College of Architecture Conference Proceedings

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Open Access
2010 Creating/Making Forum
(2010) Person, Angela M.
The 2010 Creating/Making Forum was held in conjunction with the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art’s “Bruce Goff: A Creative Mind” exhibition and featured peer-reviewed paper sessions titled: Design Education and Tacit Knowledge; Digital Creating and Making; Community Engagement; The Found Object; Innovation, Interdisciplinarity and the Environment; Interpreting Architecture; and History Reframed, as well as a juried poster session. Keynote speakers at the 2010 Forum were Sheila Kennedy, Craig Borum, and Marlon Blackwell.
Open Access
2014 Creating/Making Forum
(2014) Person, Angela M.; Martinelli, Debra Levy
The 2014 Creating/Making Forum featured peer-reviewed paper sessions titled: Do the Tools Matter; Lessons From Home; Fabricating Political Capital; Working Within Others’ Walls; Defining the Dash; Mid-Century Modern and the Landscape; Sourcing Creativity; and Towards a New Studio Environment, as well as a juried poster session. Keynote speakers at the 2010 Forum were Hans Butzer, Robert Fishman, Andrew Freear, E.B. Min, and Kirsten Murray, and Min and Murray led a student workshop as part of the 2014 Forum.
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
Clouds of Wood: A Colombian Design-Build Experience
(2022) Mesa, Felipe; Mesa, Miguel
The idea of complexity in the teaching and practice of architectural design is linked to formal processes or their programmatic features, leaving aside relevant aspects of the complete cycle of an emergent building: the relationships with the communities involved, management of financial and material resources, technical designs, environmental qualities, construction, and performance. In this way, too much relevance is given to the production of architectural representations and the student’s individual work, in detriment to the real impact that the student's activities may have on our society. In the Clouds of Wood Design-Build Studio (Medellín, Colombia, 2013–17), complexity was understood as the passage of a team of two professors and thirty students through the stages of design and construction of small-format buildings, made in association with rural communities near Medellín and a local company specializing in building with immunized wood. Constructions with a light program, low cost, and high impact on the communities’ daily lives were agreed on between all parties. Excessive production of drawings, models, and simulations was avoided, and collaboration between students, teachers, community leaders, representatives of municipal governments, and construction instructors was encouraged. In each semester of this course (ten studios in five years), the students worked in an articulated way in five groups with defined roles and responsibilities (fund-raising, drawing, wooden models, budget, construction). They only drew plans after knowing in depth the materials and construction technologies to be implemented; they only designed after visiting the communities involved; and they only built after understanding the budgets and the various constraints in play. If in a traditional design studio the students spend at least 80 percent of their time in activities of representation, often disconnected from everyday reality, in this course, they spent half of their time in meetings with experts and leaders, generating not only a balance in favor of the project but also a limited number of precise drawings. The course ran in four one-month modules: the first one to define in a group the overall aspects of the design (program, size, location, qualities) and evaluate five variants; the second, to develop the chosen design proposal; the third, to plan the construction phase; and the last, to build and inaugurate the building with the community. The result was the creation of a family of permeable buildings that are resistant and adapted to the tropical climate; have minimal geometric, structural, and tectonic variations; and made use of the constructive advantages of immunized wood. In addition, the consolidation of a group of students committed to the particular problems of communities, who can propose necessary, relevant, and unexpected buildings, raised the question about what is significant or even radical, today, in the education of architectural design: (a) the exploration of worlds (not yet seen) through images and models, or (b) the incorporation of design into the (already existing) complex and restrictive dynamics through a built architecture project?
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
Community Engagement and Service-Learning Reciprocity
(2022) Schaefer, Shawn Michael
As part of the University of Oklahoma’s Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture, the Urban Design Studio prepares graduate students from diverse backgrounds in its Master of Urban Design program to practice as urban design professionals. The studio uses a reciprocal community engagement and service-learning approach that benefits cities and residents of Oklahoma and provides students with meaningful educational experiences. Four case studies of studio projects are considered here. Each case study focuses on a different type of project, including creative urban design practice, participatory action research, community-based planning, and real-life, real-time placemaking. The studio regularly collaborates with communities on urban design studies and interventions. One such project focused on the revitalization of a three-mile stretch of Route 66 running through the heart of Tulsa. Participatory action research is represented by Tulsa Photovoice, an example of how studio faculty and students collaborate with communities to discover knowledge. Working in a more traditional framework, studio students led a community-based planning process for the downtown plan of the city of Muskogee, Oklahoma, entitled a Landscape of Hope. Finally, placemaking activities like the one for the Chapman Green illustrate how students learn by making. Each case study explains how the project was initiated, what community engagement techniques were used, and how students participated. Project outcomes are also summarized.
Open Access
Contested Territories: Evaluating the Limits and Liberties of Design (and Designers) in Public Space
(2022) Peterson, Benjamin; Warren, R. Kyle
Recent accounts in Boston highlight tensions among individuals experiencing homelessness, individuals seeking treatment for substance use disorder, service providers, advocates, residents, and business owners in geographies colloquially referred to as “Mass and Cass.” The dynamic frictions of lived experience unfold in public spaces entangled in a field of social, political, economic, and spatial conditions. The Boston Architectural College, mission-driven to “provide excellence in design education emerging from practice and accessible to diverse communities,” sits less than a mile from these geographies. A curriculum in applied learning, where practicing and learning occurs concurrently, distinguishes the BAC’s educational approach from co-op or externship models. Its educational agenda recognizes the vital dialogue between academia and practice and locates teaching and learning directly within these conduits. This research-driven project focuses on the spatial, sociocultural geographies of Mass and Cass and examines the pedagogies of community participation and engagement in design education. The project addresses the nature of interdisciplinary teaching and learning in design settings through examining modes of critical thinking, listening, reflection, and translation as integral to civic spatial practices. Using the tools of spatial designers and conceptual frameworks from other disciplines, students attempt to understand the agents, actors, and forces at play in the conditions of Mass and Cass. Through critical inquiry into the sociocultural contexts that characterize the spatial narratives of Mass and Cass, students (and city agencies as collaborators) seek to identify moments when design or designers have, may have, or could have intervened in these contested territories.
Open Access
Design Research Methods—Applied Theory and Studio
(2022) Fischer, Ole
Today, the curriculum at schools of architecture is generally subdivided into design studio (practice) and the adjacent scientific or scholarly subjects ranging from natural sciences to technology to humanities, often with their own separate faculty, degrees, and institutional structures. This separation is widely experienced as a fragmentation of a discipline that claims to be integrative and wholistic. This essay provides a sketch for an alternative pedagogical format of integrated design research methods and studio at the graduate level, which could help bridge these perceived institutional gaps, but also offer a research agenda of its own kind. Design Research Methods is framed here as an applied theory, since exemplary design approaches themselves are selected, analyzed, comparatively discussed, and serve as a primer in the studio environment, while in turn the studio tests various theoretical concepts, design approaches, tools, and methods, and provides feedback to theory. This applied theory is not meant to replace traditional forms of critical inquiry, reading, and writing but should serve as a complementary addition that empowers students to define their own research and design agenda for their thesis year and beyond.
Open Access
Developing Intent and Application Through Virtual Design-Build
(2022) Beach, David R.
The process of design-build links intention and application within a curriculum that is difficult to replicate in a traditional educational studio. While most effective in the analogue world, design-build can be simulated within a classroom by leveraging virtual reality as a curriculum connecting client, spatial immersion, precedent study, construction, fabrication, and a digital design toolset. This paper and presentation will outline a course curriculum for second-year design students at the Hammons School of Architecture that leverages the pedagogy of design-build within a virtual process. The project connects specific intent for our client by crafting spatial experiences for the CHIL (Children’s Hospital Innovation Lab) Zone, a pediatric care unit of Montefiore Medical Center in New York that brings technology to their patients. Leveraging tools like AR (alternate reality), VR (virtual reality), and 3D fabrication, patients in the CHIL Zone are moved virtually beyond the confines of rooms when their medical limitations often reduce their opportunities for exploration. Approaching the process in a parallel modality to a design-build curriculum, student application happens through the construction of virtual versions of a precedent design study, including site, phasing, construction methods, details, and basic communication of the spatial concepts for their clients (kids from twelve to eighteen in a pediatric care unit). The process happens within the immersive qualities of virtual reality, creating a narrative about the architectural design that each student must communicate. Each project is resolved by finalizing a VR “docummersion” film that includes the precedent study and specific spatial elements of their own design. This process is directly generating new understandings of the design-build process. It is developing considerations of architecture and design thinking, including spatial exploration as a form of rehabilitation and health care, architectural design intended solely for use in virtual reality, and the connection of virtual reality and cognitive spatial awareness for design education.
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
Engagement as Theory: Architecture, Planning, and Placemaking in the Twenty-First Century City
(2022) Carriere, Michael; Schalliol, David
Our recent book, "The City Creative: The Rise of Urban Placemaking in Contemporary America" (University of Chicago Press, 2021), details how participatory design and community engagement can lead to democratically planned, inclusive urban communities. After visiting more than two hundred projects in more than forty cities, we have come to understand that planning, policy, and architectural design should be oriented by local communities and deep engagement with intervention sites. Of course, we are not the first to reach such a conclusion. In many ways, our work builds off contributions made by individuals, including Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, and Christopher Alexander, and such movements as Team 10 and the advocacy architecture movement of the 1960s. Nevertheless, we need to broaden this significant conversation. Importantly, our classroom work has allowed us to better understand how histories often left out of such discussions can inform this new approach. To that end, we have developed community-student partnerships in underserved neighborhoods in cities like Milwaukee and Detroit. Through these connections and their related design-build projects, we have seen how the civil rights movement, immigration narratives, hip-hop culture, and alternative redevelopment histories, such as in urban agriculture, can inform the theory and practice of design. We want to bring these perspectives into dialogue with the mainstream approach to development and design. How does this look and work? Using a case study from the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) University Scholars Honors Program curriculum, we highlight the redevelopment of Milwaukee’s Fondy Park, an effort to create community-centered spaces and programming in an underserved African American community. Lessons include those essential for pedagogy and education, as well as for how these issues are theorized and professionally practiced, with implications for institutions, programs, and individuals.
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
Igniting Community Through Engaged Teaching
(2022) Criss, Shannon; Gore, Nils
Much of what we consider to be traditional teaching practices has been formed within the limits of a classroom setting, buried within a disciplinary focus. Yet our students face great societal, economic, and environmental challenges. We must ask what are we educating our students for? Do traditional models prepare our undergraduate and graduate students for a dynamic and changing world? Service-learning gets students involved in thinking in the context of real-world issues about how to address pressing community needs in partnership with community organizations. In this paper, community-engaged teaching and service-learning will be illuminated by highlighting four diverse pedagogical approaches. This paper will provide new considerations for how to integrate or advance service-learning through courses: (1) learn by designing and making; (2) learn by cross-disciplinary engagement; (3) learn by engaging in other fields and cultures; and (4) learn by serving in the pipeline.
Open Access
Introduction: "Do Not Try to Remember": Pedagogy in Transition
(2022) Newman, Winifred; Fithian, Lee
This introductory section of the "Do Not Try to Remember": Pedagogy in Transition portion of the Schools of Thought proceedings contains an overview of the session's chairs, its themes, and included papers.
Open Access
Introduction: Decolonizing Architectural Pedagogies
(2022) Harriss, Harriet; Harris, John C.
This introductory section of the Decolonizing Architectural Pedagogies portion of the Schools of Thought proceedings contains an overview of the session's chairs and included papers.
Open Access
Introduction: Engaging Design-Build Pedagogy
(2022) Cianfarani, Francesco
This introductory section of the Engaging Design-Build Pedagogy portion of the Schools of Thought proceedings contains an overview of the session's chairs, its themes, and included papers.