Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Radu Remus Macovei
Architects in practice design buildings for the date of substantial completion, engaging a singular timeframe. Yet buildings need to physically transform to adapt to changing circumstances, be they economic, environmental or political, tomorrow, in ten or a hundred years. In this sense, the paper at hand investigates the following question for design educators: How do we integrate temporal thinking into the design studio? “By definition, and particularly in the context of architecture, a scaffold is understood as either a temporary structure enabling construction or repair of a building, or literally as a support structure in instances where the structural integrity has come into question. […] But what if the building is never finished?”1 – Zuzana Kovar, Architecture in Abjection As a response, the following presents an architectural pedagogy, titled “Line, Plane, Mass: Scaffolds for Intentional Communities,” in a vertical elective studio in architecture at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee structured on ‘Scaffold Thinking.’ For our purposes, the scaffolding is a support structure that, by virtue of its secondary, yet vital structural role, appears and disappears, contracts and expands, and clarifies and confuses the boundary between building and scaffold in their temporal transformations. ‘Scaffold Thinking’ presents a pedagogical tool to enable students to design with transformation in mind. Starting from two quick exercises that ask students to develop a scaffold-to-object system and then submit it to changing scenarios, the studio first examines scaffolding as a conceptual and physical structure to enable spatial transformation over time. It then imagines housing for a residential community that changes in size across three temporal scales with the support of scaffolding, surfacing strategies of accretion, subdivision, carving and nesting, among others. Due to its malleable qualities, wood is the studio’s material of choice. After the theoretical and practical framework of the pedagogy, the paper reflects on learning outcomes, opportunities and limitations.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.113.61
Volume Editors
Sara Jensen Carr & Rubén García Rubio
ISBN
978-1-944214-48-7
