning outcomes in a design studio.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.113.48
Volume Editors
Sara Jensen Carr & Rubén García Rubio
ISBN
978-1-944214-48-7
