109th Annual Meeting

Our identity as architects is still very much bound up with the image of nature left to us by Romanticism. This image places architecture and other human constructs strictly outside of a “wild” nature that is pure, vibrant and untamed. The reality of climate change should enlighten us to the fact that human influence has had global reach, and no piece of nature is immune from it. Unfortunately, this has resulted in nostalgic eco-narratives that attempt to retrieve a loss that never was and to which architects are outsiders viewing in from their technology bubbles. To retrieve some ground for the architectural imagination we need to understand our role as part of this evolving ecology. Coexisting as interdependent entities (both physical and conceptual), landscape and technology can define built form that imagines productive and healthy infrastructures for a collective ecology. The studio presented here explored how to formulate an eco-centric identity through small scale architectural interventions, garden follies that literally and figuratively entwine themselves with the local ecology of a site that is at once a burgeoning “urban wild” and a monument to the city’s post-industrial heritage. This apparently wild site is in fact a garden. Maintained and curated by the site’s Director of Ecology, it highlights the effort it takes to maintain a “natural” environment in the highly synthetic context of our cities, suburbs, and countryside. Historian Robert Pogue Harrison, through his analysis of gardens in Western literature, argues that “gardens do not bring order to nature; rather, they give order to our relation to nature”. The architecture of the garden makes it into an interface where the boundaries between nature and the man-made are perpetually negotiated providing a pedagogical model that proposes alternative ideologies about our ecosystems-both environmental and socio-political. The paper describes the collaboration between the studio, its local industry partner and the site’s Director of Ecology. Within this garden, the studio designed and proposed to build an ecovention that provides space for active community engagement with the processes of growth and decomposition. This is not figurative, part of the design is a program for community engagement and education that involves control of adventive species, composting, planting and willow training. Working with an industry partner that produces highly engineered metal components the studios proposal is a combined structure and landscape regeneration system that literally entwines architecture earth and vegetation. Emulating the the work of the site’s environmental stewart the growing infrastructure aims to suggest ecological solutions for the future of cities by pushing the boundaries of architecture itself as a provider of ecosystem services and social stewardship. The proposal envisions that in a post-nature environment architecture can play a role not only in societal enlightenment but also in the intentional cultivation and stewardship of biological ecologies.

The architectural design studio has remained essentially unchanged for generations. Incremental improvements to the architectural design studio are no longer sufficient to meet the need for comprehensive responses to the problem of climate change. The traditional studio model, which features a master/apprentice relationship, is well suited to generating “good” design solutions. However, this self-driven discovery-based learning process leaves little time or focus for achieving specific high-performance design strategies. More specifically, the traditional design studio features a distinct lack of accountability for performance-based metrics, a lack of time to pursue performance-based goals, a lack of prioritization of building performance, a lack of clarity for what constitutes a successful sustainable design process; and a lack of examples on “how to” perform simple design steps.  As a response, a new studio pedagogy is proposed to assist students to achieve net-zero performance within the typical 15-week semester. A structured collection of sustainable design approaches specifically organized by a pyramid helps professors and students adopt an overarching framework for sustainable design (Fig. 1). This paper will focus more on the studio methodology itself (Fig. 2). This new design methodology formalizes activities already used in the design studio and leads students to reach higher levels of building performance for their projects. Specifically, this paper will focus on the following innovative teaching techniques: How to place “accountability” into the design studio through early and often against well-established benchmarks; How to prioritize building performance by front-loading sustainable design techniques; How to accelerate the design process through the use of “how-to” videos; and How to develop and use well-developed rubrics with learning objectives to keep students focused on both net-zero energy AND design resolution. In conclusion, this paper will spark a much-needed conversation on design studio pedagogy itself to train students to design high-performance projects in the short-term and ultimately to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

Longji (Dragon Bone) Rice Terraces, largely constructed in the last five hundred years, are located in Guangxi Province, China. For centuries, a system of trails, connecting about two dozen settlements in Longji, was the only access that could take the residents to the outside world hours away. Since the 1990s, the decision to develop tourism has significantly changed local residents’ lives, as well as the cultural landscape of Longji. Drawing upon archival research and limited fieldwork, this paper first examines the cultural landscape of Longji. It then scrutinizes the local heritage management and tourism development approach since the turn of the twentieth century, and their impacts on the cultural landscape and local people’s lives. Although recognizing the benefits from developing tourism, this paper challenges the current approach on heritage management, which presents heritage as many destinations, each being rather complete and independent, and overlooks the integrity of the cultural landscape. As a result, many segments of the rice terraces are abandoned, and the trails deserted. More importantly, the memories and stories attached to these places are forgotten. This paper argues that heritage should be viewed as narratives, connecting events and places both in space and in time. In this case, the trails, in addition to being the gateway to the outside world, not only connect the past and the present and the residents from all the villages, but also provides access to the rice terraces and the entire landscape. Based on this understanding, this paper advocates an alternative approach on heritage management, which not only emphasizes the integrity of the cultural landscape by using the trails as the axis and the access, but also celebrates and promotes the narratives that construct and connect the cultural landscape in space and in time.

This paper considers the transplantation of the Western concept of architecture to China set against the backdrop of Western colonization from the mid-19^th century. With the increasing presence of foreign populations, the urgent demand for a considerable number of new building types greatly spurred the Chinese construction market. Beyond consideration of the physical artifacts, this paper focuses upon the story behind the scenes, the mode of architectural production, and particularly how the intricate relationships among different professionals helped to shape the physical world. The West China Union University, constructed from 1915 through 1940s in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, serves as an apt case study to exemplify this process. A cooperative product of five missionary organizations from the United States, Britain and Canada, this project was designed by a British architect whose practice was based in England, superintended on-site by an American architect, and constructed by local Chinese workmen. How were these professionals able to communicate and cooperate over such a long distance and across huge cultural gaps in architectural and building practice? This case study demonstrates that the relations among different actors in the field of architecture, specifically the tripartite interactions among client, architect and builder, were far more complex and nuanced than we might otherwise assume. This paper offers critical insights into the dramatic changes in the system of Chinese architectural practice under the sway of Western influence during the first half of 20^th century.

The boundaries between “real” or virtual, fact or fiction, are blurring. Simultaneously, images are fundamentally restructuring our understanding of vision; artificial intelligence (AI) turns a machinic gaze toward a vast repository of images that are collected, analyzed, and capitalized.[1] The movement of images is the gravity of our time, and it is crucial that architects understand, control, and engineer their political forces.[2] Photorealistic techniques and “objective” image types can be deployed not to represent reality or truth but to throw those into question and reveal all the nuanced states of information and strangeness in the everyday. This paper examines a pedagogical case study framed around image-based narratives that critically examine social, political, economic, or ecological issues within an urban territory.  Each project addresses how the territory might interface with a chosen emerging technology, including AI, autonomous vehicles (AVs), drones, automation, and augmented reality. Image types relate to the selected technology, with one of each of the following chosen—(1) “objective” informational images like construction documents, patent drawings, and diagrams, and (2) electronic images like satellite imaging, video games, LiDAR, and photogrammetry. The course wrestles with the questions: How does architecture, a field tasked with confronting the “real,” contend with the complex overlap of virtual and physical realms? How might our projections of future “realities” take on political positions rather than respond to the desires of capital?

[1]Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You).” The New Inquiry (December 8, 2016), accessed November 01, 2020, https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/.

[2] Steyerl, Hito. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press, p. 32-45.

What is the function of architectural drawings, those drawn by architecture students that are conducive to learning? This paper discusses a pedagogical experiment generated from a series of collaborative drawings. The end goal seeks for a new agency, through a didactic platform and process exploring the visuality of the productive observation instead of the optical graphics of realism. Through the intermediary of the drawing in the present, the retrospective and prospective character of the design process can be explored. By reintroducing drawing as a medium of thought, its power to project a clear and intentional inquiry can be revealed. Inspired by the Chinese scroll painting and the spirit of public drawing from the west, Exquisite Scroll is a collaborative hand-drawing exercise with a working method akin to the Surrealist game exquisite corpse. It is corporeal in nature and requires intellectual exchange between a multiplicity of authors. It is a negotiated act showing beyond what is observed. The thematic topics of urban historiography and architectural conservation are further explored through a ‘multi-temporal’ perspective, to look into the past and future in both space and time.

“Architecture is not a language. Rather, architecture summons into appearance ways of thinking about the world that are otherwise unavailable; it is a particular mode of thought, one irreducible to other ways of thinking. And its images of thought have no lesser claim on the world than those of philosophy. This mode is not representation, but emanation – a showing forth of a world that exists but is not yet actualized.” [1] Typically, diagrams used in design processes exclusively serve the resultant object of the work. In this sense, diagrams are a means to an objective that is distant from, and external to, the designer, architect, or student. This paper proposes that diagrams can be used as a means to an objective that is internal to the designer, architect, or student. We often understand diagrams in terms of how they might serve the discipline within which they are intended to function. In architecture we dichotomously oscillate between the explanatory and generative. Stan Allen establishes the artifacts of architects’ processes as “impure, or unclassifiable” [2] in his explorations of autographic and allographic representational devices, and further surmises that architecture is actualized “at a distance from the author”. [3] Sanford Kwinter posits that the “[T]he diagram – or the topologized schema – represents the plastic aspect of reality: subject and object can virtually masquerade as one another,” exclaims diagrams as active rather than passive, and invokes the abstract machines of Gilles Deleuze used in pages of theory to reiterate the “agencies of assemblage, organization, and deployment” that are used in the service of architectural thought production. [4] All of these, and more, are ultimately in the architect’s/diagrammer’s service of architecture. In a description of work he planned to pursue, Shusaku Arakawa stated that he “want(s) to make diagrams on canvas of our imagination which is itself diagrammatic.” [5] His resultant paintings exemplify the pivot from diagramming in servitude of an externalization to diagramming in service to one’s own cognizance. Arakawa’s work supplants representational mimesis for emanant process of cognition; the irreducible modality K. Michael Hays refers to in the quotation above. What occurs if we reverse our focus from the diagram’s service to architecture to the diagram’s service to the architect? How does the diagrammatic process serve the architect? How does diagramming develop understanding of architecture by shaping cognitive utility towards its concepts? How can we fold this into pedagogy and knowledge production to ultimately establish methods towards expansion of architectural cognition? This author proposes to expound upon previous seminar and continue exploration through future-seminar coursework to extend studies into pedagogical methods of internalizing the diagrammatic process into architectural students’ cognitive process. By pulling from previous research in cognitive science that directly studies the operations architects utilize in externalizing cognition, diagrammatic cultures, reasoning, and processes, cognition through graphic interaction, and the problem solving benefits of drawing further pedagogical points of departure and criteria will be established towards the benefits of diagrams in expanding the capacity for architects to cognize architecture.

Despite the steady decline of coal consumption in recent years, the effects of its extraction and combustion are persistent and widespread.1 And despite the rhetoric of sustainability and climate change resilience in architecture, the field is yoked to coal insofar as buildings use electricity and is built using steel, concrete, aluminum, and countless other byproducts. To understand architecture as a material process constituted by its variegated supply chains, then, requires a thorough accounting of its production, including the territories impacted by the extraction of coal. The Archive of Lost Mountains contributes to this accounting by establishing a repository for enshrining the memory of the more than 500 mountains destroyed by mining in Appalachia. In the late nineteenth century, mining rights in Appalachia were predominantly covered by broad form deeds, which “gave the mineral owner…access to the minerals in any manner ‘deemed necessary or convenient.’”2 At the time, mining methods involved an elaborate system of tunneling beneath mountains to access seams of coal, impacting the surface only at points of ingress and egress. As demand rose and technology advanced, however, these methods began affecting the landscape in increasingly violent ways, culminating in what is known as mountaintop removal. True to its name, mountaintop removal describes the process of blasting away peaks to access buried coal, what the poet Frank X. Walker has called “dime store mastectomies.”3 Combined with the protections to use any means ‘deemed necessary or convenient’ with the fact that hundreds of miners could be replaced with “a few men armed with explosives and bulldozers,” mountaintop removal gained widespread popularity in the mid-twentieth century.4 As the Appalachian landscape was being systematically flattened, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 sought to regulate these practices; however, mining industry influence and weak enforcement mechanisms meant that many of the mines continued to operate unabated. Perhaps more pernicious than what historian Elizabeth Catte attributes to rendering “both mountains and miners into abstract and disposable commodities” is that mountaintop removal has kept this exploitation largely invisible.5 The Archive of Lost Mountains is an ongoing project to preserve the memory of landscapes destroyed by mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. The archive consists of both drawings and models. Plan and section drawings show the relative scale and volume of what had been removed by mining. Much like ghosts, the drawings offer a fleeting glimpse of something once existent, now erased from view. The physical models in the archive offer an additional layer of association with the lost mountains, seeking to activate the landscape in ways two-dimensional representations cannot. Tinted with the fly ash remnants of a coal-fired power plant, the models take on the qualities of the commodity for which they were destroyed. Together, these records reveal the damages caused by coal extraction and the complicity of architecture in the process. Part public history, part geological specimen, the Archive of Lost Mountains seeks to expose the scars of mountaintop removal and to establish tangible relics for the preservation of place.

This project weaves together architectural design, evolutionary biology, and information technology with the intention of improving the health of our most vital pollination workforce, the honeybee.  Conceptually, the project explores niche construction, a theoretical model borrowed from evolutionary biology, to set design criteria for a domestic environment constructed by the interactions of several types of organisms.  In this case, interaction between humans, honeybees, the flora and fauna of the inhabited landscape become the objects of architectural design.  The notion of ecological inheritance frames a discussion about the potential of architecture to influence existing and future selection pressures on organisms and their descendants. The project is a modular, mobile, climate controlled apiary (MICA).  It is the result of hypothesis based field experiments, participatory design, and a data-driven process.   In our phase one study, we achieved a 72% increase in honeybee survival rates.  Building atop initial results, we have designed, built and are testing a commercial scale prototype.  This prototype is a data collection tool, a seasonal experiment, and the embodiment of a new trajectory for architects interested working in ecological design.

“School’s Out: Reimagining Vacant Public School Buildings in Pittsburgh” examines the community engagement and adaptive reuse potentialities of disused Pittsburgh Public School (PPS) buildings. Once a major part of the city’s architectural identity, a number of Pittsburgh’s public school buildings remain abandoned since their closure in the late 2000’s, with many on the market without buyers. This is especially concerning in a neighborhood-driven city like Pittsburgh, as school closures lead to the loss of social and cultural nexuses, often accelerating trends of decline and disinvestment in the affected neighborhood.

Using the former Fort Pitt Elementary School building in Garfield as a case study, this proposal outlines a design and planning strategy for the conversion of the facility into a new, mixed-use development which will provide spaces for education, events and entrepreneurship in the neighborhood. The goal is to create a ‘neighborhood building’ that would serve as a social and cultural nexus — a community landmark — making the case for preserving and repurposing out-of-use PPS infrastructure. Ultimately, this project engages with issues of holistic approaches to sustainability and resource optimization by contending that we have enough buildings; the way forward is to rebuild, repurpose, and revitalize existing structures.

Architects as diverse as Frank Gehry and Peter Zumthor have responded powerfully to the elemental lessons they perceive in the artwork and architectural projects of the artist Donald Judd.  Not surprisingly, John Pawson, the “minimalist” architect perhaps most strongly aligned with the style that takes its name (if not its ideology) from the arts movement that Judd unwittingly helped father, has acknowledged many debts to Judd’s work.  From Eduardo Sota de Moura to a new generation of architects that includes David Adjaye, Claesson Koivisto Rune, Brad Cloepfil, and Johnston and Mark Lee – all attest to Judd’s influence on their architecture, and often for reasons that don’t share any immediately apparent common ground.   Query:  What form would the minimalist artist’s own architecture have taken had he not died just as he was beginning to receive commissions? Early in his career as an art critic, Judd worked ruthlessly to expose the hollow core of the post-Expressionist art world while simultaneously producing works that would eventually demonstrate the merits of his counter position – and thus radically alter the course of contemporary art.  Judd would later direct his critical attention toward the then-pervasive superficiality of post-Modern architecture, laboring in his writings to articulate an antidote to the status quo by stating the negative case:  before we can assert what architecture should be, it must first be stated what it should not be.  Unfortunately, Judd died before he was able to realize a single major autonomously designed work; unlike his art, we are left with only a few sketches and drawings of unbuilt projects against which to assess his alternative position.   In 1992, Judd began design work on an administrative building to be built adjacent to Zumthor’s Kunsthaus Museum in Bregenz, Switzerland.  This paper proposes that it represents the most succinctly articulated exposition of Judd’s architectural thinking and terminates a line of investigation that began eight years earlier with three projects intended to house artwork at his properties in Marfa, Texas.  It illustrates in praxis the case Judd elaborated in his writing and substantiates a surprisingly prescient architectural perspective that remains valid for the profession to this day.

In A Theory of /Cloud/ (1972), the cloud, or rather, the graph of cloud, served as the entry point of the French art historian and theorist Hubert Damisch (1928-2017) in his understanding of the limits of Western art and art history as framed since the Renaissance. Here he initiated another possibility of painting—a “theory” of painting, which he simultaneously termed “a history of painting”—by concluding the book with a look at the Far East, at Chinese landscape painting, during the period of French intellectual sinophilia that accompanied the Chinese Cultural Revolution launched by Mao. Damisch’s different approach to painting was, in fact, a philosophical initiative to reflect on and shift away from Western metaphysics, especially from the negative dialectics of Hegel, towards a different architecture based on a harmonious and positive materialist dialectic inspired by Chinese Taoist and Chan Buddhist philosophy. Here, in Damisch’s reinvention of Chinese painting, the cloud not only literally enters paintings to negotiate the intertextuality of mountain and water, ink and brush, even painter and painting, but also to fill the role of the materialist body in a different perspective of world formation—as the breath, the one movement that sustains or constitutes all life. Eventually, such a cloud leads to a different kind of architecture, one that counters the philosophical metaphor of architecture as the stability of the arche, the subject, the essence, or any anchored center. The cloud and its philosophical architectural alternative also contribute to a reflection on the literally physical architecture, leading to the formation of an architecture in absentia, to which Damisch was to return in 2003 when discussing Diller+Scofidio’s Blur Building (2002), as well as the Chinese architecture of the Ming Dynasty.

This paper focuses on the problematic relationship between architectural pleasure and well-being or happiness.   It attempts to update the ancient philosophical debate on the conflict between the pleasures promoted by hedonism, and the pleasures and virtues of well-being promoted by eudemonia in terms of architectural design through the lens of today’s positive psychology movement.1  This emerging field has identified, to a limited extent, when pleasure and well-being can conflict resulting in addiction, while at other times pleasure serves as a pump to the higher echelons of well-being, or what Aristotle calls eudaimonia.   This paper attempts to identify the same for architecture.   Since Vitruvius, architects have written on our preferences which appear to bring pleasure – some with empirical evidence.  By taking stock of architectural writings and program elements that aim to deliver pleasure,2, 3, 4 this paper asks which of these resonate with philosophical and positive psychology findings on higher pleasures.  Particularly relevant are the findings of psychologist Barbra Fredrickson’s broaden and build theory of positive emotions5 which sheds light on how design delight may lead to positive psychology’s promotion of higher forms of well-being such as: engagement, relationships or sense of community, meaning and achievement.6   The programming and design of Helsinki’s new central library by ALA Architects illustrates virtuous pleasures that serve a higher purpose in a city and country that ranks first in Gallup’s 2019 and 2020 World Happiness Reports.

This paper first examines how architectural history surveys ignore the hydro-ecological roots of the built environment and then what the “absence” of water in historiography means for epistemology. This absence has not been accidental but rather deeply rooted in the Enlightenment ideals that, paraphrasing John Locke, identified “land-nature” matrix as a stable foundation on which to enshrine human progress and property rights, while keeping water outside the historiographic proper as a strange, unpredictable, and inscrutable other. The Greek thinker Pherecydes of Syros imagined Chaos, the mythical Greek figure, as water. From Greek mythologies to the Abrahamic religions to vedic texts, the orderly cosmos emerged from the primordial water, represented as a void. The modern world inherited this intellectual legacy. Analyzing the conspicuous absence of the spatiality of water in Egyptian, Greek, and Roman architecture in history textbooks, the paper probes the disciplinary production of “land-centrism” that gave rise to epistemological taxonomies of what constitutes “architecture.” While revisionist histories since the advent of postmodernism in the 1980s have ushered in a host of multidisciplinary, canon-debunking, expansive, and inclusive readings of architectural history, entrenched binaries of what architecture is and isn’t continue to persist. Building on the philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich’s notion of “waters of forgetfulness,” the paper argues that the birth of modern historiography in the 19th century was tied to the double denial of water from modern consciousness. First, architectural history has essentially been conceived as a telluric narrative that took precedence over water ecology as an architectural constituent. Second, as Jamie Linton argues in What is Water? (2010), the scientific abstraction of water—a quantitative and utilitarian view—in the modern era led to the reification of water as a resource to be harnessed for human use, robbing it of its multiple ontological and social significance.

In the spring of 2020, we were awarded funding to diversify the voices in our students’ required Place and Health course. This paper presents the first results from this pedagogical project. The design and implementation of this endeavour relies on culturally inclusive pedagogy (Yu 2018) in which students use cultural anchors to connect themselves to unfamiliar subjects or contexts. We commissioned seven, original videos from architects working in the Global South, and curated 17 additional, pre-made videos. We then used short essay reflective responses to reinforce the cross-cultural learning. When evaluating these responses, we found that the students were the most articulate about their cultural understanding of people, material, form, and program when they could compare multiple contexts with their own. This demonstrates the importance of extensive inclusion of resources from a many cultural and geographic contexts.

In response to the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new pilot program was established in partnership with local design professionals by identifying opportunities to engage a diverse student population inclusively. Due to the reduction in internships, the pilot program provided an equitable educational experience to all students regardless of academic level, academic performance, previous work experience, financial ability, or geographic location while allowing them to maintain their academic paths to graduation. The partnership provided students a three-week remote professional summer experience through a series of three one-credit sessions, including eleven sub-themes. The pilot program was established for two student groups. The first is upper-level students who are required to obtain internship experience before graduation but could not get these internships due to COVID-19. Another target group was students early in their educational careers who were interested in getting a firsthand look into practice by engaging with a multi-disciplinary professional design office. The course structure employs inclusive strategies for students at various academic levels and physical locations to participate in the class and with professionals remotely. As a result, the course experienced rapid interest and enrollment within a brief timeframe, suggesting strong student interest in having access to and engagement with professionals they previously lacked. This emerging professional participation model for accessible learning in diverse student groups cultivated inclusive excellence, providing impactful learning experiences for students about design practice with professional design communities that otherwise have limited engagement opportunities and access for student populations.

The [Affiliated Institution] is one of the most affordable institutions in the country. This means the student population typically comes from the exact communities that need architectural agency the most. As architectural education continues during the COVID-19 pandemic—the confronting realizations about systemic racism, inequalities, and exclusions in academia, presents an opportunity to effectively use these conversations as a catalyst for long-lasting, structural change. Identifying actionable objectives from an awareness of the embedded privileges that actively disenfranchise socioeconomically challenged Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students. The architectural discourse and profession responsible for shaping the spaces we live, work, and gather requires a renewed dedication to social values.    In Fall 2020, the [Affiliated Institution], School of Architecture and Planning selected a team of fellows to participate in the Student Experience Project, a cohort of the College Transition Collaborative that seeks to increase degree attainment through creating equitable learning environments and fostering a sense of belonging on campus; by exploring new methods of inclusion through language.1 In addition to retooling syllabi for active de-stigmatization of available resources and adhering to a ‘growth’ mindset, the fellows will also use the same breath of energy to restructure studio formats and policies. These methods seek to decolonize unproductive hierarchies and the dynamics of exclusion that have gone unchallenged. Can more inclusive pedagogies be employed to reverse the (racist, exclusive, toxic) culture of the architectural studio and collectively build towards an inclusive and equitable studio culture that produces greater student success and ultimately a more diverse architectural discourse and profession?    The challenges architectural education faces today will require instructors to learn how to teach online and require students to learn how to learn online. This case study leverages the drastic change in platforms of learning to challenge traditional pedagogical models of architectural studios. This study’s chosen site is a third-year undergraduate architectural studio that intersects university and junior college transfer students that often requires a pedagogy reconciling varying skill-sets and educational backgrounds while delivering critical NAAB objectives. The school’s unique geographical setting and rich cultural groups offer an optimal testing ground to address disparities in social experiences and learning outcomes for BIPOC and economically challenged students.

The current amplified racial justice movement has produced BIPOC student-led demand documents to leadership, faculty, and staff of many North American schools of architecture and design.  For example, Notes on Credibility, by the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s African American Student Union and AfricaGSD, demands that the GSD “institutionalize anti-racism and acknowledge that pedagogy has a cultural obligation”.[1] Similar Calls for Action echo Notes throughout North American architectural institutions, supported by hundreds of signatures of fellow students, alumni, faculty, staff, and community.  Such directed efforts require a critical rethinking of architectural pedagogy from existing Beaux-Arts models and image-making practices.   This shift requires architectural education to focus on a new core foundation of inclusionary design – where ethics and aesthetics are aligned to develop social change.  This paper shares an example, of a fall 2020 design research studio based on The Great Northern Migration (part of REDACTED, and initiative, design practice, and pedagogy), currently integrated into the curriculum at the REDACTED School of Architecture.[2]   The Great Northern Migration, defined by journalist and author of The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson, is the outpouring of six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to cities in the North and West between World War I and the 1970s. According to Wilkerson, the Migration marks the “first time in American history that the lowest caste people signaled they had options and were willing to take them – and the first time they had a chance to choose for themselves what they would do with their innate talents.”[3] Such work was directly referred to by the REDACTED School of Architecture BIPOC students in the school’s Call to Action (and resulting listening sessions) as an aspired model integrating identity, culture, history, memory, and place. The paper provides a targeted perspective – as the methods are self-formulated from an African American architect, designer, and educator. The paper covers the process of the studio’s six Modules:  Module 1: Empathy Exercises / Collaboration Methods / Feedback Mechanism Development / Empathic Design Thinking Methods / Student Identity Building.  Module 2: Data Visualization Techniques for creating an Inclusive Timeline (setting context, socio-cultural, and historical facts from 1619 to 2020). Module 3: Mapping Jim Crow (Uncovering Design Thinking from regional references). Module 4: Design exercises based on Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series[4].  Module 5: Data Visualization – The Pathway from South to North. Module 6: Designing an Architectural Response in Vanderbilt Hall of Grand Central Station, NYC for an inclusive audience. The work is supported by the action items of the REDACTED Inclusion and Equity Plan – incorporating inclusionary processes from architectural education and professional experience, providing a sharable template for obtaining the credibility required for our time.

[1].https://notesoncredibility.cargo.site

[2] REDACTED is a winner of the 2020 ACSA REDACTED Award.

[3]https://www.ted.com/talks/isabel_wilkerson_the_great_migration_and_the_power_of_a_single_decision/up-next?language=en [4] https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2015/onewayticket/panel/1/

This paper describes a theoretical framework for conducting design research with students based on early anecdotal evidence from an academic design research team that weaves a strengths-based approach to developing self-knowledge into open-ended and non-hierarchical project investigation environment that explores inherently interdisciplinary ‘wicked’ problems. Key factors in this approach include:  encouraging students’ self-knowledge using a legible system that increases comprehension of individual strengths collectively examining the interrelationship of strengths across the cohort to understand where the team is likely to function with ease continuous assessment with a growth or progression mindset by both peers and faculty non-hierarchical structure in which students participate in co-designing the investigative or learning tactics and can shape project goals The benefits of this approach are likely derived from its ability to effectively increase self-efficacy and social connection in highly trusting group work settings where psychological safety is paramount and continuous growth-oriented assessment places value on process as well as product. Weaving this approach into architectural research and studio pedagogy will be likely not only to produce more resilient interdisciplinary-minded professionals ready to tackle complex contemporary issues such as climate change and social injustice in collaborative settings but also make architecture school a more responsive and inclusive place that welcomes inputs from a more diverse array of aspirants, not only those who arrive with the requisite resources and devotion to succeed in prevailing architecture culture in hand.