College of Architecture Conference Proceedings

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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
Reviewing Digital—Critiquing the Static Crit
(2022) Scelsa, Jonathan
This paper focuses on challenging design pedagogy to question its ingrained reviewing methods that require the production of static media. This examination looks at new methods of digital design practice that allow a student to both design and quickly output a digitally interactive version of their model for impactful means of collaboration by faculty of all ages as well as other students. Topics covered include the space of digital review, how architectural academia can harness new social media culture, and core concepts surrounding the technologies of information.
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
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.
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
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
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
Oblique Pedagogical Strategies: Improv and Speculative Realism in Support of Social Justice Design Education
(2022) Watt, Trudy
This paper acknowledges the extent to which the majority of people who work in the field of architecture are white, examines the way that whiteness in the prevailing charity-service model of community-engaged design undermines meaningful social justice design, calls for dismantling white cultural dominance in architectural education, and outlines a pedagogical method that has shown some promise in uncovering blind spots caused by dominant culture belonging that commonly prevents architects from understanding the experiences of others during design analysis, especially where asymmetrical privilege exists, such as in the field of community-engaged design. With roots in improvisational theater tactics and a thinking framework from speculative realism that helps undermine defaulting to traditional hierarchies, these oblique pedagogical strategies appear to expand student capacity for open inquiry and self-reflection, revealing previously invisible biases, and may point to more meaningful social justice design with community. The hope is that this is an entry to providing transformative education in undergraduate architecture studios that creates unfettered creative space for students of color and productively reveals bias to white students. The concern remains that the tactic persists in centering white feelings of comfort in a way that erases BIPOC distress in the studio. Early experiments with this pedagogical approach showed promise in a fifth-year undergraduate capstone studio at Jefferson University focused on how architects (a largely privileged population) can form alliances with communities experiencing gentrification (a largely marginalized population) and again in a -second-year undergraduate studio deployed within a design fundamentals curriculum at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning.
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
Putting Participation into Practice: Strategies for Evolving Architecture
(2022) Dubyoski, Jodi
For decades, schools of architecture have included hands-on education in their curricula in the form of design-build studios; often these studio experiences are guided by a social mission and employ participatory methods. In other cases, university community design centers provide opportunities for students to engage with community members on real-world projects. My own academic experience (which was far from unusual) involved the former, beginning with a summer studio focused on asset-based community development and participatory engagement framed within a design-build experience that launched me on a career-long path. Being confronted with a profession that conducts business as usual while academia is grooming a generation of socially responsible architects is jarring for new graduates . Today’s professionals approaching mid-career are unsatisfied with outdated business models that do not address contemporary concerns about social impact. Barriers to participatory engagement in practice include hourly billing that discourages clients from commissioning non-mandatory stakeholder engagement, as well as a culture of pro-bono work that ultimately accelerates burnout and devalues professional services. New ways of thinking require new ways of doing business. Today’s practitioners are seeking more sustainable methods of integrating the participatory strategies they employed in academia into contemporary practice. Drawing on extensive research conducted on the history of community design during my Master of Architecture, and using illustrations from my own path—from a student during the post-Katrina era to owning a community design practice—I propose strategies for challenging current models of practice. Specifically, I demonstrate how my current work with private landowners and nonprofit economic development groups incorporates participatory methods learned during my academic experience, borrowing from an interdisciplinary range of sources, including anthropology, sociology, and planning, as well as others who are disrupting the status quo of delivering creative services.
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
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
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
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
The Hidden Ground: Native American Intercultural Relations
(2022) Rodríguez Carrión, Awilda
Over the last two decades, a trend has been developing in the design community to promote social equity and emphasize the ethical responsibility of design. Community participation, programming, and post-occupancy evaluations have cemented a more democratic design process in which users, clients, and community members are given a voice to affect the final architecture product through a process called participatory design. This modus operandi becomes more vital when dealing with subcultures that historically have felt marginalized from the dominant culture. In the United States, there is great diversity among Native Americans, but our mainstream culture tends to see them as a homogeneous group, focusing on their commonalities rather than discovering and understanding individual tribal values. With the blind acceptance of generalizations about any subculture, we may miss the critical details that shape the opportunity to showcase their uniqueness and celebrate their differences. Within the studio context, what learning modalities are best to implement a participatory and constructivist learning experience? Traditionally, studio teaching with project-based design focuses on students learning formal considerations of design such as theory, environmental/structural performance, and implementation of regulatory measures. The participatory design methodology (PDM) differs in its approach by focusing on a process that emerges from all players. It does not dictate design but creates an environment that allows it to emerge through the process and interactions. The PDM process prioritizes collective synergy and creativity using participation techniques to allow for alternative solutions. In response to an inquiry by the Pawnee Native American Tribe, which invited us to investigate a proper approach to conduct design propositions within their land, this paper will report the lessons learned from the process and will exhibit alternate ways of implementing design ideas, using methodologies that expand the boundaries of academia while reaching out to native communities.
Open Access
Introduction: Participatory Design and Community Engagement
(2022) Ferguson, Justin; Hampton, Shane
This introductory section of the Participatory Design and Community Engagement portion of the Schools of Thought proceedings contains an overview of the session's chairs, its themes, and included papers.
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
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
Rural Studio and the Front Porch Initiative: The Opportunities and Challenges of Place-Based Research
(2022) Stagg, Mackenzie; McGlohn, Emily
Harnessing the applied student research developed through design-build projects at Auburn University Rural Studio, the Front Porch Initiative aims to develop a scalable, sustainable, and resilient process for delivering homes in underserved rural communities. Student research forms the basis for the Initiative’s work, which extends its reach and impact through collaboration with housing providers and policymakers. A unique process of prototype home development and versioning of the homes engages students in the research of home affordability at different points in their architectural education. Graduate students undertake a comprehensive project: designing, developing, and ultimately building a prototype home for a local client in Rural Studio’s West Alabama service area. Third-year undergraduate students then utilize those prototypes for in-depth study and development of a specific topic related to contemporary issues in housing, such as accessibility, energy performance, material research, or emerging building technologies. Faculty working through the Front Porch Initiative can synthesize that information and deliver it as products to housing providers outside of Rural Studio’s service area. Currently, student research is driven by the particular demands of creating housing in the rural communities of West Alabama. This provides students the opportunity to deeply investigate and respond to local conditions, a key component of Rural Studio’s teaching pedagogy. However, as the Front Porch Initiative continues to expand the geographic, climatic, and sociocultural footprint of the housing research, Rural Studio faces new and different challenges and opportunities presented by other localities. As the Studio moves forward, it works to better understand how the local and particular can inform a broader conversation on rural housing while educating the next generation of citizen architects.
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?