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» » » Thursday, June 22 - Friday, June 23, 2023

June 22-24, 2023 | Reykjavík, Iceland

2023 ACSA/EAAE Teachers Conference

Educating the Cosmopolitan Architect

Schedule

October 12, 2022

Submission Deadline

December 2022

Submission Notification

June 22-24, 2023

Teachers Conference

THURSDAY & FRIDAY

Schedule + Abstracts

Reykjavik, Iceland | In-Person

Below is the schedule for Thursday, June 22 & Friday, June 23, 2023, which includes session speakers and research abstracts. The conference schedule is subject to change.

Obtain Continuing Education Credits (CES) / Learning Units (LU), including Health, Safety and Welfare (HSW) when applicable. Registered conference attendees will be able to submit session attended for Continuing Education Credits (CES). Register for the conference today to gain access to all the AIA/CES credit sessions.

Download the Program

Thursday, June 22, 2023

Reykjavík City Hall

4:00pm-5:30pm

Welcome Cocktail

Join us in the Reykjavík City Hall for the conference welcome.

Remarks: Thorsteinn Gunnarsson, Chief Executive Officer, City of Reykjavik

Friday, June 23, 2023

Harpa Concert Hall

9:00am-10:30am
Plenary
1.5LU Credit

Opening Keynote:
Jenni Reuter

Opening Remarks:
Oya Atalay Franck, EAAE President
Sharon Haar, ACSA President
Massimo Santanicchia, Iceland University of the Arts
Tina Christensen, VELUX

Jenni Reuter

Jenni Reuter (b. 1972) is Associate Professor in Architectural Principles and Theory at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland.

She also works as a practising architect, both in her own office and together with architects Saija Hollmén and Helena Sandman. The group started their collaboration in 1995 with the Women’s Centre project in Rufisque, Senegal. They work in Finland as well as with several underprivileged communities on the African continent. At the moment they are designing dormitories for girls in the Iringa region in Southern Tanzania. In 2007 they founded the NGO Ukumbi, the mission of which is to offer architectural services to communities in need.

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11:00am-12:30pm
Research Session
1.5LU Credit

Dissident Intellectuals 1

Moderator: Ilaria Valente, Politecnico di Milano

Pedagogies of Problematisation: Architectural Technicities, Urban Literacy, and the Value of Intuition
Stavros Kousoulas, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft)

Abstract

In times of urban tensions, refugee flows, rapid climate change and increasing housing crises, the answer cannot be coming solely from the State (as a regulatory mechanism) nor from the Market (as profit-driven interventions). Arguably, the answer can be the proliferation of urban literacy: a form of urban knowledge that is embodied, enacted, intuitive and extends beyond the disciplinary boundaries of architecture and urban studies. In this respect, while the oft-cited quote “we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us” (attributed to no other than Winston Churchill) is somewhat a commonplace, there has been a substantial scientific gap in examining how this is the case. Many architecture and urban theories have reached a point where focus is given mainly on formal characteristics, stylistic conventions or discursive polemics. Even in the cases where social or cultural factors are taken into consideration, this is done in a reductionist manner: social interests, cultural tendencies or economic decisions are taken as the starting point, functioning as the means to explain the development of urban environments. On the contrary, the main assumption of my paper is that architecture cannot be explained by culture; quite the opposite, architecture produces culture. (Kwinter, 2008) Therefore, pivotal for my claim will be a renewed understanding of the relationship between architecture and culture, as well as an innovative understanding of architecture as a technology (but in an amplified account where technology is understood as any environmental intervention). Consequently, the concept of architectural technicities will help in examining how humans relate to their environment through architecture and how this mode of relation has the capacity to transform both. To achieve that I will follow philosopher Gilbert Simondon in his argument that contemporary culture is out of phase with technical progression, either considering it as a threat or as neutral matter that is ascribed merit by humanity. (Simondon, 2017) Simondon aims to demonstrate that both positions are incorrect, proposing instead that culture needs to understand technology in its technicity. Technicity is fully relational, conceptualising how humans relate with their environment through technical structures and operations. Moreover, it examines how this mode of relation has the capacity to transform both humans and environment. As such, architectural technicities understand inhabitants as ecological engineers who by producing and manipulating their urban environment are also producing the cultural meaning that brings them together. (Magnani, 2009) In this respect, meaning is understood as information: an indication of a potential for action that can prove itself of value. Consequently, I will propose that architecture produces cultural information that determines collective values. At this point, my paper will open to the work of philosopher Bernard Stiegler who claims that technology is responsible for the emergence of any collective. (Stiegler, 1998) This is the case because technology has the capacity to potentialise a particular kind of both memory and intentionality. Technological artefacts inscribe and exteriorise the actions of a collective past while simultaneously enable future interventions. A humble table, for example, is the expression of collective efforts that lasted thousands of years aiming in literally elevating the ground from the earth, enabling a form of sociality that would not have been possible otherwise. In addition, the (fundamentally technological) inscription of plans and ideas on a piece of paper brings people together by exteriorising the promise of a future that is not here yet. With these two examples, we can understand why Simondon and Stiegler suggest that we should use the term transindividual when attempting to speak of human subjects and how they evolve: the purely personal and the wholly social constantly co-transform through technology — and, accordingly, through architecture. Therefore, lack of knowledge on how architectural technicities determine our collective lives, implies a profound form of urban alienation, both among inhabitants and in relation to their habitat. This form of alienation, complementary to the traditional Marxist use of the term and to its technological update by Simondon, is of great importance: alienated from each other and from our urban environment we can neither remember nor plan together the future of our cities (and everything that happens in them). To counter this, I will propose that architectural and urban pedagogies need to shift their attention from a solution-based approach to one that prioritises problematisation. Architecture, among other design related disciplines, has long been associated with a problem-solving attitude. By prioritising solutions, problems are demonised, becoming synonyms of what is wrong, negative conditions that we must ‘correct’. Reducing problems to negative states that simply await solutions animates a technocratic attitude, associating any thought activity or design practice with the search of adequate solutions, a supposed truth and falsehood of proper responses. It is this technocratic problem-solving attitude that excludes our participation to the definition of a problem. On the contrary, I will claim that we need to conquer our problems and reconcile with them. If we do not, then we risk losing any control of the problems themselves, so long as we do not possess a right to them, to a participation in and management of the problems — and the architecturally produced collective values they imply. (Deleuze, 2001) Ironically, science has always been fundamentally dependent on its ability to properly pose and determine a problem. The empirical objects of science (including architecture) are above all answers to problems. As philosopher Gaston Bachelard (who coined the term problematique) claims, it is indeed having this sense of the problem that marks out the true scientific mind. For a scientific mind, all knowledge is an answer to a question. If there has been no question, there can be no scientific knowledge. In simple terms, we cannot respond to a problem that we have not learned how to pose. This is the educational innovation that my paper proposes: instead of treating problems as obstacles to overcome, we need to develop educational frameworks that assist us and our students to start wondering, exploring, and finding ways that we may come to desire a problem, look forward it and actively stay with it. Therefore, once we no longer bother with questions that simply demand a demonstration of propositional knowledge, once we move beyond the fixed responses to quiz questions, then the duty of architectural thinking becomes to be able to determine problems that can transform architectural thought (and practice) itself. As such, learning becomes much more important than knowledge: there is a profound difference between learning — which, is a knowing-how — and knowledge — which corresponds to the accumulation and memorisation of knowing-that propositions. In other words, learning is a matter of opening thought to the domain of problems, which has its own autonomous existence and not an issue of solving specific questions and securing a permanent body of knowledge. I will conclude this paper by outlining the basic elements that such a shift towards a problematised architectural pedagogy entails. Relying on philosopher Henri Bergson, as well as his later appropriation by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I will claim that to open architectural pedagogies to practices of problematisation, we need to educate architects and urban designers in a particular method of approaching reality — one that can examine it with a much-needed precision. This method is what Bergson has coined as intuition and, while aware of the controversy of the term, I will claim that it is the only term that can express a mode of learning that is distinct both from sterile intelligence and propositional knowledge. (Bergson, 1998) Such an intuitive mode of learning can effectively cross disciplinary boundaries and enhance urban literacy — understood now as the capacity to properly discern and modulate via design the singular elements that determine the technicities of urban life. If we wish to educate future architects that can overcome urban alienation, address the issues of our transindividual collective transformations and respond to the problems of their era — and this response-ability is what at once defines both a dissident intellectual and an ethical professional — then we are truly in need of pedagogies of creative, speculative and precise problematisation.

The Study of Commoning or Commoning as Study —Reframing the Pedagogy of the Design Studio and Thesis
Stefan Gruber, Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract

This paper reflects on the evolving pedagogy of the thesis studio on “Commoning the City,” now in its fifth iteration. The yearlong research-based design studio investigates how community-led transformations can contribute to more regenerative and equitable cities—and against our current backdrop of accelerating environmental degradation, growing socio-economic disparities and political polarization. If our many contemporary challenges can’t be solved with the same level thinking that produced them in the first place, then shifting away from market based solutions or government regulation is now crucial. Meanwhile, the growing distrust in the ability of governments or markets to produce sustainable and equitable lifestyles has prompted citizens around the world to take matters into their own hands, to self-organize by pooling resources and developing forms of collective ownership and self-governance. These collective social practices, called commoning, are structured around the production and stewardship of shared resources. While these practices have existed across time and cultures, their current proliferation indicates a shift away from market-state and private-public dualities—and towards the assertion of the civic commons as a growing strand of research and design thinking in urbanism. Instead of focusing on commoning as a subject of study, however, commoning will be explored here as a methodology. How does the study of practices and spaces of commoning also require us to frame study itself as commoning? Such a challenge provides a thoughtful opportunity to interrogate the pedagogical frameworks of typical design studios and design theses in particular. If commoning is rooted in the power of the many, how can we mobilize the collective intelligence and collaborative energies that the studio provides—and renegotiate the relation between singular and collective authorship? If commoning aims to undo dominant power structures through self-determination and more distributed decision making, how can the role between students and the instructor be redefined? And, if commoning unfolds in the pluriverse, drawing insights from a plurality of practices and viewpoints, old and new, indigenous and urban communities, feminist and environmental movements alike, how can we critically reflect on the power relations rooted in Western epistemologies and decolonize our teaching? These broad questions have led to a series of pedagogical experiments, and the introduction of new methodologies and concepts to the studio, three of which are discussed in the following. Through collective case study research and the development of design patterns across multiple years, the studio attempts to balance singular and collective research, guiding individual research interests in such a way as to constitute common interests.  The use of sociocracy, also known as dynamic governance, attempts to shift the decision making from the single instructor to the student group, and creates an environment in which every voice is heard. Through a focus on translation, and discussions about the implications of translating lessons from one culture or urban milieu to another, special scrutiny is given to the implicit and explicit power relations embedded in western epistemologies. Each of these concerns have emerged through the study of commoning. The development of new formats has been inductive and incremental. Accordingly, rather than being conclusive, this paper is an attempt to reflect critically on the affordances of an ongoing pedagogical experiment, and the implications of aligning the ideas being studied with the methodologies applied: the study of commoning AND commoning as study. Pooling resources by producing an atlas of commoning case studies and design patterns A design thesis provides graduate students with the important opportunity to pursue individual research interest, and to take a specific position. At the same time, the individual thesis perpetuates the myth of singular authorship that continues to haunt architecture. This grows more problematic in proportion to the increase in scale, from the design of buildings to the design of cities. The commoning the city studio addresses this tension by moderating individual research interests with the collective production of knowledge. In the early phase of the studio, students engage in case study research on practices and spaces of commoning from around the world. Findings are researched and documented according to a  consistent methodology as to allow for comparative analysis. Together, the case studies form “An Atlas of Commoning” that constitutes a growing knowledge archive of grassroots initiates. While the case studies are situated and specific to their urban milieus, in a second step, the studio has begun to distill design patterns from the pool of over fifty case studies. The patterns are structured around three categories—concepts, practices and spaces of commoning—and provide a collective tool kit that students share and can draw from as they develop their own individual thesis projects. And while the thesis investigations can range widely—the impact of sea level rising on Koliwada communities in Mumbai, the adaptive reuse of Danwei Housing compounds in Shanghai, or the rezoning of Baltimore’s suburbs—the patterns and case studies constitute a shared platform for collective conversations. Practicing Sociocracy to constitute a common purpose Beyond encouraging students in defining their individual research interests, this studio aims to give students agency towards framing the collective conversation and empowering the group’s self-determination of their common interests. If commoning aims at distributive decision-making, risk and responsibilities, teaching in general and architectural design studio in particular continue to be burdened with uneven power relations between the professor and students. Thus, as with Jacques Rancière’s discussion of intellectual emancipation in the Emancipated Spectator (2009), the studio seeks to renegotiate teacher-student relations: sociocracy was introduced as a method for governing important decisions throughout the semester, such as defining deliverables and formats for reviews. Sociocracy is a framework for building inclusive, participatory and compassionate self-governance; it is structured around principles of equivalence, transparency, effectiveness, consent, accountability, empiricism and continuous improvement. Sociocracy refers to the governance of those who associate together, combining the Latin terms socius, meaning companions or associates, and cratia, as in aristocracy or the democracy that designates the ruling class. Many co-housing initiatives and workers cooperatives, some of which are featured as case studies in the Atlas of Commoning, practice sociocracy for self-governance. Eliminating political competition created by majority vote, sociocracy is considered the next evolutionary step from democracy. Drawing from social, political, and educational theories as well as cybernetics and system thinking, sociocratic governance aspires at distributed leadership because decentralized systems are more resilient than centralized monocultures. This method creates a feedback-rich studio environment, open to emergence, and with an omni-directional flow of information and an increase of transparency and intentionality. Translation as a method to decolonize Western epistemologies The practice of sociocracy, along with the diverse backgrounds of the program’s student population, has also directed the studio’s collective attention to reflect more broadly on the entanglement of power in education, cultural production and western epistemologies. “Language is the house of power,” Mustapha Khayati writes in Captive Words (1966), warning us of the pitfalls that come from critiquing the old world in the very language it was made. As a result, the studio pedagogy is interested in questions of translation: literally the languages we use to define and communicate ideas, but also the implication of translating certain methodologies and concepts from one specific urban milieu to another. In fact, what is in common always only emerges in translation—the translation between different experiences, interests and subjectivities. Translation occurs at the intersection of differences, not their convergence. Thus, rather than aiming for a precise mirroring of language that would imply the erasure of difference, translation is founded on and sustained through differences. Similarly, commoning is understood as an ongoing social practice that also depends on the encounter and negotiation of difference (see Gruber, 2020). The studio’s research and design pedagogy thus attempt to celebrate differences not as forces that pull us apart, but as a starting to point for coming together. Through our conversations, the studio aims to explore the pluriversality of commoning, as well as the pluriversality of spatial practices. Elaborating on these three pedagogical concerns and experiments, the proposed presentation and paper will consider the implications of how a subject of study – commoning – might also affect and reframe the teaching and research methodologies.

Place-based Design Curriculum for Environmental and Spatial Justice Education
Ersela Kripa, Stephen Mueller, Andres Gandara & Guillermo Barajas, Texas Tech University

Abstract

The US-Mexico borderland provides a rich context for faculty research and focused experiments in design pedagogy in a unique—and uniquely successful—undergraduate architecture program serving minoritized students and the border community. The paper will detail the context and framework for this program, using examples from multiple faculty-directed research studios. The program’s curriculum engages a binational, bicultural, and bilingual student body, through cumulative exercises in critical thinking and design research. Students enter the university’s Bachelor of Science program after completing their first two years of architectural education at a community college. A robust articulation agreement between the two institutions makes education more affordable for our students, without which they would not be able to attend. Our diverse faculty engages our students directly through tailored curriculum. Our design studios focus on challenges particular to the region—including pressures of human migration, urbanization, climate change and natural resource depletion, as well as the region’s unique assets, including cultural heritage, trade, and logistics infrastructure. Teaching encourages students to explore the ways in which urban and architectural design can have positive impact within this dynamic context. The studio curriculum is designed to empower our underrepresented students with the design and representation tools to give image to their contested context and to record their diverse regional heritage. As many of our students cross the border to attend classes every day, sometimes a tow-hour commute, their ability to articulate their binational, bicultural, and bilingual perspectives is nurtured in design studio, giving students ownership and authorship of the region’s narrative. Our goal is to educate tomorrow’s leaders, and to empower our students to practice architecture in their own context. In order to ensure our students success in their professional endeavors after graduation, we facilitate access to local organizations and government leadership via collaborations in both [US city redacted] and [Mexico city redacted]. In [US city redacted] we facilitate internships with the City’s various departments, as well as at a local Community Foundation. In [Mexico city redacted] we have been organizing a collaborative series of workshops with colleagues from [Mexico school of architecture redacted] with NGOs that support migrants and other underserved communities with language skills, job training and computer skills through the design of community centers. Many of our students are first in their families to study in college and many of them are deeply connected to their immigration roots. Our faculty shares similar backgrounds, and some of them have studied in this program and have returned to teach, which renders the pedagogical framing distinctly personal. Below are highlights of a few representative studio briefs that have been designed by faculty to deepen the connection between research and design through a lived experience. BORDERLAND WASTE STREAMS This studio engages in issues of ecological and social justice through the analysis of waste stream management along the U.S.–Mexico border, with a focus in [US city redacted], where all waste from cities along the Rio Grande from Anthony to Tornillo is collected. Ranging in scale from buildings to infrastructure systems, to restoration projects, and land remediation strategies, the design proposals engage environmental and spatial justice through design. The studio’s pedagogical structure is organized as a research and design studio, asking students to construct robust and thorough regional mappings that record waste streams, recycling practices, highlighting the overlapping geography of waste dumping and landfill sites with wealth distribution disparities, while also uncovering water and soil pollution throughout the fragile Rio Grande ecosystem of the channelized border. The design phase asks students to rethink waste processing as a material resource in the construction of low-carbon waste processing centers that take on unique characteristics due to their specific context. BINATIONAL CROSSING This studio faces border politics head-on. The physical, social, and cultural connection between [US city redacted] and [Mexico city redacted] is complex and further complicated by national political discourse. This studio is coordinated by faculty who recollects there not being a wall and remembers crossing on foot without a checkpoint. The challenge of re-connecting the urban fabrics of two nations is a task greater than can be accomplished by architecture, however the studio sets a framework for potential projections that support a discourse around infrastructure’s complicity in divisions, and the architect’s role within these systems. By meeting student learning objectives of structural systems applications, the studio foils ideas of long span within questions of inhabitation. The bridge infrastructure here is set up not only as a transitional space, but also as an ecological remediation device where non-human species that were endangered by the border wall can live and migrate. The studio invites students to imagine a future more extraordinary through a programmatic shift reflecting an urban and international relationship beyond physical connections, transportation, and defensive strategies to one that relates to human and ecological conditions. Students are invited to design a bridge as a new spatial condition with implications that advance infrastructure to a role of social, cultural, and economic change in the 21st century. BORDER BUBBLE: INFRASTRUCTURAL SANITARIUM Unpredictable and extreme climate fluctuation has triggered an unprecedented global climate migration. Droughts and floods in highly populated areas are forcing large populations to relocate to more suitable, but perhaps unfamiliar, weather conditions. Housing this population will require designing for climate and designing for change. To this end, architecture must borrow from infrastructure’s performative logics to truly support humans while co-existing with environmental variabilities. On the U.S. – Mexico border, climate migration can be understood as both human movement as well as weather; water, air and the pollutants they carry. Each nation regulates its climate differently, and while national climate indexes vary, weather movement transcends borders. The studio looks at the natural border as a channel that perhaps can regulate micro and can affect macroclimates in the region. The Rio Grande, in its current man-made form, inscribes not only the ‘natural’ boundary between two nations, but it also indexes the precisely controlled water distribution politics of the Chihuahuan Desert, where increased desertification has a growing impact on respiratory ailments, due in part to climate change and environmental neglect at the regional scale. Students are invited to map these conditions and to understand them at the scale of the region and the implications on the body. The regulation, treatment, and containment of elusive pollutants is paired with updating the 20th century sanitorium as a medicalized architectural typology. The sanitorium invites complex questions of healthcare within the border region, where access to medical treatment depends upon multiple types of documentation. Students are invited to design a sanitorium supporting respiratory healthcare with an infrastructural function that responds to the unique environmental and political setting. Students explore hybridization of functions of healthcare and climate mitigation and design a climatological bubble that treats environmental pollution and respiratory disease of climate refugees, where environmental justice is intrinsically linked to universalized healthcare. Dust Institute: DESIGN RESEARCH FOR ARID URBAN FUTURES  Urban populations living in the arid US-Mexico borderland face significant environmental and public health challenges from atmospheric pollution. The region’s desert geology contributes to dangerously high levels of fine particles, threatening the estimated 25 million borderland inhabitants with adverse health impacts from airborne sand and dust. This environmental and public health crisis is exacerbated by the combined impacts of climate change, climate migration, desertification, and rapid urbanization, intensifying conditions of spatial, social, and environmental injustice. (Heyman, 2007, Eades, 2018). The built environment of the borderland has yet to adapt significantly to these airborne threats. While other urbanized desert regions have adopted advanced building technologies to manage the adverse impacts of extreme particulate exposure (Bishop, 2011; Grassi, 2019), the borderland has yet to develop an expertise to address these changing threats specific to its unique environmental conditions. The design research in this studio seeks to develop advanced building construction systems capable of managing and mitigating the flows of airborne particulate on an urban site near the US–Mexico border. By privileging ‘dust flow’ as a primary driver for envelope design, disciplinary building envelope design principles (e.g., natural ventilation) were interrogated and re-evaluated to imagine new assemblies capable of addressing ‘dust-specific’ behaviors (e.g., scouring, infiltration, creep, suspension). As a second goal, the research sought to identify architectural strategies that could leverage these new construction systems to promote the public awareness and scientific study of changing dust conditions. From this research-informed design approach, students are able to develop and test experimental, innovative, and detailed architectural designs using ‘dust’ as a driver for innovation. Students gain insight into design research informed by critical material practice, and develop their ability to design synthetic relationships between environmental conditions, sites, building forms, and the public realm. Conclusion The curriculum and extended community outreach in the [college of architecture name redacted] offers a framework for critical thinking through design research that focuses on environmental, spatial, and social justice, equipping students to formulate their own design practice in a contested context. Many students go on to earn M.Arch degrees as top institutions with substantial scholarships, and they return to practice in the region, effecting deep change.

Minimum Requirements
Piper Bernbaum & Ozayr Saloojee, Carleton University

Abstract

As architects, professionals, and academics, we constantly operate at a minimum. This isn’t to say (obvs) that workloads are small, or the stress is minimal – absolutely not – but industry and institutional requirements are based largely on minimum requirements. With these minimums we obtain degrees, acquire building permits and licensure. We get our stamps. These requirements are written into our books, codes, and syllabi (that we write) as law, holy writ, the gospel truth (can we get an “amen?”) – not the least of which are our NAAB or CACB accreditation criteria. Students must engage in a minimum of “x” topics for an accredited degree. Programs must maintain a minimum credit allowance of “x” to be accredited. Averages must pass a minimum grade point average of “x.” Code requires a minimum height of “x” for “x.” The width of the hallway must be a minimum distance of “x.” Setbacks must be a minimum “x” from the road. Minimums, minimums, minimums. From the moment design education begins, to the last drawing set produced by an office, the concern of the work and what guides our knowledge and practice is set out by bureaucratic minimums. There is no requirement to do more.
“Norms” and “minimums” of education and practice are established for accountability – but this prioritizes and shifts accountability to governing bodies and institutions (who by and large, serve to replicate themselves, and usually, extractively). How do we resist this? We suggest that we max out all methods, scales, projects… all administrative and pedagogic processes, to resist the minimum, or, to redefine it, entirely. How might we do this? Here’s a stab at it: prioritize reparative empathy and question what “ethics” means in practice –  from the land we engage with, the materials we use, the so-called longevity of our work, how we employ young practitioners[1], how we build a curriculum, and asking how do we create a maximum space where people can recognize and see themselves in the practice. This is the premise of this paper: a meditation on how we might begin to go about abolishing institutional “norms/minimums,” reflecting on the work (some successful, some not) at ________________ University’s School of Architecture, since the summer of 2020.
This began within a school and its students, and expanded to a much larger agenda that has brought together members of each school of architecture across the country. This work reflects on the bottom-up and top down approaches to anti-colonial and anti-racist practice, as a form of pedaogical dissent that doesn’t center the individual, but talks through a potential institutional dissent.[2] The paper investigates what it means to dissent, and ask for more (and engaging in what is perceived as going beyond the minimum) when considering what guides our architectural education. We see this work as a field guide (emerging though it is) for how we can begin to demand more from those who set out, and those who uphold, the minimums.
Context: The not-so-hypothetical hypothetical.
Imagine a school of architecture: faculty, students, staff, studios (mostly messy), a brutalist building (all that concrete, but still airy and open – maybe it’s a Stephen Holl building, a Rudolph, a NADAA, a Corneil, an old warehouse, heck – a NEW warehouse even), workshops (humming), the digi-fab lab (cnc-ing, drilling and carving). Maybe this school is 150 years old. Maybe its brand new. Let’s split the different and go with 75. Now, imagine a 75 year arc of education, complete with its post-war birth/re-orientation, it’s Fuller/Scarpa/Gropius aspirations, materials and urbanisms, it’s Jencks and Correa manifestos, its blobisms and Greg-Lynn-isms and Hadid-isms, its digital revolutions in the early 90s, and counter-revolutions, its parametricisms, and green-ish LEED-isms and all the various  other “-isms” and “-ologies” that have been a part of this school’s trajectory – likely similar to the trajectories of many other schools and their CACB/NAAB seeking accreditation desires. Consider, in this non-so-hypothetical hypotethical, the typical outcomes of that accreditation process, and the varied and many CACB/NAAB reports that usually note, as an item of concern or as an-item-not met:  “non-western” traditions.  And non-western, as we perhaps know, is everyone that is not gloriously Hellenic, or the contraposto of Romanitas, or of Enlightened Europe.  All hail the Queen. And non-western, we know, parallels the real reality (the definitely-not-hypothetical hypothetical) of what underlies the non-western: the settler epistemology of “whiteness”. What are we dissenting against?  If the norm (and normalizing minimum) is “whiteness”, its particular power, emphasized histories, technologies and ontologies, then this dissent means to confront and reckon with everything that leads to this moment.
“Inclusion” has become an architectural catch phrase by academics who believe they have made enough consideration in their work to look beyond their own lens. In turn, EDI and the more recent “JEDI”  has become (not always, but often) an administerium of responses to risk management, pat, glib and sterile tokens to resist systemic change. How we move, as Indigenous scholar Glen Sean Coulthard asks beyond “the politics of recognition?”[3]  “We work in allyship,” says the sign in our banks, as they refuse to sign our mortgage. “We honour our Indigenous Communities,” saw the banner in my campus (over) commons[4] as we refuse to even consider talking about land-back. We know it – this work is a verb, not only a noun, and what is necessary to go beyond rhetoric (to quote Cree Indigenous Relations Consultant, Michael Etheringon, in a workshop he held at ____________ University in September, 2022). What is the required emotional labor and discomfort that we need from institutions in order to see any kind of meaningful change?
In this presentation, we will provide a chronological account of ____ University’s experience in developing worthy curriculum, predicated in large part by global response to the murder of George Floyd, as a turning point for architectural education in _________ in the 21st Century. Many institutions received demands from students to engage in substantive EDI (equity, diversity and inclusion) projects and initiatives, all commonly under the same name and title. ____ University did the same. A small collective of colleagues were asked (at the request of students and administration) to take this work on, with haste and intensity. Early questions arose: who are we asking to do this work? How do we make change? And perhaps most importantly: how do we take an approach that offers longevity and resists glacial institutional inertia? How does this work become a process of epistemic repair, with real, lived spaces, processes and consequences? How does it become an experienced litany,mantra and practice, and not just a check-list on some website?
Encounters and Outcomes
Work towards this end was immediately collaborative (*narrator voice – except when it wasn’t) and addressed multiple scales. This paper and presentation details these varying scales of engagement and impacted communities. Through these initiatives, all on-going and still being tested, the goal was to consider reparative systems at multiple institutional scales, and through them, to empower new visions of education:
1. Small: Students: Empowering student engagement and thoughtful activism. / increasing faculty engagement; implementing __________ University’s “____” Indigenous Calls to Action, 2. Medium: Amplifying Voices/New Faculty: Offering up our curriculum to other voices and collaboratives, such as Dark Matter University. others; building solidarity networks and ceding authority to systemically and historically oppressed and marginalized communities of practice, teaching and learning; working with initiatives such as the “Where are my People” research conducted by Kendall Nicholson at the ACSA. 3. Large: Collaborative Efforts: Engaging in a cross-country collaborative symposiums and workshops across all the schools of architecture in _________ to discuss the roles of equity in teaching, research, and practice. This includes conversations with state and provincial licensing bodies, such as state and National AIAs, and provincial architectural associations and the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.  4. X-Large: Addressing Governing Bodies:  Beginning a call to action for revising accreditation requirements for schools and student learning-objective assessment  within the _____(Name of National Certification Board) __________; related to the work currently being explored by the ACSA’s “Revisions to NAAB Procedures for Accreditation.
Change needs to be collective (as much as it needs to be individual) except perhaps with EDI work, where the burden and labor  falls to a few individuals (the minimum) on behalf of a collective (the maximum, and at times, a maximum collective unwilling to engage in this work). In this multi-scalar approach, and as a part of our own action plan, we tried (and perhaps failed) to address the “minimums”, as well as to resist “singularity” (of only one perspective or voice, of one canon, as well as performative work of singular classes or professors taking on this work, or singular books being added to reading lists as a means to be “inclusive”). This is to say – in order to fight the required minimums, we need to maximize empathy and care as standard practice.

Structured Racism and Environmental Injustices: The Case of East Cleveland
Taraneh Meshkani, Kent State University

Abstract

Social drivers and spatial practices have had long-term effects on systemic racism concerning uneven resource distribution and environmental inequalities. These inequalities can be seen in many urban processes such as urban development, city infrastructures, urban management and governance, and the formation and distribution of urban ecologies, among others.  The lack of investigation of urban development and processes concerning the environmental effects of structured racism highlights the need for research initiatives, design and seminar courses, and workshops that investigate the relationship between spatial segregation, ecological processes, and landscape biodiversity in underprivileged communities. As such, the case of North Ohio and especially the east side of the Cleveland metropolitan area is illustrated as a precedent of the topics related to environmental justice and the processes of urbanization in relation to racism. These areas are also impacted by intense industrial activities and ecological damages caused by them. Systemic racist practices such as redlining have caused residential segregation in the area. More recently, the new dynamics of gentrification and displacement have created an unequal distribution of urban ecological patterns in relation to vegetation, water, and air qualities and the lack of green infrastructure and amenities. In addition to segregation caused by redlining initiatives, the proximity to former and existing industrial sites is one of the most important reasons for environmental issues. Many neighborhoods in the Cleveland metropolitan area suffer from such an effect. In addition, when compared to the racial map of Cuyahoga County, there is a correlation between the environmental justice burden and the neighborhoods with the highest black population. [Figure 1]  This presentation focuses on distinct neighborhoods in east Cleveland, such as Central, Fairfax, and Hough, that, according to Cuyahoga County Environmental Justice Index Map, have the highest environmental justice burden scores. Thirteen areas from these neighborhoods are selected for this study with the highest environmental burden and population vulnerability scores.  The research will adopt both quantitative and qualitative methods of study in order to examine the myriad of spatial manifestations of environmental injustices in the areas with the highest black population. The spatial categories of study include housing segregation and use of hazardous materials such as lead, proximity to toxic industrial sites, waste hazards, lack of tree canopies, and landscape heterogeneity.  Aside from a critical analysis and literature review of the topics of racial inequalities and urban environmental justice, this research highlights the importance of gathering, utilization, and visualization of spatial data in examining the negative environmental impacts on the selected areas in the proposed neighborhoods, and how this method can be further used in teaching courses related to social and environmental justice issues. [Figure 2]  This presentation makes inquires in the possibly of architectural education in studying such nuanced characteristics of racial and spatial inequalities to environmental issues, and how this can inform new spatial practices that are more sustainable and socially equitable.

11:00am-12:30pm
Research Session
1.5LU Credit

Caregivers of the World 1

Moderator: Roberto Cavallo, Delft University of Technology

Toward Stewardship: An Antarctic case study for methodologies of critical reflection across time, place, and species.
Rick Sommerfeld & Jacob Taswell,
University of Colorado at Denver

Abstract

Antarctica is often described in terms of absence. The continent has little precipitation, no indigenous human population, and no cities (although some of the research stations have become sprawling villages). It offers no resources to build with other than snow, ice, and some relatively small areas of exposed rock, the use of which is restricted by international treaty. While the extreme environment resists human habitation, the perception of emptiness opens the way for imposition of narratives from the outside. In the words of architect and Antarctic expert Giulia Foscari, Antarctica often serves as a “white backdrop” for buildings (1). Foscari’s theater metaphor impels readers to recognize dynamics that have persisted throughout the history of human presence in Antarctica, and it enables discussion of the ‘staging’ of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration and the subsequent heroic age of architecture, periods in which individual authors have played an outsized role. In their introduction to Architecture Live Projects, Harriet Harriss and Lynnette Widder write, “Live Projects occupy the borderlands between the simulacra which architectural education favors – the speculative project, supported by lecture and seminar-based exercises – and the trial by fire of professional practice” (2). The speculative project, drawn on a blank page, resonates with the staging of high-tech research stations on snowy sites throughout Antarctica. This act tends to emphasize the harshness of the environment over the vulnerability of its ecosystems and the boldness of human presence over our capacity for sensitivity. Through a discussion of a small field station being designed and built by graduate students in the United States for ecosystem scientists in a maritime region of northern Antarctica, this paper argues that the pedagogy of design-build in remote places not only mediates between academic and professional variants of the design process but also reorganizes students’ priorities, orienting them toward a practice of continuous caregiving. Through tools like Post-Occupancy Evaluations, the approaches of distributed authorship, and the constraints of remoteness, this educational model presents students with value systems as alternatives to aesthetic languages, encourages generative questioning of conventional categories, and promotes sensitivity to non-human as well as human bodies. The authors’ underlying hope is that lessons from this project in Antarctica may enable teachers in other contexts to foster an ethic of stewardship of vulnerable ecosystems and communities in a time of climate crisis. POST-OCCUPANCY EVALUATIONS Humility is at the core of what it means to be a caregiver. Caregivers have high esteem for the objects of their care, giving more than they take in both tangible and intangible senses. According to this definition, to be good caregivers, in addition to the obvious act of giving, designers must also be conscious of how much they are taking. The design-build program at [redacted] addresses the theme of humility by engaging in Post-Occupancy Evaluations (POEs) as starting points for projects. This methodology invites students first to apprehend built work through critical reflection rather than traditional precedent studies, which prioritize images over site visits and form over performance. Teachers can counter the notion that school is about individual aesthetic refinement, often achieved through patterns of content consumption and imitation, instead advancing the idea that “the ethical obligation to perform becomes a central generator of architectural form” (3). POEs free students from adopting the transactional framework of the traditional constituent relationship, in which designers complete tasks set by clients in order to reap personal aesthetic satisfaction and acquire new portfolio items. This approach is harmful because it glosses over the true impact of buildings, which is often both positive and negative, requiring experienced judgment to assess. As evaluators, students take a critical stance, asking, “Do the ideas work in practice? Does the design continue to provide value as time passes? Is the community empowered?” Planning a course sequence in which the POE comes before design effectively prioritizes these questions and removes form-making from its traditional position of dominance. Rather than analyzing consequences after a trajectory has been set and there is little that can be done to change course, analyzing these outcomes first creates a chance for the conclusions to feed into students’ designs. Furthermore, POEs teach that projects are never conceived and executed perfectly, countering the polishing influence of architecture media and fostering in students a real sense of empathy with building occupants. The semester at [name redacted] begins with a series of site visits to past design-build projects and interviews with design-build alums. This exercise allows students to recognize the range of emotions – from happiness to apathy to confusion to frustration – that occupants might experience while navigating their designs, which they are usually too immersed in to see objectively. Providing students with the opportunity to anticipate the future reception of their work and to grapple with the imperfection of built reality is more powerful than simple factual instruction that buildings have real and enduring consequences. The practice of reflection also allows students to identify how the overarching design-build program mission and values manifest in past work. In the context of an annual program cycle, the POE teaches that caregiving is a process of continuous improvement that unfolds collectively over years or even generations. The paper will expand on the POE assignments, rubrics, and outcomes using the Antarctic field station designed in 2022 as a case study. DISTRIBUTED AUTHORSHIP Distributed authorship is an essential tool for teaching students to be caregivers, as it encourages boundary-questioning, a practice designers should engage in to make connections of caring. When a single author is given jurisdiction over the design development of an entire building – from foundations and structure to windows and doors, from interior finishes to exterior cladding – the natural tendency is to focus on the center of each of these categories. Viewing the centers as equally distributed points across the field of issues the designer must address allows the categories to exist in a stable relationship. As an alternative approach, [name redacted] breaks down the design-build project into smaller focus areas as the project moves into design development, and students choose to participate in one ‘professional’ and one ‘construction’ team. As the authors of Leading Collaborative Architectural Practice point out through their citation of self-determination theory, “control over which task to undertake” makes students’ work “feel less like an obligation,” encouraging deeper engagement (4). In addition, distributing authorship by category counterintuitively prompts revision of the categories and imagining of new possibilities. Students learn that decisions they make about elements with a specific category often trigger larger questions about the overall design system, and they discover that some elements do not fit neatly within the established categories. As the categories begin to feel constricting, students push and prod strategically at their boundaries. Instead of a stable relationship between established points, lines must be drawn, and generative friction occurs. These lines often coincide with the thresholds and details that make architecture narratively interesting, experientially rich, and functionally efficient: where interiors meet exteriors, where unlike materials come together, where one component performs multiple functions. Distributed authorship forces students coming from adjacent focus areas to renegotiate the boundaries between them. Sometimes this process yields inventive design outcomes. More importantly, renegotiating boundaries encourages a type of thinking that manifests beyond invention in the physical design of buildings. When students attack the edges of the political, social, and cultural categories given to them, they reveal the constructed nature of these categories and gain more nuanced perspectives. Making connections across boundaries is a necessary step for discovering why designers must be good caregivers in a complex globalized society. The paper will discuss examples from the Antarctic field station where distributed authorship encouraged student groups to challenge established categories. TOWARD STEWARDSHIP  In her book Staying with the Trouble, critical theorist and SF writer Donna Haraway uses the titular phrase to describe a blend of critical reflection and action that generates the best incomplete response possible at any given moment – the basic instance of a larger, ongoing process of flourishing (5). Another way of describing this method of addressing overwhelming 21st-century challenges to people and the planet is through the concept of stewardship. Stewardship is typically associated with landscapes, and contemporary theories of stewardship in environmental science have roots in indigenous land management practices that have existed for centuries (6). From the outset, the project of stewardship rejects the fantasy of completion and accepts caregiving as a continuous practice. Stewardship does, however, allow for the possibility of continuous improvement, an aspirational meaning that the term sustainability lacks. In the remote sites where [name redacted] undertakes design-build projects, students encounter fragile lichens, threatened migratory birds, overfished krill, and seals that were once on the brink of extinction. Each of these species deserves more than sustainability as usual. While doing construction work, often without access to heavy machinery, students feel the importance of caring for themselves and recognize, once again, the power architects have over human bodies. As students grow their capacity for sensitivity, they open doors to rich careers of stewardship devoted to our planet’s most vulnerable inhabitants.

Embracing Uncertainty and Visible Mending: Repairing the Pedagogy of Architecture in the Anthropocene
Orla Murphy, University College Dublin

Abstract

Introduction This paper describes the recent development of architectural design studio pedagogy in the Master of Architecture course in University College Dublin, with a focus on development of the standard model of project-based learning to respond to climate change. Part One will set out the context and reasons for change. Part Two will describe how we adapted the Master of Architecture course over three years. The paper will conclude with a look at an ambitious 3-year project to review and redesign the undergraduate curriculum in the school as part of a national funded research project now happening across all six schools of architecture in Ireland. The approach being taken in UCD will be set out from the experience of the Master of Architecture trials. A case is made for a balance of structure paralleled with an openness towards risk, as core tenets of a transformed pedagogy in preparing graduates to act with bravery, imagination, resilience, care and skill, in order to transform the design and construction eco-system for a decarbonised society. Part One: The modern and post-modern studio model.  Key to the traditional Design Studio model has been the development of students’ ability to be what Donald Schon has called ‘reflective-in-action and reflective-on-action’ (Schon, 1987; 1991), whereby students follow an active learning, quasi-real design process, based on how a design problem would be approached in a typical architectural office, under the instruction of tutors who are also practicing architects. Students are offered project briefs and then test solutions, with the advice of their tutors, and present the solution for discussion to fora of peers and expert critics. The review, or crit, is the central tool for feedback in this traditional Design Studio model. While playing an important role in the community of learning that is at the core of the Design Studio, it has come under scrutiny for its potential subjectivity, and construction of relationships of power between tutors and students which can hinder rather than help learning (McClean & Hourigan, 2013). It has also been criticised for inadequately preparing students for the ethical and societal complexities and challenges facing the built environment today, including among others adaption to climate change, mass urbanization and mass migration (Charalambous, & Kyriazis, 2018).  As the built environment contributes approximately 40% of global Greenhouse Gas Emissions (IGBC: 2021), the onus on the practice and pedagogy of architecture to undergo transformational change is urgent. We are tasked to question the tenets of modernism; to radically tool up on facts, figures, metrics, regulations, to decarbonise society fully by 2050 and limit global warming to 1.5 degree Celsius. We are running not just to stand still, but to be ethical, to take responsibility, to do the right thing, to understand the impact of our actions: on ecosystems near and far, on people and communities, on patterns of behaviour, on material extraction, process, construction and deconstruction, on just and inclusive societies. In our school, as in so many others, we have been grappling with how to better equip and enable our students to address these challenges. In 2015, COP21 and the Paris Agreement gave us a target, but in general the studios carried as they had done for over 100 years: brief, concept design, develop drawings and models (which are critiqued and reviewed) repeat, submit, move on. Our school’s mainly part-time cohort of teachers is engaged to teach, with little time to question whether this model remains the best way to equip future architects to operate within a broader socio-ecological tapestry of systems and spatial thinking. Limited testing foregrounded engaged studios, live projects, co-design methods, adaptive re-use and social inclusion. While valuable, and fruitful, these tests remained marginal and had limited impact on the culture or pedagogy of the school as a whole. Part Two: Three years in Stage 2 of Master of Architecture – a case study for a caring pedagogy. In 2019, our teaching team in the Master of Architecture course decided to work for three years to trial responsive models of teaching and learning with a focus on the climate emergency. We made structural, cultural, thematic, methodological and hierarchical changes. Changes focused on instilling students with autonomy to robustly and confidently explore an aspect of climate change important to them. By the third iteration, students were visibly comfortable departing from the finished solution  Their work imagined radical beginnings (order and disorder in the city, queer space), more-than-human clients (moulds, fungi, insects, birds), intimacy with materials (water, timber, mycelium, repurposed pre-cast panels), novel understandings and re-imagining of the rural condition,  the material of unlimited hospitality and care, the connection between food and production and society. While the breadth of study was significant, a shared common focus was intimacy with the material world. The first iteration during 2019/20, was called Live. Earth. Neutral. Climate change was the central theme. A plethora of inputs encouraged students to explore their relationship to climate change, through exploratory workshops, precedent studies, and unfinished business from students’ previous portfolios or experience. We encouraged students to develop reflective criticism of their own work and that of their peers, to document and record this using clear, respectful language. During the move to online teaching during Covid 19, the resilience of the students was noteworthy. Reflecting on this first year, we realised that students felt a burden to solve climate change. This engendered a sense of anxiety in some: that no matter what they did, it would never really be enough. This realisation  helped us to adapt in the second year. We introduced smaller components, called Testing Cycles, in which students could trial an approach, set out a path and make a discrete study, reflect upon what worked or didn’t and plan their next step. We balanced a more structured format – through clearer descriptions of learning outcomes and assessment strategies, more regular and diverse formats of feedback (verbal, written, peer-to-peer) with autonomy to take risks. This relieved anxiety by enabling students to ‘bank’ grades during the semester. In the third iteration, we began with the particular (material conditions at a close scale) and worked with students to build their understanding of connected systems: the material, ecological, social and political, connected in parallel to the emerging New European Bauhaus values of beauty, sustainability and inclusion. Somewhat counter-intuitively the more we encouraged specificity at the outset, the greater the freedom students had to diverge and explore more varied interests from a common point of departure. The resulting work of this cohort was hailed by external examiners as exceptional. It has been heartening to watch these graduates progress beyond the academy with confidence. They are exhibiting their work, they are engaged in research on climate policy, they are hosting workshops and advocating for change. They are winning awards – which is nice too.  More than that, they are kind and generous peers, curious and creative spatial pirates. The future in their hands looks bright. Part Three: Embracing uncertainty as a means to resilience. UCD, along with all six schools of architecture in Ireland, is now reviewing its undergraduate curriculum to address the changing landscape of practice in the context of climate change and housing need. Our challenge, as educators is to co-design with students and staff what a curriculum for architecture needs to be. Reflecting on the changes made in the Master of Architecture course, key aspects we plan to include are the acknowledgement of the material in architecture and how it is embedded within social, economic and political systems. We cannot replace care with software, we cannot pretend to certainty when resilience, innovation and imagination are more valuable to our craft than ever. We need to trust in each other, learn from failure, welcome all voices, throw open the doors to other disciplines in a spirit of respectful listening. Test, make, reflect, with parity of esteem. In doing so, we can accept that the process of mending the planet is beyond time. It is a new paradigm and transformational for the practice of architecture, and necessary for us as both teachers and learners. This developed paper will explore the above in more detail and describe explicit examples of its impact as this project unfolds.

Water and the City. A Call for Climate Action through Water Saving Behaviors.
Oswald Jenewein, Texas at Arlington
Mohsen Hajibabaei & Robert Sitzenfrei,
University of Innsbruck
Seyyed Ahmadreza, University of Tehran

Abstract

Water – the petroleum of the 21st century. It is the well of life and after air, the most important element to survive. For as long as humankind has conquered the earth, the relationship to water to sustain life and serve as a premise for settlement has been essential. As villages became towns, cities, and mega-regions, the complex system of urban water got even more intertwined with the architecture of the city, establishing a network of wells, pipes, and plants to enable growth, prosperity, and well-being. With the processes of urbanization and industrialization, natural water cycles were impacted, increasing imperviousness, accelerating rainwater run-off, and reducing natural infiltration and evaporation volume. As a result, there is less water renewed on a local scale, impacting the local climate negatively (Wong, 2006). Moreover, water infrastructures are considered complex adaptive systems that contain social, environmental, and technical components (e.g., consumers, supply resources, and infrastructures, respectively) interacting dynamically and continuously with each other (Koutiva and Makropoulos, 2016). Hence, water systems can be viewed as socio-technical systems, as they are interconnected with society and the environment, which significantly affect their performance (Berglund, 2015). The actors within the city are a fundamental factor in the production of space (Lefebvre, 1991) and reach from humans to non-humans, from fauna and flora to the natural context that shapes everyday life. Within the age of climate crisis, the quest for an architectural response has been manifold. Architectural education has the responsibility to set the context for a growing generation of designers who will be, among other things, global citizens facing an environmental crisis. An open-minded and forward-thinking architectural generation, blurring the boundaries between the natural and the built, the analog and the digital, and the material and immaterial qualities of space. This generation works interdisciplinary across different campuses and beyond, engaging a variety of stakeholders in academia, the profession, and the community. This study follows the pathways of water to, within, and from the city, articulating a concrete call for climate action on water-saving behaviors in a transscalar investigation working across disciplines and continents. The primary goal of this paper is to show how research informs teaching to allow students to become an integral component in data collection and visualization, and articulating a concrete call for climate action. This interdisciplinary and cross-university project is part of a global campus framework built upon an academic partnership program between an architecture school in the United States and Central Europe. It utilizes a seminar course as part of the “Humans & Space” module within a bachelor of science degree in architecture. Both the research project and course teachings are conducted by faculty and scholars of both institutions engaging students on both sides of the Atlantic. The semester-based course is integrated into a one-year research project on quantifying people’s water-saving behaviors, linking architecture, engineering, and social sciences. From a psychological viewpoint, human behaviors are rooted in a complex process driven by psychosocial factors (Shahangian et al., 2021). The aims of the research study are to explore key determinants and prerequisites affecting individuals’ adoption of water-saving behaviors through the application of the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991, 1985) as the theoretical research framework. For this purpose, a cross-sectional survey is conducted using a structured questionnaire as the research tool to analyze data and examine the research hypotheses. Moreover, the study employs structural equation modeling as a powerful multivariate analytical tool in social and behavioral sciences. These methods of the research project are tied to the course content exposing students to interdisciplinary approaches. As a bridge between urban water, the socio-technical aspects of the research project, and the architectural curriculum and goals, the course design structures the semester topic into three main groups: (1) freshwater, (2) wastewater, and (3) stormwater. Within this framework, two distinct urban climate conditions aim to contextualize the respective investigations focusing on Alpine versus Coastal regions to follow the path of water from well to estuary. Each group consists of eight students (see Image 1), split into four subgroups of two to conduct a transscalar investigation on the respective water system, one focusing on an ideal scenario, and the other on a disaster scenario. These scenarios highlight the efficient and ideal operations of water systems and also highlight failures and hazards. The transscalar foci zoom from the (1) territorial to the (2) urban, (3) architectural, and ultimately into the (4) social scale. On the territorial scale, students investigate the origins of fresh, waste, and stormwater and their pathways to the city, including the naturogenic and anthropogenic processes needed for each network. On the urban scale, the respective water lines within the city are investigated from a treatment plant to a household or vice versa. On the architectural scale, students explore water use within a building, considering interactions between consumers and the respective networks as well as design strategies to conserve water. And lastly, on the social scale, people’s behavior and attitude towards water, especially water-saving behaviors, are visualized based on the variables as defined through the modified theory of planned behavior, like attitude, subjective norm, perceived risk, etc. This transscalar approach aims to provide a holistic overview of both the discrete components and the macro-level systems of water within and around the city. Pedagogically, this course utilizes a Socratic Pedagogical Model (Delić et al., 2016), based on  argumentative dialogues between individuals and collective decision-making to stimulate critical thinking. The teaching method emphasizes individual inquiry and collaborative problem-solving as essential components of the learning process through teamwork, visual and verbal communication. Articulating a call for climate action, this study combines research and teaching to visualize and understand water and the city based on quantified data on water-saving behaviors as a perceivable pathway for action in urban communities. Therefore, students link environmental topics to architecture, the city, and the human and non-human members of the urban ecosystem. This paper is a guide for faculty and scholars to plan interdisciplinary and cross-university projects, integrating teaching and research.

In our Own Words: Climate Change Education in Architectural Curricula in the United States
James Leach & Kristin Nelson,
University of Detroit Mercy

Abstract

Climate change is a cardinal issue in contemporary architectural discourse.  The last two decades have seen the rise of initiatives like Architecture 2030 and the Architects Declare movement, and the most recent NAAB Conditions for Accreditation brought new emphasis to educating students about the climate impact of buildings.1  The American Institute of Architects recently ratified Resolution 19-11, declaring an “urgent imperative for carbon reduction,” 2,3   and Architect Magazine recently produced a special issue focused solely on the topic of decarbonization.4  It is not clear, however, that this heightened attention has resulted in an increase in the  ability of architects to effectively engage in carbon reduction in practice.  In 2017, Architectural Record conducted an online poll of architects to measure their understanding of climate change.  The answers from 547 respondents suggested that architects are in agreement about the need to address climate change.  Over 86% of respondents answered that climate change mitigation was either “very urgent”, or “the most urgent challenge of our time.” 5  This same poll demonstrated, however, that respondents had an imperfect understanding of the causes of climate change, and fewer than 50% were able to identify that buildings are the primary contributor to climate change. 5  Design educators are well-positioned to redress this apparent knowledge gap and help to effect change in architectural practice by equipping students (the architects of the future) with the requisite knowledge of climate change and decarbonization. Over the past decade, the authors have taught architectural design and building technologies courses at three different institutions in the United States, have served as visiting critics at several others, and have attended numerous academic conferences.  From this perspective, it is not apparent that a majority of institutions have made climate literacy and action a mainstream and integral part of architectural curricula.  In order to test this observation, the authors have undertaken a survey of the language used by individual architectural educators and by institutions as an indication of the prevalence and importance of climate action in current architectural curricula.  The website of an accredited institution includes accessible school or departmental mission statements and faculty bios.  These are the words that educators and administrators themselves choose to convey their priorities, beliefs and values.  Although the presence of language addressing climate and carbon action in such statements does not guarantee that these subjects are core to the curriculum, its absence is a strong indication that these matters are not significant concerns. This study attempts to understand how and if NAAB accredited schools of architecture, and their faculties, have referenced climate literacy and carbon neutral design in these statements.  More specifically this paper will limit its survey to the first phase of the study, focused on NAAB Region 4 schools.  The paper will present figures and statistics noting the  frequency of key terms such as: “sustainability”, “carbon neutral”, “zero net carbon”, “climate response”, climate change”, “high performance” etc.  These findings serve as a beginning indication of the level of engagement of architectural educators with the subject matter in question.  The ultimate intention is to expand this study to include course descriptions and learning outcomes for core courses and to include all 131 NAAB accredited schools of architecture in the future. The information collected by this study will allow the community of architectural educators to better understand the current state of architectural education, and to better prepare for the future in this time of urgent need to address the global climate crisis.

11:00am-12:30pm
Research Session
1.5LU Credit

Co-Creative Partners 1

Moderator: Sedef Doganer, Wentworth Institute of Technology

Designing Rooms-for-Play as/through Digital Tools
Gregor Grunwald & Lutz Robbers, Jade University

Abstract

In this paper, we attempt to explore the potentials of digital architectural design based on a specific case study. Connecting theoretical reflections on the notion of play in design education with concrete case studies in digital practice we intend to make a contribution to the further development of design research. Didactic approaches in design education in architecture, still until the present day, rely on methods inherited from prior reform efforts. Basic training in creative design still clings to lessons first introduced in modernist avant-garde institutions such as the Bauhaus or Vkhutemas whose socio-political vocations were based on blending elementary material exercises and workshop conditions with Gestalt theories and spatial psychotechnics (Bokov 2020). At the same time, today’s architectural education still to a large measure mimics curricular structures and technocratic instrumentalizations introduced more than two centuries ago by polytechnical schools of applied sciences. Caught in-between these two competing currents architectural education continues to aspire to educate ‘artist-engineers’. Such widespread assumptions of a single, centred and empowered subjectivity as both creative origin and engine still operate as the justification of modern design practices (see e.g. Gänsehirt; Mattenklott/Weltzien). Contemporary approaches in Science and Technology Studies and cultural techniques studies have started to interrogate this delirium of autonomy and omnipotent subjectivity that dominate our comprehension of what design is, how it is practiced and taught. Critiquing the Western heritage of “designo” discourses that since the 16th century have displaced the locus of creative practices design research has focused on extended definitions and range of agency (Siegert 2015) to include multiple actors both human and non-human (Latour 1990) as well as extended debates about the role of design media/tools beyond the limitation of functionalist or optimizing instrumentalizations. The ongoing digital transformation increasingly leads to changes in the work practice of architects and as a consequence also affects the design process itself. The computer is not only replacing the architect’s pencil. Digital techniques fundamentally expand and redefine the tools and media employed in design. They are removing restrictions and opening up new areas of creation and design. Digitalisation leads to an increase in complexity in the design process, thus creating new challenges and at the same time opening up new pathways. For example, the participatory element of digitalisation gives the possibility of involving different actors. This makes designing a “collaborative journey” where we are “producing collective experiences” (cf. concept of co-creative partners). The integration of automation changes the group of the design creators and adds further, non-human actors to the list of participants. Against this background, design research must be re-thought and further developed. It must ask itself how digital planning methodology, with its new forms of communication, its unhindered access to information and the lowering of participation barriers, promotes design as a networked, collaborative process beyond the mere notion of optimization. We intend to explore this potential within the specific didactic environment of digital architectural design, using the method of play. By play we mean the voluntary engagement in rule-bound yet creative activities that stand outside ‘ordinary’ life while mimicking it (Huizinga, 1955). In contrast to intentional and goal-driving design practices that aim at achieving a certain object while paradoxically materializing a creative idea of the individual designing subject, play is means oriented, intrinsically open and collective because it involves multiple actors. We want to frame play as mode of non-instrumentalizing interaction and incorporation of technology in design environments ensuring both the compliance with having to assure the training of certain skills and modes of practice inherent to the trade of architecture while permitting to explore the potentials of these new technologies. Play relieves digital technologies from their purely technical, functionalist vocations and allows glimpses into their transformative potential, which can go far beyond control and compliance with sets of rules and can be used creatively. Digital technology’s Janus-faced nature – allowing for control and optimization of evermore intricate design tasks while, at the same time, increasing open-ended contingency and complexity by inviting new actors into the design process – might not be understood as a revolutionary caesura after all. By bringing in the notion of play, we want to argue that there exist striking parallels with equally ambivalent experiments of the modernist avant-garde of the last century. Digitalization should not be framed purely in terms of a fundamental technological shift but also in terms of certain forms of continuity (see Carpo, 2008). Once digital design tools are given ‘room-for-play’ to unfold, to be put to the test and explore. Through our concrete case study of integrating digital tools in teaching design we enable students to explore this contradictory potential: the increased control of complexity in planning combined with the playful embrace of complexity’s inherent contingency. Our collaborative project opens up two avenues of exploration: First, the project interrogates the inherited didactics of design education by laying the theoretical groundwork for playful modes of design. We want to explore the potentials of contemporary BIM applications for teaching fundamental design skills and, at the same time, expanding what design entails in terms of collaboration, contingency and innovative thinking. Secondly, our paper applies this theoretical foundation to a specific case study in the classroom. It reports on the “BIM Game” that was organised in the winter term 2022/23 at Jade University of Applied Sciences as an interdisciplinary seminar of the departments of architecture and civil engineering and an experimental laboratory of design education. The BIM Game is a learning format designed as a digital simulation game that playfully introduces third year Bachelor students to the complex world of digital planning methodology. During the study period the game wants to convey digital knowledge and skills in a protected space. The focus lies on a common design task, which is to be worked on in groups of 4 to 5 people. An important aspect of the group work are role assignments. Their cooperation, distribution of rights, powers and tasks are digitally structured by a Common Data Environment (CDE). Coordinated in this way, the participants start the design process, which focuses on the following learning objectives: understanding and applying digital planning tools, creating models, working and communicating on the model, as well as cooperating in interdisciplinary project groups. The non-geometrical information receives special attention. Attaching it to the model, the purely three-dimensional design body develops into a multi-dimensional database. This increases the complexity and digital control technologies are required. A further increase in complexity comes with the involvement of other actors. In addition to the actions of human participants, automated actors appear in the BIM Game. For this purpose, we use a work portal that accompanies the participants and generates input automatically. The work portal provides information, sets deadlines, distributes tasks and checks that these are adhered to and completed. With the work portal, the experimental working environment is extended by influencing factors that have an impact on the design process. The BIM Game ends with the joint presentation of the final designs to a jury, which judges the results and determines the winners. The underlying evaluation criteria, however, do not only consider the result, but also shed light on the quality of collaboration and compliance with the rules of the game. In this way, it puts a special focus on the design process, collaboration, contingency and innovative thinking.

Checkup: Revisualizing Spaces of Care Through a Multidisciplinary Immersion Experience
Jonathan Rule &Michelle Aebersold, University of Michigan

Abstract

Extended Realities or XR has become a staple field of interest over the last decade. It has infiltrated our homes, businesses and has become an everyday component of education at many different levels. While there is still a lot of skepticism around the value of this technology, curiosity by many has allowed for different disciplines to embrace it. Its novelty has instigated new questions, spawned new methods of engagement, and has forced anyone working with it to move beyond the safety of tacit knowledge and find new answers through broader collaborations. Within education, universities across the globe are rapidly integrating extended reality in their curriculum. New XR labs are being formed to provide the necessary infrastructure to instigate new conversations and provide spaces for experimentation. Projects are being incentivized through startup funding and grants. Students are requesting that it be part of their course work. With all this euphoria, the field of XR is ripe to put pressure on the “idols and icon” of architecture and establish new methods for collaboration and the production of collective experiences. This paper will discuss the methodology and outcomes that resulted from an experimental collaboration between two graduate level seminars. The first course is an experimental research seminar led by a faculty member from architecture. The course teaches digital skill building while interrogating the affordances of XR by focusing on virtual and mixed reality as tools to study and improve how spaces are designed. The second course, led by a faculty member from nursing, is a foundational course in the leadership, analytics and innovation masters degree in nursing. The course focuses on quality science and performance analytics and teaches students how to use continuous improvement, process flow and decision analytics to improve patient care delivery. Many of the students in this course are currently practicing in leadership roles, bringing some real world experience to this engagement. The co-creative endeavor has productively established a space for teaching and learning beyond the boundaries of architecture and nursing while still deeply engaging core values of their respective disciplines. What is XR and how can it be used in a school of architecture and other disciplines? Extended reality (XR) is a term used to describe a fusion of all the realities, which are “… technology-mediated experiences enabled via a wide spectrum of hardware and software, including sensory interfaces, applications, and infrastructure”. (XRSI, n.d.). XR includes virtual, augmented and mixed reality as defined by Milgram et. al, 1994 in which he describes a continuum between the real world and the completely virtual world. Progression along the continuum incorporates more digital content overlying the real environment until you reach the point where it is entirely digital. Each of these technologies has its own unique use in both education and real world applications.  In healthcare XR is used as a way to educate learners and provide patient care through the use of virtual simulated experiences nurse can learn how to manage a patient care situation or perform a procedure (Aebersold, 2022). Frameworks to guide the use of XR in teaching include both educational frameworks (mastery learning or experiential learning) and  user-centered design (Salcedo,et al, 2022). It is a technology that also affords new possibilities for collaboration, co-design/co-creation. XR in architecture is used in many ways in a professional capacity, including the design of spaces and new methods of fabrication through human-computer interaction (HCI). In addition, as a visual field it is also being used to educate future architects. The intersection of these two fields through the use of XR presents new possibilities for collaboration, co-design and co-creation to speculate on how spatial/environment designs impact the way we deliver healthcare and support the nurses who provide that care. Nurses and architects need to collaborate together in the real world to design safe and effective healthcare spaces, however they often don’t understand how each side approaches this task.  The methodology of a co-creative process: Education should not occur in a silo and should embrace co-creative opportunities and methods whenever possible. In architecture it should not only be about improving design and final product but about teaching students to learn how to communicate and collaborate with others in different fields. This co-creative project recognized that there was a critical issue missing in health care spaces that in part is a result of the lack of thought in caring for the health care provider.. “Previously, designing clinical spaces for well-being was focused primarily on the patient. Now, taking care of patients is table stakes; caring for the people who serve them is crucial to creating and maintaining a high-performing hospital system.” (Saba et. al, 2022) The traditional exam room has not changed since the 1950’s even though healthcare has changed significantly.(Ku et. al, 2022) To study this, students from a nursing and architecture seminar, utilized XR, building design, patient safety and nursing work to assess and re-conceptualize three spaces that are often part of the healthcare environment. These spaces are: wellness/break area for the staff, hospital patient care room and an outpatient exam room. Each of these spaces has a unique function and unique challenges. The first step in this project was to help each group of students understand the unique nature of their work. This was done using XR experiences that are unique to each group. Nursing students utilized Augmented Tectonics to learn about architecture and architecture students used Under the Skin to learn about patient care delivered in two different environments. This provided a background to demonstrate how XR can be used and to learn about each discipline. Following this initial encounter, each course was structured so that the students would work together to design and model the three different healthcare spaces.  In parallel to becoming adept to the technologies that the students would use, the seminars developed base knowledge through initial research into the design of these spaces through documentation, inventory assessment, process flows, performance analytics and first hand experience with professionals. Following this analysis the courses implemented a PDSA cycle (plan, do, study, act) which was broken down into three stages: prototype development, testing and prototype adjustment. During prototype development students from both disciplines worked in tandem to establish criteria that would be studied. This included visibility of objects in the room from the nursing perspective (monitoring equipment), patient safety features, layout and organization, functionality and spatial flows, lighting and visual reception of the environment. After the initial design iterations were complete, a testing phase was initiated. This phase ascertained both qualitative and quantitative feedback on the spaces by way of two methods of analysis. The analysis used direct observation and surveys in addition to more objective measuring metrics which leveraged motion mapping and eye tracking integrated in virtual reality headsets. Additionally the co-creative student experience was evaluated and found to be beneficial.  Conclusion: There are a wide range of benefits to designing, iterating and collaborating with peers in a virtual space. With advances in technology it has become clear that in both education and practice, work has become more collaborative. XR as an emerging tool for co-creativity, offers the potential to improve the design process, especially when that process takes on a multidisciplinary approach. The work completed between these two seminars was largely successful; however, it is also possible to highlight moments where future research into XR supported co-creativity is required. The future of healthcare is important for everyone both the recipients of care and those that deliver care. Creating optimal space for healthcare delivery will require a co-creative approach through student/professional exchange and innovative uses of new technologies.

The Role of Team Collaboration in Didactics of Architecture – MpiBIM Project
Krzysztof Koszewski & Pawel Przybylowicz, Warsaw University of Technology

Abstract

BIM technology in design
BIM technology is very popular topic in the construction industry in recent years. The use of digital building models has modernized the design and construction process. The benefits of using BIM are, first, reducing the number of errors during the design leading to an increase in the quality of designed buildings, which reduces their operating costs. The main reasons for using BIM at the design stage include:
modeling of building elements and ongoing analysis of design decisions, automatic generation of 2D documentation using information related with model elements for their annotation and take-offs, obtaining fully coordinated multi-industry documentation using BIM models and tools for automatic clash verification and the correctness of design solutions.
However, in our opinion, the most important benefit is the ability to significantly improve the quality of communication in the project team or in relations with external stakeholders. Architectural design is interdisciplinary – comprehensive, universal, versatile. This means that many different designs decisions result from the actions of design teams. Inter-industry collaboration and coordination is one of the important areas that can be modernized using the BIM technology.  Pic.1 The transition from distributed communication to integrated access to a building database.
The design process is finding optimal solutions in subsequent design decisions and assessing their compliance with the defined requirements. The involvement of the entire project team in this process and wide access to information facilitates the understanding of individual arrangements and their verification.
BIM at the Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw University of Technology
BIM technology has been present at the Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw University of Technology for many years. During the courses, students learn the methods of organizing the BIM process and using BIM coordination tools. From the first year of studies, students of the Faculty of Architecture learn the basic principles of modeling with the use of BIM platforms popular on the market. They also learn the benefits of using 3D methods for communication and evaluation of design decisions.
During the course Computer Modeling students learn 3D tools to clearly present the design issues. The continuation of these activities is the Digital Geometric Techniques course, which deals with the automation of design processes with the use of visual programming tools such as Grasshopper or Dynamo.
The next stage is the Integration of Design Processes – BIM course, a compulsory course in the first semester of master’s studies. During the lectures, students learn the theory and principles of using BIM technology, and during the laboratory, in teams, they simulate the collaboration process, learning the tools and methods of inter-branch coordination
mpiBIM – inter-faculty interdisciplinary BIM project
The period of the last decade was the time when a new concept of building knowledge matured at the Warsaw University of Technology. Students, doctoral students, and academics of engineering faculties related to transforming the construction environment have taken initiatives to integrate design processes. The most important element of BIM teaching at the Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw University of Technology is the mpiBIM project.
Inter-faculty interdisciplinary BIM project is a subject which is carried out in close inter-faculty cooperation. The project teams are composed of students and lecturers from the Faculties of Architecture, Civil Engineering, Building Installations, Hydrotechnology and Environmental Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Management. Students from these five faculties form multi-discipline teams to prepare an interdisciplinary construction project.
The tool for cooperation and coordination is a digital BIM model, containing not only geometric information, but also other types of information used by the participants of the design process. The primary goal of the class is to develop the ability to collaborate and communicate in an interdisciplinary team, with the help of BIM tools, techniques, and processes. As opposed to “traditional” design, where each discipline works separately and only uses solutions developed by their predecessors, during mpiBIM all the students actively participate in project creation from the very beginning. General assumptions of the mpiBIM course:
The subject is dedicated to students of higher years of studies with basic knowledge and skills in issues relevant to a given field of study of the construction industry, teamwork, and inter-branch cooperation, Ensure active participation of the teaching staff of individual Faculties. The number of persons and their area of interest selected depending on the size of project teams and types of topics, Broad participation of representatives of external parties related to construction industry: investors, designers, and contractors. Cooperation in this area consists in participation of specialists of a given industry in classes, conducting consultations, visits of design teams to cooperating institutions or on construction sites, Close cooperation of units of Warsaw University of Technology connected with construction industry. Other units are also invited to participate in the project depending on the specificity of the subjects carried out.
The idea of creating an experimental course for engineering and graduate students was based on two foundations. First, we wanted to look at the issue of cross-industry cooperation from the perspective of new media and a new sensitivity. Digital CAD tools have become the basis of engineering design, but communication remains imperfect. Inference procedures, terminology and even the way of interpreting phenomena become more complicated every day. What is obvious for an architect may be difficult for a structural designer to understand in terms of the conditions for shaping the structure or creating architectural partitions in a building.
Pic.2 The idea of integrated design as a cooperation of all stakeholders from the beginning of the construction process.
In our considerations on teaching methodology, we referred to the thoughts of Wojciech Gasparski, who perceives the future of technological development in the context of the transition to the era of a designing knowledge society. Our student collaboration model must break with the routine of sequential transfer of material between industries, i.e., long-term coordination through successive approximations. The goal is that everyone solves problems simultaneously, and digital tools translate information and help visualize conditions in a generally understandable and constantly updated manner.Here we come to the second essential condition of the project. For the parallel work to run effectively, students had to gain access to a medium representing the real construction situation. This allows them to experiment and obtain repeatable, reliable results. In our project, the engineering laboratory was built with the help of BIM technology and modeling. We do not promote any specific IT tools. On the contrary, we try to work in accordance with the openBIM idea, applying the principle of effective use of a multi-industry, integrated database.
Pic.3 An example of multi-discipline project documentation prepared as part of the mpiBIM course in BIM technology.
Conclusions
Running an mpiBIM project enables the modernization of other projects at the Faculty of Architecture. The conclusions of the project made it possible to develop a catalog of good practices for creating and running other inter-faculty subjects. mpiBIM is also an opportunity to identify organizational, legal, and financial problems related to the implementation of didactic projects between various departments of the Warsaw University of Technology.
The mpiBIM project is an excellent platform for testing collaboration capabilities and tools. As part of teamwork, students can practice real processes related to agreeing design decisions. Teaching the course in the following years resulted in:
Ensuring the flexibility and scalability of the courses implemented at a level that allows them to be effectively conducted in multi-person industry teams, Enabling the active participation of tutors and moderators to ensure the correct direction of the didactic process and support for project decisions, Using the principles of agile planning and organization of the design process to ensure early and effective response to changes and the best adjustment of decisions made to the requirements of the topics being developed, Increasing the quality of the didactic process using modern tools and methods of team collaboration and design in BIM technology, Making design work more realistic by establishing cooperation with institutions and organizations closely related to construction market and having needs in the field of implementation of integrated design solutions and BIM technology.
Thanks to the results of the mpiBIM project, it was possible to create a knowledge base and examples for the implementation of other scientific, research and educational projects, including supporting initiatives on interdisciplinary activities in other international projects of the Warsaw University of Technology, e.g., the New European Bauhaus or the ENHANCERIA project.

Teaching Co-Creativity with Building Information Modeling for Sustainability Analyses and Engaged Storytelling
Sebastian Damek & Carolin Schulze, Fachhochschule Erfurt
Andreas Pilot, Technical University of Darmstadt

Abstract

1 Problem Statement As part of digital transformation of the design, construction and operation of buildings, Building Information Modeling (BIM) is increasingly the central topic. Different disciplines create digital building models in which information and geometry are combined. These form the basis of the so-called “BIM-method”. Learning strategies for successful collaboration is a major challenge in architecture education, since extensive specialist knowledge is an essential basis for interdisciplinary collaboration which must be acquired in parallel during studies. Teaching successful collaboration is challenging due to the required interdisciplinary organization, didactics, and the required technology. It is, therefore, hardly ever implemented in architecture curricula.[1] 2 Purpose The aim of the presented work was to develop a teaching concept that is lowering the thresholds and facilitating access to collaborative interdisciplinary design and planning processes so that students are enabled to co-design buildings in interdisciplinary teams as co-creative partners. Based on the openBIM-method, it was made possible for the students to consider the ecological factors of the design holistically through collaborative interdisciplinary work, to carry out energy assessments and to analyze these as ethical professionals., A key deliverable was that teams of students present their results as engaged storytellers by giving VR-tours (virtual reality) through their respective buildings. 3 Methods “Building Information Modeling refers to a cooperative working methodology in which digital models of a building are used to consistently record the information and data relevant to its life cycle, as well as to manage and to exchange this information in transparent communication between the participants or transfer it for further processing.”[2] The VDI 2552 sheets 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3 are currently authoritative for basic and advanced training on BIM in Germany. The standardized educational content described therein has been defined, as the “BIM Standard of German Chambers of Architects and Engineers” and a certification program of chambers, private providers, but also universities use this series of guidelines for their teaching-programs. Didactically, the guideline series describes a sequence, which begins with teaching theory and based on that provides opportunities for the application of the learned content. An understanding of the processes in the construction industry is assumed or at least not taught. Students mostly lack this knowledge as it requires practical experience. Participants Students from the departments of architecture and building and energy technology at a university of applied sciences and from the department of architecture at a university at two different locations in Germany participated in interdisciplinary teams in this teaching project with scientific evaluation. Teaching concept The class consisted of multiple different learning phases. Each phase started with an application-oriented impulse lecture followed by the students’ own practical implementation of the methods, implemented in an onside kick-off workshop on the one hand and weekly virtual phases spread over the semester on the other hand: design processing, life cycle assessment and energy evaluation repeatedly passed through these learning phases. Fig. 1 The aim of dividing the schedule in a workshop and a project phase was to enable the students to acquire skills in the workshop phase, which they could then apply, deepen and reflect on in the project phase through targeted theoretical and practical impulses. Throughout the semester six competence fields of the BIM-methodology were conveyed: “model use”, “model creation”, “model export”, “model coordination”, “definition of strategies” and “definition of requirements”[3]. Across classes model-based communication was regularly addressed. , which were combined into three learning phases “modeling”, “coordination” and “presentation / reflection / documentation”. Workshops At the beginning, two workshops were held. The students got to know each other and were put together in interdisciplinary teams, team cohesion was facilitated through a short team-building intervention. The workshops aimed not only to strengthen the communication amongst each other, to bind the participants to the project and to increase the motivation in the team, but also to prepare them for the contents of the project phase through the preliminary exercises “3D-puzzle” and developing a concept for their Tiny House (Fig. 1). Workshop 1 The task included designing and modeling an exhibit in a virtual museum. As a classic “zero-point-task” each exhibit had to consist of at least 4 pieces, one of which was designed by each team member and created using a software of their choice and exported in Ifc format (Industry Foundation Classes) for coordination. In advance the required basic techniques and skills for model creation, model export as well as model coordination and the CDE (Common Data Environment) were demonstrated live to the students using an example. The results were then viewed in a VR-environment and presented to the entire group by the respective teams (Fig. 2). Through this students experienced collaborative and cooperative work on, in, and with digital 3D-models. Fig. 2 To create a kind of competition, all students and teachers formed a jury and voted anonymously for the best sculpture. Four second prizes and one first prize were awarded. Workshop 2 The design task “StackItUp” was performed where the plots for the designs were located in a common virtual environment on a grid of 3×3 sections and a small village was created – the “StackItUp Park” (Fig. 4). The task was to design a Tiny-House as a 3-storey residential building with a floor area of 7 square meters, in which all functions of living should be available for at least 1 person. Fig.3 In an impromptu of 3 hours, the teams developed concepts for the design of the facade, interior, landscape, and technical building equipment within the specified maximum dimensions and uses for the respective property (Fig. 3). This short and intensive processing time laid the foundation for minimizing or avoiding delays in the planning phase due to later conceptual design adjustments. At the end of the second day of the workshop, the results were presented by each team and collectively critiqued across disciplines by the instructors. Project phase Starting point of the project phase was again the creation of a 3D-model. This phase was supported by lectures focusing on the use, requirements and creation of models and the processes learned at the workshop (Fig. 1). In coordination, the CDE became the self-evident hub of the course. Each team was given its own virtual space for its own project. Model stands that were intended for higher-level discussion or presentation to the public were uploaded as revision stands into the overarching project space called StackItUp-Park (Fig. 4). Fig.4 Lecture notes, notices, and assignments were also centrally posted there. At the same time, this served as a presentation space for the individual designs. The interplay of team-internal collaboration on the 3D-model and cross-semester presentation in the VR-environment resulted in a self-evident BIM-process. In order to be able to discuss the jointly developed intermediate states of the designs together regardless of location, joint planning meetings with up to 40 people were held in the virtual space, in which the students’ projects were part of the virtual environment and were experienced and discussed via VR inspection. This also served as an exercise for the final presentation. Through this collaborative interdisciplinary effort, students were then able to take a holistic view of the ecological factors of their design, conduct energy assessments and analyze them. The target parameter of the joint consideration was the carbon footprint per person/year. In order to have the corresponding data available in the various sub-models for a sustainability analysis, a combination of model use, creation, export and coordination was once more necessary. (Fig. 1). In the phase “Definition of Strategies” it was the task to select one of the workflows the students had gone through together, to reflect on it and to present and describe it per BPMN-schema (Business Process Model and Notation). The didactic combination of a playful approach and in-depth content conveyed by lectures enabled a low-threshold and natural access to the application of the openBIM-method. 4 Results and conclusion Based on an entrance survey and a final survey, the extent to which students’ self-efficacy of BIM and their understanding of the roles of their own other disciplines evolved during the project was evaluated. Both improved throughout the semester. Teaching and learning to work exclusively with 3D-models and the openBIM-method means additional work for students and teachers. This could be compensated by foregoing the teaching of theoretical knowledge in advance as well as the creation of common 2D representations. A deeper collaborative interdisciplinary cooperation in the teams was promoted. The understanding for the respective other disciplines increased, fundamental misinterpretations did not occur. The designs of the Tiny Houses were also perceived as a unity as a basis for a holistic view of sustainability. The immersive experience of the self-created 3D-models led to advanced storytelling, where students recorded films in VR similar to a short play. They themselves acted as avatars and their own designs were the stage. Fig.5 In contrast to previous interdisciplinary courses, it is remarkable that all participants stayed in the teams until the end and contributed their models to the respective Tiny House.

Deep Inversive Projections: Form Making through Perspectival Mindset of Architects and Machines
Frederick Kim & Jeffrey Huang,
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)

Abstract

Both traditionally and historically, architects have been building 3D objects by designing, representing, and communicating their formal ideas in 2D orthographic drawings as projective tools. However, technological advances have challenged these drawings by enabling architects to design in 3D using computer-aided architectural systems. Such technological advancements have allowed architects to analyze and explore form making using curved lines and surfaces in a digital environment. With more recent developments in what has been called the ‘second digital turn,’ machines now have the intrinsic capacity to learn from an infinite amount of data. Therefore, they can contribute in unprecedented ways to the perennial act of making architectural forms. With this latest transition, the conventional roles of the virtuoso architect as ‘sole author’ and prime ‘form giver’ have given way to newly skilled ‘data pilots’ working in the interface between human and machine with transmuted abilities. Such a shift has given novel significance to the issue of form generation in design disciplines. In response to such transitions, the research examines how architects and AI machines can work together, as collective intelligence, in creating architectural forms. With advances in image learning with deep learning, more 3D information can be extracted and used creatively to transform 2D results into 3D, continually extending the repertoire of architectural form. This research aims to extract perspectival information from learning and clustering architecture based on the images of diverse viewpoints of buildings, by using the state-of-the-art Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), StyleGAN3’s potential to generalize different perspectival views of the object. For the perspectival transformation of different views of architecture, the research employs traditional projective representation techniques, based on Taylor’s inverse projection method, as the operative tool to transform 2D generated images to create a new 3D architectural form. The implicit research question addressed here is: How can the perspectival mindset of human architects can co-create with machine to generate new three-dimensional architectural forms from two-dimensional GAN images? To address this research question, this research developed Deep Inversive Projections (DIP), a new methodological framework for integrating inverse projection systems into 3D architectural form-making by employing machine learning and clustering of 2D images based on perspectival representations. The method was deployed in a design case study to demonstrate architectural form generation with tools developed based on inverse perspective projection. The DIP method includes the following five sequential stages: (1) Data curation, (2) Imagery learning, (3) View clustering, (4) Perspective transformation, and (5) Inverse form-making. A new methodological framework, Deep Inversive Projections (DIP) integrates the inverse projection systems into 3D architectural form-making by employing machine learning and clustering of 2D images based on perspectival representations. In the overall workflow operating at a perspectival level from data curation, learning, clustering, interpolating, and transformation from 2D images to 3D form, the novel method enabled a new human-machine collaboration for generating architectural form. The two logics of form-making, 1) machine learning strategies of learning form and 2) using conventional projective systems to draw form, were combined to create new architectural forms based on the manipulation of perspectival information contained in 2D imagery generated by the GAN. Through the human-computer interactive tool, developed based on perspectival projection, architectural forms could be carefully sculpted by architect’s interpretation of morphology of GAN images, generated by the interpolation of self-similar architecture in different perspective views. The DIP method produced more precise volumetric information compared to sub-optimal results in previous research where 3D data was generated by machines, providing potentially more meaningful models for architects that could be further developed into architecture. The paper discusses an architectural form-making process from 2D GAN imagery by leveraging the perspectival logic of machine-human intelligence using deep learning and projective geometry. Using images of Swiss cabins as a dataset, the Deep Inversive Projections, DIP show how machine learning, clustering, and transforming of perspectival representation-based imagery could give insights for humans to inversely translate architectural information inherent in 2D GAN images into 3D forms using perspective projection techniques. In DIP, machine learning and parametric techniques are combined. The machine learning components are used to learn, organize, and interpolate perspectival information using StyleGAN3 in conjunction with k-means clustering and a t-SNE visualization algorithm. The parametric projective drawing technique is used to “reverse engineer” the perspectival information into 3D forms. The framework suggests that perspectival information could be curated, extracted, and learned by deep neural network algorithms, and further interpreted and extrapolated into 3D forms using parametric projection. The research presented possible directions for how machine intelligence could be used to augment the utility of conventional architectural drawing techniques and enable a creative architectural form-making process. In view of future applications, DIP aspires to create an interactive tool between humans and machines in designing architecture forms based on the collective intelligence between humans and machines and a shared “perspectival mindset”.

12:30pm-2:30pm

LUNCH

2:30pm-4:00pm
Research Session
1.5LU Credit

Dissident Intellectuals 2

Moderator: Mimi Locher, University of Manitoba

Leaving Space for Alternative Pathways
Suzanne Lettieri, Cornell University

Abstract

With ongoing externalized pressure following the socio-cultural turmoil of 2020, there are currently widespread attempts to increase diversity in architecture schools across the US. Amidst this active recruitment, there is a real need to evaluate recent methods of attracting and retaining underrepresented students. Defined preparatory programs are initiatives set up to make an impact in introducing underrepresented students to the discipline and provide an on-ramp to the pursuit of architecture. While these processes have aimed to produce more equitable pathways into higher education, there is a need for broader-scaled networks that stitch these discrete practices to sustain commitments to diversity and equity. This paper will question the institution’s role in identifying gaps in pathway systems. Further, the paper considers these gaps as creative opportunities to work within a pathway system and career trajectory that may unpredictably yet productively meander. In Spring 2017, Dr. Sharon Sutton visited the University of Michigan to speak about her then recently published book When Ivory Towers Were Black: A Story about Race in America’s Cities and Universities. In the book, she tells the story of Columbia’s “experiment” to actively recruit minority students in response to the civil rights protests and campus rebellions of the late 1960s and in Sutton’s words “made the recruits the stars of the school” (1). In light of the present-day tumultuous socio-political landscape, Sutton’s 2017 visit presciently provided a historic context for the radical framing of engaged work that has since become commonplace in contemporary architecture schools. In hindsight, the lecture also underscored the academy’s relationship to social justice and reminds us of the work that remains to be done.  While roughly half of new NCARB record holders identify as a person of color, “the proportion of African American candidates in the profession has seen little change over the past decade and continues to be underrepresented when compared to the U.S. Census data.” Furthermore, Black Americans report the longest licensure path of 15.2 years (2). This speaks to Sutton’s concerns on the validity of “pipelines” if students are not even coming out the other end (i.e. arriving as a licensed professional). This also brings to the fore the limitations of the linear pathway that the pipeline alludes to and the need for assessments that value alternative possibilities that an architecture education enables. That current measures to increase diversity and equity are insufficient comes as no surprise to a contemporary audience, but Sutton’s observations then, with Columbia’s 1968 efforts in mind, took issue with solely data-based recruitment strategies aimed at increasing the Black and Brown student “pipeline” into universities; what she called “a ruse that diverts the attention from the here and now to an ever-elusive future.” Among many potent lessons from the lecture, Sutton’s points on creating an “educational ladder,” the importance of continuous tracking and support for Black and Brown students, institutional focus on attrition, and a student-focused education that reflects lived experience resonate strongly with gaps in current initiatives. Of utmost importance was what Sutton described as the failure of Columbia’s epic recruitment experiment: its inability to persist, adapt, and “transform the structural conditions that underpin white privilege.” Over the past ten years, 13 out of 53, (3) Predominantly White Institutions (PWI) have initiated early-learning programs for underrepresented students that introduce architecture as a career pathway before the college application process ensues (4). From 2016-2018 the author was a Michigan-Mellon Fellow in “Egalitarianism and the Metropolis,” a multi-faceted fellowship that included full-time teaching for a Detroit-based pre-college architecture program (ArcPrep)–a design and research project–and administrative responsibilities. The position served as exposure to the detrimental effects of status quo recruitment strategies, and the roadblocks that students face outside of the classroom environment which impact continuity beyond. The experiences in Detroit affirmed that along with inventive pedagogical strategies, more attention and creative thought must be given to tasks that are typically deemed to be non-design-related or administrative. Recruitment, post-evaluation, and large-scale mentorship are just as important as course content in providing students with an egalitarian, human-centered education. Since the authors time as a fellow, the “Stacked Mentorship” model has been introduced, forging vertical support that follows a student’s trajectory (high school, college, graduate, doctoral, through early and advanced professional practice) and horizontal support across institutions (5). It is described as a “meta-mentorship community supporting students of color and other underrepresented minorities in architecture.” In the paper, tangible examples will be explored that shed light on how this method could expand to other institutions and how design milestones as well as alternative trajectories may overlap with the ”five mentorship stacks.” Along with structural changes, as the current NOMA president, Jason Pugh, says, we need to consider “milestones” throughout the journey (6). Large-scale change will rely on the accumulation of several smaller scale initiations that most importantly provide continuity and extended support for longer than a singular introductory course can offer. The full paper will explore the role of a series or sequence of projects and protoypes that could serve as a repository of ideas for design milestones and infill mechanisms, including, for example, early design-exposure programs, design-build events, engaged syllabi, student-led initiatives, and non-hierarchical teamwork that double as opportunities for students to expand and solidify their network of support and perhaps embrace alternative pathways. Since Sutton’s book launch in 2017, the parallels to the events that spawned the 1968 campus rebellions have only increased, and the number of Black Americans in the profession has remained relatively unchanged. Preparatory programs are extremely successful in exposing students to the discipline of architecture, but without structural change in our institutions, these programs are destined to create little change. Additional support through mentorship and cross-institutional networks would amplify their effects and provide a broader-scope pathway for underrepresented groups to enter into the discipline and feel greater comfort in doing so. As universities seek methods of increasing diversity, it will become necessary to expand beyond current investments in recruitment and move toward building expanded support networks that may also support alternative pathways. These advancements toward continuities of support would suggest a new model of collective stewardship and, moreover, they would leverage the capacity of institutions to instill an ethos from which all scales of support can grow.

Design for Dignity: Collaborative and Generative Pedagogy for Social Impact
Michaele Pride & Mark Childs,
University of New Mexico

Abstract

How can the relative freedom of the design studio explore, debate and address social inequities? What generative role can design pedagogy play in shifting perspectives and affecting change—among students, faculty, and decision-makers? This paper presents a collaborative urban design studio that incorporates four pedagogical approaches: direct community engagement, interdisciplinary collaboration, a focused design problem, and systems level interventions. Through primary and secondary sources, students identify and articulate a range of world views, and identify potential, corresponding design strategies. This approach helps students explore the architect’s responsibility to guard the health, safety and welfare of the general public, in ways that are simultaneously specific, intellectually challenging, and reproducible.  This paper discusses this approach in two instances of the community design studio. In the first, students, faculty and community stakeholders address the socially and politically charged question of unequal and inequitable access to sanitary facilities, especially for our unsheltered neighbors—through dialogue, debate and design. We came to understand the multiple ways in which homelessnes and basic human functions are criminalized. The exercise was prompted by a real situation made evident in a local public park, which served as a daytime gathering place for people who relied on an isolated, nighttime only shelter. Without public toilets, the park is emblematic of the politics and paradox of public space—designed to exclude and deter, as much as to support.  What design solutions lie at the intersection of conflicting interests of our communities? Students learned that public toilets are an issue of public health, public safety, hospitality, dignity, and beauty. At the systems level, they explored opportunities for  sanitary facilities as civic infrastructure—integrated into public policy as well as in existing systems, such as transportation and health care. They found opportunities in the public art program and in the special zoning exceptions granted religious organizations and facilities.  This investigation led students to explore not only provision of public toilets and handwashing, but also ways to increase access to showers, safe injection sites, and social services, as well as shelter.  One concept “Heavy Duddie,” which would transform the public toilet into a sculpture that provides visual identity, while also providing increased safety through night lighting. Rounded forms also eliminate the safety risk of corners that shield potential predators and serve as hiding places for used injection needles.  One group of students combined the promising practices of mobile shower units (e.g., LavaMae), storage, and public art to a concept for safe camping sites. They continued their work after the semester’s end, to develop a concept for a portable individual shelter and storage unit, called “Cocoon Rover,” with the support of an innovation grant.  We were surprised by the amount of media attention the studio received, in print, radio and television. In the months that followed, the City installed a Portland Loo that had been misplaced in storage and implemented a mobile shower program.  In the second instance, students engaged with city officials, consultants, and community organizers—all concerned with how a large infill site would be developed. They gained insight into the privileged relationship between professional consultants and the government agencies that commission them, finding little opportunity in that relationship to understand and meet the needs expressed by community members. Empowered to direct the studio, the students turned their focus on the call for “community control,” which was frequently heard in conversations with the community organizers. This led to extensive research into development strategies that promise collective ownership, management, and control. Students developed a Tool Kit for Community Control, including definitions, examples and design applications, which are serving as a reference for those community organizations today.  These projects demonstrate the potential advocacy role for design education, and the agency of design to support underserved and marginalized populations. We look forward to sharing this work with our colleagues and discussing the potential for further social impact.

Cosmopolitcs and Virtual Environments in Architectural Design Studio Teaching: Collaborative Computer-Aided Strategies and Social and Environmental Equity
Marianna Charitonidou, Athens School of Fine Arts

Abstract

The necessity to combine sustainable methods in architectural and urban design and democratization calls for a shift from technical to the socio-technical perspectives within the field of architecture and urbanism, which is related to a need to reshape pedagogical agendas. At the center of the paper is the conviction that this endeavor of combining social and environmental equity in data-driven societies goes hand in hand with the intention of placing emphasis in critical thinking, self-reflection, social awareness, imagination, and activism in architectural education. To shed light on the role of cosmopolitan citizenship in reshaping architectural education, the paper examines how Isabelle Stengers’s conception of “cosmopolitics” as ecology of practices can help us reinvent the relationship between individual subjectivity and collective subjectivity in architectural education. At the core of the paper is the exploration of how Stengers’s etho-ecological approach draws upon Bruno Latour’s understanding of ecology politics. The paper explores an ensemble of new online practices employed in architectural design studio teaching, paying special attention to analysis of D. Randy Garrison and Terry Anderson, in E-learning in the 21st Century: A Framework for Research and Practice, concerning the recent pedagogical, technological, and organizational developments in distance education. It presents several approaches of collaborative digital architecture design teaching within virtual environments, scrutinizing the impact of technology-based instruction environments on the learning processes in various architectural schools all around the world. It departs from Michael J. Crosbie’s remark that “[m]any studios deal almost solely with the individual, while complexities of contemporary practice require collaborative teamwork” (Crosbie cited in Emam et al 2019: 164), and examines which methods can enhance participatory practice when virtual environments are used for teaching architectural design studio. Comparing collaborative learning strategies with individualistic strategies of distance learning, as far as the teaching of architectural design studio teaching is concerned, the paper aims to shed light on how methods of teaching that are based on the creation of networks offering to students the opportunity to develop informal social relations are more efficient that those that are based on more individualistic methods. In parallel, it explores how such networks of collaborative learning could be incorporated in on-line teaching strategies in the case of architectural design studios.  The main objective of the paper is to demonstrate that the engagement of students in collaborative learning environments has an important impact on learning processes, contributing to the realization of much more successful final outcomes than in the case of individualistic methods of teaching. Today, the need to shape tools and methods allowing schools of architecture to conduct Virtual Design Studios (VDS) that allow collaborative learning is more urgent than ever. As Spyros Vosinakis and Panayiotis Koutsabasis remark, a worth-noting advantage of the Virtual Worlds (VWs) is the fact that they offer to their users the opportunity to “meet and collaborate in shared workplaces” (2013: 60). An important advantage of the incorporation of the so-called Virtual Worlds (VWs) in online architectural design studio teaching is the fact that, thanks to the use integrated platforms, “the learning community has the chance to see not only the final outcome but also the resources and paradigms that led to it” (ibid.: 66). The paper presents the shifts in online architectural design studio teaching due to the elaboration of strategies promoting collaborative learning, explaining how Virtual World servers can be hosted in open-source platforms such as OpenSimulator and Second Life. of Hong Kong. For the analysis of the second case, special attention is paid to the examination of how the Virtual Reality Architectural Modeller (VRAM) software by Regenbrecht et al. (2000) was used.  The paper also explores how Manuel Castells’s theory could help us better understand the relationship between big data and architecture and urban planning in our data-driven society, on the one hand, and to reshape the agendas of architectural education within the context of the New European Bauhaus, on the other hand.

Using Socio-Spatial Practices to Create the Citizen Architect
Kate O’Connor, Ferris State University
Michelle Pannone, Marywood University

Abstract

“(Social) space is a (social) product the space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power.”i   Henri Lefebvre The community of Idlewild, located in Yates Township, Michigan, United States, possesses a significant history as the largest historic African American resort community created during the Jim Crow Era. Established in 1912, it thrived for more than fifty years but declined in 1964, with the passing of the Civil Rights Act. Listed in the Green Book, the historical importance of Idlewild was recognized at the time as a safe space for African Americans to vacation during the segregation era. At a time when African Americans were systematically pushed to the margins of society, Idlewild was viewed as a place where the luminaries of the black community could safely gather and discuss issues of vital collective interest. With a history of vacillation, today, Idlewild is experiencing a measured resurgence in its re-population. and has begun to revitalize, with a new influx of full-time residents. These citizens are moving to Idlewild looking for work-life balance in a rural context as a result of societal factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matters Movement and most importantly, seeking residency in a historically safe African American community. Notably, this incoming population resides within infrastructure that was originally designated for seasonal residents, resulting in a new set of needs for community sustainment. The community’s current needs are twofold: first, significant changes to the system that support full-time residents and second, progress that will respect and revive the historical origins of Idlewild. As an African American community discriminatory infrastructure impedes the ability of the community to thrive, and prevents the support required for a robust quality of life. Local systemic change is required, beginning primarily at the township level. Significant concerns include rural tourism, worker retention, cooperative economics, and local living, among other considerations. Recognizing the need to rectify these burgeoning issues, the Yates Township Board approved the pursuit of development of a Strategic Plan for the Township with funds allocated from a grant received by the Planning Commission. The process included three steps: 1. A pre-planning survey 2. An initial half-day session to explore the emerging trends that would impact the township in the future, plus consideration of a preferred future statement. 3. A full day session which fleshed out the preferred future and identified key strategies and goals to achieve that preferred future. The planning team was created by invitation and facilitated by a third-party, professional planner. The planning team extended invitations to thirty year-round AND seasonal residents from Idlewild and the Acreage. Additionally, each Township Board member invited key community members to participate. In all, approximately 30 unique individuals from Idlewild and the Acreage were involved in the process. This strategic plan was unanimously passed by the Yates Township Board Members in September 2022. Overarching Outcomes of the approved Strategic Plan were twofold: first, the township grows strategically with prosperity impacting the township’s year-round residents and tourism, and second, the township celebrates and promotes Idlewild as a nationally historic African American cultural community. It was unanimously agreed upon that ‘Effective Governance’ is the enabling strategy to open pathways for the Overarching Outcomes to be achieved. This paper will focus on the projects of the REDACTED fourth-year design studio as they worked with stakeholders in the Idlewild community and aligned their designs with the needs of the client and the newly Overarching Outcomes implemented in the Strategic Plan. This studio is designed to address real-world architecture problems in its social and environmental context. Student’s research and analyze existing conditions and client needs, define project requirements, and develop macro level schematic solutions based on input and feedback of a client community. Emphasis is placed on the analysis, process, and synthesis of architectural problems and their solutions. The REDACTED Studio pedagogy does not focus on the quick fix or seek easy solutions, but instead on systemic and sustainable change to position small towns for viable long-term stability; to respect the work of generations past and promote the preservation of historic architectural and cultural artifacts, not only as a gesture towards the past, but towards a sustainable future; expands students’ understanding of sustainability to include a broad, holistic view that incorporates economic and social patterns, while promoting communities that are sustainable in terms of their use of natural resources and their relationship to the environmental context in which they evolved; will be inter-disciplinary, seeking to bring teachers, students, professionals and citizens from diverse backgrounds together to solve complex problems; seeks to expose students to professional architectural and planning practice, nurturing them as future professionals and committed citizens in their communities. Students engaged members of the Idlewild with community visioning using a holistic definition of sustainability while addressing the theory of Empathetic Design, integrating ethics, equality and justice into decision making. The strategic conversation with the Idlewild community members was also formulated through the lens of economic and community theory throughout the exercise, leading to the documentation of solutions for the future of Idlewild. The aspiration for this process was to create a successful case study(ies) for other rural communities to begin strategic planning and the revision of cooperative community modeling, using architectural education to be more political, radical, compassionate, and focused on the greater good. The application and continuation of these theories, and their effect on the sustainability of the community is of particular interest throughout the development of student projects. The critical factor in this process is preserving historical community values while not stifling progress that will allow for a continued longevity. Embracing the African American heritage of Idlewild makes this instance of cooperative community living a unique example, amplified by its resort identity. The importance of social engagement throughout the process, with integration of these global and local narratives, will be examined. Extensive literature review, community engagement through meetings and discussion, and active group communication serve as the basis for student engagement with the stakeholders.  The motivation of this project engaged students in discourse with diverse clientele that is typically absent from current architectural design curricula. It emerged from society’s current awareness of the needs of a rural, afro-centric community and how to design space inclusively, responsibly, and respectfully as future architects. As a result, this studio specifically aspired to create awareness and advocacy for increased inclusiveness, diversity, fellowship, equity, and excellence in design.

Dissident Professional Practice: How Critical Design Work Can Create Activist Architects While Supporting a More Equitable Profession
Tadd Heidgerken, University of Detroit Mercy

Abstract

We teach architecture students to creatively and proactively design buildings, but often instruct them to adhere to a normative career path. Students are commonly told they will have to work late to meet deadlines and sacrifice in order to make a difference in the field. They are implicitly told the same thing by programs that expect high attrition and professors who encourage competitive study environments and extreme focus on a single studio course. They are taught that their agency in the world is limited to their product. Worse still, they are taught that unless they can sustain low pay and hard hours for several years, they do not belong in the field. This paper will examine the results of a case study professional practice course which approaches work, career, and ambitions more as a studio design project than a lecture on “how-it-is.” It will show that the typically overlooked professional practice course can be the key to an architect’s entry into the field as an activist for social, economic, and ecological justice. The paper will also discuss the responsibility professional practice courses have in creating more equitable access to the field. The course examined in this paper provides students with the regularly expected information on becoming a practicing professional architect, as well as alternative practice models, and allied fields which are available to students. But it also asks students to design their own firm. In so doing students become aware of their agency in what they do and how they do it. By asking them to do this work within the framework of their self-selected thesis topics, they are quickly introduced to their power to affect change socially, economically, and ecologically. The course content includes an introduction to professional practice across North America, providing a deeper understanding that standards of professional practice can shift depending on context. Students become agents of change advancing the causes most important to them, whether they choose a traditional career path or not. Using examples of student work, student evaluations, alumni interviews, and alumni activities this qualitative research will assess the success of a critical design approach to professional practice courses. It will examine the types of assignments in the course to show how each works and the type of thinking each assignment introduces to students. Assignments range from case studies of firms, to production of a business plan including financial calculations for employees and project management, role play of different positions in a firm, a comic strip imagining a day in the life of architectural work, weekly blog posts, time management, personal finance and compensation negotiation, readings and discussions. These assignments are aimed at four scaffolded target topics: logistics of business, personal responsibility, work-life balance, and empathy among working partners. Logistics of business refers to the knowledge students gain in this course on how a business runs. Within these assignments students learn about cash flow, overhead, employee tax rates, contract labor versus employee status, productivity measures, capacity, project management, client management, client and project contracts, contract language, marketing and promotion. Personal responsibility assignments encourage students to reflect on how they want to operate when they enter the workforce. They are asked to reflect on what they would like to provide to their firms, colleagues, bosses, clients, communities, families and themselves. Students are also introduced to ethics inquiries and thinking. Work-life balance assignments reflect on time management and how they can accommodate all their identified personal responsibilities. It asks them to consider their limits and how they will handle being at their limit. It also asks them to reflect on the effect their identified personal responsibilities will have on the world around them, from friends, family, and colleagues to the plants, animals, and insects which will be impacted by their projects. I call this a life-based design approach, which builds empathy across all beings impacted by design work. It is a view of work-life balance which is based on scales of communities rather than contained within an individual. Empathy among working partners expands on this life-based design approach. Assignments ask students to embody the role of a partner in a firm, a new employee, a client, a contractor, an engineer. They are taught that design work is not us versus them, but that each role can positively impact the design. Communication, conflict resolution, and contract negotiation skills are presented within the complex framework of differing goals, responsibilities, and expectations. Through the assignments within each topic students obtain the skills, tools, and support they will need to excel in their chosen career path. It introduces students to the field’s shifting understanding of how work is done and by whom, taking into account working from home, the rising labor movement, and an unreliable economic outlook. The research presented in this paper will share not only the approach to teaching professional practice but also real outcomes evaluated through the lens of questionnaires from past students, student evaluations of the course, and publicly available records of student careers. The paper will show that creating a course which presents students with a realistic understanding of the challenges they will face in an imperfect professional field, gives them critical thinking tools to cope with these challenges with resilience and grit, while also developing their capacity to actively work to reform the profession, either from within an existing system or by creating new work models. This will help diversify the field and in turn encourages new architects to support and work for their diverse communities. The course itself has been developed from ongoing research on collectivist architecture and alternative practice models. It is based on information from qualitative case study research on employee owned and cooperative firms as well as the organizational structures and methods of mutual aid organizations, farmers collectives, labor unions, and other activist collective groups. This research has examined indigenous and cross-cultural methods of organization of work generally as well as architectural firms specifically. The paper will share a brief introduction to this research as a framework for understanding the course structure. Radical dreams for better futures come from people who care deeply for the world around them without sacrificing their own well-being. Dissidents are deep thinkers who can critically assess the current context to understand what works and what does not. They are unafraid to forcefully demand change. Dissident designers can be trained by giving students a rigorous introduction to the reality of the architectural profession as it stands today along with the tools they need to exercise their power to change that profession for the better. This gives students the capacity and endurance to not just effect change in their field, but to make the conditions of the world more fair, just and equitable. They understand that by doing so their work as professionals will be easier, more fulfilling, and more sustainable.

2:30pm-4:00pm
Research Session
1.5LU Credit

Caregivers of the World 2

Moderator: Dan Pitera, University of Detroit Mercy

Āina-based Design of Emergency and Homeless Shelters for Indigenous Communities
Ming Hu, University of Maryland
Junghwa Suh & Matthew Higgins,
Chaminade University of Honolulu

Abstract

The goal of project is to propose, test, and validate an integrated Āina-based design approach that is intended to serve indigenous communities in Hawai’i. The testing platform is a sequence of courses offered in Chaminade University of Honolulu united students, community, and faculty, including design studio, required lecture courses and elective seminar courses. The tested design outcome will be a temporary shelter to serve the homeless and for disaster relief. The Chaminade team also partnered with the Institute of Human Services in Hawaii to identify the temporary housing community that needed help. Background Island communities like Hawai’i suffer from resource scarcity and high costs of living.  The result is a housing crisis that disproportionately affects low-income indigenous communities, and which is likely to become even more severe through the effects of climate change. This project will address the need for a novel design approach and socially-rich data on native Hawai’i housing to guide future projects and to avoid mistakes of the past. Our project will test two design principles that have been overlooked in the development of emergency housing initiatives: the integration of Hawai’ian values in respect of the land (Āina) and people; and community engagement to generate solutions that are informed by local need. While the specific causes of periodic disasters and entrenched homelessness may vary, this project proposes a common approach rooted in the community and its cultural traditions. A key part of the study is to consider shelter design from the inside out. It will focus on the material, space layout, climate quality, natural view, and lighting of the shelter’s living environment, placing emphasis on the occupants’ requirements for personal security, community sociability, and individual dignity. Identified Knowledge Gaps What is missing in current temporary shelter design is a comprehensive assessment of shelter design as a reflection of the community that it is intended to serve, an approach that has specificity to the culture, traditions, and geography of a particular people. In the context of Hawai’i, Aloha ‘Āina (love of the land) is a powerful core value for the people of Hawaiʻi, representing a deep connection between land, nature and people.  A primary aim of this research is to generate, test, and validate an Āina-based approach to the design of a home suitable for both disaster relief and homelessness.  The outcome would be a space that is physically safe and comfortable, as well as psychologically supportive and healing Marianist Education and Chaminade University of Honolulu Chaminade university of Honolulu is a private Marianist university. Marianists (Society of Mary) embrace the idea of education as a mechanism to transform society and support a spirit of openness, mutual respect and acceptance. Chaminade is a minority serving institution with 18.4% Native Hawaii or other pacific islands students, 28.2% Asian and 11% Hispanic. The characteristics of Marianist education are listed as following: 1. Educate for Formation in Faith (Mana). May I live by God (E ola au i ke akua) (ʻŌlelo Noʻeau 364) 2. Provide an Integral, Quality Education (Na’auao). Acquire skill and make it deep Lawe i ka maʻalea a kūʻonoʻono (ʻŌlelo  Noʻeau 1957) 3. Educate in Family Spirit (‘Ohana). Recognize others, be recognized, help others, be helped; such is a family relationship (ʻIke aku, ʻike mai, kōkua aku kōkua mai; pela iho la ka nohana ʻohana) (‘Ōlelo Noʻeau 1200) 4. Educate for Service, Justice and Peace (Aloha). Education is the standing torch of wisdom (Ka lama kū o ka noʻeau) (ʻŌlelo Noʻeau 1430) 5. Educate for Adaptation and Change (Aina). All knowledge is not taught in the same school (ʻAʻohe pau ka ‘ike i ka hālau hoʻokahi) (ʻŌlelo Noʻeau 203) Project objectives An Āina-based design approach has three fundamental components: Bioclimatic design, community engagement and design within means(materials, resources). The specific design parameters that the study will explore include material, climate quality, space layout, natural view, and lighting of the interior space. The research shows that people who have experienced emergency shelters often feel the absence of human dignity [1-3]. Existing shelters are often constructed quickly, leaving no time to consider how the occupants may feel and be emotionally supported in the interior space. Staying in these emergency shelters often results in a reduction of a sense of self-esteem and self-worth [4]. In the worst cases, shelter users report being denied respect as an individual, and having to endure arbitrary and excessive rules, unfair treatment, poor services, a lack of resources for basic needs, and a negative physical setting [4]. The teaching and learning objectives are integrated into four courses taught by three faculty members: EID 271: Materiality in Interior Design studio, EID 471 Senior Studio – commercial, EID 480: Special topic seminar and, EID 380: Prefabricated Environment. Students examine space layouts that will enable occupants to take control of their environment. The individual living space and their situated setting correlate to a sense of “place “founded on mutual respect and sustainability [5].  In addition, students also explore the appropriate use of materials and access to a natural to create a sense of belonging and comfort. Those design elements and concepts well with the values of Marianists and Native Hawaiians.

Learning from Spatial Capital in Architectural Education – Tools and Perspectives : The Case of the Nantes School of Architecture, France
Bettina Horsch & Pauline Ouvrard,
École nationale supérieure d’Architecture de Nantes

Abstract

This communication aims to seize the “spatial capital” as a notion to question the way in which space is taught in schools of architecture, both “in” and “outside” the walls. It being understood that spatial capital “describes the way in which space, in particular its use, its knowledge and its control, are the subject of learning which is a social and cultural construct. Spatial capital covers the ability to move around (mobility capital), to control, to dominate and to transform a space, which is covered by the notion of mastery of space[1]”. Thus, we start from the premise that the Schools of Architecture are institutions whose vocation is to transmit a specific capital to future architects – and it is this “specificity” that we intend to question and criticize. From the crossed trajectories of architecture students, we will discuss the way in which the spatial capital of future architects is built “in” but also “outside” the school, on the occasion of particular space-times which are spread out over the long term. We will focus our attention on what the institution does to students’ spatial capital, and more particularly how it transmits, compensates, distinguishes, but also reproduces specific spatial skills through teaching methods, theories and doctrines which are provided. We will start from the postulate that schools of architecture train students to understand, analyze and propose spatial transformations. Thus, it will be a question of identifying the type of repertoire of specific spatial action with which the institution endows its students. What kind of prior spatial capital (on entering school) are students equipped with? What can the institution do to the spatial capital of the students, “in” but also “outside” its walls? What legitimate or illegitimate culture is transmitted there and how? In order to illustrate our point, we will retrace what contributes, during the time of studies, to the acquisition of a specific repertoire of spatial action, whether short or long “field” immersions during project studios or study trips, as well as so-called “professionalizing” experiences such as internships, or even educational devices promoting “student engagement” such as collaboration in participatory projects or architecture festivals. Finally, a more prospective part will open on what prior and transmitted spatial capital augurs as pedagogical horizons. For example, some tracks envisaged: towards taking into account the prior spatial capital of students to adjust teaching / towards an objectification of the type of dominant spatial culture transmitted and reproduced in our schools / towards greater attention to ensuring that students increase their repertoire of spatial action during their studies to compensate for, or even counter, prior social determinisms / towards teaching modules that provide students with an understanding of what is at stake during their studies, and of the functioning of the “architecture worlds” in which they will circulate, exercise, but also transform. The corpus is based on two quantitative and qualitative surveys aimed at documenting the student trajectories of the Nantes School of Architecture over the past ten years, part of which focuses more particularly on the way in which the spatial capital of students is shaped over time, of their trajectory, from childhood to professional integration, via architectural studies. Through this research, we discuss the updating of the determinisms at work, but also what makes it possible to counter them through the figure of the “space defector” (in reference to the class defector). To support the argument, we will also rely on a more ethnographic corpus of pedagogical experiences lived by the two authors, including study trips of project studios to Berlin/Rome/Buenos Aires, field sessions on social housing or cities in decline, a teaching partnership with the École Supérieure du Bois (wood engineering school) and the École des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, the Solar Decathlon Europe 2014, project studios in real order situations with cities, urban planning agencies or federal counseling agencies for architecture and urbanism (Conseil d’architecture, d’urbanisme et de l’environnement, CAUE), etc. [1]     http://geoconfluences.ens-lyon.fr/glossaire/capital-spatial

Access Unlimited: Approaches to a Barrier-Free Architectural Pedagogy
Julia McMorrough, University of Michigan

Abstract

With the conviction that architecture, as a practice and a pedagogy, is equipped to navigate and accommodate emerging issues in a capacity that transcends the perception of limitation, and that architectural education is fertile ground for experimentation outside the pressures of practice, ‘Access Unlimited’ is an ongoing pedagogical, design, and research project focused on methods of engaging architecture students in re-thinking defaults in accessible design. This work endeavors to make barrier-free design, the understanding of disability, and the topic of accessibility, in a word, accessible. Issues of accessibility can be physical, social, legal, spatial, perceptible, and imperceptible, and to be accessible means a lot of things (especially about being approachable, able to be reached, or friendly and easy to talk to). A significant challenge of making the world more accessible to those with disabilities involves making the topic of accessibility not only more easily understood, but even more inviting, toward a productive accommodation of possibility and potential. Selwyn Goldsmith’s 1967 Designing for the Disabled: A New Paradigm identified the built environment as complicit in the creation and promotion of disabling situations, by pointing out that it is the architecture that must make accommodations, not the disabled user’s body. However, 55 years after Goldsmith’s critique, architecture continues to struggle with a delayed reaction to accommodation. Despite progress in the form of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), it remains common for architects and students of architecture to approach accommodation as an unwelcome afterthought to a design, making it challenging to recognize opportunity instead of constraint. The efforts of Access Unlimited began in 2018 as a response to an impactful lecture by two disability activists (both students, both disabled) within my institution. As an architect and educator, I was struck by two things: how much the presenters lamented disabling architectural conditions which seemed almost unsolvable, and how few architecture students attended this lecture. My work has been motivated by both challenges, and Access Unlimited continues to grow in its reach and impact, through the following efforts: Master of Architecture Graduate ‘All Access’ Thesis Studio: This course proposed that, in bringing to the forefront our thinking about design for accessibility, we can better ask architecture to lead instead of follow. By not defaulting to a delayed reaction to accommodation, this course asserted that architecture can become more, and not less, inventive. Run as a research seminar in Fall 2018, and design studio in Winter 2019, this was an important starting point for the farther-reaching Access Unlimited teaching agenda, aspects of which have subsequently been included within the required building studio and professional practice courses for graduate students in our program. Students who took part in the All Access course are now active members of the professional community, well-equipped to share their deep knowledge of design for accessibility with an expanded field of colleagues and clients. Significantly, “Mobile Access,” the final thesis project of one student, was chosen as the runner up for the best thesis award in our school, from a class of over 150 other students; and her project was later featured in an exhibition of barrier-free design solutions in an international design competition. Master of Architecture ‘Fresh Access: All Graphics’ Seminar: Initially offered in Winter 2019, and to be offered again in revised format in Winter 2023, this course has operated under an ambition to ‘draw to architecture,’ with the focus on accessibility as both design for disability and the communication of ideas to expanded audiences. The class is organized as a simultaneous research seminar and design workshop focused on the role of graphic design and communication in providing access to greater understanding of design for and about accessibility. The work in the course intertwines graphic design logics set forth a century ago by Otto and Marie Neurath (pioneers of the Isotype and visual education), and a historic understanding of the graphic world that has shaped current understanding of design for accommodation. Neurath’s motto, “words divide, pictures unite,” unifies this course’s efforts to give accessibility a stronger graphic voice within our designed environments, including a re-evaluation and re-design of current graphic standards for accessible design. In the first offering of the class, students collaborated on a Fresh Access Guide to Accessible Design, a document created specifically for their peers. The book continues to be shared with incoming students to our program, and students in the upcoming semester of this class will pick up where this effort left off, proposing increasingly interactive formats for the work. Access the Game A research and design prototyping project that involves student collaborators and testers, Access the Game is a pedagogical system that is part game, part tool, part toy, invested in the development of ideas about accessibility across a wide audience. While the general motivation of accessibility is easy enough to convey (make things possible for everyone), to understand how is a more difficult proposition (in that it might be different for everyone). The project engages exploring difference and accessibility in a manner that is more than only adhering to the ADA, but also more didactic than simply having “good intentions” toward making accessible environments. Through play and interaction, the game facilitates an understanding of differences in the ways that people move through and interact with the world. Primarily, each player is responsible for two game pieces (one ambulatory and one in a wheelchair) as well as two pieces of a final communal space. The objective is simple: to bring everybody together into one shared space. Every turn brings an opportunity to move, but obstacles will abound, requiring re-calibrations of movement. The design of the pieces lets the player know right away who can have access; players figure out quickly what kinds of spaces make an environment available to all. Playing the game sets up opportunities for cooperation, accommodation, and celebration of differences, toward increased understanding of barrier-free design, and is being tested not only with players of all ages, but also strategically within all of my courses of graduate students. Access the Game allows the player to ask, discover, and feel, in pursuit of designing a more accessible world. Access Unlimited is an ever-expanding collection of design-based pedagogies that unite in their ambition to empower students of architecture to become ethical professionals and caretakers of the world – not only in their futures, but within their immediate academic environments among their classmates, instructors, and friends. This work is continuing to develop as a book that ties together these teaching and design threads, not as an explanation of work already completed, but learning from it in order to create a guide to support those in the study and practice of architecture (and anyone else) to engage accessible ideas toward innovative and compassionate environments. The goal, as characterized by Graham Pullin’s Design Meets Disability, is that “when the issues around disability catalyze new design thinking” they “influence a broader design culture in return.” Access Unlimited, in all its forms, proposes an accessibility that is not an add-on or a lamentable condition, but is necessary, integral, and beautiful.

Teaching Posthumanist Site Analysis
Kathryn Bedette, Kennesaw State University

Abstract

Site analysis is a process of discovery that establishes the reasoning for many subsequent decisions in a project’s design. It is the moment in a project were environmental conditions and human experience are studied to create key insights and constraints that inform the rest of the design process. Edward T. White, in his seminal instruction to students of architecture, Site Analysis: Diagramming Information for Architectural Design, posits that “The major role of contextual analysis in design is that of informing us about our site prior to beginning our design concepts so that our early thinking about our building can incorporate meaningful responses to external conditions.”(1) In the decades since White’s publication, we’ve seen the human-centric, centralized approach he presented expand through research that, like the shift from humanist perspective to axonometric (or oblique) in early modernist design studies, decentralizes our mapping of experience, exposing networked conditions of human occupation within an environment. Much like the relationship between Merleau-Ponty’s “map of the I can” (2) and isovist studies, these decentralized site studies question boundaries and the relationship between what is considered site and what is considered context. But what new questions still need to be raised for site analysis in our posthumanist age? As Mariano Gomez-Luque and Ghazal Jafari said, to be a subject of our time is to be posthuman. (3) While the values of human rights that originated from humanist philosophy are held dear, anthropocentrism and its presumptive structures of power have, in many cases, been left behind. To fully uphold the responsibility an architect has to the global community, site analysis must move beyond its basis in humanist, and human-centric, philosophy to establish design priorities and constraints that respond to the needs of humans and the full biosphere in which we live. Posthumanist site analysis responds to human experience, but not solely, decentering it among studies designed to expose the needs and experiences of multiple species and processes interacting with, or impacted by, the terrain marked off as “site”. Ultimately, the insights, constraints and priorities gained inform posthumanist design, site by site, ecosystem by ecosystem. This research builds on two key concepts. Foundational to this work is the understanding discussed by Gomez-Luque and Jafari (3) that posthumanism is not a new circumstance on the horizon. We live in a posthumanist world and posthumanism seeks to know how we exist, presently. A second premise comes from Cary Wolfe’s text What is Posthumanism? (4) where he clarifies that posthumanism is not a wholesale rejection of humanist philosophy. Instead, it seeks to learn from humanism while exposing the destructive engines it generates. Posthumanism offers a way of thinking about how humans exist within a multiplicity of non-anthropocentric conditions and posthumanism’s decentering of the human opens architectural design to new priorities and ways of working with the potential to create built environments that reverse and ameliorate architecture’s destructive effects. Teaching posthumanist site analysis is elucidated through teaching method examples from second-year architecture studios within a five-year Bachelor of Architecture program. Informed by an inductive pedagogy, three key steps to teaching posthumanist site analysis are offered in this presentation and paper: Fostering an expanded sense of self-awareness in students through critical literature reviews Creating a dynamic reflection process for students—first collaborative, then individual Prompting a set of written inquiries, one for each proposed site study The reasoning is discussed for the selection of each text assigned in step one. This work builds on a body of research by the author and two of the author’s prior publications are also referenced in this section. Students developed a dialog around the themes of how site concepts are constructed, how time exists within a site, and human/non-human circumstances. Students raised questions on how sites are conceptually constructed formally, through policy, legal definitions, and infrastructure; informally, through culture, community, and territories; and technologically, through data and access to information. They questioned scales of time as they exist on a site in terms of human lifespans, human time constructs, other species lifespans, geologic time, solar and lunar time, seasonal time, and scales of time—micro to macro. Site conditions were discussed in terms of the biosphere the site is embedded within, beyond human context and interactions, and studies were proposed to understand migration patterns, air flows, plant biomes, geological conditions and constructions, soil deposits, sun paths, habitats, and non-human technology.   From these dialogs, students established some frames of reference for their further work, including: shared ecosystem, human- and eco- system continuity, cohabitation / shared environment, habitat restoration / creation, symbiotic building + occupied environment, timeless / flexible program, leave no trace / minimized disruption, deference to, resiliency + flexible interaction with natural systems, nonpolitical geographies, and judicial use / off the grid. These frames of reference were considered fluid and the language created helped to hone student’s thinking for their final posthumanist site study proposals that contrasted human time to geologic time on the site, explored movement and growth patterns for site vegetation, overlaid nonhuman circulation and movement flows across the site’s context, mapped human generated habitat declines, mapped watershed flows across terrain and human infrastructure, analyzed site color pallets from multiple species visual perceptions, and so forth. Posthumanist site analysis recalibrates students’ understanding of the biosphere, biomes, material circumstances, processes, and constructions of the “site” in which they are designing. Creating a new relationship between the student and the environment ultimately supports reforming relationships between people, architecture and ecosystems.

2:30pm-4:00pm
Research Session
1.5LU Credit

Co-Creative Partners 2

Moderator: Luis Rico-Gutierrez, Iowa State University

Bringing the Studio Alive with the Living Museum: Collaboration between Genesee Country Village and Museum and Rochester Institute of Technology
Alissa de Wit-Paul, Institute of Technology

Abstract

In 2016 Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and the Genesee Country Village and Museum (GCVM) received a private grant to support collaborative projects between the two institutions. This presentation will discuss the transdisciplinary work the grant underwrote, focusing on the innovative pedagogical opportunities it enabled and the measurable ways they enhanced the experience of first-year architecture students. The collaboration afforded students a unique opportunity to understand the history and use of local building materials, a key element within the sustainability movement. Students also gained a deeper understanding of site and context, especially in terms of accessibility. No previous collaboration between a living museum and a design studio has been documented in the scholarship and, as such, there is much to be learned from its successes. This paper will show that the living history museum was an ideal transdisciplinary location for teaching first-year studio students regional history and traditional building technologies while also developing their understanding of foundational design skills and the important relationships between buildings and their sites. Genesee County Village and Museum (GCVM) was founded in 1966 to preserve and promote the architecture of Western New York and the Finger Lakes region. The GCVM created a village plan that includes over 68 buildings across the region and which trace the history of Western New York from colonial times through the Victorian era. These sites provide educational and entertainment activities year round. Visitors can enjoy typical nineteenth-century activities, led by volunteers in period costumes. The collaboration between RIT and GCVM benefited both institutions. The museum planned to use the students’ projects to evaluate how new ideas could enhance both its educational mission and its architectural features. RIT Architecture, which focuses on sustainable design practices, used the museum as a project site to teach foundational design studio to beginning students, those with no prior design experience. Through this collaborative, I was able to create new connections between design principles and practice for first-year students with exciting results. As my presentation will detail, the collaboration led to major changes in the way the RIT Architecture Department introduced concepts to this specific student population. Students without a design background traditionally concentrate on the foundational skills: path and node; symmetry/asymmetry; and creating space using architectural elements. They begin with study models to develop architectural ideas while learning drafting and rendering. The students are expected to complete five small and one large projects; each builds upon the previous in size, scale, and complexity. The reorganization of this studio was fundamentally transdisciplinary. Transdisciplinary educational experiences have been defined as having three components.[1] First, they emphasize the integration of discipline and practice. The second aspect of transdisciplinary educational experiences stresses ethics. The third transdisciplinary practice prioritizes a designerly mode of inquiry. The collaboration kept all three of these principles in mind. This first-year studio utilizes actual clients and real locations, stressing the integration of hypothetical projects with actual context, including site and client. Equally important, RIT Architecture’s mission is organized around  sustainable design. The partnership with GCVM usefully stresses the importance of regional and traditional building materials. Students learn that sustainable design practices emphasize the ethical stance of using locally-derived materials. This ethical stance is integral to green building systems such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). Finally, the studio emphasizes design understanding and development by utilizing study models as the primary mode of exploration. The study model is a traditional design technique for exploring three-dimensional space. In this case, though, the study models were tailored to what students found interesting about the architecture and structure of the museum buildings. A key feature of this collaborative first-year studio is the ability to use and visit real sites. The students walk the grounds and choose locations for each of their designs, creating cohesiveness between all their projects. Each of them thus develops the student’s understanding of site and context in architecture. These projects include a small educational display on construction, a small outdoor theater, a location for visitors to rest and admire the view, a ramp to accommodate easy access to the museum trolley, accessible stands for viewing period baseball games, and, finally, a community center. Each student must choose a structure from one of the buildings on the museum’s grounds. This structure becomes the foundation for his or her series of projects. Local materials and traditions are the second major focus for this studio. Students researched wood details as precedents for design exploration. The students choose a wood detail precedent which evolves through the small projects. The studio asks the students to build study models of the detail, manipulating it to support their small structures. In the previous years’ studios, these details were found in journals or on the internet but, thanks to the collaboration, students could focus specifically on local practices and materials. This led to a solid general understanding that architecture cannot be divorced from either site or materials. It also emphasized the importance of knowing not only what materials are being considered for the design, but where they come from. They came to understand that materials derived directly from the site or from local or regional sources are more environmentally ethical. The last feature for transdisciplinary architecture is a designerly mode of inquiry. The physical modeling of architecture is the most closely related to the actual experience of spaces. In consultation with museum staff, the progression of studio projects was designed to benefit the GCVM, particularly in terms of its accessibility, and to provide students with a way to bridge theory and practice. Using design to create accessible spaces as integral elements, not as afterthoughts, makes it possible for more people to experience the museum. Students developed a nuanced appreciation of how design contributes to social justice by providing equal access to spaces and experiences. The collaboration with the GCVM thus allows the current studio a unique experience with site, materials, and the design process. As my presentation will show, the students toured the grounds with the head curator. They worked together with the curator to select sites which both parties agreed accommodated the basic program of the studio projects. They located the first project adjacent to a unique unfinished structure highlighting traditional construction methods. The first project then became an experiential display for a wood construction detail found within the local vernacular highlighted by GCVM. The students chose what interested them most about eighteenth- or nineteenth-century construction, decisions reached via their experiences in the museum and discussions with the curator. This collaborative work between curator, myself as professor, and students is the basis for the development of each of the projects. The students then began their inquiry with study models manipulating their construction within the site. A transdisciplinary approach is used in many studios, however, I found unexpected results with the GCVM and RIT collaboration. These projects and students were graded on the same rubric as previous studios, but within the first two projects students in the collaborative studio received higher scores. Because the worked with the museum in selection of materials and site, they developed an ownership of the design process not seen in earlier studios. For example, they began to sketch site plans and build site models earlier than required and without prompting. This paper will conclude by discussing the benefits for student outcomes of such collaborations such as this one in helping students understand the role of architecture in creating a more sustainable and equitable future. As my paper will detail, even more substantive results are likely to emerge as we tackle the larger projects. The last project, the community center, will serve both the museum and the school children who routinely visit the museum, situating the studio’s work squarely in the region’s community. The students will give their final presentation at the GCVM and receive feedback from the curator and museum staff as well as from me. What will be very interesting to report is how this collaboration supports the museum in its community outreach as it also benefits RIT students.

Teaching through an Indigenous Ecologies Lens: Co-designing with Xhosa and Dakotah Communities
Phoebe Crisman, University of Virginia

Abstract

We live in a time of changing climate, widening economic inequality, social and political intolerance, and unprecedented environmental degradation on a global scale. New design pedagogies and collaborative approaches are essential to expose social and environmental injustices, and to understand, imagine, and enact a hopeful and more sustainable shared future. Engaging students with both ongoing processes of decolonization and valuable Indigenous knowledge and practices offers particularly relevant ways of advancing ecological and social justice and activism. Thus, I have developed and experimented with a transdisciplinary indigenous ecologies pedagogy in several recent studios and seminars. Currently my university colleagues and I are working with two indigenous communities to reclaim their culture, sovereignty, and sustainability through design. Half a world apart, we are collaborating with a Xhosa community to create the Black Power Station in Makhanda, South Africa, and a Native American Dakotah tribe to design a Cultural Center on the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota, USA. This paper compares the co-design process and lessons learned in these pedagogical experiments in studios with graduate and undergraduate Architecture and Landscape Architecture students, as well as related research seminars that also included students majoring in environmental science, global development studies, sustainability, ethnomusicology, and global public health. Bringing these diverse disciplines together is essential to the approach. Most practicing architects and students are not prepared to design culturally relevant buildings for indigenous communities, since architectural education, and especially in the Eastern part of the in US, rarely engages contemporary indigenous peoples and their architectural heritage. This is a major omission given that American Indians and Alaska Natives comprise about 2% of the total US population and Indian trust land accounts for about 2% of all US land. Knowledge about indigenous peoples in other parts of the world is often even more limited. When invited to join a long-standing, university research engagement with a Dakotah tribe, I committed myself to developing indigenous ecologies collaborative design approach to guide my teaching. Design became a key part of the multi-faceted sustainable development efforts on the Reservation, including Dakotah language reclamation, youth development, buffalo herd restoration, and renewal of the tallgrass prairie ecosystem. Today over 60% of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate (SWO) band lives in poverty and 40% are unemployed.1 Poor education and job opportunities, substance abuse, and youth suicide limit individual and collective thriving. Tribal trauma includes the historic discrimination that accompanied European contact and continues today. For example, settler colonization and mandatory assimilation were achieved through US government laws that prohibited speaking the Dakotah language and engaging in Native spiritual practices. Children were forcibly removed from families and sent to Christian boarding schools that eradicated their Dakotah identity, language, and way of life. Prior to the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, they were officially considered wards of the federal government and were not protected by the US Constitution from human rights violations.2 Yet the Dakotah nations have survived and are defining for themselves how they will integrate and share their cultural knowledge, practices, and Dakotah language. We sought to understand their specific contemporary identity and the range of language and arts activities that would take place in and around the new center. This required situating ourselves within the context of knowledge production on the Reservation. Informed by the indigenous scholarship and feminist writings of Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, and Caroline Ramazanoglu, we recognized the differing subjectivities of all participants and nurtured relationships as the foundation of the research.3 Richa Nagar’s work on co-authorship and storytelling as tools of empowerment also informed the pedagogy.4 The co-design process itself prompted the indigenous community to reflect on their culture and place in new ways, while students were pushed to explore alternatives to normative design methods. In anonymous course evaluations one undergraduate student wrote: “The ideas of providing support and amplification, rather than using our already politically and financially empowered voices, formed the basis of a class that listened to the needs of the SWO and continually sought their voice, stories, experiences, and opinions to create the best co-design possible.” Beyond imagining a building, the participatory design process contributed to the political sovereignty, economic development, and cultural flourishing of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. Pedagogically, we explored how architectural education and practice might advance the project of undoing colonial legacies, supporting cultural recovery, and advancing economic and political sovereignty for indigenous communities. Together we created a participatory method for sharing ideas and designing across difference. Continuing this pedagogical experimentation, my students and I are now working with an indigenous Xhosa arts collective to co-design The Black Power Station. Occupying part of an abandoned power station in Makhanda in South Africa, the public arts space uses music, art, theater, poetry, and other forms of creativity to help Xhosa youth overcome the history of apartheid and its contemporary legacies of radical economic and social inequality, high unemployment and poverty, violence, and political alienation. The goal is to put artists at the center of collective social, political, economic, and cultural transformations that integrate Xhosa cultural knowledge and practices while sustainably regenerating the degraded landscape and its many buildings. Collaborating with students and faculty from ethnomusicology, anthropology, and public health, we are exploring how arts practices can inform the physical design of indigenous cultural spaces, thus promoting creative economies and individual and community thriving. The architectural design integrates green water, energy and waste systems with local materials and regenerative agriculture. The project is co-producing music and art at The Black Power Station and our US university, while stimulating arts education and community development initiatives in both locations. This pedagogy attends to the deepest differences in ontological and epistemological views. The co-design process is highly iterative and emergent, treats all participants as socially and culturally situated, and troubles conventional ideas of expertise and divisions of labor. The goal is to teach students how to produce architecture where inhabitants see not only their needs represented, but their knowledge and culture. One M. Arch student reflected: “How do you design for people in a way that is positive? Co‐design seems like an amazing start … Having to communicate ideas to a group of people who don’t know much about architecture, BUT truly envision that a new set of buildings has the ability to revitalize their culture, bring people together, and educate and excite young people is challenging, inspiring, and new.” As a result, the process produces shared understanding and empathy for ways of being in the world across cultures and geographies. The paper analyzes the results of this transdisciplinary co-design process and situates the findings within the context of ongoing situated socio-ecological systems research in architecture. Wherever they are located, these pedagogical experiments are ultimately intended to change the way students learn to design the world, through social awareness, critical thinking, imagination, and activism.

The SmarTuria HUB Project: Transformative Education Experiences Outdoors
Marina Puyuelo Cazorla & Lola Merino Sanjuán, Universitat Politècnica de València

Abstract

The quality of public space is the result of everything that takes place in it, and therefore, it has to be part of a dynamic process in order to respond to the needs of people and to the constantly changing situations. From this idea the study and analysis of public space has to be done through active synergies, which favour its understanding by the public and their active and positive participation, enhancing the relationships between function/form/structure (Habraken, 2000). In addition, competency-based education requires methodologies that place greater emphasis on learning and the link between practical skills, knowledge, motivation, emotions and attitudes (Haak 2017), which requires a disruptive approach (Dygert 2017). The SmarTuria Hub Project is being an academic experience, which started five years ago taking as scenario the public park Túria gardens in the city of Valencia (Spain), with the aim of experiencing with the students the methods and strategies of the European urban labs (ENoLL, 2013) and the open design, where the approach of integrating the users, is the key for reaching more innovative, inclusive, sustainable and adapted design solutions. The goals of the urban living labs are “innovation, knowledge development for replication and increasing urbans sustainability emphasizing the need for supported, local solutions” (Steen and Bueren, 2017 p.11). To reach these goals in a real-life use context, co-creation techniques with the actors (users, private and public actors, institutes…) are the basis to understand their needs and expectations, including them in the innovation process, iterating with the feedback gathered from use and evaluation, and empowering people for decision taking. Thus, students internalise that creating tools for expression and participation of the users is essential and it is one of the means to achieve a more active role in the design process (Kristensson 2004). The Turia Park responds to the contemporary concept of sustainable city that is active, healthy and alive (Puyuelo, Merino and Rodrigo, 2017). Furthermore, this place coincides with some of the trends of Smart Cities and the Smart Mobility (Casado et al., 2015), by placing priority on “soft” transport services such as cycling, joging, healthy habits, openair gyms, the city on a human scale as well as acting as a means for enhancing local Identity and Tourism. This urban field works-driven investigation project aims to explore and to think on a new model for obtaining innovative design criteria, involving learners and different users in outdoors analysis and projects. This approach leads all the participants through activities, to appreciate from real life perspectives, apply them to possible revisions in their own teaching, share them with others and apply them in their design projects. As a context for collective life, public space implies public domain, an anonymous, costless and free use, which must guarantee the full accessibility of all citizens regardless of their physical or sensory characteristics, as well as the essential multi-functionality that promotes their social side. These parameters are the real factors to evaluate the quality of public space according to the intensity and quality of the social relations it facilitates. That means its ability to stimulate and promote a sense of identification, expression and cultural integration (Merino y Puyuelo, 2020). All these experiences trigger critical thinking, involving observation, study, empathy, understanding ideas behind the constructed space, and practices when examining the relationship with people and uses. This urban park, its background and current state, makes a singular environment, due to its length and its spatial configuration, connections between the different áreas of the city, the urban services and furniture have and, above all, its quality and intention of fostering relationship with a huge diversity of users. This huge linear park is structured from its entrance head in the city in 18 stretches, that arrive until the Port crossing the city from west to east. These  sections, have different characteristics with recreational areas, which acquire usefulness and sense in the global context and where the pedestrian and bike routes interrelate them in a continuous. The methods applied are ethnographic and direct observation in fieldwork, personal and online interviews for collecting the user’s voice, to know the degree of satisfaction of their experiences in relation to existing installations. The use of open questions have the objective of detecting needs and obtaining suggestions to improve the equipment of the environment. The online surveys aim to understand the service and design preferences of the target audience and have been addressed to people who live in the city and know the place directly or indirectly. In a general approach, people are randomly selected and sought to cover diverse profiles of local users: citizens, young sports people, senior citizens and tourists/visitors and in-house analyses, which can subsequently derive on useful approaches for the design project. Data obtained with this methodology, allow us a more adjusted analysis of the relationship between the user and context, while showing the possible shortcomings and aspects to improve, that will guide future intervention strategies. As results from the SmarTuria HUB project, a large theoretical and graphic document collection has been generated, which has been presented in different international forums, conferences design journals (EADesign, Cisti, Achi etc.) and have been shown in different exhibitions. The multiple partial studies developed in the different sections of the Turia Garden, constitute a solid foundation on which new design projects and installations for this environment are developed, meeting the identified needs: insufficient signage, wc and toilet services, lighting, connectivity, meeting etc. The SmarTuria HUB Project challenges the students to locally engage as active citizens in our context, developing empathy and analytic capacities not only focused in the spatial features of the site, but in its potential role as sustainable social frame for collective imagination and research at the city. REFERENCES Habraken, N.J. (2000). The Structure of the Ordinary: Form and Control in the Built Environment. J.Teichles (Ed) MIT Press. Haak, T. (2017), 6 Trends in Learning and Development, https://hrtrendinstitute.com/2017/12/04/6-trends-in-learning-and-development/ “6 Trends in Learning and Development | HR Trend Institute,” 2017. [Online]. Recuperado de Available: https://hrtrendinstitute.com/2017/12/04/6-trends-in-learning-and-development/. Dygert, C. “Thinking Out Loud: Disrupting Employee Development,” 2017. [Online]. Available: http://dygertthinkingoutloud.blogspot.com/2017/08/disrupting-employee-development.html. [Accessed: 11-Jul-2018] ENoLL  European Network of Living Labs (2013). Tips & Tricks for Building a Sustainable Living Lab Retrieved from [Consulta: 5 de julio de 2022] Steen, K. and Bueren, E. (2017). Urban Living Labs: A Living Lab Way of Working, AMS Institute, p.33. Retrieved from https:// www.ams-institute.org. Kristensson, P., Gusyafsson, A. and Archer, T. (2004). “Harnessing the creative Potential among Users”, The Journal of Innovation Management, nº21. Merino, L., Puyuelo, M., and Val, M. (2017). Design for the Smart Cities. Investigation about citizen’s needs and products to improve public places. The Design Journal, 20(sup1), S4748-S4750. https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2017.1352979 Casado, M.G., Revert, C., Sales, V. and Veral, S. (2015). Smart Cities Trends: Tendencias en las Ciudades Inteligentes y oportunidades para los sectores del hábitat [Smart Cities Trends: Trends in smart cities and opportunities for sectors habitat]. ITC y ADIMA, 3–4. Castells, Manuel. (2021). Networks of Outrage and Hope. Cambridge: Polity Press. Merino, L. and Puyuelo, M., (2021). “Public space as a context of design and innovation” in All about Design, Valencia, Spain, Ed. Universitat Politècnica.

Understanding Local Stakeholder Perceptions and Needs to Improve Rural Ecologies and Economies in SW Georgia
Michelle Ritchie, J Calabria & Douglas Pardue
University of Georgia

Abstract

Conventional public participatory methods have a history of disregarding voices of poor, minority, and otherwise marginalized peoples, creating or deepening a misunderstanding of the issues that concern rural residents and their desired solutions to these issues. To counter this, we used photovoice to push for a collaboration using creative methods for the co-production of knowledge and critical reflexivity. We used photovoice to co-produce knowledge with the help of rural stakeholders in Southwest (SW) Georgia to showcase the most significant issues confronting the communities and landscapes as experienced by local stakeholders. Our project identified community issues important to stakeholders to benefit the community by laying the groundwork for future applied research for conservation and restoration in the area. This led to actions such as expanding ecological corridors and integrating land use planning documents (Hostetler, Allen, & Meurk 2011). Ultimately, the products of this project promoted improvements to community vitality and public health, such as restoring landscapes in support of functioning ecosystem services. Our project draws from interdisciplinary, convergent, and engaged research approaches. For interdisciplinary knowledge to exist, researchers must cross disciplinary silos to collaboratively develop and pursue an integrated goal that addresses a scientific challenge. To become convergent research, interdisciplinary research is taken a step further, and researchers may also cross disciplinary conventions and must pursue a goal that also addresses a societal challenge (National Research Council 2014), such as we seek to do through this project by empowering stakeholders to improve the health and economic viability of the communities and landscapes along an ecological corridor of rural SW Georgia. In particular, we focused on issues related to human use of the landscape to promote sustainable development efforts to improve resiliency. For example, restoring natural infrastructure with green and blueways can provide opportunities for ecotourism while addressing a need for ecosystem service improvements (Tiezzi 2005). Fishing, cycling, camping, and heritage tourism enabled by this ecological restoration can then benefit local stakeholders and land owners in economically viable ways. This is particularly important as climate change impacts continue to take hold (IPCC 2022) and pose threats to existing social and ecological systems that communities rely on, such as ecosystem services (Miller 2008).  Our area of interest is the Fort Benning Army Compatible Use Buffer (ACUB) outside the Fort Benning Installation and the surrounding rural areas of SW Georgia, particularly those areas envisioned for future recreational and ecological connectivity. This area has a rich social history, including resources from multiple Indigenous groups, early settler American history, periods of agriculture and industrialization, cultural and land use changes, and resilience. The area also sports a rich diversity of plant and animal species, such as the red-cockaded woodpecker, gopher tortoise, indigo snake, and Bachman’s sparrow in the longleaf pine plant community. Nature-based economic activities include camping, fishing, and outdoor recreation, and work to preserve discourses of “rural character” that maintain the intangible and aesthetic values ascribed to the area’s place identity. Despite being a well-populated area within the site of Fort Benning, the adjacent areas are characterized as rural. Like many rural areas in Georgia, some of these communities experience poverty and are well-situated for economic development initiatives (e.g., qualified opportunity zones) to improve poor scores on area measures of economic and health statistics. The participatory research and outreach efforts advanced social-ecological resilience through sustainable economic practices that were mutually-beneficial for people and the environment. We used photovoice as a participatory action research method to foster critical dialogue around issues that are important to residents. In addition to being a research method, photovoice serves as a form of outreach and engagement because it is a vehicle for expressing community concerns to a broader audience, which can stimulate social (and ecological) change (Powers & Freedman 2012). This work can support social empowerment, trust-building and reduced power differentials, and can increase a sense of local ownership over the issues at hand (Berbés-Blázquez 2012; Catalani & Minkler 2010). Photovoice is the ideal method for this research because it is rooted in social justice and advocacy. Here, photovoice can aid in the building of positive relationships amongst stakeholders while creatively assessing what the needs of the area are (Wang & Burris 1997), what or who the project team can to bring to the table, and how our collective capabilities can be applied to address and solve topics of local community concern. Our findings may improve social-economic and ecological resilience through mutually beneficial uses of greenways and blueways, using modes such as ecological restoration and ecotourism to enhance connectivity in the landscape and across communities (Benedict & McMahon 2006; Walmsley 2006). To wit, we focused on: (1) community vitality, and stronger families; (2) improved public health, and longer, healthier lives; and (3) a dependable food supply, viable land and waterways, and enhanced infrastructure. The primary outcome of this project is an improved understanding of community and stakeholder needs to improve social-ecological wellbeing in rural areas through mutually-beneficial conservation and economic activities to garner buy-in from local champions, agencies, and organizations in and around the Fort Benning area of Georgia.

Peacebuilding and Placemaking: Studying Collective Actions in the Urban Hinterlands of Colombia
Aaron Brakke, Samford University

Abstract

An important objective for contemporary architectural education is to prepare our students to engage in the development of projects where conflict is expected, and spaces of conflict are the sites chosen for intervention. These conditions are becoming increasingly common around the globe, and the design process has morphed to accommodate and respond to these circumstances. The question that has guided this work are: How can co-creation help form solidarity in communities that have been affected by violence and displacement? This paper will chart the case study of Colombia that was covered in a graduate level seminar and in an independent study that created opportunities for students to gain insight into alternative modes of practice where the agency of architecture is made evident as an instrument to promote spatial justice and equity. These courses were taught through the lens of urban humanities and examined the ‘production of space’ in Colombian communities located in the hinterlands of urban areas of Bogota, Medellin, Tumaco, Pereira and Cali. The specific sites of this research are spaces in ‘comunas’ and ‘barrios’ where either government sponsored public projects have been built or where communities have engaged in the collective construction of public spaces to give shape to their environs.  Overview: In the 1940’s Colombian architects dreamed of vibrant modern cities and involved the architect Le Corbusier in the development of  urban schemes for Bogota known as “Plan Piloto”.  Unfortunately, the second half of the twentieth century was marred by violence and none of these ideas were realized. The tension between the state and armed actors perpetuated a state of insecurity and bloodshed into the twenty-first century. In 2016, a major milestone was reached when a peace treaty was signed between the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government. However, the social and spatial tensions generated from civil war and conflict that extended over six decades are still palpable in a country where high levels of inequality, violence and exclusion have been increasingly scrutinized by international organizations such as Human Rights Watch and the United Nations. One of the most critical aspects of the Colombian situation has been the proliferation of displacement. Colombia has 7.4 million internally displaced people, nearly 17% of the total population (UNHCR, 2017). Additionally, over 1.3 million Venezuelan migrants have sought refuge in Colombia since 2018. The unceasing flow of people into urban centers has been difficult to accommodate, yet numerous programs have been developed to address the housing deficit and improve accessibility to public services and amenities.  Though the speculative urban proposals of the 1940s and 1950s were never brought to fruition, municipal administrations eventually came to recognize the importance of the built environment. Innovative city planning and investment in education and infrastructure have yielded results in the twenty-first century. For example, the story of Medellin’s transformation is quite remarkable. It was once described in the Los Angeles Times as, “Lawlessness Rampant in Streets of Medellin, World’s Cocaine Capital: Colombia: An anonymous warning tells citizens to be indoors by 9 p.m. to avoid ‘being surprised by killer bullets’” and was the most violent city in the world in 1991. However, the city worked hard to recover, and the resilient Spanish speaking metropolis nestled in the Andean Mountains beat out New York and Tel Aviv to be named the world’s most “Innovative City of the Year” in 2012. This seemingly miraculous feat was the result of creative strategies and persistence. Enlightened leadership used the construction of new buildings and upgrades to the transportation network and infrastructure to improve living conditions for the inhabitants. A program called PRIMED was developed in the 1990s and served as the foundation for what former mayor Sergio Fajardo developed as Proyectos Urbanos Integrales (PUI) during his term from 2003-07. He sought to reinvigorate the city by promoting education and “social urbanism” which was predicated on three pillars: the ‘social’ through citizen participation, the ‘institutional’ that recognized the importance of security and support, and the ‘spatial’ which increased access to public amenities throughout the whole city and promoted conviviality as vital to urban life. The projects and developments over the past two decades have provided better public transportation, cable cars, outdoor escalators, hospitals, new schools and museums, parks, and have contributed to this significant transformation. The example of Medellin provides a glimpse into what Colombia has become, a country where tangible traces of optimism are evidenced in the unrelenting construction of the built environment. Other major Colombian cities have also undergone impressive transformations. For example, Bogota promoted the flattening of social classes by improving education, connectivity, and investing in and promoting new libraries. Mayors such as Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa took note of Jaime Lerner’s strategies in Curitiba, Brazil and implemented the Transmilenio bus system. One hundred thousand trees were planted, and hundreds of kilometers of bicycle paths and pedestrian walkways were paved. Cali has created new programs for affordable housing and a new network of buses.  Specific Areas of Study, Mapping, and Speculation: The dramatic transformation of these Colombian cities intrigued a global audience of architects, urban planners, sociologists, political scientists, and landscape architects eager to see more beautiful, healthy, equitable, and just cities. Scholars from numerous fields have studied and documented the initiatives with favor. Architecture critics, urban planners, and landscape architects have thoroughly chronicled the evolution that occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I have traveled to Colombia with students numerous times and have documented the projects and neighborhoods that have received the ‘slum-upgrading’ described above. During our visits we have conducted formal and informal interviews with local inhabitants that were either using the public spaces, in a ‘tienda’ or were located on nearby sidewalks and streets. The feedback we have received is mixed and has raised questions about the quality of the architecture as well as the impact that these projects have had in their respective communities. Through each of the phases of inquiry, enough data has been gathered to suggest that the internationally acclaimed efforts in Bogota and Medellin have been disseminated through a well-crafted narrative that differs from the lived experiences of people in these communities. In fact, projects such as the Parque Biblioteca España (Spain Library Park) that won the award for best architecture of the year at the Lisbon Ibero-American Architecture and Urban Design Biennial have failed to the extent that they were closed only a decade after opening. The classes have been spaces to challenge students to use tools from the urban humanities to map these strange ecologies and provide fresh insight into the recent past to uncover narratives from the people who inhabit these spaces.  In addition to looking at top-down initiatives, we have uncovered other provocative stories of solidarity and placemaking that have emerged in the absence of the state or where infrastructures have failed. We have identified compelling stories of communities that have taken it upon themselves to give shape to public space and the built environment. These communities have often enlisted the aid of ‘colectivos’ to develop community-based projects in the urban hinterlands. ‘Colectivos’ are conformed of designers, architects, and activists that develop networks of people to work together to improve the lives of the underrepresented citizens in the urban peripheries. The projects consist of unconventional assemblies of bamboo, tires, scavenged materials and have become community centers, movie theaters, and parks. They are shared initiatives that have improved solidarity, represented resilience, and given a sense of place and hope to people who have been marginalized, many of whom had been displaced, and who live and occupy less than desirable spaces. Though I have found several of the ‘colectivos’ have documented their work, most of these grassroots initiatives have yet to be disseminated in English or Spanish. Studying these projects advances our understanding of the post-conflict landscape in Colombia and the role of placemaking to aid communities in processes that promote peace and foster solidarity in communities. In developing an inclusive framework for the understanding of these initiatives, we recognize that these projects are assemblages of people, resources, institutions, material resources and knowledge in a particular context and part of my ethical responsibility is to capture many different and at times conflicting voices. Community residents, social leaders, designers, architecture ‘colectivos’ and non-government institutions are key actors in many cases. The strategies employed in each project are circumstantial and emerge from the specific type of gathering of people in the same space and time. The cross section of peoples and projects illustrates unique practices of placemaking for people whose lives have been impacted by conflict, displacement, and loss. By reading these entanglements through the lens of non-representational theory, my aim is for my students to depict the unique narrative of ‘external’ conditions ‘forged in a manifold of actions and interactions’ (Latour, Barad, Thrift). Though a work-in-progress, the examples are aligned with the conference theme and will contribute to the dialogue and debate about how “cosmopolitan citizenship education is able to form critical, informed, empathic, and socially active individuals”.

4:30pm-6:00pm
Research Session
1.5LU Credit

Dissident Intellectuals 3

Moderator: Óskar Örn Arnórsson, Iceland University of the Arts

Matterscapes
Ophelia Mantz, University of Houston

Abstract

In the Western world, ecological consciousness has been marked by different movements over the past 200 years. Although the Industrial Revolution freed human beings from the constraints of space and time, we did not begin to realize the consequences of human activity until the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Why are we unable to curb this trend? According to Bruno Latour and Timothy Lenton, in an article published in Science in 2018 entitled Gaia.2.0, there is an urgent need for human beings to develop a higher level of self-awareness related to the self-regulation of the Earth. Ecological awareness starts with visualizing the time and space embodied in every element of the built environment. From substance called matter extracted from the earth system to material made, transported, and converging in a building, the afterlife of material can trigger different timescales depending on its ability to be part of a loop. For this reason, studying the material’s life cycle begins with understanding the time dimension behind the “Matter-Matter-Matter?” sequence. Matter, extracted from the earth’s crust, generates an economy and a social organization. From industrial landscapes to ecological upheavals, the transformation and transport of matter shape our living environment. Matterscapes means a comprehensive view of the matter. This concept aims to decipher the interconnection between different network systems integrated into the use of materials. Matterscapes respond to the scrambling of networks and data triggered by globalization and the abstraction of climate change. The content of the “Matterscapes” class is directly linked to the urgency of visualizing the journey of matter far beyond its temporality restricted by the life of a building. Visualizing the economic, social, and ecological landscapes intertwined in the life of matter could initiate the power of actions in our psychology. The transport and transformation of matter have an essential impact on the different layers of our living environments. To understand contemporary issues related to materials and ecology, the course focuses on representing the life cycles of other materials to help visualize the impact on the Earth system. This paper presents a course on materials geography within the design strategy framework. Students are asked to explore and represent the relationship between the use of a material and its original territory. The pedagogy and method of the course are built upon two approaches. The first is scientific, based on consistent research that provides an objective view of each material’s origin and manufacturing process. The second approach requires developing a critical mind and an aesthetic position through a collage capable of triggering emotions in the observer, likely to create an acute awareness. Each student is asked to select a precedent by following a list of different architects with specific geographical locations. The list of precedents curated by the educator ensures the representation of different cultures worldwide. Students learn to decipher the entanglement of geology, biology, economics, and social organization embedded in the material by analyzing the life cycles of three materials from their precedent. The research on the three materials is split into two different analyses. On the one hand, there is a scientific approach to the life cycle of materials, where each stage of transformation and transport is presented. On the other hand, students are challenged by making a collage capable of revealing important information hidden in each material, including social, economic, and political landscapes. Finally, students prepare a small video or gif that compiles the most relevant aspects of the three material’s life cycle analyses. The final project is an opportunity to reveal temporal and spatial scales embedded in the built environment leading students toward a critical position.

Dismantling Hidden Curriculums: A Case Study on México-United States Border Pedagogy and Subjects
Cesar Lopez, University of New Mexico

Abstract

Dismantling Hidden Curriculums: A Case Study on México-United States Border Pedagogy and Subjects Dismantling Hidden Curriculums: A Case Study on México-United States Border Pedagogy and Subjects Accepted To date, the México-United States border remains a reductive topic in news media and policy debates as narratives of violence, trafficking, and immigration dominate the region’s characterization. 1 Succumbing to these narratives have been trends in architectural education to view the border region and its complex filtering of capital, material, and labor as a fortification problem to solve, fueling studio topics and research projects from institutions that focus on materializations or de-materialization of the México-US boundary. The issue is that these projects overlook the architectural typologies shaping populations as border mechanisms in favor of topics traditionally rooted in architectural scope. This stems from our discipline solely training architects to leverage their skills and knowledge as service providers limited by scope and commission instead of investigators that uncover sobering perspectives of our practice. Thereby limiting the academic institution’s responsibility to produce new knowledge. Hidden Curriculums Jean Anyon, a researcher in education and policy, presents a theory central to this paper. It lies at the intersection of education and classism called hidden curriculums, where Anyon states that public schools in complex societies, like that of the [institution-redacted] in the [redacted] region, make available a type of education experience and curricular approach that is specific to students in the prevailing social class of the region.2 This paper unpacks a series of studio and seminar courses taught since Spring 2020 across two institutions. The first is the [institution-redacted] in the [geography-redacted] where 60% of its undergraduate class are on Federal Pell Grants while many of those who aren’t are foreign international students receiving a combination of merit and need-based aid.3 The second is the [institution-redacted], which is one of the most affordable institutions in North America, offering undergraduate and accredited graduate degrees in architecture. It is located in [city-redacted] within the México-US border region, where students are situated in a mixed-status population with one of the highest poverty rates in the US.4 This means that the students at these institutions come from communities that need the agency of an equitably built environment the most. Therefore, education and knowledge production must be seen as a liberating power, and their experiences must be leveraged to uncover counter-modes of practice. The institutions and students documented in this paper experienced economic constraints and political subjectivity that Anyon describes as intrinsically tied to Working Class educational models where “practical” curriculums are prioritized to instill manual skills and produce docility and obedience.5 This contrasts the other categories Anyon describes, which are Middle Class and Affluent models where objectives focus on new knowledge, independently driven production, and assertive behaviors.6 This paper argues that architectural education relies too much on producing industry-ready graduates and not enough on providing them with the skillsets to interrogate our discipline’s entanglements with political and economic structures. In what follows are a series of studios and seminars focused on citizenry, migration, and the inclusion/exclusion dynamics of the México-US border. These topics were dictated by the traditional scope of architectural education and had limited scholarship. Yet, the students participating in these courses have first-hand experience. Each class was positioned to reveal overlooked building and infrastructural typologies and our discipline’s entanglements with marginalizing power dynamics. The methodology starts with a constituency or environment subject that has yet to be framed by the architectural discipline. Emerging Border Typologies The first case study was a graduate research studio taught at the [institution-redacted] where the students explored architectural typologies that emerged as a result of the rise of deportations from the US to México since 2009, displacing a generation of immigrants who have been in the US since early childhood.7 What we discovered is that in parallel with these displacements is the emergence of a call center industry in Northern Mexican cities aiming to receive and capitalize on bilingual and college-educated deportees to spur the next generation of the maquiladora industry.8 However, while Maquiladoras relied on cheap/unskilled labor, call centers required English as a second language and savviness with technology. This realization that deportees are the desired workforce prompted new architectural models for a call center representing labor empowerment. This studio asked students to look past reductive narratives in political issues and unpack architecture’s entanglements with inclusion/exclusion dynamics. Border Subjects In the Spring of 2021, a graduate research studio taught at [institution-redacted] titled Citizenry Exclusions explored the México-US border as not a static barrier but rather a filtering system that attracts flows of capital and labor. We set out to obtain a new understanding of citizenry when sovereignty is no longer tied to borders but rather to the nebulous flow of capital.9 In our research together, we identified groups shaped by these dynamics and proposed new typological counter-models that can foster collectivity and solidarity, such as housing, schools, and markets. While producing high-caliber work is an essential outcome of every studio, it is not the only measure of success, as ethical reasoning and empathy outcomes are as critical as coherent arguments and technically sound work. In this studio, students, in the end—regardless of race, culture, nationality, and legal status—came to identify as subjects shaped by the border. Even though some of them had not crossed the border, the inclusion/exclusion dynamics that shape mixed-status populations also impact their economic stability—realizing that by making these circumstances visible, this community could find solidarity in the broader public. Border Representation The final course in this series was a seminar taught at [institution-redacted], which investigated the border region, environment, and populations as the focus of image production throughout history and the role that images have played in constructing public consciousness regional identity. This seminar interrogated various forms of representation specific to the border, from the depictions of 19th-century national survey parties to contemporary political narratives and the future-looking perspectives of architects and science fiction authors. We engaged cross-disciplinary voices to discuss how histories, methods, and agendas shaping contemporary perspectives can be leveraged to design new representations of the region: forward, plural, and resolute imaginaries. This course culminated in new border visuals that brought together archival documents, political propaganda material, videos, comics, social media posts, and photojournalism to visualize the nuances of border issues. Towards New Subjects in Border Issues Transborder scholar, Norma Iglesias-Prieto, alludes to the border as a complex social construct of opportunities and challenges presented to the daily life of populations crossing the border.10 This notion of a border dynamic is critical in identifying the border subject as groups that experience inclusion/exclusion. This paper identifies ways the border forms subjects and explores citizenry, not as a legal status, but as a participation in civic life. The argument here is that since modern architecture poised the built environment with the ability to enact bio-political agendas—we must identify the spatial devices shaping border subjects.11 The key to empowering border subjects in our societies is to leverage the spaces they’re already in—the living, working, and commercial typologies they already comfortably populate. Since these groups’ social, economic, and political precarity makes them reluctant to participate in collective civic life—we must leverage latent opportunities in their daily environments to make themselves visible to each other so that a new border conscience can emerge.12 Through such exposure, border subjects can see their shared precarity, thus beginning to dismantle fears of diversity for some. Disciplinary Impacts These courses have been taught in a region where many architecture schools emphasize the production of industry-ready graduates. While it is an objective in these courses to provide them with the skills and competency for professional practice, it is a parallel priority to do so without conditioning them for the social inequity they very well may find in the profession. Therefore, these courses are grounded in countering the hidden curriculums in architectural education associated with shaping students based on economic class. Instead, the experience in these studios asks students to develop projects that position the role of community leadership and social responsibility. The effects of an architectural education in which diversity is valued will transform how designers will interface with these growing populations. The graduates from [institution-redacted] entering practice today will have a crucial role in shaping the [geography-redacted] region. There lies an opportunity to prevent the established exclusion dynamics that riddle major cities today. Furthermore, the [institution-redacted] is the only accredited School in [state-redacted]. Because our graduates tend to stay in the region to practice, the school’s alums run many architectural practices within the state. Instilling social justice values in future region practitioners allows architects and planners to design with the community in mind. This paper claims innovation in resisting hidden curriculums that shape our students on socioeconomic terms. The cultural potentials of these courses instill in the students the nuances of borders when reexamined as subjects, such as people and environments. They have recognized that barriers don’t just impact the lives of those who cross them but also those contained within them. These courses have been a powerful experience, where students who have experienced trauma from the enforcement of borders and border policies have experienced solidarity in the studio environment.

Radical Vernacular
Mireille Roddier, University of Michigan

Abstract

Although Bernard Rudofsky’s 1964 MoMA exhibit and catalogue Architecture Without Architects may have shaken the discourses of modernist capital-A architecture by bringing attention to non-western, “non-pedigreed” domestic building practices, after a half-century, architects’ subsequent preoccupation with vernacular architecture has mostly digressed into simply another stylistic exercise, borrowed imagery. That the description of forms would mutate into prescriptive styles is foreseeable given the predominance of visual media for communicating architecture. Yet, the concept of vernaculars as it prevails in linguistics, holds the potential to resist both imaging and the resulting market for image consumption.  Vernacular forms can be characterized as non-mimetic and non-image-driven — i.e. non-iconic and non-symbolic in their inception, although they can become both icons and symbols with time (thereby losing their radicality). They are not scripted in advance (pre-scripted) nor communicate in a standardized language. In architecture, the vernacular is an optimized indexical configuration that purely reflects and reifies the use value of everyday life. The term first appeared in the Theodosian Code of Law, which opposed it to the commodity. The vernacular pointed to all that was crafted, weaved, or raised within the domestic realm, for household use only, and not intended for resale. It was defined as that which has no exchange value. The 20th-century commodification of the home into real-estate investment and the ascendancy of mass-production in the housing industry have annihilated the possibility of a true vernacular architecture. Paradoxically, although shunned by an architecture culture all too preoccupied with modernism and its discontents, it has recently and marginally entered academic concerns as an object of study yielding lessons on environmental resilience and sustainability.  Radical Vernacular reports on a new graduate seminar taught jointly between the department of Architecture and the department of Women’s and Gender Studies. The content is situated at the intersection of architecture, gender studies, material culture, linguistics, heritage preservation, and environmental sustainability. Each of these disciplines appropriates the notion of vernacular in specific yet divergent ways — as a retrogressive style, as domestic labor, as resistance to mass production, as an environmentally-conscious ways of dwelling, as culture-specific codes and markers of belonging, as indigenous know-how, etc. Taken together, these views foreground everyday life over symbolic accumulation. In contrast to the architect-designed monuments standing for civic institutions, vernacular forms are produced from and for domestic life, in service of non-commodifiable acts of dwelling. Not only do they index and materialize quotidian gestures and behavior, but they can also reproduce them, along with their associated habitus (Bourdieu, 1977). Whether in the form of tangible objects such as fashion, arts, and architecture, or intangible practices such as dialects, craftsmanship, culinary and performing arts, vernacular forms are an enduring expression of non-dominant cultures that both identify and enable domains of belonging.  Our focus on vernaculars expands beyond the boundaries of architectural studies, but we study them as architects — as orchestrators of knowledge equally spread between the arts, the humanities, and applied sciences. Understanding vernacular forms through a range of disciplines enables contradictions, paradoxes, and discursive biases to emerge, finetuning our capacity to both make sense of our built environment and to practice within it. We address world-makers at large: architects and preservationists, but also everyday dwellers, conscious of their participatory role in the writing of their environment. The stakes are not only ecological, they engage the material expressions and possible preservation of cultural diversity. Persistent if apparently unrelated questions arise that, when assembled, offer new connections and possibilities to think the immediate future.  The seminar borrows from a range of discourses that span from the humanities to the sciences, from structuralist and ethnographic readings of the environment to complex systems and the thermodynamics of evolution. The turn to those who thought through the energy crisis of the 1970s is probed: what strengths and lacunae need to be acknowledged? Each week’s discussion opens a new realm of questions, as we slowly shift from one territory to another: ON CENTERS (in opposition to margins) We first begin with bell hooks’ concept of margins as spaces for resistance (hooks, 1989) in order to posit what we define as “centers”. In this context, we see margins as the spaces of least standardization — i.e. in which communication is the slowest, and “code-switching” is maximized (Ashanti Young, 2018). We borrow from linguistics to oppose vernacular languages and dialects to vehicular languages — to the colonial languages of commerce (Munat, 2005). Here we see standards (étalons) as imperial instruments, be they units of measure, rules of grammar, or culturally defined points of origins (geographical, discursive, aesthetic) (Illich, 1981). We see vernaculars as resistance to globalization. Examined through the tectonics of the built environment, is the universal a space of freedom or exclusion? Do the margins limit opportunities or provide a space of emancipation? What are the conditions of reproduction of centers, the voices they enable to surface, and those they cancel? (Spivak, 1999) To master narratives, we oppose the possibility of vernacular epistemes. On MARGINS (as spaces of resistance) In this module, we understand vernacular spaces as disconnected from global networks — as much energetic as discursive. The question of scales of auto-dependance becomes crucial. Can micro-grids enable a local autonomy? Bioregional concepts of conviviality, bartering economies, local know-how, rather than stylistic specificities, serve as lenses through which we study “anonymous architecture” (Moholy-Nagy, 1957). Through conversations on labor, we necessarily acknowledge the etymology of the vernacular in the verna — the home-born slave, the domestic. How do we make sense of vernacular objects through the forms of labor that have produced them, for better and for worse? Has the economic argument for mass-production restricted the access to difference and customization to the elite, or are we still trying to learn from the self-organized economies of the favelas? From site specificity to place identity, we begin to explore the relationship between dwelling and preserving (Young, 2005). As representative artifacts of specific cultures and territories, and given contemporary debates on the instrumentation of preservation by capitalism, how do we extract heritage value from indexical forms? Is the preservation of heritage (material and intangible) a necessary rooting of values in an increasingly dematerialized society or a means of reifying specific cultural narratives that reinforce patterns of exclusion? On FRICTION (as energy regulation) The last module addresses the environmental claims of architectural vernaculars. First, by extending the conversation on both labor and preservation to include maintenance, repair, and care. To best do so, we turn to environmental historians and ecofeminists who have studied the disconnection between environmental sustainability and patriarchal systems (Merchant, 2005; Shiva, 1993). Looking beyond the analysis of material origins, processes of assembly and life cycles, and learning from deep ecology, we study energy dissipation and self-organized criticality as an introduction to the degrowth movement (Merchand, 2020; Prigogine, 1984). Can we learn from past practices anchored in tradition to inspire new material and technological innovation or are the building industry’s claims of sustainability a contradiction of terms? We conclude with a look at vernacular forms as cultural heritage through the lens of collective identity, ecopsychology, mental health, and sacredness (Macy, 1992). How do we make and make sense of reality through the production of objects in which to dwell? In an age of non-places (non-lieux) and safe spaces, how are degrees of safety — psychological and physical — reified in or missing from the built environment? Considering the physical environment as the materialization of ideology, can the tectonics of inclusivity resemble anything but generic spaces (common denominators), or can they only result in what architect Rem Koolhaas has termed junkspace — the apotheosis of universality? If over a century ago, Georg Simmel opposed the blasé metropolitan resident to the de-individualized small-town inhabitant in “Metropolis and Mental Life”, how do we reconsider the complexity of his arguments in our globalized world? Lastly and most significantly, how do we understand the markings of homein light of increased homelessness, displacement, fragmentation, and diasporic settlements (hooks, 1990; Dovey, 1985)?

After Sections: New Directions for Studio Teaching Methodologies
Dora Epstein Jones, Texas Tech University

Abstract

A pedagogy for a cosmopolitan citizenry calls not only for compassion, and not only for intrinsic complexity, but also for an integrated teaching methodology that embraces intellectual diversity. This paper asks educators in architecture to critically revisit the “atelier” model of studio instruction by removing the one-to-one nature of the traditional studio critique. Traditionally, and currently, in US universities, at least, we divide studios into single-instructor sections. The larger the cohort, the reasoning follows, the more sections are needed. Embedded in our minds, in studio culture, and throughout the data compiled regarding studio pedagogy, there is a myth at the level of standard modus operandi of a studio “golden ratio,” one that corresponds to the ideal conditions of single-instructor sections: 1:9 seems to be most desired, 1:12 is more the reality. In the immediate era of the post-pandemic, or endemic era, many US institutions are cracking under the weight of an enforced “return to in-person” policy, wherein studio cohorts are large, and qualified in-person studio instructors rather scarce. The main issue proposed by this paper is not that we suffer from “under-staffing,” but in effect, that we are detrimentally clinging to an old teaching methodology when it is no longer necessary. This paper presents 3 new models for studio teaching that ensure both the magical qualities of a low student-teacher ratios AND introduce a set of new teaching methods that potentially can embrace and model the compassion, complexity, and diversity that we understand now to be essential to architectural education. Building on 20+ years as an architectural educator, and drawing from specific studio cases and settings, the 3 models are presented as catalyzers. The models are not specific to any one school, but instead serve as tailorable templates that will alleviate the more-outdated section approach while enhancing student learning outcomes. Briefly, the 3 models are: Arboreal: Arboreal studio settings allow for different levels of expertise and different areas of expertise to unfold from a centralized set of rules or leaders. Students are encouraged to consult with instructors based on any individual instructors’ qualifications. Students therefore learn the value of cross-pollinating knowledge sets as part of the design process. In addition, less experienced instructors can be mentored and overseen. Rhizomatic: Rhizomatic studio settings allow students to learn to design using multiple types of insights. These studios can be staffed with a team, or cloud, of various teachers: professional architects, theoretical architects, poets, artists, mechanical engineers, and so on. Students understand design problems as “wicked,” and then use critical thinking skills to unfold a set of strategies. Advocative: Advocative studios ask students to work on behalf of a narrative “client.” Most instructors work as a juridical team to evaluate and advise students in their process, while additional TA’s and support staff can help students locate resources, command software, use advanced technologies, and so on, to establish their case. While these 3 models are not exhaustive, they suggest an opening of teaching methodologies that emphasize student inquiry over perfunctory tasks and establish modes of working that begin with a more liberated inquisitiveness. Furthermore, these studio models set a tone that is cooperative rather than competitive among teachers, and serves to enhance the special knowledges that each individual brings to the studio. In cases where there is an unevenness in teaching abilities, these models expand our roles into positive mentorship, promoting what NAAB may be referring to as a “teaching culture.” Overall, this paper will hope to inspire schools of architecture to release themselves from sectional thinking, so that design studio will emulate a positive relationship to the diversity that we know in the world.

4:30pm-6:00pm
Research Session
1.5LU Credit

Engaged Storytellers 1

Moderator: Jason Schupbach, Drexel University

Ephemeral Traces – Creating a Conversation in Light with Borromini; Travel Abroad Studio
Yael Erel, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Abstract

When educating cosmopolitan architects we aspire to provide students with tools to be able to understand otherness and engage thoughtfully with different cultures in an empowered manner. In order to accept otherness, one needs to be exposed to it, and perhaps immerse within it. Programs that are located “abroad” i.e. in an environment that is foreign to the students, immerse them deeply into another cultural setting that allows them to develop open-mindedness. As architects we have a unique ability to create immersive teaching environments. Architecture is an artifact of the past that can be entered, experienced and seen through our contemporary gaze [1]. Can we as architecture educators heighten the degree of immersion beyond a gaze? Can we temporarily interact and physically imbue the artifact with our insights? In this paper I would like to propose the potential of extreme and active immersion by using light installation as a medium to intervene within architecture, while in a travel abroad program. I’d like to explore how light is a medium that can heighten a sense of immersion in a site-specific context; students have a unique opportunity to physically project their reading onto an architectural artifact and the unique experience of merging an architectural reading with the original artifact. The work that I would like to discuss are installation projects conducted within a lighting seminar in a study abroad program in Rome. Using light to intervene with the Falconieri Crypt by Francesco Borromini, students were asked to create a thesis in light anchored within the history and context of the Crypt. Each installation used different light strategies and exposed different parts of the building’s past and memory (See figures 1-5). The setting offered the opportunity for students who would typically work in a neutral black box setting to engage with a site specific installation that addresses both physicality and trace. The setting of the project within a Crypt by Borromini was not culturally neutral. The process of engaging the students in the project required an expansion of the students’ cultural frame of reference. Initially some students presented hesitance and cultural repulsion to the notion of intervening in a site that is loaded and linked to death. An earnest conversation about our cultural preconceptions, fears and hesitations was essential to gain the trust and engagement from the student. We discussed the role of art, death and memory in the different cultures that the students originated from and through this communal discussion the students emerged with new understandings that energized the projects with different modes of expression and an existential depth. What began as a protest became an aware and engaged act of making.  The projects constructed a liminal space between analysis and intervention in which we facilitate a spatial-temporal conversation with a historical building without altering it.  Light may be an ideal medium through which to explore this intersection of memory and space. It is a way to conduct a conversation that is temporary; one that changes how we perceive the built environment without permanently transforming it. The student projects were constructed as installations that used light as one actor in a temporal unfolding of that engaged memory within the site. Students used choreography of procession, sequence and poetry to craft a viewer experience in light and unlock awareness and memory.  The projects were all collaborative projects, students worked in teams that negotiated differences and contradictions. The process was one of discussion and feedback, having access to the crypt multiple times, we had the privilege of extending a conversion with Borommini through light. Students were exposed to an architectural master as an essential part of their work. They visited the site, researched, measured, and studied historical drawings[2], gaining an intimate understanding the potentials and limits within the design as they conversed with the structure with light.  The final installation at the Falconieri Crypt was the capstone in ‘Projecting Light’ seminar, a seminar focused on extending students’ understanding of light as material[3]. The seminar was structured as a series of experiments exploring topics that relate to light combining literary studies with hands-on experimentation. Attempting to develop a methodological tool box  to understand and explore our environment through experimentation[4]. The seminar operated as an experimentation and testing that was arrested at the point of the final installation. During the final installation critics and students alike identified unplanned effects and insights, a mark that the unpredictability of the exploration followed us till the final moments of its conclusion. This paper will unfold both the pedagogy of building an argument in light while engaging with a historic context and expand on the resulting student installations that exposed different facets of the Crypts history, the lives of the Falconieri and Borromini’s architecture.  Each of the four student groups used different strategies to construct an installation event – The project Drawing Borromini through Borromini, was constructed so that the oval oculus becomes an aperture to shed light and shadow in tribute to Borromini and moments in the structures history (figure 1-2).  The project Shifting Memory used color as a device to reveal and hide information; under different colors of light, different facets of the lives of the Falconieri come to the fore, fading in and out as the illumination shifts (figure 3). The Project Distorted Memories looked at convex and concave geometries and created a tale in light and shadow that exposed unintended effects in shadow and reflection (image 4). Whereas the project Light Transcends used language and poetry together with light to reflect on existential questions of life, death and transience (figure 5). This seminar was a unique opportunity to deeply immerse in architectural mastery and converse with it, generating an unfolding architectural story in light. Students aspired to develop a thesis in light and engage in a conversation with the built environment and its architect Francesco Borromini. This experience also challenged our preconceptions and cultural prejudices, making it a significant instrument for learning and extending our cultural frames of reference. We confronted issues of memory, life and death, through light and architecture. Each structured light narrative event was temporal and fleeting. At the end of each installation, as the general lights came up, no evidence of our tracings remained.

Wahnabezee and the Future [Hi]stories of Place
María Arquero, Ana Morcillo Pallares, Jonathan Rule & Claudia Wigger, University of Michigan

Abstract

Wahnabezee and the future histories of place is a collaborative research and pedagogy project supporting the co-creation and circulation of community narratives along the transnational waters of the Detroit River. By conceptualizing the river as an agent of urban transformation and generator of a new socio-ecological fabric, the project engages with the many cultural, environmental, and socio-political discourses that have shaped our knowledge of the region over time. Specifically, this project component centers the investigation on Wahnabezee, the largest city island public park in the US, as an experimental prototype for the development of methods of public scholarship and situated pedagogies.  While narratives of the island abound, many accounts remain incomplete, largely unacknowledged, or have been erased from our collective memory. But erasure and omission don’t mean absence. Thus, this project asks: what [hi]stories are to be told, and who may tell them? how can they be shared and celebrated?  Building on this mission, this project invests in forms of storytelling1 that are inclusive, equitable, and complex to steward the future of the public park as a pluralistic cultural commons, a place of longing and belonging. By reimagining the park as a living museum and inviting citizens and visitors to participate in telling the stories that matter, the initiative aims to create opportunities for mutual learning and the continued reformulation of knowledge. The Significance of Place Wahnabezee, also known as Belle Isle, exists both as a real site and an imagined place, a fluid commons of sorts. For centuries, the island has served as refuge and sanctuary, a shared natural resource for humans and non-human species alike. Its insular nature has historically enabled narratives of urban modernity, exceptionalism, and pluriversal2 world-views, registering booms and crises and evolving notions of belonging, nature, and justice. Located in the homelands of three Anishinaabe Nations of the Council of Three Fires, Wahnabezee was renamed Isle St. Claire and Ile au Cochon by the French and Hog Island3 by the British and Americans before becoming Belle Isle, the public park we know today.  The city of Detroit has owned the island since 1879, and its inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places in 1974 describes its significance, celebrating permanence and consistency, and provides an individual inventory of the constellation of elements that merit this distinction: “This unique atmosphere has existed virtually unchanged since the park officially opened in 1884. The real historic value of the park is not so much in the speculative value of the isolated buildings, structures, or assorted objects, but in its collective entirety. Its continuity in visual imagery and its historic consistency relative to its use certainly makes Belle Isle a major landmark in the Detroit townscape.”4 Additional historical accounts of the many layers of the island are documented in regional archives, and the very landscapes, buildings, statues, and memorials scattered across the island enable their embodiment by the public. The ancestral wet-mesic flatwoods forest and the popular beach, the aquarium and the conservatory, the museum and the casino, and the Detroit River itself embody the narrative of Belle Isle Park as the Jewel of Detroit.5 Yet, the evolving recalibration of the [hi]stories of place, the problematization of their authorship, the sources, and the many omissions, are not so easily accessible by the wider public visiting the public park today. Traces and stories have been erased or remain unacknowledged, haunting the memories of those who are still excluded from the core narratives. How can the insular landscapes tell us about the violence of colonization that was instigated by the 1807 Treaty of Detroit and is ongoing, the past and present stories that the Native American Tribes honor, the intangible traces of the slaves in search of emancipation, the scars of the 1943 riot that ignited in the bridge, the demolished bathhouse turned prison during the 1967 rebellion or the financial emergency that turned Belle Isle into a State Park? How can the present of Belle Isle elicit conversations around uncertainty and impermanence in the face of a changing climate? What [hi]stories need to be told and who may tell them? Where and how should they be construed, circulated, displayed, and counter-interpreted? What is our agency diversifying the narratives and mediums to consider not one but many inconclusive pasts, contingent presents, and a more pluralistic future? Stories that Matter The project is conceived as an experimental prototype for the development of innovative methods of publicly engaged scholarship and situated pedagogies centered on the re-examination of past and present [hi]stories and the coproduction of more just futures. Through the collection of situated [hi]stories, participatory mapping and counter-mapping, and immersive visualization techniques, the goal is to steward the future of the public park as a pluralistic cultural commons, a place of belonging. The project builds on the premise that addressing the critical societal matters of our time demands new coalitions and modes of knowledge creation centered on recognizing the diverse expertise and lived experiences of the people and communities we work with. Through the collection of oral histories, participatory mapping and counter-mapping exercises, and immersive visualization techniques, the goal is to steward the future of the public park as a pluralistic cultural commons, a place of belonging. The project builds on the premise that addressing the critical societal matters of our time demands new coalitions and modes of knowledge creation centered on the recognition of the diverse expertise and lived experiences of the peoples and communities we work with. Building on the partnership between the [institutions redacted] and a team of faculty teaching across units and degrees on campus, the project also engages graduate students through different course formats and experiential, mutual learning components (studios, workshops, and seminars) and research assistantships. Building on the [redacted] Story Lab mission, this project invests in forms of storytelling that are inclusive, equitable, and complex. Working from the premise that the narrative infrastructure of regional communities is critical to sustaining social justice efforts, the Lab builds on local partnerships to research, co-produce and disseminate historically nuanced, contextually aware, and culturally rooted stories harnessing the symbolic power of the Detroit River in drawing out the lives and struggles of its adjacent communities. Working in collaboration with some of the organizations rooted in the park and the many other groups who visit and steward the island, this proposal brings a multilayered approach to the coproduction, curation, representation, and mediation of alternative histories and stories of place. To account for all, the journey includes a combination of access to archival and field work, public history and journalistic research, citizen science, and public engagement. To tell [hi]stories inclusively and holistically, the project prioritizes the collection of stories of place highlighting the many urban natures and incorporate participatory critical cartography as a means to recalibrate the process of knowledge coproduction, emphasizing the subaltern lens. Immersive visualizations and the integration of metaphors of haunting and erasure will be critical to the creation of a holistic socio-cultural narrative of the Detroit River and the island. Prototyping: seeing, telling, and sharing To create a digital commons of sorts, the project builds a digital platform to display the stories collected through different research methods including online questionnaires, archival research, mapping techniques, the commission of curated visual narratives, and additional informal learning strategies accessible on and off-site.  The project includes a web-based Augmented Reality application to allow on and off-site content engagement in a spatial format. The idea is that through a target-based scanning and a digital overlay of information users emerge in a media-rich environment where the visitor can interact with the (hi)stories collected through the different design methods. Through these disparate accounts together, the project invests in celebrating the diverse authorship and elevating the accounts brought by those who labor, steward, and enjoy the park. Through this mix of narrative mediums and capacities, the project prototypes and tests different avenues of storytelling in the formulation of cultural resilience and environmental stewardship. Working iteratively, we focus on data collection of archival and local narratives through different activations and launching a civic tech portal to support feedback loops. As we bring the data into the digital platform, we continue to collect additional narratives and experiment with a range of visual tools in conversation with partners and other users.

“Imagine oneself close to the Equator”: How museums tell stories with African Architecture
Steven Lauritano, Leiden University

Abstract

Recent efforts to write a more global history of architecture have resulted in an outpouring of publications and exciting new teaching materials.[1]  Still the fact remains that most architecture students will never experience global building traditions in situ, but instead encounter them vicariously through images, or reinterpreted in revivalist buildings, or in museum collections.  For the architecture of Africa, the last category is the most likely place of encounter.  Yet architecture poses a number of challenges when it comes to museum display, and these challenges are multiplied in the case of African vernacular architecture.  On the one hand, many of the architectural examples collected from Africa are not currently on view.  The components of nomadic architectures, for example, are frequently kept in storage, sorted according to the museum’s pre-existing classification system (typically based on material) and housed according to the material’s differing preservation requirements.  In other words, the building components become isolated “things.”[2]  Imagine a Levittown home disassembled into its constituent parts, sorted by material, and divided up among different museum departments.  How much of its story would be lost?  African buildings, including smaller dwellings, were rarely acquired by museums en toto.  More often the carved wooden elements were separated from the rest of the vegetal or earthen materials so they could be reclassified and sold as sculpture to satisfy the early 20th-century demand for such pieces.[3]  During the harvesting of these architectural components, the names of architects and fabricators were rarely recorded, adding to the racist stereotypes of “anonymous” and “primitive” African arts.  As Labelle Prussin has pointed out, the collecting history of African architecture is further complicated by the fact that most pieces were acquired during expeditions led by men.  This poses a problem in many African contexts where the architecture was designed, planned, fabricated, assembled, preserved and taught to the next generation by women.  This produced a situation where much of the knowledge about African architecture, not to mention the associated material culture, remains outside of archives and collections.[4]  Needless to say the examples of African buildings that have made their way into ethnographic museums and other collections represent a very limited fraction of a bigger picture.  It is vital that an awareness of these limitations makes its way into architectural history curricula.             Beyond outlining the challenges one faces when trying to understand African architecture through museum collections and displays, this paper makes an attempt to consider the powerful stories that can be told.  What can an architectural student learn by visiting a reconstructed African building?  How can the physical architecture support modes of storytelling that are unavailable in a text or video presentation?  To answer this question, the research follows a comparative approach, closely examining two museums with displays of African architecture that opened within one year of each other: 1) The Afrika Museum in Berg en Dal, Netherlands, which opened in 1958, and 2) The Musée National du Niger (now renamed the Musée National Boubou Hama) in Niamey, Niger, which opened in 1959, shortly before Niger achieved its independence.             These two case studies are especially noteworthy as examples of a trend that in emerged in the 1950s when architectural “specimens” from Africa were used to contextualize different museum’s presentations of African art.  On the one hand, the display of domestic structures (often in outdoor settings) adjacent to art (in nearby indoor galleries) represented a reaction to the false narratives perpetuated by earlier attempts to “modernize” African art through strategies of decontextualization.  On the other hand, such groupings of “model” buildings harken back to the troubled history of the Village Nègre at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris and similar exhibitions that followed in Hamburg, London, Brussels, Barcelona, Osaka, and elsewhere.             To better understand the motivations and consequences of displaying model African buildings alongside African art, this paper presents a detailed analysis of the two museums, in Berg en Dal and Niamey, where the combination of (outdoor) architecture and (indoor) artworks was envisioned as an integral aspect of the museum’s display strategy from the start.  Drawing on archival research, the paper unpacks the different motivations and consequences of two visually similar architectural installations in vastly different settings.             The display of these model buildings at Niamey and Berg en Dal can be interpreted as presenting a misleading, or false contextualization – especially when one considers the examples of nomadic architecture displayed at each site.  The elements that come together to form such nomadic structures are almost never static, whether in terms of their constructive role, their functionality, or their place in diverse rituals.  Plaited ropes, wooden ribs and woven mats assume one shape and use as part of a dwelling, then shift into entirely new configurations when they are disassembled and reassembled to form palanquins (to cite one notable example). Despite the potential for misrepresentation, scholars like Labelle Prussin and Risham Majeed have argued that it is precisely this shape-shifting and meaning-shifting that makes architectural elements an essential ingredient in museum displays.[5]  By resisting ingrained museological categorizations, architectural elements pose important questions for the artworks in their immediate vicinity.  In this sense, the combined display of African architecture and African arts might create opportunities to pose questions of authorship, temporality, and the care or preservation of these works.  The combination of assembled architecture, dis-assembled architectural components, and art also suggests the possibility of balancing a more synoptic ethnographic approach to display with strategies that highlight material properties or aesthetic qualities. If one accepts the premise that contemporary architecture is in the midst of a resurgent interest in tectonics, in the symbolic, social and affective capacities of material assemblies not merely to reflect cultures, but to participate in their transformation, then the African tectonics on display in Berg en Dal, Niamey, and several other museums are well worth revisiting.  When presented with the right stories, such model dwellings have the potential to suggest alternative scripts for collective creative action, to map out the intersection of labor politics and gender identity, and to recognize the power of understanding architecture as a logistical process, rather than a monumental product.  While this paper remains tightly focused on the two museums in Berg en Dal and Niamey, it opens up onto a much broader set of disciplinary issues.  What role, for example, could architectural installations play in the ongoing efforts to decolonize museum spaces, and by extension, architecture school curricula?

Looking In to See Out: Making History Personal as a Strategy for Expanding World Views
Mary Beecher, The Ohio State University

Abstract

This conference aims to examine the societal relevance of architectural education, from its content to its pedagogical approach. By putting the emphasis on the concept of cosmopolitanism, it raises the potential for some controversy, however. Generally speaking, adopting a cosmopolitan understanding of one’s place in the world encourages viewing oneself as a citizen of the world at large, first and foremost. This is an ethical position. Thomas Pogge, whose scholarship articulated a framework for the principles on which cosmopolitanism relies some thirty years ago, claimed that a citizen of the world must value individualism (placing human beings at the center of what is of ultimate concern); must think universally (seeing all humans as equal, no matter what); and must seek a position of generality by encouraging the belief that people are the “unit of concern” we should all care about the most.[i] Today, this framework requires new interrogation in the context of justice and de-colonial imperatives and with the climate crisis in mind. It also provokes us to re-evaluate the relationship between notions of the local and notions of the global. Pogge’s new scholarship on cosmopolitanism proposes that it support the principle that humans are responsible for ensuring that global rules and practices can be justified based on the “equally weighted needs and interests of all human beings.”[ii] Can architectural education position itself to create actors who are qualified to be authentically impartial and empathetic to this cause? This paper argues that before one is eligible to claim cosmopolitanism, it is essential to acquire a self-reflective lens and a strong understanding of one’s own roots and personal context as a way of identifying one’s own values and biases. While this happens in distinctive way through creative, project-based learning in the studio, it also can happen through a research-oriented approach to the study of history, which provides a key opportunity to strengthen students’ ability to know themselves well when pedagogical values and challenges are framed accordingly. This is partially due to the fact that teaching the history of design and architecture has become much more interesting in the twenty-first century. Instead of creating familiarity with a popular canon of iconic works and genius individuals (usually white, and usually male), historians now find themselves free to create expansive lessons about the past that recognize the richness of the range of design innovations that have been invoked by a diverse range of those who have come before us. New educational priorities and values also invite the establishment of a global perspective on what matters about the past, and whose contributions are worth examining closely. But because all dimensions of history, including the personal, are ripe for interrogation, its study can also become an introspective endeavor: an opportunity to learn about and articulate one’s own story. This presentation is, therefore, rooted in the premise that teaching design history is always an act of storytelling and the study of design history includes the creation of a narrative that is unique to each learner. There are few absolutes and there should certainly be no Euro-centric canon in the decolonized curriculum of today.     With this invitation to reconsider the definition of what possible content in the design history curriculum should be, it may be useful to examine tactics that can be used to frame a series of lessons that contribute to building an understanding of how to approach a life-long learning approach to the study of history. Inspired by William Littman’s 2020 essay in Platform entitled “How to Travel the World During the Pandemic,” I have developed a framework for teaching design history that expands on the premise found in the 1790 Xavier de Maistre memoir entitled Voyage Around My Room.[iii] This detailed historic essay—framed as a travel memoir—tracks de Maistre’s experience of a 42 day-long house arrest for dueling with a fellow officer in the late 18th century. By adopting the method of close looking and a mindset of understanding one’s own “territory” as a mirror of a personal “world,” I am interested in posing a new model for how we think about the relevance of historical knowledge within architectural and design-focused education. Based on a set of experimental assignments that I have been conducting in a beginning design history survey course over a period of six years or longer, this paper will present three possibilities for learning that encourage students to participate in the study of history as a means of getting to know themselves. I will extend this argument to propose that this is also useful as a way to support their future cosmopolitan aspirations. In direct response to reading an excerpt from Voyage Around My Room, a writing assignment cultivates students’ notions of sense of place by requiring them to conduct their own exploration of their personal environment (dorm room, apartment, bedroom, etc.), students begin the study of design history by looking closely at the materiality and cultural meaning of their own belongings and spatial conditions. This requires paying attention to minutiae and cultivating skills in being descriptive and precise. By attending to the overlooked or under-valued components of an environment (or perhaps features that have been taken-for-granted), students’ ability to see and “read” layers of meaning in environments is practiced and expanded. Secondly, students extend their individualized interpretation of rooms by moving beyond their current environments to look at places across time. They are encouraged to perceive evidence of the material world as a set of genealogical relationships by looking at the sequential development of historical features in the built environment and places with relationships to it that extend beyond the geographic. Starting from each student’s place of origin, they are asked to learn enough about its history to determine a theme for a hypothetical exhibition of designed artifacts or environments that range in scale and represent a range of time that spans at least 100 years and at least two different, but related places. A “collection” of four artifacts should tell a story about each student’s place of origin and its history, helping them understand how influences and information are exchanged through progressive and iterative design developments in the process. Lastly, by invoking the traditions of fictional storytelling, students are asked to develop their understanding of relationships between disconnected moments in time by developing an essay that details a hypothetical encounter between two designers, chosen from a lengthy and diverse list of global figures. Over lunch at a place of the student’s choosing, these individuals converse about what each admires about the works of the other. By crafting the essay’s information as a narrative, students are encouraged to transcend disciplinary boundaries within design (by giving voice to designers from differ locations and with differing expertise) and beyond design, by being rewarded for creating as detailed and engaging a story as possible. These are just three assignment scenarios that have provided anecdotal evidence that students do expand their ability to develop a deeper understanding of their relationships to cultural and physical environments with a past. They also validate their ability to translate ideas by expanding their abilities with non-fiction and fictional story-telling. Whether or not this guarantees the cultivation of global citizens, I cannot say in a definitive way. But experience suggests that it raises the possibility that those who do will think about relationships across time and place in a more engaging and compelling way. By recognizing similarities or parallels that occur between the study of history on a macro or global scale and the micro-scaled exploration of one’s own room, one’s place of origin, or between two unassociated historic designers, this presentation’s ideas address the conference prompt that asks how architectural education can empower students to develop narratives that contribute to their understandings of architecture and place. Relatedly, they also suggest ways that we can promote a pedagogy in architecture that is less focused on idols and icons. Perhaps most importantly, this approach to learning about the history of design and architecture drives home the notion that education can be directly related to lived experience.

Restitching Post-industrial Sugar Heritage: Developing Advocacy Attitudes as a Strategic Plan
Awilda Rodriguez, Oklahoma State University
Gabriela Campagnol, Texas A&M University

Abstract

From the early plantations through the mid-twentieth century company towns, sugar production substantially influenced land use and settlements. Sugar production was the first and most important economic activity established in Brazil by Portuguese colonists. Sugarcane played a critical role in the socio-economic development of Puerto Rico and was the reason for the urbanization of South Texas in the area of Sugar Land. Therefore, one of the earliest forms of architectural expression and urbanization in colonial Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Texas emerged on the sugar plantations. Sugar towns symbolized the industrial landscape while retaining some characteristics of traditional rural life. The grandiosity of the plant, the smokestacks, and strong odor, the cranes loaded with cane, the juice running from the crushers, and the “Chaplinesque” gears in the factory contrasted sharply to low scale rows of houses and barracks-like structures, the church on the hilltop, the green cane-shaped walls following the dirt roads, and some distinctive community buildings. These agro-industrial communities, which built up around the processing plant, expanded considerably in the Americas throughout the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Adaptive reuse has emerged as an important strategy in conserving and preserving post-industrial buildings and landscapes. Departing from sugarcane heritage areas of Sao Paulo-Brazil, Texas-United States, and Aguirre-Puerto Rico, this paper examines a pedagogical approach to advocate for preserving and conserving historic buildings and their contextual locations to promote cultural heritage as an indispensable component of livable, sustainable communities. Through students’ research analysis, they realized the significance of the historic resources and proposed different program narratives that could give new life. Moreover, in these design exercises, they identify potential partners, media channels, and allies to support their proposal that, after careful analysis, may yield the best potential to communicate these historical structures’ critical role. A comparative study attempts to reveal common models and distinguish specific characteristics of each location, looking at issues related to sustainable regeneration in post-pandemic times and using this to empower students to develop common narratives that build a common understanding of architecture and place. Sugar company towns, which flourished in Brazil from 1910 to 1945, are small-scale urban-rural hybrids with agricultural, industrial, and residential features. Sugar plantations based on slavery were often the starting point for developing many company towns, which grew from the modernization of sugar production in rural areas. These settlements juxtaposed industrial (urban) and rural (country) aspects. According to Mário de Melo, the sugarcane agro-industry generated a “sugar civilization,” which imprinted particular characteristics on the area where it was implanted in an almost irreversible way. These post-industrial sites are prime examples of the rehabilitation process of the industrial heritage. The history of Engenho Central de Piracicaba, a former sugar factory and refinery that operated from 1881 to 1974, provides an instructive example of the complex issues involved in adaptive reuse. Since the 1980s, the site and its fate have been the subject of political controversies and stewardship debates, resulting in several rehabilitation plans by renowned Brazilian architects. Among the most recent developments have been a theater, which opened in 2012, and a project for a Museum of Sugar, currently in progress. Through an examination of specific design approaches suggested for the rehabilitation of the Sugar Heritage, this paper addresses the consequences of the disappearance of industrial buildings in general and examines the role played by architects and planners in defining the contribution of industrial heritage to contemporary (and future) urban identity. Sugar Land flourished as a model company town for the Imperial Sugar Company, the first sugar refinery in Texas and the oldest extant business in the state. But before it became in the 1920s one of the “best planned and equipped communities” in Texas for its size, Sugar Land had been called the “hell-hole of the Brazos,” defined by its dependence on convict labor and its identity as a segregated community. Under the impact of Houston’s expansion in the 1950s, it changed its status. In 2002, activities in the refinery ended, so its original identity and history, connected to the sugar industry, has been weakened. The area has been on the verge of redevelopment and was included in the National Register of Historic Places in 2017. The plan for Sugar Land’s district forms an important case study of a defiant industrial structure on the bend of Oyster Creek, subject to flooding, as well as of urban rehabilitation strategies. In its heyday, Sugar Land demonstrated industrial features and residential characteristics like other sugar towns in South America, the Caribbean, and the United States. Now considered “one of the fastest growing cities in America,” Sugar Land has lost its historical identity and is easily mistaken as one of Houston’s suburbs. Sugar production and changing attitudes towards the workforce were central to the generation of housing and urban form for white, African American, and Hispanic workers in Texas. As part of American-led economic initiatives, a large number of sugar mills were constructed in Puerto Rico at the turn of the twentieth century, leaving a stock of post-industrial structures as the sector declined. La Centrál Aguirre in the southern Puerto Rican municipality of Salinas is one of the most significant examples of this industrial legacy. In 1899, a transformation and extension of the agricultural estate known as Hacienda Aguirre resulted in the birth of this sugar mill and its subsequent company town. These now-abandoned post-industrial structures contributed to the cultural history of this city and reflected the political and economic relationship between the United States and one of its most important Caribbean possessions. A connection that brought both benefits and numerous obstacles. Due to a lack of preservation measures, governmental failures, the economic crisis, and natural forces, the main industrial buildings and many of the surrounding structures, such as the administrators’ homes, workers’ housing, hospital, theater, and hotel, continue to degrade. Hurricane Maria (2017) and the earthquakes of 2020 have contributed further to the deterioration of this neglected terrain. In architecture pedagogy, educators need to craft effective design learning experiences to facilitate students’ path toward developing attitudes so they can subsequently create strategies that align with those attitudes. In the professional field, conducting feasibility studies on whether to demolish or not a building to make room for a new one, architects face many ethical challenges. Clients may not be interested in the upkeep, and the costs associated with maintenance may not be financially sustainable. Still, unprotected historical buildings (not protected by historical preservation ordinances) may contribute to the urban fabric in ways that are difficult to monetize. In addition, there are towns such as the company town of Central Aguirre, where losing its main iconic structure may substantially affect the city’s urban character, both physically and emotionally. How do students carry these messages? This paper examines a pedagogical approach for students to develop a moral compass and a decision-making path to navigate these situations and decide whether to advocate for preserving or conserving portions of historic buildings and their contextual locations.  Through targeted research analysis, students’ could realize how to promote cultural heritage as an indispensable component of livable, sustainable communities and the significance of these historical resources in order to propose different program narratives that could bring them back to life. In addition, students must also identify community leaders to facilitate community contacts to capture stories not necessarily found in academic history books but bring knowledge that enriches the histories of the structures and helps in the narratives and creative process for various design strategies. Moreover, these design exercises, mapping buildings “at risk,” producing analytical visual material, and identifying potential partners, media channels, and allies to support their proposal, may yield the best potential to communicate these historical structures’ critical role in society.

4:30pm-6:00pm
Research Session
1.5LU Credit

Co-Creative Partners 3

Moderator: James Benedict Brown, Umeå University

The Enabler Architect: Social Housing Through a Spectrum of Participation
Livia Catao Cartaxo Loureiro,
Texas A&M University

Abstract

Introduction In the context of housing, the Modern Movement’s concepts in the schools of architecture envisioned the architect as an individual who possessed all the necessary skillset concerning social housing as their forefront pedagogy. This tradition historically shaped the typologies developed by architects and engineers, who invested in an educational model that thinks and designs housing solutions aimed only at finished products. Although these products may adequately fulfill the desires and reality of its residents, there is no guarantee that these architectural solutions will evolve along with its residents’ needs and societal changes on domesticity. Design and development of open building systems and customization of housing have been for many years a part of several architects and researchers’ pursuit of feasible solutions (Habraken, 1972; Ward, 1972; 1976; Kendall & Teicher, 2000; MOM, 2008; Aravena & Iacobelli, 2012). These strategies aimed to solve housing demand, industrialization and customization “without falling in the repetitious ploys of mass production” (Kendall & Teicher, 2000, pp.16). Nevertheless, most contemporary architects still need to embrace the inherent capacity of indeterminacy that exists within a design, especially in social housing (Schneider & Till, 2005; 2009; Baltazar, 2009; Aravena & Iacobelli, 2012).  The inclusion of open building, self-help, and participatory design in social housing projects can have the potential to optimize urban, typological, and social conditions of future designs. By allowing decent living conditions, a design-oriented policy serves as an economic mechanism to overcome poverty (Aravena & Iacobelli, 2012). By including these theories as critical elements of architectural education, schools will be training the new generation of architects to position themselves as enablers of the design rather than sole authors of housing projects. In the social sphere, it will amplify the possibilities for the dissemination of architectural culture for the 98% of the population (Bell, 2004; Bell & Wakeford, 2008) within a framework and reinterpretation of the dwelling more grounded to the reality and free from architectural bias and aesthetic pressure. This research aims to discuss the role of architects and architectural education by establishing a framework of participation elements applied to social housing design allied with a discussion of the architect’s role. It places enablement at the core of the architect’s agency and responsibility, and discusses a pedagogical approach to social housing design that is focused on empowerment and user autonomy rather than aesthetics and finished products.  Method The research developed a theoretical analysis towards a working framework to be used in practice and pedagogy by using a combination of two research strategies; logical argumentation and case studies. Logical argumentation connects, explains, and establishes the whole argument of the investigation since its primary purpose is to frame the reasoning in a system that has broad explanatory applicability (Groat & Wang, 2002). Logical argumentation was chosen because this research aims to change the way architects and educators position themselves on social housing by developing a framework for thinking and designing social housing projects incorporating open building, self-help, and participatory design.  Case studies complemented the assessment of the theoretical concepts proposed as a structure for social housing design and pedagogy, establishing a calibration parameter for future projects. The case studies selection derived from a timeline highlighting relevant discourse, architects, and projects incorporating the theories from 1914 to 2020. The timeline shows moments of pivotal change regarding social housing and elements of participation occurring approximately every 30 years. Two representative projects from architects that have globally impacted the housing discourse serve as case studies for investigation: Maison Dom-Ino (1914) by Le Corbusier, and Quinta Monroy (2003), by Alejandro Aravena. The selection of these architects and their projects observed their influence on critical changes in social housing discourse and architectural education.  Data Analysis  The case studies’ examination followed two structured phases. Phase one focused on constructing the “macro” picture of each project, creating a matrix of categories and distributing the evidence amongst them, investigating the following aspects: historical context, site context, and architectural theory. Phase two concentrated on composing the “micro” picture: developing a project analysis and evaluation of architectural drawings and other artifacts through a soft & hard scale system, generating data displays that measured each case study’s performance under a participation spectrum. Thus, the two phases of the data analysis followed an explanation building technique, analyzing the data by explaining each case study and observing stances of pattern matching (Yin, 1994). Soft and Hard Score Soft and Hard is a parameter created by Schneider & Till in their book Flexible Housing (2007) for analyzing levels of flexibility. It is a theoretical classification in which soft refers to flexible solutions that allow space for indeterminacy. Hard applies when projects’ flexibility is structured with elements linked more specifically to the way the design may be used (Schneider & Till, 2007). In soft approaches, the user has more control over the complete design (plan, interior, exterior) with the architect acting in the background. For hard uses, the architect takes the lead in the process, regulating the use, size, and overall appearance of the project.  Schneider & Till (2007) only offered this classification abstractly in their book as a way of explaining degrees of flexibility. This research expands this concept, by adding a numerical scale to transform theory to data for the case studies. This decision also came to materialize the conceptual aspects of the selected projects graphically within their diversity beyond the scope of architectural description in a manner to highlight their limitations and strengths. The scale ranged from minus five (-5) to five (5). The negative side did not stand for a negative result; it only denoted approaches where the architect’s control over the whole design was higher. It is also important to realize that in this case, the zero value (0) did not mean balance, but instead, the representation of the departure point of the projects, from where they started. to which score they reached within their final solutions.  Discussion During the second phase of the case study analysis, one particular element stood out on both housing designs: the frame. Perhaps the most important component present across the projects analyzed in this paper, it is an element that has dual embodiment; it can be literal or implied, material or theoretical, open or closed. Its versatility and familiarity across the world qualifies this element as the core component of the framework that will encompass the elements of participation. Thus, the frame is the element that will serve as a vessel to incorporate open building, self-help and participatory design. It is a mediator that will adjust based on the soft & hard score, encompassing the spectrum of autonomy and spatially organizes both the architect and the user’s contribution; through it, participation can happen, implicitly and explicitly. The analysis demonstrated that depending on the context, there is a calibration of the contribution of users, architects, and the frame in how much appropriation will the design afford. This proves that what makes social housing design most effective is the adaptation of the solution to the context, embodying levels of collaboration that are comfortable to the inhabitants. That’s why the Soft & Hard Score is so important. It confers the flexibility needed to achieve the balance of each input, and thus arrive at a project that truly represents the characteristics of the inhabitants while still advancing architecture. This elasticity amid enabler (architect), collaborator (user), and mediator (frame) on the projects also allows the observation of levels of individual and collective identity. The Soft and Hard Framework, aims to facilitate the collaboration during all the phases of the social housing design, and ultimately promote more equality while articulating the concepts presented in this study: – The elements of participation: open building, self-help, and participatory design. – The three forces that act in social housing design: architects, users, and the frame.  The Soft and Hard Framework diagram displays the process by which all of these elements can be combined during all phases of a social housing design. It defines a dialogue amongst architects and users mediated by participatory design at the beginning of the process, in order to establish trust and understand their individual and collective needs. After that, the architects present an initial design encompassing frame, open building, and self-help strategies that will be refined by the users, once more through participation. This adjusted frame will then be refined once more by architects and users, until, reach the final project stage; a collaboration between forces that materializes a shared vision of social housing design, pertinent to its context and its people. The framework offers both a practical and pedagogical model that can help redefine and reshape the future of social housing design and education.

Institutes, Institutions, and Institutionality
Alex Maymind, University of Minnesota

Abstract

Before the events of 1968 as a cultural and historical hinge point unfolded, a slightly earlier moment in the mid-1960s was significant for the ways in which governmental institutions as well as philanthropic organizations and schools of architecture frantically searched for new ways to define and live up to their social responsibility. In this moment in the middle of the decade, American knowledge production and institution-building rapidly evolved and a significant number of architectural research institutes developed, multiplied, and flourished, at a time when societal institutions, from the armed forces to government, endured heavy scrutiny and attack. These concerns, despite their wide ranging interpretations, would form a crucial backdrop to the educational and pedagogical debates that would significantly mold the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) and a handful of other para-institutes at this moment. This is particularly important as a framework, given that much of the historiography around IAUS has identified it as a unique occurrence that deserved to be seen as fundamentally different from schools of architecture, or other research formations which unfolded around the same time.  Looking anew at IAUS through an examination of the organizational and administrative documents with a vast empirical basis, this essay tracks the influence of these debates on the formation of IAUS as a nonprofit “non-stock corporation organized and operated exclusively for educational purposes.” IAUS proposed to explore a “diverse number of subjects concerning the environment, with the hope that this experimental institutional model which we have today can grow to become a truly ‘urban university,’ where the process of education, the students and teachers, participates directly in the activities of the city.”1 This question of pedagogy at an architectural nonprofit operating in/ of/ for the city of New York would underpin the first decade of their research, production, and critical questioning, and would lead to a number of innovative but ultimately problematic efforts in linking together urban problems, institutional legitimation, and pedagogical innovations. This essay uses archival research into IAUS to explore the larger question of how institutionality was changing in this moment, and how para-institutionality developed.  Arguably IAUS has an outsized history in architectural discourse, as evidenced by the number of tangents, reference points, and historical actors which can be tied back to its orbit, some of which are still unfolding today some forty years after its doors shuttered. At the same time, there exists a substantial critique of the main historical actors, outputs, and its exclusivity as a very small group of individuals, or “minority of minorities that New York architects.”2 Architectural histories of the postwar period which have discussed IAUS have by-and-large avoided archival investigation and research, and instead have relied on charting its effects, influence, and ramifications through multiple modes of media, dissemination, and publicity. This feedback loop of the political economy of media includes tracking both publications which came from and originated with IAUS, including Oppositions, Skyline, and October, and those that referred to it directly or indirectly, creating what Beatriz Colomina has called a “cycle of production and reproduction as two terms within a continuous cycle, their roles overlapping.”3 This paper attempts to take an altogether different path from one which has been mapped out in earlier histories: instead it considers the institution itself as an abstract author in the larger context of New York City and beyond, determined by and determining of a variety of forces beyond the individual’s control. This could be understood as a process of untangling the many contradictions of IAUS in order to explore its history. As a counterhistory, this paper is part of a larger research project which is organized as a series of diagonal slices through its institutional history to reveal problematics and intersections with other issues larger than architecture itself, particularly around relationships with municipal governance and administration, finance, and economic shifts in the moment of late capitalism. Instead of subscribing to institutional history as a mode of historical writing and investigation, I rely on critical aspects of this form to recount key aspects of the institutional narrative and evolution, while also relying on other modes of writing to fill in blanks, modify and expand the framework, and to position IAUS in a larger territory of institutional figures, changes, and contexts in this time period. While institutional history puts the institution front and center as historical actor and agent, what is critical to take into account are all of the other forces outside of and adjacent to architectural production that are not within the realm of authorial control, but hold great power over its objects and outputs.4   Following Bruno Latour’s emphasis on documents and facts, or what could be described as a search for an understanding of actual practices which explain what happens between the relationships of daily practice and theory, this paper tracks nominal tasks of paperwork, which reveal and identify relationships to other institutions, to subject formations, and to control mechanisms which situate IAUS in relationships to larger more established institutions.5 Many of these day-to-day practices were quite surprising for an institute that has dedicated itself to architecture and urban studies; they pertain to everything but architecture. Arguably a counterhistory emerges from this focus on documents, which is not the narrative of a hegemonic power, or a fractured and fledgling institution that has lingering influence because of its charismatic personalities.  An analysis of paperwork and wordcraft is relevant not only to connect the material culture of these documents and the bureaucratic medium to the more intangible ambitions and stated goals of their contents, but as a way to examine the question of materiality of language itself. What IAUS produced the most of was, in fact, its own constantly evolving self-identity and self-fashioning as a para-institute. A para-institute in this context can be defined as that which occupies an in-between or liminal condition, taking up a familiar form but also pushing that form beyond its definition. For IAUS, this para-institutional quality was most evident in the continual process of defining and re-defining the institutional scope of work, methods, protocols, personnel roles, and in the work of managing the institute as such. In this sense, IAUS was defined and self-regulated by this flow of documents in and out of the institution more so than by its definition of the sum of projects, tools, and individuals operating under the direction of these protocols. Working from and against the grain of the archive allows a number of competing voices and objects to be read as evidence, not simply the objects or texts that are thought to nominally play this role, thereby opening the material up to actors who were not necessarily authors, and to other forces such as extra-disciplinary changes in non-profit funding streams, shifts in federal housing policies, and others.  The archival documents, viewed through an empirical lens, pose indirect answers to how we might understand what constituted, organizationally and bureaucratically, an institute in 1967. And more importantly, the aspirational cultural and intellectual capital of an institute at this time, as distinct from its technocratic and instrumental role as a producer of research, is systematically revealed through an examination of the minutiae of paperwork. These documents, and others like them, are evidence of a language game that focused on describing and delimiting an institution as constituted by its self-made protocols, justifications, procedures, and organizational hierarchies. Jean-François Lyotard’s influential book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge significantly outlined these undercurrents from a broader cultural and philosophical perspective, where he argued that knowledge acquisition was no longer about bildung, or the shaping of the mind through selfhood, but instead was increasingly dedicated to a situation in which knowledge was no longer the subject, but in the service of the subject.5 In this vein, IAUS was an institutional structure that could produce knowledge without any disciplinary boundaries per se.  Furthermore, we often reserve a reading of technocratic documents such as spreadsheets as being ideologically neutral, but in fact their ideological function is to neutralize the difference between things, under the guise not of the aesthetics of the museum, but of the evenness of data information architectures. What the documents studied here make clear is how much of their time was spent on these matters. What is more surprising is the fact that this was structural to being a non-profit that was situated neither as a practice or as a school. Looking at how the notion of para-institutionality shifted over the course of its lifetime, as well as understanding the extent to which an institute was defined less so by activities and types of work and much more so by its development of its sense of “self,” modes of self-preservation and articulation of an institutional identity through formats like letterhead and graphics, wordcraft, and other strategies of legitimation which attempted to simulate the operational and bureaucratic paradigm, which was then was mirrored back to them through their own efforts.

Full Scale Investigations of Non-Extractive Materiality as a Pedagogical Pause
Malini Srivastava & Mike Christenson,
University of Minnesota

Abstract

Designers rely on seemingly unlimited material inventories deriving from extractive systems, histories and practices, including violent transfers of human labor, energy, technology, land, and materials, based on growth-based economic systems, causing climate change and resource access inequalities across the globe. As architects and university faculty, we have a role in changing perceptions and practices concerning extractive systems. In this paper, we have described our recent work organizing and leading a week-long vertical design studio in our university, in which we asked, “how will we function as designers without relying on supposedly unlimited inventories of extractive materials?” With our students, we organized workshops and experimented with non-extractive material practices in five categories. Here we report the outcomes of the material experiments and practices that emerged from this workshop. We also reference the early survey results of students who participated in the repurposing pandemic waste workshops. We conclude with a discussion of the student participants and the likelihood that they were willing to make their own material (bioplastic, earthen) or reuse waste materials for model-building and prototyping.  Embodied carbon represents a significant share of buildings’ contribution to global carbon emissions, ranging as high as 50% to 70% of that contribution (Pomponi and Moncaster 2016). Here, the term embodied carbon refers to the total carbon equivalent (CO2e) associated with constructing and maintaining a building during production, construction, operation (except utilities), and demolition and disposal, i. e., life-cycle embodied carbon (Hu and Esram 2021). Commonly, designers rely on seemingly unlimited material inventories of minerals such as cement,lime, plaster, iron, steel, glass and several others which are extracted, transported, manufactured, assembled and used as needed. A majority of the materials come from petroleum-based products, ceramics, metals and composites that are founded in extractive capture of nature, histories (and current practices) that include violent transfers of human labor, energy, technology, land and materials based on global networks of extraction (Radhuber 2015) that are based on growth-based economic systems (Smil 2019) and are devastating causes of climate change and resource access inequalities across the globe (Radhuber 2015). 2.0 Method:  Catalyst Started in 2007-2008 at the School of Architecture at the University of [redacted], Architecture as Catalyst was designed as an annual pedagogical pause in the School’s regular curriculum in order to introduce new ideas, conversations, and expertise. Architecture as Catalyst invited guests from around the world to join the School over a one-week period, during which they would run experimental vertical workshops with first- and second-year professional graduate students, give public lectures on their work, and join a public dialogue about the ideas that emerge from the weeklong workshop.  In 2022, Author1 organized the Catalyst titled Materi/eality (College of Design 2022b). The name was a play on Material + Reality + Materiality. In organizing Materi/eality to address embodied-carbon impacts in architectural practice, the organizers recognized their intersecting roles as architects and university faculty: i. e., to educate students, to heighten awareness and to change perceptions and practices concerning extractive systems. The common framework for all Materi/eality workshops included carefully examining the “before, during and after” inputs and impacts of material, resources, energy and labor in the examination of non-extractive practices. Building on the material taxonomy proposed by the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan, the organizers arranged for five workshops to address the following means of countering extractive material practices: (1) changing material composition of products such as using bio-based, nano and smart materials; (2) local material circularity by applying the most low-intensity methods of material production that eschew large inventories and create local on-demand circular economies; (3) reducing material intensity by inventing usability enhancements through 3-dimensional geometries in infrastructure and structural use; (4) conservation of materials by reusing materials and using materials that are non-toxic, reusable, recyclable and not energy intensive; and (5) carbon capture by specifying carbon sink materials, inventing materials that are carbon sinks or produced from carbon capture.  3.0 THE WORKSHOPS Each workshop was led with partnerships between guest and local experts from various disciplines. The overarching call for pedagogical emphasis was to create the “before, during and after” stories for experimental materials within the workshops. This emphasis was key in creating awareness that even in the small amounts of materials that were created and experimented with during the workshops, students were constantly reminded of the resources being transported, used, reused or discarded.  Workshop 1: A Place for Plastics  (Figure 1) This workshop was in the category of changing material composition of products (such as using bio-based, nano and smart materials). In this workshop students made bio-plastic samples, recorded recipes, made models and products from the bioplastics. All this was exhibited and donated at the end of the workshop for a bio materials library. This workshop was instructed by an industrial engineer and designer, and two apparel designers (W1-IAP + W1-IMV + W1-IPT). Workshop 2: Common Ground (Figure 2) This workshop was in the category of local material circularity which applies the most low intensity methods of material production that eschew large inventories and create local on-demand circular economies. For this workshop, we tested cob and rammed-wall structures, with an emphasis on local soils analysis for understanding the potential for cold climate application. This workshop was run by a structural engineer with training in construction management, curatorial studies and an architect (W2-LBA + W3-ML). Workshop 3: Earthen Tectonics (Figure 3) This workshop was in the category of reducing material intensity by inventing usability enhancements through 3-dimensional geometries in infrastructure and structural use. Work in this workshop progressed from toolpaths used to carve wooden molds on a CNC machine, experiments with cement, sand, soils and various seed mixtures, using stable mixtures to create rammed earth panels that were scaled versions of shaped landscapes to retain water at larger scales. This workshop was instructed by an architect and landscape architect who are both digital fabricators (W3-AM + W3-JRM). Workshop 4: Illuminated Shadows (Figure 4) This workshop was in the category of conservation of materials through reusing materials and using materials that are non-toxic, reusable, recyclable and not energy intensive. We examined this concept by repurposing pandemic waste using low-intensity methods of material transformation to prevent pandemic waste from ending up in landfills. Work progression in this workshop included scavenging for input materials to transform the found acrylic panels into artistic expressions of pandemic difficulties. The panels created a structure which could be occupied. Students learned how to bend, light, paint, etch, curve and emboss acrylic panels among other techniques. This workshop was run by a designer and visual artist ((W4-RC + W4-JN). Workshop 5: Unprecedented (Figure 5) This workshop addressed the category of carbon capture. Although we did not invent any carbon capture materials during the short workshop duration, we promoted carbon capture by studying problematic, high-environmental-cost disciplinary precedents that form the historical canon of the discipline and reimagined those precedents by substituting materials that are carbon sinks or produced from carbon capture. This workshop was run by two architects and an engineer (W5-BS + W5-AR +W5-MS). 3.0 Results: Outcomes of the workshops In order to assess the student learning, the guest and local instructors gathered student work and feedback in various ways that aligned with the format for each workshop. All the workshops included daily documentation of the work produced and final presentation and discussion narratives on Catalyst’s final afternoon. One workshop distributed and gathered survey responses from students and the Catalyst cohort in general. Others used drawings for speculation, diagramming the process, generating recipes and journals or short essay reflections. In the final paper we conclude with assessments of the workshops and full scale methodology of the catalyst through three discussions: (a) the ability for students to share specific and quantified knowledge through systematic collective experimentation with non-extractive materiality; (b) The ability of students to conduct critical examination of the “Before, During and After” stages of material journeys through diagrams, narratives and quantifications; (d) qualitative analysis of written reflections, open discussions and survey results to assess persistence of interest in and pursuit of non-extractive materiality such as bioplastics, earthen methods, waste reuse in future projects.  We conclude our paper with the recognition of the importance of pedagogical pauses that have resources of time, space and budget, such as the Catalyst program, in order to create culture-shifting ideas and methods to influence regular curriculum and pedagogy. While the response to the Catalyst program was overwhelmingly positive in the skills, empowerment and critical thinking it engendered about non-extractive practices, the long term impact on curriculum, persistence of behavior changes in students (making their own modeling materials that have low carbon footprints), creating a ubiquitous culture shift of examining the embodied footprint of material resources and other inputs required for designing buildings, is yet to be examined and will be the future trajectory of this research.

Learning the Commons
Antje Steinmuller,
California College of the Arts (CCA)

Abstract

As environments and resources are increasingly threatened by climate change, economic austerity measures, or conflicting political interests, the commons have received new attention as an alternative form of ownership and governance. Sparked by a loss of confidence in the state as the steward of resources and in the free market as provider of goods and services, today’s interest in the commons is rooted in their promise of a more equitable distribution of spatial and material resources. For architects and urbanists, the commons as a project –as a site but also as a multiplicity of user-owners, and as a governance model – has opened up questions and challenges. It expanded how we conceive of clients and stakeholders. It has challenged conventional design and approval processes. Perhaps most importantly, the commons as the subject of design asks architects and urbanists to rethink our position as an author and provider of services to that of a member and “activist-participant” in the process of commoning itself. This paper proposes a pedagogical method of introducing the commons in the context of architecture education through the presentation of a seminar and social media project that made tangible the commons in five ways: (1) the course built knowledge of the historical and theoretical perspectives on the commons; (2) it offered a framework for understanding critical components of the commons today; (3) it placed joint ownership and development of a common project in the hands of the student group; (4) it asked critical questions about how “commoning” as a process might apply to communication and knowledge sharing; and (5) it sought to apply the knowledge towards a short design project related to a type of commons. As this paper sheds light on the successes and short-comings of what might be considered the construction of a micro-commons in the classroom, it seeks to also speculate on how the methodologies presented could be further expanded into studio-based models. Commons, Commoners, and Commoning The notion of “commons” can apply to resources across a range of territories –be they natural, cultural, spatial, material, or immaterial– of which ownership and access is shared. These common resources need to be maintained, which necessitates boundaries to delineate them and their users (the commoners), and practices that govern and preserve them (commoning). As such, the concept of the commons has seen many “protagonists” including economists, historians, social scientists, and urbanists among many others. The term ‘commons’ had its origins in the sharing of natural resources like pastures and fishing territories, and it is now frequently used to describe the collective appropriation and regulation of space in contemporary cities. In this context, commons are still understood as a system by which community members equally share and steward spatial resources with minimal reliance on market or state. Beyond this spatial application of the term commons, Stavros Stavrides describes the commons as “a set of spatial relations produced by commoning practices” that govern everyday use, regulate access, distribute labor, and ultimately, constitute a relational social framework associated with the physical space in question. This highlights the commons as characterized by a social group that shares equal access to, and use and stewardship of a resource. In addition, such commoning practices manifest joint ownership, control, maintenance labor, and active governance practices that often are the subject of a constant process of formation and negotiation amongst members of the commons. Ultimately, such practices or shared labor and governance are what creates and sustains a sense of community—highlighting new forms of living, working, and being in common.  The pedagogy introduced in this paper reflects on these constituent components of the commons (a resource; users of this resource; and the practice of negotiating and governing this use) as interrelated territories in which architects potentially have agency as they partake in and co-produce commons projects. Pertinent texts from different disciplinary perspectives built a deeper understanding of commons theory.  To capture the different components of the commons described above, students analyzed case studies, developing graphic techniques to trace what was termed hardware (the subject or space of the commons), software (the use and users of that space), and orgware (the structure of ownership, labor, and stewardship practices). In addition to visualizing details and identifying differences, this representation was used to visually (and comparatively) unfold the territories within which architectural expertise might play a role.  Unpacking Common(s) Territories Architects and urbanists most frequently encounter commons in relation to land ownership, housing models, shared urban space and gardens, energy and water, and also knowledge. In order to ask critical questions about what we do, and what we should hold in common within the environment and our discipline, specific case studies were presented in five consecutive thematic modules, supported by pertinent readings. commoning land The Commoning Land module attempted to bracket ways in which land is ‘held’ collectively –from the common grazing land in medieval England to community-based ‘usufruct’ right to use government land for agriculture in Mexican Ejidos, to utopian cities based on joint landholding and more recent attempts to return to reclaim the commons in cities during the Occupy movement. The joint use of land by specific groups has a history of complex relationships to property ownership, use restrictions, access rights, as well as different durations of common territorial claim. commoning domestic space  This module considered different scales of collectively used and stewarded domestic space –from a systemic removal of housing stock from the open market through community housing trusts, to co-developed housing, to historic building types built and inhabited by multi-generational families and the contemporary sharing of individual domestic units. Domestic commoning touches on both economic and social aspects of living together as they have their roots in migration patterns, changes to family structures, and to the relationship between living and working.  commoning urban space This module concerned itself with the space in our cities that we describe as ‘public’, acknowledging that it does not necessarily equal the commons, yet, some commoning practices situate themselves in public space. Other commons come into being through the appropriation of privately owned territories (e.g. for gardening or leisure activities) by citizen groups, perhaps first under the radar and later sanctioned by city governments. Similarly, shared of care practices (childcare, food services etc.) in private interiors, over time, can develop into formalized community-led institutions. commoning resources This module took on natural resources whose governance is complicated by its scale, movement, or extent across different jurisdictions –from water (pollution) and air (viruses) to finite resources like fossil fuels.  The amount of stakeholders, institutions, and infrastructures involved escalate the complexity of ownership structures and stewardship processes, and most resources cannot be considered independently as they operate within fragile ecosystems.  commoning information  This module considers the spectrum of open-source software platforms, crowd-sourced GIS databases and web-based libraries in which tools, knowledge, information, and ultimately, expertise are held in common and shared beyond the boundaries of a single discipline. Strategies of collective knowledge gathering, copyrighting, and hacking foreground questions of ownership and imposed limitations.  Classroom as Common(s)  Commoning practices require communication and negotiation. Making these realities of commoning tangible, the project structure and class formats catalyzed different types of collaborations between students. The student cohort was split into different ‘pods’ whose specific roles for each module enabled and supported others. Negligence on the part of one pod was felt by others. At the same time, full agency over the final outcome was placed in the hands of the student group, challenging traditional hierarchies and roles within the student-instructor relationship and foregrounding processes of decision-making as the subject of conversation and teaching.  As part of the student-led portion of the course, the presentation and dissemination of the work became the subject of ongoing discussion. Breaking with conventional formats of end-of-semester critiques, the group argued for a dissemination on social media where published work could be accessed and augmented by a broader public, inviting further evolution of the work along with equitable opportunities for feedback from disciplinary critics and laypeople alike. Common(s) Futures: Designing the Commons In addition to the readings, discussions, classroom structure, and dissemination strategy, the relationship between commoning sites, protagonists, and practices unpacked by the analytical representations and the potential design agency contained within them was tested in a short design exercise. Bound by the limitations imposed by the class format, a seminar, students speculated on ways of applying the strategies identified in the case studies as part of design. Quick and abstract, these design projects produced rich territories for further investigation –opening the door for discussion on the role of partnerships, time frames, tools for engagement, and how to educate students for membership instead of authorship in a world in which the commons will take on an increasingly important role.

Designing Collectives, Designing Collectivity
Mia Roth-Cerina, University of Zagreb
Harriet Harriss & Federica Vannucchi,
Pratt Institute

Abstract

Addressing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2015) directly relates to a redefinition of spatial practices, challenging the aims and means of a sustainable design and raising the issue of the collective as a spatial, social and creative notion. The paper examines conditions framing and triggering collectivity as well as the creation of space as a collective, inclusive endeavor. Both imply a questioning of the goals of architectural education and the role of the architect, looking into the current marginality of architecture as a potential for its own remaking. Arguments intertwine parallel ongoing researches focused on design as a collective spatial practice, how we teach architecture for meaningful spatial agency, and how spatial conditions of bringing communities together are manifested. The first research path focuses on past and present spatial collectives which have established alternative paths for advocating, teaching, theorizing, and making architecture, approaching them as case studies pointing toward a redefinition of practice. The second looks at case studies of spatial conditions enabling inclusive encounters, learning from vernacular, spontaneous and designed spatial expressions of the notion of the collective. Relating these to each other, we arrive at a reconsidered definition of the fundamental role of architectural practice as a meaningful, multidisciplinary and collective venture centered around processes nurturing togetherness. The third research path focuses on interdisciplinary professional trajectories of a growing number of architecture graduates falling outside a traditional understanding of the profession yet clearly employing skills attained in architectural education to achieve societal and cultural impact. Collectivity and collectivism as space making is the result of a long tradition of architectural experiments. Its recent modernist history includes women’s collectives and their experiments of placemaking of the late 19th and early 20th century. Parallel to the Avant-guard myth of an architect as the only creator, femminist activists such as Marie Stevens Howland and Alice Constance Austin have designed a socialist society based on the collectivization of domestic spaces (Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs For American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities, 1981). The 1960s have seen the opening of the discussion of the architect’s role in society and definitions of what a participatory architecture might have been. Among them, Giancarlo De Carlo’s projects in Italy, and John Turner’s ‘The Barriada Movement’ theorized a new collaboration between maker and user in the design and construction process. In the 1970s, the design collectives working not simply for but with communities became central to architecture making. Matrix in the UK, Grupo Proceso Pentágono in Mexico,  Women’s School of Planning and Architecture in the US, and Collettivo di Architettura in Italy were just a few collectives questioning both the role of the architect and their making in relationship to the society that their serve. The work of these collectives challenged canonical narratives of place making while bringing visibility to networks of support for disadvantaged communities.   Collective placemaking is embedded into built environment’s histories and can reversely be examined as collective staging of environments triggering collectivity. Learning from vernacular patterns of framing encounters, instigating appropriation, we can find common denominators: the stone bench of warm climates, the communal loggia, the relinquishing of private property to create a covered arcade (as Bernard Rudofsky described it: altruism turned architecture).[1] Triggering coming together in current contexts asks for a contemporary definition of the more-than-human collective and its needs, uncovering conditions of appropriated interstices and the interdisciplinary practices behind their design. The quest for a collective process has prompted new discussions on the fluid boundaries of the architecture discipline – its disciplinarity vis-à-vis its interdisciplinarity – often favoring a broad understanding of the architect’s role “as integrator, professional generalist, and practical idealist” as Rachel Armstrong has recently put it.[2] A pan-European study funded by the European Community, Architecture’s Afterlife: The Multi-sector impact of an architectural qualification explores the relationships between the disciplinarity of architecture and its interdisciplinarity as a way to adapt architecture to societal changes, thus responding to systemic crises.[3] Through competency mapping, Architecture’s Afterlife offers an alternative to this binary view, turning it into a relationship of complementarity. The interdisciplinarity of architecture is a necessary means through which architecture constantly redefines itself and adapts to resilient futures. Between June 2021 and April 2022, Architecture’s Afterlife launched a questionnaire that solicited the participation of 3636 architecture graduates in Europe. Architecture’s Afterlife Questionnaire asserts that 38% of architecture graduates are working exclusively or partially in sectors other than architecture. Yet, when asked this 38% whether and when they left architecture, only a small percentage of the respondents answered that they indeed left architecture. When asked to define their current occupation, they often required lengthy descriptions. Their definition of what is architecture and what it means to be an architect often fell outside traditional understandings of the profession such as, simply, ‘the design of buildings’. At the same time, competency mapping outlines an ‘architectural method’–specifically architectural but interdisciplinary in nature–by which architecture graduates address complexity.          Architecture’s Afterlife interviews have defied any rigid categorization, supporting the argument that the mentioned 38% is not “other than architecture,” or at least not completely. This percentage is understood as practitioners whose work is complementary, even instrumental to architecture. It is instrumental for architecture to change and adapt to current demands, and it becomes the space where these changes are most required. This is a point readily recognized by architectural educators, albeit disputed in effectual ‘practice’ and vague in the perception of architecture as a discipline to those ‘outside’ of it. As stated by the “Principles and Practices of Architectural Education: A Position Paper of the EAAE Education Academy” (2018), “architecture students are schooled in the ability to pose questions not just answers, thereby embracing complexity and uncertainty, rather than resisting it.”[4] Architecture’s Afterlife demonstrates that what is commonly understood as ‘other than architecture’ defines a necessary space of inquiry and adaptation for architecture to respond to contemporary shared challenges, thus to make architecture current.

  

   

   

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