OU - Academic Colleges, Departments, and Programs

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Open Access
2020 Schools of Thought Conference Proceedings
(2022) Person, Angela; Cricchio, Anthony; Pilat, Stephanie
The Schools of Thought conference took place at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma, from March 5-7, 2020. It drew more than 100 faculty from over fifty institutions from the United States and beyond. The idea for the Schools of Thought conference grew out of research into the history of pedagogy at the University of Oklahoma (OU). In the postwar era, faculty at OU developed a truly original approach to teaching design known as the American School. Students were taught to begin with the natural context: the slope of the land, the quality of light, and the local materials. They were instructed to earnestly respond to the program and sincerely listen to the needs and desires of each client. Most importantly, students were taught to trust their own creative instincts and avoid imitation of all kinds. Their work was hard to define stylistically but united by a commitment to resourcefulness, experimental form, and respect for context. Today, we find aspects of the American School approach resurfacing in architectural pedagogy and practice. Designers are again considering how to be materially resourceful, design sustainably, and work sincerely with clients and sites. More than 70 years after the American School era was founded at OU, the “Schools of Thought” symposium sought to extend the American School tradition of reconsidering how and what we teach our students.
Open Access
Agency in the Education of an Architect: Models of Engagement Toward Empowering Students
(2022) Pannone, Michelle
The disparity between education and practice continues to dominate academic discourse, but oftentimes forgotten is the impact that agency plays in architectural education and, in turn, a student’s presence and contributions within the future of the built environment. Integrating a haptic and tangible process with easily recognizable social implications alongside traditional didactic models in architectural education engenders a sense of empowerment and obligation to a larger social authority. How might agency drive the education of an architect? In addition to teaching technical skills, how might academia address the methods to develop students’ skill sets working with and through local and political actors? Implemented as an experimental design-build course, the intention is to enable students to apply their understanding of the design thinking process and knowledge of architectural principles in their community. The specific course that is the case study engages students across a variety of levels outside their comfort zone through collaborating with departments, administrators, and stakeholders to truly understand the inner workings of a project at the scale of a community. The outcomes, presented through a case study of an experimental course, further exemplify how architecture students employ the concepts of environmental psychology and participatory planning in action, within the context of a semester-long design-build, to create a more integrated user-driven approach to architectural education. Leveraging the next generation of thinkers by empowering them to apply their skills for the betterment of society is critical to the future. In cultivating experiences that empower students, it is imperative to recognize each student’s ability to impact the built environment, further establishing the basis of their responsibility as a designer through developing a sense of collective agency in their design education. Therefore, not only addressing but actively pursuing engagement in the context of their education transforms their academic experience from a passive learner to an active participant.
Open Access
Architecture Education for World Citizenship
(2022) Santanicchia, Massimo;
This paper presents findings from fourteen qualitative interviews conducted with students of architecture from eleven schools of the Nordic Baltic Academy of Architecture (NBAA) and from numerous conversations conducted with students in architecture at my home institution, Iceland University of the Arts (IUA). The findings of these conversations reveal that students consider a meaningful architectural education one that helps them make ethical design choices. To do so, respondents indicated that schools should help students find their inner compass, develop their professional skills and ethical attitudes, think independently, and make a difference in society and beyond. Four narratives emerge that describe the multiple roles of an architect in our society: the dissident intellectual, the ethical professional, the storyteller, and the caregiver of the world. Based on these findings, and with the support of the work of Henry Giroux’s “Critical Theory and Rationality in Citizenship Education” and Martha Nussbaum’s “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” a framework referred to as Cosmopolitan Citizenship Architecture Education (CCAE) was developed.
Open Access
Architecture in the Anthropocene: Toward an Ecological Pedagogy of Parts and Relationships
(2022) Jenewein, Oswald
The impact of human activity on the global climate has started to cause physical repercussions that form, transform, and inform the natural and built environment. These repercussions have been materializing in a variety of ways, from sea level rise to wildfires, from health-threatening pollution to contamination of air, soil, and water. Architectural education in the age of climate crisis must tackle ecological challenges and respond to the impacts of global environmental change. This paper uses three curricular components as a case study to demonstrate how architectural education may be able to address global challenges through the lens of ecology, showcasing (1) Design Studios, (2) Seminar Courses, and (3) International Initiatives. This methodological approach is strongly connected to a pedagogy based on flat hierarchies, personal engagement, and collective awareness of the individuals within a course environment. The content-based pedagogy around ecology becomes a guide for both architecture and architectural pedagogy. The aim is to provide students with an understanding of how the formal relationship between the (geometric) parts of space becomes an integral part of the emerging systems within the changing environment. This paper also highlights the importance of travel components in contemporary architectural curricula, promoting a global-campus concept that is based on international academic and professional partnerships. Concrete examples of interdisciplinary and inter-university collaborations are provided to connect teaching components to research projects. The paper concludes by relating teaching and research endeavors to the current transition of traditional architecture programs to STEM-affiliated disciplines.
Open Access
Architecture Revisits Math & Science: Computation in a Visual Thinking Pedagogy
(2022) Brackett, Robert
This paper makes a case for the greater integration of computational logic and principles in core undergraduate architectural design courses as visual thinking pedagogy. Math and computation present abstract problems that may seem at odds with the real-world design concepts with which students are familiar. Because architecture students are typically strong visual thinkers, abstract mathematical language can be difficult to learn, but these concepts can be used as a pedagogical interface to support visual problem-solving in the design process. Building on the work of Christopher Alexander in Notes on the Synthesis of Form and A Pattern Language, the idea of “pattern languages” can be used to develop a curriculum that relies on math and computation to connect the visual and social systems at work in the design process. Design curricula can integrate computational thinking based on vector math, geometry, calculus, matrices, set theory, visual programming, and scripting to build students’ computational literacy through visual problem-solving. George Stiny’s “shape grammars” offer an intuitive analog method for introducing students to computational thinking through elements and rules in preparation for designing with digital tools. The further we distance ourselves from the fundamental operations of mathematics and computation, the more we risk becoming obsolete in the process. Computer programs can automate modeling, analyzing, programming, reviewing, and even designing buildings. For now, that places the architect in a narrow domain of design and visual aesthetics, which will quickly be subsumed by machine algorithms deployed by software companies. These machine constructions operate at the social/cultural scale, a place suited for the critical position and service of architects. The education of an architect should therefore provide students with critical knowledge and skills that position them to define the parameters of automation and challenge the computer programmers with radical ideas, communicated in a shared language of mathematics that is both visual and abstract.
Open Access
Coalition Building and Discomfort as Pedagogical Strategies
(2022) Vallerand, Olivier
Innovative design solutions come from inclusive and diverse design teams (Page 2008). In this paper, I reflect on how such insights can be used in developing pedagogical approaches that use coalition building, knowledge translation between disciplines, and pedagogies of discomfort to foreground implicit biases impacting architectural practice and education. Based on interviews with educators thinking about the built environment, as well as Kevin Kumashiro’s (2002) anti-oppressive education framework and Megan Boler’s (1999) notion of a pedagogy of discomfort, and building on examples from queer and feminist educators, I suggest in this paper that the disruptive use of feelings and emotions in architectural education can prepare students for more collaborative and inclusive practices. Such discussions allow students to understand the impact of biases but also to think about tools to acknowledge and challenge inequity in the design of the built environment and in the design professions themselves. Cross-disciplinary collaboration, at both the students and the educators level, can also create opportunities for coalition building, particularly in contexts where a limited number of faculty are explicitly discussing race, gender, disability, class, sexuality, or ethnicity in their teaching. Faculty members with diverse individual self-identifications can multiply their impact by working together to tackle the intersecting ways in which minoritized experiences are pushed aside in mainstream architecture discourses and education. They can also foreground their combined experiences as positive role models to create a constructive learning environment to address these issues, both within universities and directly in the community.
Open Access
Doing the Right Things
(2022) Ra, Seung
In John Tabita’s essay “Doing Things Right versus Doing the Right Things,” he discusses two different approaches in the business management world: tactical thinking and strategic thinking. This opens up an interesting debate between creating the vision and implementing the vision. He offers a fair argument for both approaches. They are beneficial to tackling a problem and fundamental to success in business. Yet there is a critical tension between a tactical thinker who tends to “do things right” and a strategic thinker who is inclined to “do the right things.” “If you do something ‘right,’ but it is the wrong thing to do, your efforts will be futile. Conversely, if you do the ‘right thing,’ but you do it wrong, you will also fail miserably” (Tabita 2011, n.p.). How can we apply this inquiry to architectural pedagogy? The current model of architectural program curricula is based on the tactical approach, predominantly skill-based design education. Therefore, the measure of success in architectural pedagogy of NAAB-accredited programs tends to be solutions for tackling a design problem. While the tactical thinking process is needed and essential, how can we implement the strategic thinking process into our current architecture curricula to promote the idea of “Doing the Right Things”? The research paper is rooted in an upper-division special topics course, Data-Driven Research Methods, and will showcase two projects. The first, Spatial Network Analysis for Oklahoma City Streetcar, is focused on the infrastructure of the streetcar and its effects on the urban environment. The second project, Interactive Podium, uses embedded computing technology to create a visual platform for interaction between users. By developing diverse perspectives of the research process, the architecture curricula can nurture an effective decision-making process and proactively seek the “right things.”
Open Access
Freedom and the Politics of Space: Contemporary Social Movements and Possibilities for Antiracist, Feminist Practice in U.S. Architecture
(2022) Daemmrich, R. Chris
Students and practitioners of architecture challenge the hegemonic Whiteness, maleness, cisheteronormativity, and capitalist control of these disciplines as a means of democratizing and decolonizing practice to create conditions for Black self-determination. This paper considers how architectural professionals have responded to contemporary movements for social justice in the United States and the ways in which some are more and some less successful at addressing the intersecting nature of identity-based oppressions. Organizations and convenings, including the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), Black in Design, the Design Futures Public Interest Design Student Leadership Forum, Equity by Design, and the Architecture Lobby are considered from 2012 to the pre-pandemic spring of 2020, with a focus on the emergence of new spaces and shifts in how existing spaces engage with activist movements as a result of changing political conditions. The paper provides historical background and constructive critique. It concludes with recommendations for creating institutions that respond proactively, rather than reactively, to racist violence, sexual harassment, assault, and exploitation, and for making lasting meaning of these injustices when they occur. The roles Black people and other people of color, particularly women, have played, and the roles White people, particularly men, and White institutions must play in creating an antiracist, feminist architecture are a focus of this paper.
Open Access
The Architecture Curriculum Between Two Revolutions: From the West to the Islamic Curriculum
(2022) Javid, Ali
The architectural curriculum in Iran has been changed five times in the last five decades (1963–2017). In each period, efforts to change the content and structure of the curriculum were based on the architectural profession’s vision with regard to sociopolitical and economic issues, such as the agenda of development in the White Revolution and Islamizing the society after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The curriculum as a sociopolitical artifact can be defined as a systematic set of relations between people, objects, events, and circumstances that is changed and developed based on the sociopolitical agenda. This paper focuses on crucial moments in the transformation of architectural education between the two contemporary revolutions in Iran, the White Revolution and the Islamic Revolution. The story of the transformation of the curriculum began in 1963 when a new system of architectural education, Italian pedagogy, was brought to Iran and decolonized the curriculum from the previous pedagogy system, Beaux-Arts, and it continued until the Cultural Revolution (1980–1984), when the new Islamic government decided to detoxify the curriculum from Western influence to Islamize it. This paper outlines the transformation of the structure and content of the architecture curriculum to adapt to the sociopolitical agenda of each revolution.
Open Access
The Stranger in the Architectural Project on the City
(2022) Macken, Jared
This paper presents the project “Two Strangers Meet in a Parking Lot” and associated research studios as a case study of decolonized architecture pedagogy. The project conceptualizes the stranger as an alternative architectural user, creating a dialectical conversation with the users and architectural visions from architectural history. This dialogue encourages new pedagogical research methodologies related to the topic of city design. The case study uses these methodologies to recuperate lost cultural histories of Tennessee Town, an overlooked neighborhood in Topeka, Kansas, with an important connection to the Harlem Renaissance. According to Kwame Anthony Appiah, strangers transgress and challenge cultural boundaries by creating conversations at the edges of these borders, yet strangers counterintuitively utilize the environments in the city that are initially foreign to them to produce alternative cultural knowledge. This interaction between stranger and entities in the city provides a model for how disciplines can communicate across their own boundaries. The strangers’ conversation, when transferred to the architectural studio setting, becomes what Mark Linder calls “transdisciplinary” discourse, which occurs at the borders of adjacent disciplines. The resulting knowledge intentionally highlights overlooked and misinterpreted cultural moments in the city while creating an alternative to traditional interdisciplinary modes of working, which the philosopher Homi Bhabha says is essential if disciplinary fields are to progress with the global city. The “Two Strangers” case study consists of built structures that were designed, first, to transform people into strangers and, then, to instigate conversations between them. As a result, strangers become acquaintances and exchange new knowledge. The architectural studio course explored this idea further by taking students outside of the classroom where they engaged with the community through conversations with city archivists, community leaders, city council persons, urban planners, and museum directors.