2023 ACSA/EAAE Teachers Conference

Over the past decade, accrediting organizations and academic groups in architecture have encouraged faculty to introduce global ideas in their classrooms to avoid the privileging of regionalist or nationalist views. Yet for faculty not trained or versed in global politics or history, the introduction of new material can be challenging and lead to encyclopedic understandings of architecture. This paper offers two different storytelling methods for introducing global concepts to architecture students, and it suggests that students themselves, and the lands on which their homes and schools are built, already represent global conditions. By teaching them how to view themselves, their houses, and their “backyards” as inherently global, even in geographically isolated regions, students are able to find a greater sense of belonging in the classroom and profession, position themselves within and against communities beyond their own, and develop a heightened sense of empathy and planetary responsibility as architects. This paper is organized in two parts. In part one, Professor [redacted] describes a “house histories” research assignment that asks students to research a house from their own family and ancestral stories about it, and in part two, Professor [redacted] describes a method for studio teaching in which students research stories about land that has been witness to globally significant events, such as the developing and testing of nuclear bombs. Prof. [redacted] begins by describing an architectural history assignment, “House Histories,” in which he asks students to study a house in which their own family once lived decades or centuries ago (or still to this day). Students consider the ways that the house–its materials, style, organization, location, etc.–makes visible stories about global phenomena, such as migration, industry, and colonial displacement. The “house” is defined broadly, and students’ case studies have ranged from Navajo hogans to plantations to farmhouses to suburban developments across the world. With an ultimate goal of considering how architecture materializes stories about who we are as individuals, shaped over extended periods of time, students are able to view themselves in global pasts, presents, and futures. Combining oral history research with archival analysis, students seek out the “extraordinary” in the “ordinary” and describe details that are unique or meaningful to them and their family. They then share and compare these deeply personal stories with each other in the classroom. Students uncover new stories about where their families came to settle, and they uncover and grapple with surprising details about their families, such as the discovery of a backyard grave of Native American people or a family’s slave-owning past. The assignment has helped to enhance the students’ sense of belonging in the classroom, increase their interest in architecture history, and improve their grades and participation. Beyond this, the students’ histories challenge Prof. [redacted] to reconsider the scope of the course in subsequent years as an important exercise in global reflexivity. In part two, Prof. [redacted] considers a studio that interrogates the ways that land in the state of [redacted] has been deeply informed by decades of what Traci Brynne Voyles describes as “wastelanding,” implying that the American desert has been historically viewed as a place to be exploited–primarily through extraction of resources or labor, or by highly toxic nuclear testing. Wastelanding, in Voyles’ analysis, is not so much about “the inherent value of wastelanded places as it is about the meaning–social, cultural, ecological, or juridical–that we make out of them.” [Redacted state], which is home to most of the students, is both familiar and unfamiliar. Though they know it, they are usually not familiar with its fuller history as the birthplace of the nuclear bomb, or ground zero for atomic testing on Earth. In this upper-level undergraduate studio course, Prof. [redacted] frames a series of assignments that begin with constructing new meanings of place–a project called “Un-wastelanding,” in which students select a site and then produce an intervention or documentation project that prompts them to reverse the “wastelanding” being enacted on that site. From informal dumping grounds along the Rio Grande to inert volcanoes that have been mined for minerals and other resources, students identify and document places that hold meaning for them, and they produce films, public petitions, and installations. This situated engagement with place creates the foundation for the rest of the studio, which then turns to the site of the first nuclear test–the Trinity Test Site, on what is now the White Sands Missile Base, just outside of [redacted]. Throughout the semester, students meet with land artists and activist collectives, such as the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, who have organized and recorded decades of interviews with victims of the nuclear fallout of this experiment. Students then create a timeline of the events that unfolded here and across the globe that prioritizes understanding it through space- and place-based memory, rather than through the more familiar, national narrative of war and calculated risk. Following this, they also visit the Trinity Site, where they experience how this history is currently organized: a chain link fence traces the outline of the original blast; a 12-foot tall obelisk made of lava rock sits at the center with an inscription that reads, simply, “Trinity Site: Where the World’s First Nuclear Device Was Exploded on July 16, 1945;” a metal shed is buried in the ground that is rumored to cover the original, post-blast ground (the rest of the site has been excavated and filled with fresh dirt); and some tangled steel remains from a tower on which the bomb was placed for this test. Students ultimately design a memorial and public building that actively remembers this history not as an event of the past, but one that is ongoing. Rather than locating this on the site itself, students design this for the place along Highway 380 where the Downwinders protest during each biannual “Open House” event–in October and April–when the site is opened to visitors. Balancing this local history with the global events that transpired immediately afterward, and local narrative and experience with the detached “historical” lens, students often discover the ways in which their own families have been impacted. For many students, this might mean discovering that grandparents had worked in uranium mines; for others, it means discovering a grandparents’ “lab” work may have been implicated in further obscuring this history. In many ways, this studio continues the work of the Downwinders as students turn to their own families’ heath histories, employment histories, photographs and other sources as a way to continue building a repository of knowledge about this site. Taken together, these two approaches to teaching architecture–one that positions the house as a global construct through historical research and the other that considers landscapes with global consequence through design–teach budding architects the importance of geopolitics and geopolitical storytelling. These approaches bring global views of architecture into the local and material foreground. By situating architecture within broader political, environmental, and personal narratives, students are able to see themselves as participants in global pasts and futures and develop a greater sense of planetary responsibility. By emphasizing engaging and learning concepts such as environmental racism and colonization, students are better able to identify systemic experiences, name them, and see the impacts on their own lives and families; they’re also equipped to begin to practice interrupting privileged or biased views through architecture. Instead of focusing on “that issue over there,” a privileged position all too familiar in some forms of community engaged design, students engage and learn through situated knowledge, empowering self and community. The learning gained from attaching global knowledge to local and personal experience contains within it the promise of future action–not just passive viewing or understanding of global “issues.”

This paper presents works that derive from the Architectural Design Studio 2 (section N – Ιtalian program), Bachelor’s degree in Architecture, held in the period 2018-2021 at the School of Architecture, Urban Planning, Construction Engineering (AUIC), Politecnico di Milano. The works refer to the case study analysis carried out as an exercise which aspired to provide a deeper understanding, to shape knowledge and to interpret a series of collective housing projects. Drawing upon recent research works, part of them design-driven and developed in educational contexts (Kries et al. 2017; Guidarini 2018; Frampton 2015; Fernández Per 2013; Melotto and Pierini 2012), it focused on key issues of housing design, namely co-living, flexibility and adaptation, future living, typological innovation, architecture/nature integration. As an area for the project the urban margins of the Monte Stella Park, at the Quartiere Sperimentale dell’Ottava Triennale (QT8) district, were identified. The district, north-west of the city of Milan, is the result of the partially-realized project coordinated by architect Piero Bottoni, in the context of the 1947 version of the Triennale di Milano exhibition. It promoted design innovations at various scales, not limited to structural, morphological, typological or material aspects of architecture, which aimed above all to verify “the housing qualities, corresponding, in time, to the needs of man” (Bottoni 1966). The district survives today as “one of the happiest syntheses, after the war, between organicism and rationalism” (Tonon 2005), characterized by strong landscape connotations, and sees the transformation of its ex-Market (Bottoni 1947; Aitelli 1962) to the new premises of the Centro di Alti Studi sulle Arti Visive (CASVA). In this context, the Studio’s design topic – a new mixed-residence building in connection to CASVA – set out to explore innovative types of collective housing at QT8 and to reflect on the role of the design project in setting new boundaries between the spheres of dwelling and work. From within a context that introduced a significant reflection on the spaces of housing,  the Studio proposed an exploration of “living” in the expanded “semantic extension of the verb [one which] includes and manages not only the ‘house’, but, in a progressive expansion, its natural environment, its geography, its history” (Vitta 2008).  The presented projects mainly derive from the 2019-20 academic year, a period that was marked by fervent discussions on the demand for housing renewal, in which architecture was once again faced with the challenge to define new research directions, new modes of practices, new narratives, and new visions of the ways in which we inhabit, share, and appropriate the living spaces around us. It was situated in the framework of contemporary design-driven research practices which regarded the moments of crisis linked to the residential realm as “a unique call for a radical reinvention of the idea of housing that rejects the hegemony of the family (and private property) as the only way to live together [in promotion of the idea that] co-living and co-working can be more than temporary solutions driven by necessity; they can also offer long-term conditions inspired by a sense of togetherness and solidarity” (Aureli, Tattara 2015). The case study analysis part of the Studio aimed at discussing manifold approaches in architectural reasoning and practice towards collective housing as a means of rethinking the ways to reside on and in the contemporary city, collectively. More precisely, it aimed at examining the spatial, typological and distributive character of a selection of collective housing projects. Among the selection criteria of the references was the innovative approach to the relationship between domestic space and landscape, between public and private spheres, between the living unit and the city. Each analytical study was called to highlight in a critical, coherent and concise manner the architectural compositional peculiarities of the assigned case study regarding two themes: its character of collective use and the relationship it establishes with the surrounding natural context. A board (Manifesto) expanding on five design issues (context; ordering principle; space and use; forms of living; sustainability and services for the district) was developed as a node, a series of design actions, strategies and guidelines shared between the design references and the new projects. Shared point of departure for the course participants, the exercise aimed at articulating a critical reflection on collective knowledge gained from the analysis of past references. The design-driven exercise held a central role in the externalisation, elaboration, and representation of this knowledge; it was intended as an expressive tool, questioning its potential to articulate the conceptual boundaries of the new design project. Analytical drawings and illustrations (diagrams, details, maps) crossed between different scales and spatial contexts and were the result of critical processes of redrawing, regarded as strategies for speculation and additional knowledge media. Regarded as a driving force for the definition of new design strategies, on the one hand, and of the limits of a specific field of operation, on the other, the process of redrawing borrowed meaning from contemporary works of design speculation (Krumwiede 2016; Aureli and Tattara 2019). Such process becomes, in this regard, even more relevant today when the tools and the processes inherent to the architectural project increasingly demand new definitions.  In the spirit of a parti diagram, defined “as a system of relations that indicates both the overall character of the design” (Pai 2002) and its precise details, the analyses were regarded as preliminary critical positions targeted at mapping out similar systems. “The term parti,” Hyungmin Pai reminds us, “derives from the phrase prendre parti (to take a side, make a decision)” and it represents “the critical founding act of design” (ibid.), aligning the various architectural needs with their proper correlations. In a similar vein, students were prompted to reveal how certain issues connected with housing belong to a shared terrain with other disciplines that are intersecting with architectural thinking. The course explored common disciplinary territories that have the potential to reevaluate the tools, processes, and techniques that underpin housing design today.  This part of the course therefore placed attention on and explored the dialectic relationship between verbal and non-verbal parts of a given project, between design and research, in line with broader works communicating the results of a design project (manifestos, handbooks, guides, primers). As Brett Steel has noted, regarding the close connection between theory and practice, “questions associated with beginnings are inevitably – simultaneously – problems of a practical and theoretical nature” (Steele 2009). In a similar context, theory and practice aimed to complement one another, exploring the reciprocal critical process of analysis, synthesis, interpretation, proposition and so on. The governing principle of the presented works was to illustrate the central design hypothesis that each analysed project has put forward and to outline the design framework for the new project. The projects belonged to a broad chronological range, ranging from the modern movement to contemporary design practice, with the intention to understand past practices in new ways and examine the modernist origins of contemporary phenomena, meaningful in the present sociocultural context. The exercise of the Studio addressed Kenneth Frampton’s definition of the comparative process as able to constitute “a genealogy in itself, in as much as by passing from one comparative analysis to the next, one reveals the pattern of a constantly changing value system as expressed through the open-ended evolution of architectural culture over time” (Frampton 2015). The case study analysis aimed in this regard at revealing specific stratifications of architectural production and culture. By focusing on the study of past design references, this initiative aspired to explore the notion of design as a critical-analytical tool which oscillates between objectivity and subjectivity, fact and abstraction. Conversely, it aimed to question the notion of design as a generative-propositional tool, as the central part of a creative process which, founded on a solid theoretical framework, is capable of leading to site-specific design guidelines and solutions, opening up new methodological trajectories.

“A function of literary art is to give visibility to intimate experiences, including those of place.” -Yi-Fu Tuan[1] This pedagogical project presents ways in which an undergraduate architecture studio can use storytelling, in parallel with a design investigation, to better understand and address the complexities of housing for migrant workers. The curriculum of the studio, carried out at [UNIVERSITY NAME REDACTED], included reading, writing and filmmaking assignments designed to allow students to explore key social, economic and spatial issues in the lives of migrant workers. The studio presents a model for formulating more socially sustainable and contextually responsive housing solutions through empathetic design. The design studio brief asked students to design new models of affordable housing for the industrial districts of [LOCATION REDACTED], an emirate in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The provision of inexpensive housing is a particularly sensitive issue in the country, where there is a large transient working-class expatriate population and a large wealth gap between groups of residents at either end of the socio-economic spectrum. Although developable land is seemingly limitless in the Dubai metropolitan area (including [LOCATION REDACTED]), due to tight governmental control over where workers may live [2] and a relatively high cost of living, the demand for comfortable, affordable housing for working-class expatriates is substantial. Many low wage-earners in the UAE live within labor camps and industrial zones, areas of the city that offer few public amenities or open space. This segregation of the industrial areas of the city away from the clustered commercial, residential and cultural areas further exacerbates the degree to which higher-income residents (including architecture students) are segregated from the living and working environments of the country’s expatriate laborers. Storytelling can traverse these layers of separation and serves as an essential guide to help students engage with the lived experiences of the population for whom they are designing. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has asserted, fiction and storytelling reveal the intimate experience of place and space and the diverse ways in which it is given meaning. “Literary art,” he notes, “draws attention to areas of experience that we may otherwise fail to notice” – the sensory perceptions, emotional resonances, and social relationships that animate space and place.[3] The layered understanding and definition of complex urban sites is a complicated task,[4] but one that is necessary for a sensitively designed architectural proposal. To explore how storytelling can be a core part of developing this understanding, the studio used creative writing assignments in the form of fictional vignettes describing a specific migrant worker as well as short film productions to investigate the living conditions and lived experience in the industrial zones of [LOCATION REDACTED]. According to Juhani Pallasmaa, “Architectural form is humanly meaningful only when it is experienced in resonance with life—real, remembered or imagined.”[5] As narrative and storytelling serve to imbue and describe meaning in the experience of architecture, exercises in narrative storytelling were embedded into design and mapping assignments throughout the semester-long studio course. This process provided students with a conceptual framework to “imagine” architectural form and think more empathetically about the complex conditions that affordable housing should address in rapidly developing cities. The first exercise of the semester asked students to identify a group of migrant workers and research their lives and working conditions through literature and journalism.  Sources included poetry, short stories, articles, videos or images of daily life in domestic conditions for migrant or expatriate workers across the globe. Subjects for research included stories about Cambodian construction workers in Thailand, domestic helpers who reside with their employers in Lebanon, Egyptian itinerant farmers in Jordan, and Pakistani restaurant delivery drivers in Dubai, among others. Based on their research, students then each wrote a short vignette [6] to trace the physical, sensory, emotional, and social dimensions of experience in the daily lives of a migrant worker or groups of workers– how an individual lives in their domicile, commutes back-and-forth to work, interacts with their roommates, communicates with family abroad, cultivates food at home or engages in informal economies. In the second part of the assignment, the fictional vignette formed a site in which students constructed a program for a design intervention.  Students were asked to problematize or find inspiration within some aspect of their protagonist’s daily routine and design a new object or piece of furniture that could accommodate the character’s needs or desires. The piece served as an initial design investigation—a prototype for engaging with the transient, temporal and collective attributes of a migrant worker’s domestic life. For example, in her fictional vignette, “Waiting for the Dust to Settle,” [STUDENT NAME REDACTED] imagined and narrated the invasive sensory dimensions of a local woodworker’s combined live/work space: the dust clouding family photographs, the sound of power saws layered over street noise. Her design intervention focused on an interactive partition that both separates and connects spaces for work and domestic life.  The adaptable barrier helps to carve out a space for privacy and memory amid the commercial and sensory space of a workshop. Other students designed to facilitate the global and local social connections that migrant workers rely on or to offer female domestic workers private space within the home. These early semester research activities used storytelling to critically engage important socio-economic, cultural and spatial considerations related to housing and to amplify the voices and experiences of migrant workers in the design process. As students broadened the scale of site investigation in the industrial districts of [LOCATION REDACTED], they engaged with conceptual aspects of lived space through film narratives as well. Assigned a specific abstract theme to investigate, such as flows, informal networks, nodes and boundaries, teams of students created short films that each developed a cohesive and complex narrative about cultural, social, and economic life in the industrial areas of [LOCATION REDACTED]. Films combined mapped data, time-based analyses, photographs, animated drawings, and narrated text. The five-minute pieces document the physical and infrastructural conditions of the city and region and define the significance of site on a local and global scale. The medium of film encouraged attention to key narrative devices, including character, plot, motif, and theme, and allowed the peer audience to place themselves more actively and intimately within these spaces. Students found that despite a lack of formal infrastructure, intricate networks of informal social spaces and commercial services have developed over time within these districts. These informal social infrastructures provided a key foundation in students’ pursuit of inventing and activating new spaces for housing within the city. Through reading stories and producing their own fictional and filmic narratives, students developed a more empathetic awareness of the challenges that various groups of migrant workers face and how global dynamics like geographical displacement and economics impact the local social context in Sharjah. Building on earlier narrative and spatial themes of isolation and alienation and the informal social infrastructures students articulated in their site analyses, the final design project examined ways in which affordable housing can work in spite of socio-economic obstacles and within the space of industrial production. Working in teams, students focused intensely on cooperative live-work housing models that engaged with the industrial architecture, logistical systems and manufacturing infrastructure of the area, while privileging the agency of migrant workers to create and shape their own spaces. Design solutions were developed to offer an open system of public amenities to the industrial zones and socio-economic mobility to the residents. To facilitate an “imaginative exchange of roles and personalities” [7] and empathetically test their design proposals, the final presentation asked students to compose a second vignette from the perspective of a resident. This final creative writing task highlighted the value of storytelling not only as an exercise in envisioning a different perspective, but in prospective vision as well–in imagining a future for their design. Rather than the traditional mode of presentation in which student designers explain their design process in chronological steps, storytelling encourages students to present their newly conceptualized environments through the eyes of the resident–how building program is organized, how architectural elements are encountered, how one moves through the space.     By reading and creating fictional and filmic narratives in conjunction with their design endeavors, students benefited from a deeper understanding of the complexities of designing impactful, affordable housing in the Gulf region. Storytelling, as a form of an empathetic design methodology, helped final proposals transcend typical housing types and technocratic, top-down neighborhood planning strategies. The studio course encouraged students to approach existing social, economic, and urban conditions more sensitively and to creatively imagine the lived experience of housing from a different perspective. A scenario-based design methodology helped to conceptualize, design and eventually test architectural proposals that are better suited to the transient workforce and dynamic social conditions of Gulf Cities.

Tumbleweed Rodeo is a multi-sensory, multi-species approach to understanding temporality, migration, and the arbitrary nature of borders by tracing the vectors of tumbleweeds’ movement from where they’re from – the Caucus Region – to where they’ve ended up: America. Over the last three years, architecture students from across the Great Plains have engaged collaborators in America and Caucasia to tag, track, draw, and build with tumbleweeds, because they defy humanmade borders and ask new questions of indigeneity and invasiveness.  Students leverage the ubiquity and levity of the plants to establish relationships with people and organizations on both sides of the urban-rural divide. Together, they attempt to comprehend the social dimension of an ecological catastrophe that, when considered from a different perspective, isn’t all that bad. Their work positions the question of invasive species (what came first, and what’s truly invasive?) not as disasters but as displays of the majesty of nature and of life. They use tumbleweeds as a discursive tool to prompt conversations that range from colonial strategies in the Americas to contemporary water issues and geopolitical futures.  In the 1870s, Russian sailors smuggled the plant to America to regenerate the topsoil and create groundcover for combat after European settlers enacted agricultural practices incompatible with the colonized landscapes [1]. The tumbleweed, which has earned the moniker “Russian Invader,” [2] speak to America and Caucasia’s complex histories of war, technology, immigration, and agriculture, from Thomas Jefferson’s formation of the Public Land Survey System to create a nation of yeoman farmers to President Hoover’s control over wheat prices in World War I and Georgia’s steppe biome degradation during the Russo-Georgian War. These activities, among others, led to the removal of millions of acres of native grasses and plants in both America and Georgia, exposing new ground and leaving it vulnerable to invasive plant species and different forms of warfare. Additionally, tumbleweeds fulfill the final stages of their evolutionary life cycle in death. Once the plant reaches maturity, a bone-like connection anchoring it to the ground breaks, transmuting it into a traveling exodeisic armature for sprinkling the landscape with thousands of seeds. Students excavate these histories and realities and instrumentalize their architectural education to bring them into high relief. They accomplish this in two ways: by imagining new possibilities for the tools of architectural visualization – drawings, models, virtual reality environments, etc. – that are capable of capturing the speed and politics of rapid transformation; and they design and execute public events that invite people to reconstitute the plant and dirt into different architectural compositions, during which they relay anecdotes, facts, and oral histories about the materials and their relationship with America and Caucasia’s revised legacies of subjugation and productivity. Students sleuth, solicit donations, and marshall permissions from municipal bodies to bring their events to fruition and, in the process, learn how to balance budgets, find and maintain professional partnerships, make their work legible, relevant, and accessible to a broad audience, and design, deploy, and disassemble temporary installations. Here, the instructor’s role becomes one of a co-conspirator, helping students expand their scope of influence by supporting their commitments to galleries, international architecture biennials, manufacturing companies, and conferences. Students learn the craft and scope of research and creative practice in the classroom.  This paper will cover three examples of students engaged in such projects: the first comprises two month-long participatory performances in Lubbock, Texas, and Chicago, Illinois, respectively; the second of hacking and reimagining architectural tools to produce new forms of human and non-human extra-thick mappings between New Mexico and Tbilisi, Georgia; and the third chronicles the planning efforts of students in Colorado who will execute five design-build events in a borderland region with an overlay of different cultures. In all these efforts, the students use their architectural training to create spaces for storytelling that operate across multiple timeframes and geographies.

An Atlas for a Shared Future Land is represented. Land is representative. Land is representation. This paper presents and proposes a cartographic teaching of empathy. Through developing a multi-media technological atlas that would exhibit the potential fruitfulness of highlighted multiplicities already found in shared places, this paper looks for ways to represent land as a better representation of its many people. Throughout the “civilizing” histories and processes of expansion the claiming and taming of land has involved the drawing thereof. As explorers moved into new territories, they, often accompanied by cartographers, would extend the staking of their claims not just through posts and fences; flags, and forts, but through the drawing, naming, and defining of territories they encountered and encapsulated. The map has long been a device through which land was sequestered and sovereignty established. In James Corner’s seminal The Agency of Mapping, he deftly explains a powerful duality of the map. “The analogous-abstract character of the map surface means that it is doubly projective: it both captures the projected elements off the ground and projects back a variety of effects through use. The strategic use of this double function has, of course, a long alliance with the history of mapping.” a Through this ability to be “doubly projective” the map speaks of the here and now and the consequences to follow. It draws presence in actuality and intention. Through the history of mapping, drawing land has held multiple functions and values. For early cartographers and explorers, it abstractly conveyed the vastness of unknown landscapes they encountered. It was a documenting practice describing what was seen and arrived upon, many times so that it could be returned to. In this, mapping was a process of finding place. Maps, also though their construction, gave claim to that land as a material manifestation of presence and even preeminence. Through this, mapping acted as a process of defining place. For some, mapping must also be performative, “construct[ing] the unconscious.” b When mapping attains this higher quality, of intention and execution it is projective. However, through all of these, mapping communicates not just place but also the relationship of the mapper and/or the mappee(s) to the mapped. As the representational lines of the land are drawn, so are the powerful lines of representation. Simply put, lines can become walls, both literally and figuratively. On the road to civilization, the circumscription of an early human community by a wall was a pivotal moment in its evolution into a formal city. It marked their collective interiority and protection from every danger that lay outside their wall. While the specific dangers varied for each city, an overly simplistic summation of those dangers could be “the wild.” Simply put, those within the city felt the need to be bound in by a wall that kept out the dangerous (so-called) wild—or wilderness—whether that dangerous wild be other people, animals, or the fear of the unknown, the uncivilized. Unfortunately, these notions and tactics of excluding the wild included excluding other peoples, particularly when land was taken from groups that had lived on and even cultivated that land for generations but were no longer deemed civilized enough to ‘own’ it. Humanity has found every reason imaginable to steal, envelope, and commodify land – extracting from it every value it could whether it be resource, capital, or power. Wars over land rights by both neighbors and neighboring countries is nothing new and yet unfathomably persists today. Through such antiquated practices, people are killed, and land is decimated. In order to reverse such idiocy, we must find better ways to understand our relationships to one another through the lands we share. Perhaps one of the very tools used to enclose and privatize land could be a key to open and share them. If the cartographer is willing to appropriate the tools of claiming and division, contemporary maps, along with other means of representation, particularly those digitally exhibited in public forum, hold the potential to represent land as a shared resource. By using online or application-based tools, maps can give access and credit to those connected with lands. Lands can be shown as the variable, inclusive, and vital resources they are, homes for advancing understanding of exchange and value. Not as bait for power exchanges or personal-wealth/value extraction but as common-ground places for intra-personal and intra-cultural exchanges and the sharing of community values. To fully commit to this tool appropriation, one must understand that mapping is more than mere drawings of land as object. Mediums and options must be expanded to deepen the understanding and methods of drawing place to include histories and potential futures, to include all voices linked to a place, and to give viewers the ability to toggle and self-curate the information in order to absorb the vitality of place through its translation. When incorporated into classrooms and community dialogues, such tools transform from mere exhibits of representations into moments of effective representation. These tools in the hands of students give them access to expand their understanding not only of context in a physical sense but also in terms of their poignancy as tools for change and advocacy. Place is powerful when conceived as a shared condition for connectedness and co-representation. As an example, a single piece of land holds the history of many families and peoples throughout time. A digital cartographic collection of curatable drawings, images, videos, virtual inhabitations, time-lapse recreations, models, story-telling, and historical accounts could allow all of those vested within that singular place to share and exchange the values they place on that place. This repository becomes a virtual community-hall where one can learn of the others who have lived in and cared for this place. Such shared inhabitation can preserve the land from destruction, extract it from conflict, and prepare it for an inclusive and decolonized future. Such technologies also give educational access to those working in design fields as a means for understanding the nuanced and complicated histories of place as it impacts all involved. Such varied inhabitation advocates for the people of the land as much as it does for the land itself. Instead of a singular narrative line written or drawn by the “victors” of an exchange, the ability to include every involved voice provides a more complete, representative history of people in place—another example of virtual representation and technological empowerment through education. Multiple narratives could be overlayed within the environments in order give voice to all those who have interacted with that place, fostering equity and insight into multiple possible readings of each place for experts and visitors alike. A healthier and more productive platform for contesting land emerges. Expanded notions of inhabitation are discovered. New tools for teaching content and empathy become available. This informational transportation of people not only presents them with access to new places or access to new information regarding their known places, but also fresh attitudes and expanded understanding. It builds stewardship and empathy by promoting the realization of community and interdependence.  It fosters a new understanding of land as a shared resource, acknowledging all of have played a role in its shaping. Through this, the map represents more than a designated territory, or a troubled history. It speaks to a future of shared representation and inclusion, and it presents the transformative duality of representation to both show clearly and honestly what was while also speaking to what could yet be. Jean Baudrillard, in his explanation of Jorge Luis Borges’s “finest allegory of simulation,” describes a “map the precedes the territory,” one that becomes the forbearer to a new reality, even a state of “hyperreal.” c This collection, this Atlas for a Shared Future possesses the potential to deliver on that hyperreal, not as a slick simulation of some uncanny copy but a hyperreal that leads us into a better way of living – a way of living together with shared presence.

Introduction Collaboration has always occupied an awkward position within the conservative walls of architecture education. Even as educators develop collaborative projects with intentions to foster students’ interpersonal, critical thinking skillsets (Dochy et al., 1999) and domain exploration/generation, students tend to strategically divide their workload and combine their parts into a disjointed whole, thus squandering opportunities to reap the benefits of working together. The ambiguous nature of design education (Orr & Shreeve, 2017) coupled with the asymmetrical power-balanced Master-and-Apprentice (M&A) One-on-One (OOO) pedagogy (Liow, 2016) has posed persistent threats to the mental stability of students (Stead et al., 2022). This study, therefore, argues that collaborative studio pedagogy can be deliberately structured to induce camaraderie (as social support) and resilience, which Archana and Singh (2014) identified as an essential factor for student wellbeing and academic success in higher education. Resilience is not only about the capacity to return to the previous state prior to the adversities (Luthans, 2002) but also the capacity to establish new visions and missions along with virtues characterized by high performance and positive adjustments (King & Rothstein, 2010). Based on three concepts: adversity (risk factor), positive adaptation, and protective factors (Sarkar & Fletcher, 2013), resilience is becoming increasingly important in our ever-changing world (Whiting, 2020), which places immense stress on individuals and societies. Resilience is conceptualized as a malleable skill through interactions with the environment (Bartley et al., 2010) and the passage of time (Rudd et al., 2021). Due to the highly contextual nature of resilience development (Brewer et al., 2019), this study focuses on Academic Resilience. The premise of this study pivots away from the ubiquitous M&A OOO pedagogy to the experimental Cross-pollinative Team Learning (CTL) (Figure 1) to instil academic resilience during weekly formative reviews for their individual design project. CTL is distinguished by a non-hierarchical studio culture in which design tutors constantly orchestrate and advance discussions in a collaborative peer-to-peer (P2P) setting. Notably, Masten (2001) and Yıldırım and Çelik Tanrıverdi (2021) advocated the presence of positive social support/relationships between peers as protective factors in building resilience. Social support is the assistance that people receive from interacting with others (Lakey, 2000) and is evidently associated with academic success (Meehan & Howells, 2019) and mental wellbeing (Yıldırım & Çelik Tanrıverdi, 2021). Currently, there are limited empirical studies in the literature on design education that investigate alternative collaborative pedagogical models. The objective of the research is to compare (within and between) the effects of Pedagogy Frameworks (OOO vs CTL) on Academic Resilience (RQ1) and Academic Scores (RQ2) by capitalizing on the inevitable ‘Daily Design Setbacks’ as students navigate through Design Education’s Pedagogy of Ambiguities (Orr & Shreeve, 2017) as Risk Factors and with Social Support as Protective Factors. The possibility of ‘residual’ effects of the CTL experience as they transition to the prevalent OOO pedagogy after one academic year in CTL is also of interest to the study. Methodology The three-year longitudinal study was designed as a randomized control trial in which programme administrators randomly assigned first-year architecture students to their studios (Figure 2). The school adopts an ‘Integrated approach’ wherein Design, Construction, and Building Services courses were incorporated into a single project and accessed by a panel of more than five lecturers. Learners shared identical design project briefs and joint assessment rubrics in a ‘cohort system’ where their studio peers remained the same for three years. One important distinction is that, whereas the control group (OOO) experienced the same pedagogical model throughout the three years, the experimental group (CTL) begins their transition into the OOO pedagogy in their second year and continues through their third/final year. This change is an opportunity to evaluate possible ‘residual’ effects of the tutor-choreographed CTL experiences in their onward journey in the OOO learning environment. A paper and pen survey, the ‘Academic Resilience Scale (ARS-30)’ (Cassidy, 2016), was administered three times at the end of each academic year before their grades were released. ARS-30’s Cronbach’s α of 0.90 indicated high internal consistency reliability, and acceptable alphas between 0.78 and 0.83 were reported for factor level reliability analysis and with good content validity. Participants responded to the 30 scale items on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from likely (1) to unlikely (5) after reading a brief vignette. Cassidy (2016) created the vignette to depict an instance of academic adversity and disappointment. Academic scores were also collected for each academic year. A one-way repeated measure ANOVA was performed to seek out significant differences in ARS readings and Academic Performance within-group comparisons and Independent T-test between groups. Results and Discussion (RQ1: ARS) An overview of the results can be found in Figure 3. The type of pedagogy did not significantly affect the ARS readings over time, except for OOO students, whose readings were statistically significantly different at different time points, F(2, 30) = 6.102, p= .006, evidenced by a decrease from DP2 to DP3 of 5.96%, 95% CI [11.00, 0.91] p= 0.019. ARS readings for CTL learners were also not statistically significantly different over time, F(2, 26)= .061, p= .556. OOO students were revealed to be more academically resilient than the CTL students (although not statistically significant), excluding DP3, where CTL students were more academically resilient (p= .321). There are two speculative spectrums for OOO students. First, the stability of their ARS readings between DP 1’s 78.396% and DP 2’s 78.750% is hypothesized to indicate the absence of Risk Factors (sheltered from the ambiguities of the design process) whereby ‘solutions’ were dispensed almost immediately. Learners have been denied opportunities to develop their academic resilience/perseverance for the design process due to the bonafide eagerness of OOO tutors to dispel students’ confusion (Green & Bonollo, 2003). This form of ‘sheltering’ has prevented bona fide learners from experiencing a safe failure threshold, as the potential normalization of failures with ‘teachable moments’ was not experienced to instil academic resilience. The dominant M&A OOO discussions (Goldschmidt, 2002) frequently replicate tutors’ personal pedagogical experiences and aesthetic preferences (Moore, 2001), which beginning design students may interpret as dogmatic instructions. Second, the lower ARS readings of OOO learners for DP3 (72.794%) could probably be attributed to the emergence of risk factors such as the greater independence expected of final-year students, increased project complexities, and the withdrawal of the highly guided M&A OOO Pedagogy. During the first two years of the directed M&A OOO pedagogy and the relative absence of ‘design setbacks’, learners may have developed a false sense of security and confidence in the design process. OOO learners might have found the newly imposed autonomy stressful without the excessive dispensation of solutions by the tutors. Therefore, a surge in risk factors does not always imply an upturn in academic resilience. The ARS readings of CTL students remained relatively stable, with a modest gain at DP3 (p= .556), inferring that the social support they developed during their first year provided a solid foundation for their learning journey. During the study’s focus group, CTL learners affirmed the importance of social support in effectively cross-pollinating during their P2P discussion after studio hours. (RQ2: Academic Scores) The scores for both groups remained stable, as revealed by the one-way repeated measure ANOVA, with OOO (m= 70.039%, F(2, 30) =.371, p= .693) and CTL (m= 75.560%, F(2, 26) = 2,687, p= .087) without any significant changes over time. Senior students are suggested to be acculturated into adhering to the M&A hierarchical pedagogy in exchange for grades by having surface-level discussions and blindly reproducing solutions tailored to the tutor’s preferred design paradigms (Webster, 2005), thereby achieving stability for their scores. Upon closer inspection at DP1, where the ARS readings (OOO: 78.396% and CTL: 76.048%) were comparable (p= .2013), the CTL students outperformed their OOO counterparts by a significant margin (p= .0002). This finding suggests that the design explorations and solutions of CTL learners have benefited from the collaborative pedagogy of CTL. Furthermore, the consistent outperformance of CTL learners (p= .0070 & p= .0044) in DP 2 and DP3, respectively, reinforced the notion that CTL has established a solid foundation for both the stabilities of Academic Resiliencies and Academic Performances through Social Support contextualized in a heterarchical studio culture. Conclusions Collaboration in design studios remained hazy, and educators are lukewarm in exploring alternative pedagogies beyond the revered M&A OOO model. The recent Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL fiasco (Howlett Brown, 2022) have accelerated the urgency to reconsider our faith in the authoritarian M&A Pedagogy/Unit Systems. CTL challenges the dominant paradigm of design pedagogy simply by recalibrating/redistributing power structures in the studio by embracing design ambiguities collaboratively. The shared camaraderie will be the cornerstone of developing academic resilience. This study aimed to understand the effects of the teaching frameworks (OOO vs CTL) on academic resilience and academic scores. Although the proposition of inculcating academic resilience through the heterarchical CTL remained inconclusive, the stability and consistent outperformance of their academic endeavours over the OOO learners were encouraging results. Prepare the Child for the Road, Not the Road for the Child (unknown), the CTL design pedagogy gears up our Generation-Z students’ agencies for an increasingly VUCA environment (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity).

What is cosmopolitanism, being a cosmopolitan individual? How it affects contemporary architectural discourse and pedagogy? Should discourse and pedagogy shift their paradigm or rely on the existing atavistic methods and traditional trajectories to educate cosmopolitan architects? Cosmopolitanism comes from the word cosmos in Greek, which means ‘universe, world, or city, in general sum of everything’. Being cosmopolitan, therefore, pertains to being ‘a worldly citizen’[1], and attaining a global identity as an individual. Thompson and Tambyah outline cosmopolitanism and being cosmopolitan as ‘a cultural orientation’ considerably integrated and suited to ‘the socio-cultural and economic complexities emanating from the accelerating pace of globalization’[2]. Indeed, globalization imbues us a ‘multiple affiliations’ that we ‘possibly value more than our local attachments’[3]. As an inevitable consequence, it means that the global problems affect us, the cosmopolitan society, more than they used to. Stone and Sanderson demystify that ‘rapidly advancing digital practices, evolving expectations, the climate emergency, the need for densification, the necessity for diversification and COVID-19’ are among those newly acquired problems in the 21st century that should be apace responded with delicate perlustrations[4]. Within that sense, they underscore the crucial role/position of the ‘cosmopolitan architecture’ in facing uncertainties and contingencies that these problems bring[5]. Rather than remaining in insensitive placidity, it must come up with either resistive or adaptive solutions since now it has variegated and complex affiliations. Although it seems thorny under cosmopolitanism, architecture should be one of the masterstrokes that would become a panacea. In becoming so, architectural pedagogy and profession should be invigorated and reformulated with contemporary discourse to address cosmopolitan condition, transforming into a more active, flexible, liberal, and integrated entity[6]. Salama calls for a ‘paradigm shift’ in architectural education, from ‘static domain knowledge traditional approach’ with obsolete, outmoded, and parochial doctrines to a more ‘updated, integrated and integrative response’ that effectively engages with the social, economic, and environmental problems[7]. Student-centered learning with interactive dialogic approach, community-based design learning, service learning, experiential learning, critical inquiry-based learning, outcome-based learning, process-oriented design pedagogy, participatory learning, design-build, and live projects[8] are the contemporary pedagogical approaches in design education that probes the conventional and self-aggrandizing methods to foster heuristic understanding.  To mediate chasms between the triad of students, academy, and profession, and to increase awareness of the problems, the academy should inculcate these techniques in every strand of education. Besides the pedagogical concerns, architectural education is contingent on the built space and spatial qualities. Indeed, the ingenuity of architecture can prompt an upswing in the quality of education. In the 21st century case, cosmopolitan architecture ineluctably needs to grasp a flexible, adaptive, resilient, and imaginative[9] approach to fulfill the never-ending requirements of ‘an increasingly complex world’[10]. Therefore, architectural space should promote these traits within and between the pedagogical components. The space, to become a fecund ground for education, should correlate with cosmopolitanism’s immanent qualities; cognition, consciousness, action, awareness, dynamism, and flexibility. It should embark upon them, mediate them with architectural discourse and theory, and engender a way of space-making that would earnestly seek to usher the education of a cosmopolitan architect. Unfortunately, the conventional Euclidean spaces are remarkably devoid of the ability to acknowledge these since they instantiate acutely but obliviously the obverse of cosmopolitan conditions; inertness, passiveness, and stagnation. In parallel to pedagogical alterations and shifts, architecture should transform its Cartesian orthodoxy, and instigate new way of cosmopolitan spatiality, prompting users to be vigilant and receptive to the contemporary world by triggering them to be active in the state of limbo. Spuybroek suggests that in Cartesian spaces ‘perception and action are completely separated’[11]. This means that the mind and the body act discretely[12], failing to recognize the situation simultaneously and congruently. To better clarify, the dynamism of the mind and the inertness of the body contradict each other. Consequentially, it causes the deferral of activation and awareness in a certain environment. The brain is, as neuroscientist Andy Clark delineates, ‘a malleable organism’ whose potential is emerged and is fully cultivated ‘through the interaction with the environment’, ‘through physical action and exploration’[13]. One could infer that the cognition and efficacy of humans depend on their interaction and integration with the built environment. A cosmopolitan architect, who has a number of potent and intermingled connections with urban agencies, must cope with the global developments to acquire a consolidated position. Indeed, the urban built environment must avoid tenuous linkages and provide a pedagogical ground for a cosmopolitan architect. The Oblique Function Theory[14] (Image-1) by the eminent figures architect Claude Parent and architect/philosopher Paul Virilio holds effective conceptions and thorough contemplations on how the cosmopolitan architecture of the rapidly changing and ‘increasingly complex world’ could be established. Exhaustively formulated between 1963-1969, under the group of Architecture Principe and eponymous manifestation magazine, the theory postulates how a ‘third urban order’ named ‘oblique’ could be practiced to decry contemporary problems. ‘Gestalt theory – the psychology of form and the phenomenology of perception’[15], as Virilio proclaims, established the theoretical foundation of the work. Oblique discourse offers a new gaze to fill the interstices between the mind and the body, which could lead to the perpetual epiphany of the users. Özdamar propounds that the oblique plane ‘’have a polyvalence spatiality (Image-2) – ‘a form that can be put to different uses without having to undergo changes itself so that a minimal flexibility can still produce an optimal solution’[16]- that evokes emotions and different behaviors and movements of the body’’[17]. It promotes free movement and open-ended activity ‘that mirror the dynamic nature of today’s society’[18]. Revolving around the concepts of kinesthetic and proprioceptive perception, meta-stability, disequilibrium, gravitational awareness, continuity, fluidity, dynamism, disorientation, flexibility, activation, habitable circulation, and potentialism, the function of the oblique elicits a theoretical framework, establishing a springboard for its successors; deconstructivism, folded-topological surfaces, and parametricism, latently paving a way to a ‘cosmopolitan architecture’ which contributes to the engagement with the contemporary problems. Although not clearly indicated, the conception of space under oblique phenomena leads to the acquisition of paraphernalia of the latest pedagogical key concepts such as community, engagement, participation, human-centrism, and heuristics, concomitantly connected to accommodate new pedagogical grounds and understandings under the cosmopolitanism. The oblique architecture ‘accords with the new plane of human consciousness’[19]. It extols ‘a state of mind, which is characterized initially by receptiveness, then by participation, and ultimately by a sense of belonging’[20]. Siddiqui promulgates that this ‘not only describes architecture as a space of inhabitation but also considers space as a didactic tool for architecture’[21], a tool that could be dissected to address the contemporary situation. The cosmopolitan condition has introduced many new discrete urban segments of administration, architecture, engineering, telecommunication, etc., that must compromise with each other in the urban and architectural environment. In pedagogical terms, the cosmopolitan reflections entail the need for a multi-disciplinarity way of education, the creation of a tapestry or a mosaic that enables diversification and manifoldness. However, this could also lead to ‘a melting pot’[22], ceasing the quality of the segments within the whole. Cosmopolitan architecture, within that circumstance, should posit itself in a place where it should be autonomous as a profession as well as non-autonomous to interact and integrate with others. The oblique architecture, deconstructivism, folding and topological surfaces, and parametricism, in general dynamic patterns, within the acknowledgment of the oblique function theory and its potentials, warp ‘social, spatial, structural and aesthetic functions into one continuum’[23] while allowing architecture to represent its autochthonous characteristics. The contemporary pedagogical ground that demands exactly this kind of framework, could grasp the oblique function’s theories and fundamental approaches augmented and developed with contemporary examples, to establish an educational platform for a cosmopolitan architect who has already been amalgamated with the vast complexities. Therefore, the paper aims to unfold the latent oblique trajectory and elucidate how it could become a didactic and pedagogical tool to educate cosmopolitan architects. Dwelling mainly on the contemporary and educational precedents like SANAA’s Rolex Learning Center (Image-3), OMA’s Jussieu Library (Image-4), Diller+Scofidio Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center (Image-5), and Zaha Hadid’s E ON Research Center that palpably use oblique principles, it evinces how the oblique concepts, strategies, and statements could respond to the problems and requirements of cosmopolitanism; which coins in the inexorable emergence of uncertainties, changes, and, indeterminacies. The paper espouses that by being flexible, open-ended, active, and unitary, the oblique provides the execution of eligible conditions for cosmopolitan architectural pedagogy, educating aware individuals with the reciprocal reification of the oblique principles, resulting in a complete embodiment of space and society. Conversely, it dissents flatness in Cartesian architecture and broaches the obstinately preserved flat condition despite the whole architectural transformation and the radical changes in contemporary life. It criticizes the validity of the mundane understanding of anthropometric precepts of the classical era where the human figure is too static for cosmopolitan architectural pedagogy. As Taylor and Zavoleas suggest, it supports the idea that ‘the topologically defined surface bypassed geometric fixity and aesthetic determinism and incited a responsive attitude that formed a connecting system between edifice, dweller, and environment’[24], believing that it is critically essential.

From our review of the evolution of existing pedagogies in architecture (shown in figure 1), we propose a new model of performance and collaboration. We introduced the Critical Practices Laboratory model, in Spring 2020 in our architecture school’s curriculum for students in their last three semesters of the Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch) and the last two semesters of the Master of Architecture (M.Arch) programs. The CPL is conceived as a methodology that is applicable to different projects and partnerships. Currently, we conduct this curriculum in partnership with the NGO Pipeline Worldwide and its national and international collaborators to work on projects in the Refugee Settlement of Moyo, Uganda. To develop more cosmopolitan notions of citizenship in the spectrum of architectural practice, we look between the definition, history, and different approaches to pedagogy in architecture. Our goal is to minimize the hierarchical difference between teacher and student and focus on the ability of architectural education to respond to the social missions of architecture at a time of great social, climatic and urbanistic challenges, creating conditions for students and educators to engage as active citizens in their communities.  Pedagogy can be understood as a set of techniques, principles, methods and strategies of education and teaching (Soares & Severino, 2018), which aim to understand education, related to the administration of schools and the conduct of educational affairs in a given context. Pedagogy in the teaching and practice of architecture is complex and must awaken the student’s subjectivity of thought. In addition to technical knowledge, students must learn a variety of social skills, knowledge of design aids and ethical issues that arise in the design process. Students must recognize the importance of sustainability and creation for future generations (Jindal, 2016). Most importantly, in a global world, students must recognize the lens through which they approach design and make a conscious effort to design for culture and place, wherever the project is based. Existing pedagogical approaches As our approach to pedagogy is focused around reducing hierarchies between teachers and students, we derive inspiration from two Western authors who have dedicated much of their lives to the study and practice of pedagogical methods that have moved away from the traditional “top-down” model in the transfer of knowledge to students. They are, the American, John Dewey, and the Brazilian, Paulo Freire. John Dewey, in his pedagogical theory, argues contents taught in the classroom are assimilated more easily when they are associated with tasks performed by the students. For him, the union of theory and practice is necessary, and he values the capacity of thinking, and stimulating the adult student to think, especially in collective discussions, when knowledge flows more easily and is thus built (Mendonça & Adaid, 2018). In Paulo Freire’s pedagogical process, education is a political act that seeks to liberate individuals through the critical perception of reality. For him, there is no neutral learning: either education is an instrument that facilitates the integration of people in conformity with the current logic of the system, or it is a means for people to deal critically with reality, discovering themselves capable of participating in the transformation of their world (Martino,  2021). By elaborating this representation, students perform an operation of distancing themselves from the cognizable object. In this way, teacher and students can jointly reflect critically on the objects that mediate them (Neto, 2007). Architecture curriculum is often described as the tripartite relationship of history/theory, design, and technology. Architectural pedagogy must transition from outdated and conventional methodologies to contemporary ones. To do this, it is necessary to understand the design process and develop effective ways to bridge the gap between the technical and non-technical parts of the architecture curriculum. Another essential function of teaching is to stimulate the student’s imagination and capacity for observation. It is important to engage the student to think of design through action, reaction, and interaction. To teach architecture also includes questioning pedagogical conventions and challenge the political status quo (Colomina et al. 2015). The diversity of pedagogical experiments was a crucial aspect of radical experiments in architectural education. These are connected as a web of shared concerns across ideologies and geographies. Rather than individuals creating radical schools or the genius figure instigating change, radical pedagogies are necessary formations of a larger political process sustained as a web of movements, a layering of short-lived, temporary manifestations (Colomina et al. 2015). Performance and collaboration in architecture pedagogy and practice Our Critical Practices Laboratory (CPL) has three overarching research and pedagogical goals: 1. Train students in a diverse set of research methodologies and a process to translate evidence into actionable design that has the potential to improve outcomes in health and equitable resource access. 2. Foster individual student inquiry across a complex social, built, and ecological situation toward a rich variety of capstone projects that respond directly to community need and have the potential to positively impact inhabitants of East Africa (specifically Moyo, Uganda and Nairobi, Kenya). This goal and the breadth and depth of faculty researchers that will guide this curriculum promise a process by which students have multiple paths to a capstone project. 3. Collaborate on multidisciplinary research and design through a critical practice approach.  Within the region of the West Nile of Uganda, the planning efforts for Moyo require attention to ecological and socio-cultural conditions to inform appropriate strategies for resource access and improvements to the living and working conditions of the population. Our expertise is required for research and design efforts that will link the physical, environmental, and cultural contexts across a regional scale to local settlement, infrastructure, buildings, and materials. The CPL methodology is based on the following tenets: 1. Projects are grounded in reality and undertaken with the intention that they will be constructed and utilized. Real world conditions whether physical, environmental, cultural, financial, human etc. serve as necessary constraints with which the designer must engage in objective dialectic negotiation. 2. Performance and Research are central dimensions utilized in framing design as the formulation of a hypothesis, to be verified or refuted; driving both the impact of the immediate project and the generation of knowledge that will impact future projects. 3. A comprehensive project delivery process is implemented for projects, from predesign to post-occupancy evaluation, conceived on the premise that performance based architectural design can be optimized through the many dimensions of comprehensive project delivery. 4. Collaboration is to be critically employed, where it is understood to be the construction of consensus through individual contributions. 5. A multi-dimensional and integrated model of projects will be utilized. Technical realms of structures, materials and environmental performance are fully integrated with social, cultural, aesthetic, and experiential performance criteria. 6. Creativity is key to successful design. Deliberate and spontaneous creativity is to be rigorously explored and employed. 7. Educere, the root of education, means to draw out. The spirit of the Critical Practice Laboratory is to eschew indoctrination and to appeal to the curiosity, interest, and motivation of the individual student, the collective and their role in furthering the definition of Critical Practice. 8. The curricular network aspires to optimize the relationship between the research electives and the design courses by using the research electives to teach students research methodologies and specific techniques that are applied to actual projects in the design courses. Our paper will describe how the CPL prepares students to work to initiate and complete research and design projects collaboratively; to answer architecture’s mandate for health and equity; and to contribute to evolving visions of human settlement in an international context. Further, we will discuss how our pedagogical goals and learning outcomes were met by the first group of students that moved through the CPL, how we learned from their feedback and experiences, and revised the curriculum for the next group. For example, we found that architecture undergraduate and graduate students found it challenging to apply research methodologies to real-world design projects. To address this, we designed a set of collaborative performance exercises in which students studied existing spaces on campus with mixed methods, conducted post-occupancy evaluations, and proposed design solutions. We gave agency to students so they could directly stay in contact and work with internal and external project stakeholders, develop performance criteria for projects, synthesize health and wellbeing research, address social and cultural issues, organize criteria for digital simulations for environmental performance, and set graphics standards for presentations, exhibitions, and reports. This encouraged them to be more active, engaged, and to collaborate with each other throughout the design process. Importantly, this also reduced the hierarchy between instructor and students.

How can architectural education prompt and support students to embrace architecture as a transformative process towards shared understandings and a call for shared actions? Transformative pedagogy has been defined as “a learning process that seeks to contextualise contemporary issues as active learning instruments for pro-active response” (Salama 2015, 310).  In this paper, the authors will present three trajectories for promoting transformative pedagogy that comprise a non-self-referential approach to architectural education: Othering, Complementing, and De-gendering. The authors describe each trajectory in relation to course offerings and learning experiences at the School of Architecture and Community Development, University of Detroit Mercy, and illustrate the transformative pedagogical theories and practices that inform and support an educational model and transdisciplinary content that is built outside-in versus inside-out. We conclude that adopting this transformative pedagogical framework can support a radical shift in architectural education that historically has prioritized disciplinary knowledge and skills rather than responsiveness to others, communities, and societies. Othering The first trajectory involves engaged learning, such as critically engaged civic learning (Vincent et al. 2021) or critical service-learning (Mitchell 2008), to examine one’s relationship with others in architectural education. Othering is “a process of figuring out how one differs from and how one is similar to another that ultimately yields understanding and respect of self and other” (Martin and Casault 2005, 3). Post-structuralist approaches to service-learning are founded on the recognition of service-learning as a tool that exposes and questions borders and definitions to better understand teaching, learning, self, and otherness (Butin 2003). The foundations of this trajectory include the questioning of the classroom as a confined space, the prioritizing of projects and activities bridging the classroom and the community; the promotion of reflection within the context of critical service learning as a central pedagogical tool that allows for the questioning of roles beyond the teaching and learning dichotomy; the strategic frontloading of dialogues in/outside of the classroom on issues of disparity, systemic injustice, structural disadvantages in education, dwelling, and urban life; and the creation of a safe space for students to share preconceived ideas, prejudices, and fears towards self-awareness and personal growth. In this paper, the authors will discuss Othering through takeaways from our decades-long experience in teaching and research that has led to an understanding of new conceptualizations of self, self+others, and self+society as learning outcomes of engaged learning. Complementing The second trajectory focuses on the importance of surpassing competitive approaches to architectural education toward collaborative modes of learning. Complementing can be thought of as a strategy that recognizes individual strengths, multiple intelligences, and diverse perspectives. Collaboration and co-creation (co-production) has been at the center of the discourse on teaching and learning for several decades, including more recently collaboration across in-person, hybrid, and virtual modes of instruction (e.g. Rodriguez et al. 2016). Collaborative skills are recognized as not only central to pedagogy but also are considered desirable at the professional level. The authors claim that a further step in the direction of embracing learning as social endeavor is the more strategic building upon opportunities that lay in diversity. How can the curriculum support and exploit individual differences rather than promote homogeneity? The question of thresholds, and sets of minimum outcomes met, informs conversations regarding accreditation and assessment. How can those conversations be more compatible with the recognition of human individual richness?  In this paper, the authors advocate for increased nimbleness in exploring multiple modes of collaboration in conjunction with multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches as a tool for creating a learning environment capable of hosting and nurturing individual differences as well as supporting communities, groups, and subgroups. De-Gendering The third trajectory includes an earnest critique of established theory and praxes of education and design through the acknowledgement of gendered perspectives in the discipline. De-gendering involves ongoing discussions of underrepresentation of non-men in both academia and professional leadership, as well as examining a deeper and structural conundrum that stems from the origin of the discipline and its tools. How can the long-standing prioritization of formal, spatial, and phenomenological approaches in architectural education over experiential, intersubjective, contextual, and socio-cultural understandings of architectural and urban spaces be understood and measured in light of exclusionary male-dominated places and traditions of education, research, and practices? Decolonizing and depatriarchalizing approaches to design and research begin with the uncovering of underlining beliefs, motivations, and values that drive the discipline’s scopes, boundaries, methods, and tools (Smith 2012; Wilson 2008). We argue that gendered differences in approaches to space, movement, and behavior (Rendell et al. 2002) and the homogeneous male-dominated power and authority in academia and the profession have favored an emphasis on tools centered around abstract, fixed, and objective representations of architectural and urban environments, de facto devaluing lived experiences, their narratives, diversity, and multiplicity. In this paper, the authors will broadly illustrate various examples of gendered approaches in the academic setting and will more specifically discuss the relationship between masculine versus feminine/other conceptualizations of space and its representation. Conclusions To holistically embrace the human, social, psychological, and emotional aspects of transformative pedagogies as a central aspect of the architectural curriculum requires prioritizing education of the whole person, as well as recognizing the individual as a member of a community, of a society, of a nation. Aestheticizing approaches to the discipline of architecture have hindered the adoption of more encompassing multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches to architectural education that acknowledge pressing social issues and the envisioning of complex solutions, referred to as exogenous interdisciplinarity because issues originate in the community rather than the academy (Klein 2012).Transformative pedagogies thus require re-examining course offerings founded on the formal, spatial, and phenomenological aspects of architecture from a dominant white male individual perspective and re-centering the discussion on the socio-cultural, socio-economic, socio-environmental, socio-behavioral aspects of architecture (Pulver et al. 2018). Recently, the National Architecture Accreditation Board (NAAB 2020) has revised a traditional approach to the assessment of architectural learning outcomes at the national level to include more qualitative and more holistic evaluations of curricula. Inclusion of Shared Values of the Discipline and Profession, such as Lifelong Learning, Leadership, Collaboration, and Community Engagement, and Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, suggests that accreditation can become an important external force to spur more transformative approaches to architectural education; however, it is imperative that schools promote an internal discussion around the philosophical and ethical underpinnings that inform and sustain the curriculum and the teaching methods. In addition to evaluating what is being taught at the curricular level, a reassessing of what is most valued is necessary: How do mission, vision, and identity align with pressing needs and issues? In particular, questions to be asked include questions related to skills, experiences, voices, or knowledge intentionally or inadvertently undervalued, ignored, and moved to peripheral areas of the curriculum. Although such considerations are too often delegated to university-level services and programs, transformative pedagogies in architectural education can promote a process of examining discrepancies or gaps between what is valued and what is evaluated. The transformative pedagogies discussed in this paper are not exclusionary, but rather coexist, complement, and reinforce each other. Engaged learning provides students with the ability to question themselves and understand themselves in relation to others. Acknowledging diversity in learning and embracing complementary skills and interests together with multi-inter-transdisciplinary perspectives promotes openness and inclusiveness in architectural education. Understanding how gender has shaped the architectural profession and education sheds light on hidden roots of traditional approaches and allows for considerations of radical uprooting, shifting, and reframing. Together these trajectories provide grounding for the much-needed reshaping of architectural education around shared issues, social justice, and the understanding of individual and shared responsibilities, and can become a call for shared actions.

In the face of rapid change, instability, ambiguity and uncertainty, people require skill in adaptation and resiliency. These skills are applicable to the design profession and are a necessary part of being a global citizen in today’s world. An essential quality to adaptation and resiliency is failure fluency, a phrase that builds out from the concept or phenomenon of successful failure. For the authors, an interest in the phrases “successful failure” and “failure fluency” build from narrative and grounded theory research into the experience of architectural and community educators. Specifically, architectural educators expect that students will be willing to explore, to fail, and to try again (Barker, 2020). This expectation for a willingness and ability to fail—rooted in aspects of developing innovation and creativity (Brown, 2015, 2018; Kelley & Littman, 2005; Sharp & Macklin, 2019)—often remains tacit, a desired outcome expected to arise out of the design process. Explicating Failure Fluency To make failure fluency an explicit goal of design action, the concepts of successful failure and failure fluency must be understood. This paper provides a literature review on aspects of failure to develop a description for the term successful failure. Clarifying the phenomenon of the term provides the context by which the action of failure fluency can be described. The theoretical concept of failure fluency is developed from adult education theories to become a teaching methodology. From there, recommendations can be made for the implementation of both phrases into architecture curriculum. As this conference, and the interest of the authors, extends to connecting the design profession to the global community at large, including pedagogical and andragogical shifts to the education of global community members, this paper will also include recommendations beyond design education itself. Background and Process for Term Definition The phrase successful failure is found in the work of Eve Weinbaum, a community-activist and labor organizer researcher, who described the term in in her doctoral research (1997) and in the book To Move a Mountain: Fighting the Global Economy in Appalachia (2004). Weinbaum’s use of the term seeks to reposition the connotation of failure as it relates to political/economic activism: even though organizers’ original goals were not accomplished, personal development still occurred. Weinbaum found that participating community members gained confidence in their activism, developed their sense of self, felt empowered, and developed critical awareness and understanding of becoming an agent for change. This fostered professional growth, sustaining platforms for future political and economic activism, which further secured community membership. Ultimately, this led to a sense of something having been accomplished and a feeling of the ability to do more, shifting from hopelessness to hope and an ability to see possibility for change in the future (of which the participants’ themselves could mobilize). Weinbaum’s use of successful failure indicates a link to self-actualization and the development of critical consciousness, concepts in liberatory pedagogy and democratic education as defined by Paulo Freire (1970/2000, 1998), Myles Horton (1990, 1997), and bell hooks (1994, 2003). It also links to transformative education (Mezirow, 1990), and through other adult education theories, aspects of human development and the role of post-secondary, higher, and community education to assist people in their own development (Lindeman, 1926/1961; Chickering, 1981; Palmer, 1998). Personal development, in the form of critical consciousness, is what leads people to becoming better members within their local and global environments (Freire, 1998; Brookfield, 2005, 2012). Failure Fluency and the Design Process Because architectural education, as a regulated professional education in most countries, is facilitated within post-secondary or higher education institutions, adult education theories should be considered for their ability to guide, reinforce, and sustain design education. There are, however, unique considerations to design education that must be considered to ground the phenomena of successful failure in architectural pedagogy. This leads to the development of the concept of failure fluency, resiliency in failure where failure is seen as a natural part of the process of innovation and creation. This idea is expressed in business and organizational research, where innovation is understood and celebrated as a necessary aspect of the discipline (Kelley & Littman, 2005). One helpful resource for the concept and practice of resiliency and failure is the text Iterate (Sharp & Macklin, 2019). The authors, both game designers, clearly describe and demonstrate the iterative process of creation as it is generated through successive failures. They provide thick descriptions for the process, and name portions of the process, indicating a workable definition for the execution and understanding of failure nuanced to the process of design itself. Together, these resources provide robust explanations to build out the concepts for successful failure and failure fluency. Additionally, they provide a map for outlining recommendations for the incorporation of failure fluency into architectural education. Broadening the Scope: Primary Education to Community Education Advancing students’ participation in global citizenship should also consider pedagogical shifts that have occurred in primary and secondary education, specifically the aspect of fixed versus growth mindset (Kennedy-Moore, 2014). Growth mindset holds that one’s beliefs and abilities can be cultivated, and that intelligence is not fixed, such that one can and will grow through concerted effort and openness to the process of learning (Dweck, 2006/2016). Actualizing a growth mindset reconceptualizes the definition of failure, seeing it as an opportunity to develop. Early learners who engage teaching and learning under the growth mindset will be better prepared to practice failure fluency because they will expect it as part of the learning environment. Architecture, as a profession, requires continuing education. Life-long learning, a hallmark of adult and community education, professes the importance of continuing education as a co-learning process that is a necessary and important characteristic of adulthood. Community education also promotes critical assessment of adult development with a focus on self-defined growth. That is, it drives from what is important to the individual in their environment, to help them define and improve their individual lives, the lives of those in their community, and their local environments. In a globalized world, local environment changes have impact on global scales. For global paradigm shifts to occur in the field of architecture, participants in the creation of the built environment must share the resiliency skills evidenced across various levels and types of education. Key to this is developing skills in failure fluency.

While design education and practice are increasingly specialized, even hyperspecialized,[1] synchronous with technological advancements and robust building systems, contemporary wicked problems of climate change, social inequities, and land use development practices require additional designers who work between disciplines to develop emergent fields of study and collaborative processes. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary design are critical in undergraduate education and professional practice as they promote diverse typological responses, rather than advocating for physical and nonphysical artifacts nested within traditional disciplinary boundaries. This integrated approach to design responds to complexity through the development of new theoretical frameworks and diversity of perspectives informing the design process. Additionally, if beginning design education can inform future practitioners the values integral to various architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries, graduates are better prepared for the requisite collaboration of professional practice. As such, new professionals no longer greet one another as strangers at the commencement of their careers, rather, they begin work as partners and co-advocates. Contemporary design work requires specialization; however, in the wake of hyperspecialization, design pedagogy should additionally promote problem solvers between siloed industries and those working to develop emergent theoretical frameworks. This paper explores interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary design education and practice through interrogating existing design pedagogies, exploring a series of university case studies, interviews with design practitioners, and investigation of a specific university’s undergraduate program where integrated design methods are being explored, tested, and refined. Since the Bauhaus, examples have emerged of early education intentionally “un-siloing” design fields and integrating traditional disciplines.[2] Elusive, however, are present design pedagogies conceptualizing that future specialization is optional. Many programs initially organize design studios generally, and later require students to select a specific design field such as urban design, landscape architecture, architecture, industrial design, graphic design, and so on. While this form of design education is critical, it should not be the sole framework as it limits future AEC professionals to collaboratively problem solve for appropriate solutions. This model compels team members to advocate for their disciplinary and contractual scope of work, which may not produce the most appropriate solution for end-users and environmental conditions.[3] In an AIA report researchers found that collaborative, integrated project delivery (IPD) methods promote sustainable results and allow for increasingly aggressive goals as team members are incentivized to increase overall project success.[4] While this approach starts to be evident in professional practice at firms like Heatherwick Studio, COBE, Weiss/Manfredi, James Corner Field Operations, and Bjarke Ingels Group, to name a few, it has yet to inform undergraduate education. Less evident, still, are renown design firms radically integrating within their studios other disciplines in the AEC industry such as real estate development, construction, and engineering – some of which have heightened agency in the construction of our cities and landscapes. Germane to contemporary design challenges focused on collaborative responses to real world complexities, an interdisciplinary undergraduate design degree that does not suppose students later specify an area of study is essential. Likewise, design degrees inclusive of other AEC professionals have roots in history. Regarding contemporary challenges this framework for education and practice has never been more critical. This undergraduate design degree focuses on foundation design education born out of the Bauhaus Basic Course and reconceptualized based on modern technologies, twenty-first century design disciplines, and the inclusion of other AEC professionals. The program is nested within various design, construction, and real estate development programs and intentionally integrates students and faculty from these fields to teach an interdisciplinary, rigorous design degree. This collaboration teaches design process to other fields involved in the construction of our buildings and landscapes, informs future practitioners of shared values and competing goals that can, if allowed, advance projects, and fosters the creation of emergent fields of study and theoretical frameworks that can be outcomes of close, interdisciplinary collaboration. This interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary educational shift more acutely aligns with the demands of professional practice aimed at highly collaborative processes and divergent typological responses to stubborn problems. As the École des Ponts (circa 1749) sought to teach engineers to think like architects, undergraduate design education should continue to provide opportunity for traditional non-design fields to consider complexity through iteration, divergent thinking, systems thinking, and at various scales.[5] Here, Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” is reconsidered in design education for collaborative creation by the plural, rather than the singular, and for the critical analysis of systems interdependence as we provide society with long-term resilient options.

This paper focuses on the increased application of game design to complex issues of environmental stewardship, infrastructural policy, and resource management in architectural pedagogy. Educators who introduce game design to architectural frameworks experiment with new ways to work on the built environment that model collaboration and process rather than fixate on top-down, prescriptive approaches to solution-making. Borrowing Mary Flanagan’s term of critical play1, game design within architectural education nurtures the development of ETHICAL PROFESSIONALS who acknowledge and appreciate the ecology of forces influencing the built environment as relational, fluid, and mutable. Gameplay within architectural pedagogy also supports the development of CO-CREATIVE PARTNERS who expand the agency of architecture beyond the conventions of the discipline to an expanded understanding of environmental agency that interfaces with multiple stakeholders. The application of gameplay to architectural projects on the environment move the discourse away from singular, didactic models of design and towards rhizomatic, systematic, and cooperative frameworks that simultaneously empower and establish the dependency of architects on other agents of change. The intersection of game design and architectural education has expanded in relevance given the history of games as both a social technology and medium of representation. This paper works through the role of games as a unique medium that both inscribes cultural positions and disseminates agency through player engagement. Leaning heavily on the work of C. Thi Nguyen on theorizing games as an artform of agency, the paper will trace how games act as a social technology that “are a method for inscribing forms of agency into artifactual vessels: for recording them, preserving them, and passing them around.2 This transference or modeling of agency resonates with architectural theories on active forms and the concepts of fluidity within a designer’s sense of agency. Keller Easterling describes this modality of active form as “forms that do not fix position, but rather release agency or get things moving…The form is a change and the means to make a change.  It is a theater of operations and actions – an explicit set of interdependencies that set up new potentials within the organization. 3 As designers confront complex, multi-scalar issues of climate change and environmental ethics, games and their active forms allow both designer and player to strategize and through interplay that resist fixed states of being, focusing more importantly on lever of change and temporary / incremental units of change. The applicability of game design to architectural thinking is reinforced through mutual interests in representation as a disciplinary inquiry. For example, “Ian Bogost argues for the value of games by showing that games can be a form of rhetoric, making arguments via their ability to simulate the world [whereas] John Sharp reserves his highest praise for those games that move beyond the “hermetically sealed” experiences of merely solving the game, and instead represent and comment on the world. 4 On a basic level, gameplay lends to architectural design territorial, behavioral, and causal relationships that are otherwise overlooked or overgeneralized. On a more sophisticated level, game design allows architects to practice world-building through a critical lens. Referencing Mary Flanagan once more, “critical play is built on the premise that, as with other media, games carry beliefs within their representation systems and mechanics. Artists using game as a medium of expression, then, manipulate elements common to games – representation systems and styles, rules of progress, codes of conduct, context of reception, winning and losing paradigms, ways of interacting in a game – for they are the material properties of games, much like marble and chisel or pen and ink bring with them their own intended possibilities, limitations, and conventions.”5 Teaching architecture through questions of possibility and limitations becomes clarified when game mechanics are instrumentalized to this effect. While the territory of architectural practice can seem overwhelming and difficult to orient, games offer designers “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices.” Artist-created board games use this theory to its fullest, providing table-based mini laboratories for the examination of choice, chance, and social interaction.”6 The affinity between game design and architecture is rooted in shared impulses to ground or orient oneself. As such, this paper is particularly interested in the development of board games as a teaching tool the architectural studio. If agentic fluidity is an affordance of architectural game strategy, then the desire to establish common territory or grounding provides the space required to practice these forms of agency. As such, the history of games as territorial anchors demonstrates what Bruno Latour describes as a need to land somewhere. “To resist this loss of a common orientation, we shall have to come down to earth; we shall have to land somewhere.  So, we shall have to learn how to get our bearings, how to orient ourselves.  And to do this we need something like a map of the positions imposed by the new landscape within which not only the affects of public life but also its stakes are being redefined.” 7 For educators experimenting with board games in architectural pedagogy, Bruno Latour’s map manifests through speculations on the game boards, rules of engagement, metrics for progress, but also aesthetic experiences and desires. As architecture becomes ever more entangled in social political, environmental issues, it is easy for the opportunities of engagement to become obscured by the sheer scale of the challenges at hand. Games are affective in cutting through this stagnation because “game[s] must limit the range of stimuli players need to take in. Play fields or boards establish what space and what relevant objects will be involved. “Within this limited spatio-temporal unit the player can abandon himself to the process, acting without self-consciousness. 8 In other words, there is a productive irony at work between the clearly defined parameters of the board game and its ability to address the nebulous, all-encompassing nature of social/political/environmental issues. To illustrate how board games serve as a paradigm for working on the environment, the paper will establish a lineage between traditional games such as mancala and chess to new environmental games designed by contemporary artists and architects. The paper will look at works by Lauren Ball, Jannette Kim, Gabriel Kaprielian, StudioAPT, BairBalliet, and Debbie Chen to name a few. These examples of architectural educators working through board game design embodies the investment in supporting “third spaces” in architectural education. Flanagan describes this tertiary territory as “the site for play and struggle [where] players may eschew binary oppositions and allow for the possibility of a subject to be simultaneously in several spatialities.” 9 Simply put, board game design avoids the limitations of didactic communication and instead produce territories for architecture students to negotiate real-world concepts, issues, and ideas. “Games engineer subjectivity because they create, or rather they are, both affective and relational systems, both for the designer and for the player. Critical play is not about making experts, but about designing spaces where diverse minds feel comfortable enough to take part in the discovery of solutions.” 10  This privileging of discovery, collaboration and indeterminacy over expertise and prior knowledge eschews the importance of process and interconnectedness that is essential to the fostering of ethical professionals and co-creative partners.

Design as a synthesis of multiple parameters is nothing new, but how do we move forwards to integrate our real complexities into our design equations in more critical, productive directions? The premise of the author is that to begin to address our common issues of global concern we need to critique our predominant pedagogies and epistemologies into new glocalized[1] realities to enable more diverse, resilient designs and methodologies. Embodied carbon in building materials and construction makes up 20% of annual CO2 emissions[2]. This implies that on a basic level architecture needs to be informed by the materials and material assemblies from which it is made, as it has been complicit in the current environmental crisis. Currently most of our methods of evaluating architecture’s performance are too simplistic and do not factor in the necessary dynamic externalities to have real impacts, e.g. true costs, ecological justice, climate adaptability and issues of labor equity. This paper disseminates an upper-level capstone design studio devoted to this inquiry. Students work was initially directed with readings and precedents, to jump start an understanding of how material matters: understanding that the process of extraction, production, fabrication, maintenance and demolition have impacts and are connected to our environment, culture and life forms. This helped students understand the connection of architecture to key wicked problems and contemporary issues of concern. Apart from understanding that our current evaluation metrics are often inconclusive, not incorporating as many externalities as they should, students also began to understand how inter-connected all the issues are. It is important to not be technically reductive, so there included readings beyond science and techno-performativity, for example, they also read philosophy to enable them to start having a personal ethics and qualitative attitude towards the issues beyond the purely quantitative and to start understanding the benefit of not separating the two. The assumption was made that to be more sustainable in a globalized world, generally the maximization of local resources is a positive. So, the next step for students was to select a local region and material for their future research project. The region provided a context and focus for the physical and human aspects of the research and was explored through text, various forms of graphic and parametric analysis and physical models and tests. At this point students were also given lectures and seminars by two colleagues with expertise beyond the instructor, these were in the area of geography and material science, to help students move beyond their fairly traditional architectural education up to this point, which generally had focused on a building scale solely. It is imperative for architecture students to work across multiple scales simultaneously, beyond this typical building scale, as in this way only can they understand the connections and impacts between them. Generally design at the regional or urban scale does not get into any level of detail at the building scale, let alone at the material one, and vice versa. This silo-ing of scales has been detrimental to our environment on multiple levels. These scales are inter-connected, but not the same, akin to complexity theory, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, e.g. individual trees are not the same as a forest, so their study is important. The specific larger region contained a variety of materials and biomes that students could pick from, with three eco-regions of plateaus, highlands and basin and range. Students had the option of working in more rural and/or urban conditions, understanding that these too are related and that the dichotomy of human built verses more wilderness areas has blurred with the Anthropocene. Initially these studies required an in depth looking at what was really there, not what should be there, understanding the ecosystem that it is part of. Anthropocene and posthuman layers were encouraged, understanding that much of what is needed in our design toolbox today is the ability to uncover, and connect in more circular and dynamic ways, the forces around us more clearly, including ones that relate to different time scales, labor, changing bioclimatic forces and more seemingly invisible phenomena. Specific related ecologies and their connection to every increasing climate-change natural disasters e.g. droughts and wildfires were also made. Architecture was understood “as a material organization that regulates and brings order to energy flows, and simultaneously and inseparably as an energetic organization that stabilizes and maintains material forms.”[3] Students were encouraged to identify the potentials of a given region and material at a variety of site and material scales (global, regional, district) through a process of mapping over time, precedent research, material properties (including micro scales) and physical explorations. One of the key goals of this phase was to determine a regionally sourced building material to be studied for its tectonic and energetic potentials in subsequent phases of the project. To understand the specific material  and it’s energy flows, work needed to grounded in physical reality and testing. Beyond tests, students were encouraged to focus on four conceptual areas to tie together their transcalar material studies. These were: Energetic and Material, the potential to engage the patterns and flows of energetic and material qualities at various scales in order to promote a regenerative environment (some of these are more obvious and visible than others). Secondly, Social and Economic:, the potential to create settings that foster human interaction and agreement through the design of processes that connect social activity to sustainable and equitable cultural, ecological and economic conditions. Thirdly, Tectonic:  the potential to engage the tectonic history of a place by designing a project that engages in the material conditions and everyday life through a specific mode of construction and materiality, and finally Infrastructure:  the potential to enhance the life of a settlement (its human and non-human inhabitants) through a systemic understanding of its built environment, public open space, transportation and naturally occurring systems. Later, students zoomed in to a specific locale within their selected region, to develop a deeper understanding of the social, cultural, economic, and environmental context for their proposals. They also continued to develop their material trajectory in particular through a more in depth life cycle analysis and focus on material assembly rather than just a material properties, often searching out further consultants in the wider University. Understanding how the parts relate to the whole e.g., if you are looking at a unitized system, how do the units relate to each other and what forces are they responding to? Encouraging form finding based on specific, articulated parameters, related to their earlier research. It was not just analog or parametric thinking/making, but also emergent speculation, based on real knowledge that impacted and connected to larger scales over time. Sometimes reversing the normative became a way of opening up possibilities: “I call it a (Semperian) reversal, but that is a reversal of the order of the four elements, where the tectonic precedes the textile, I want the textile to become tectonic itself. In that case the soft elements become rigid through collaboration, by teaming up, by weaving, bundling, interlacing, braiding, knitting or knotting and through that convolution the whole becomes strong and rigid.”[4] The focus was not just future about new materials and synthetic biology, but re-looking at our existing context and construction materials which may have been overlooked during globalized industrialization and colonialization due to the specific ethics of those cultural sensibilities. Chosen materials ranged from living materials to various fibers, masonry and other biogenic materials e.g. various local wood species. Many of these required a re-looking at our past construction trajectories which generally have recently favored homogeneity in our built environment, due to various economic and industrial drivers. It was not just about uncovering past indigenism, but looking forwards in new ways with our environment and new technologies as partners. Student’s final projects emerged out of these individual meditations and research on material, context and culture, with the goal of creating more critical, sustainable futures. This pedagogical model flipped the traditional role of architects  and students, who are typically given a program and site from clients or their professors. Instead this gave them more agency to research potential project directions, site locales and materials. Their speculations had multiscalar implications from the micro, to buildings, urbanism and the region, and gave agency to the patterns and flows of the energetic and material qualities in productive and sensitive ways. These projects begin to question the societal role of architects and their pedagogical methods, the specificity of place in a globalized world and the future role of the architect in that space.

The architecture and construction industries, which are notoriously slow to change, are having to adapt to new climate realities very quickly. The growing mandate to reduce, and be accountable for, the greenhouse gas emissions across the life cycles of a building and its component parts is having diverse effects on material choices and building technologies. From pepper-hull wall panels and carbon-eating cement blocks to vast infrastructures designed to draw down and store atmospheric carbon–the “solutions” are varied and their emergence often occurs outside the architect’s domain. Many layers of scientific, cultural, regulatory, and market-driven forces are driving the production and selection of climate mitigation strategies, even those that operate at the scale of a building.  Within this distributed network of stakeholders working toward a decarbonized built environment, what role should architects play? Does design practice, as we know today, need to develop new tools for moving the needle on architecture’s climate impacts? This paper will discuss the pedagogy of an experimental graduate seminar called Out of Practice. This course adapts methods from evidence-based entrepreneurship (EBE) to help students learn ways to leverage their design expertise beyond traditional architectural practice. Recent iterations of this course have applied these methods to understanding emerging decarbonization efforts in the building design and construction industry, situated within the wider context of contemporary climate science, climate policy, and material culture. Following a brief description of EBE tools, the paper will argue for the benefits of applying them as a research methodology within an architecture curriculum. Finally, the paper will provide an example student project that positions evidence from their research as support for a speculative proposal for an integrated building technology.  Methodology: Evidence-based entrepreneurship (EBE), also known as the lean start-up methodology, is a systematic approach to business development that emphasizes learning at the early stages.  Popularized by Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, this methodology has gained a following among tech industry executives and aspiring entrepreneurs.  A central principle of this approach is for the entrepreneur/inventor to “get out of the building,” or seek input from people who represent the end-user of the proposed business or innovation early in the process. The idea is not to pitch the innovation but to listen to people’s experiences within the specific domain that the entrepreneur/inventor hopes to enter. This process of “getting out of the building” and “talking to people” is referred to as Customer Discovery, an early step in learning and validating the core assumptions behind a business idea before heavy investment is made. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has adopted the EBE methodology in its Innovation Corps (ICorps) program, which annually runs several cohorts, each comprising about 24 academic teams seeking to commercialize their technology or innovation. Similar to its application in the private sector, the NSF trains researchers in this approach to learn early on what problems their innovation might solve in the “real world.” The intensive seven-week course introduces academic researchers to EBE tools with a focus on Customer Discovery, encouraging them to get “out of the lab” in order to talk with people whose experiences can provide insights into the field their research is aimed to impact. As a participant in regional and national cohorts, one of the authors and the leader of this course conducted over 150 interviews with professionals across the building design, construction, and product manufacturing industries. While the explicit purpose of this process was to identify a market fit the author’s academic research, the experience led to transformative insights on design practice and its embeddedness within larger business ecosystems—a side of building production not typically represented in students’ coursework. Given the primary emphasis is on learning, this methodical approach to gathering information from professionals in the field has potential as a tool for students to gain insights from real-world scenarios. Out of Practice combines a research seminar format with tools adapted from evidence-based entrepreneurship (EBE) to explore ways architecture can contribute to industry change. Through customer discovery style interviews, students learn from designers, builders, manufacturers and other industry stakeholders about their specific arenas of lower carbon building technologies. This on-the-ground knowledge is particularly important when it comes to decarbonization, since knowledge and implementation is rapidly changing. Business development tools such as EBE and Customer Discovery were developed for entrepreneurs, who by definition take on financial risk in search of high profit margins. However, placing these methods in the context of an architecture course enabled students to consider other forms of risk and gain: environmental, social, aesthetic. Pedagogy: Over the first few weeks, readings and lectures established a broader planetary context (carbon cycles, climate science, governance) and emerging strategies for low-carbon and carbon-neutral building (mass timber, other bio-based materials, circularity). A series of “Decarbonization Talks” by guest experts provided a window into current work at the leading edge of low-carbon building technologies and materials. Stephanie Carlisle (Carbon Leadership Forum), Michael Green (Michael Green Architects), and Anton Maertens (BC Materials). Students produced a “Carbon Primer” for key terms and concepts to demystify the confusing language around climate science and carbon reduction strategies. This shared visual and text-based document served as an open resource for the class and the basis for exploring how these terms are entering the building industry.  Next, students worked in groups to conduct research on specific products representing distinct approaches to materials, assemblies and project delivery. Using EBE style interview techniques, students talked to people who have specified, used, or designed those products in order to understand values, decision factors, and problem areas. By mapping the industry “ecosystems” around each product, encompassing supply chains, regulatory influences, and market forces, students gained a business-informed perspective on the various decisions and transactions that accrue into a built reality.  Finally, students proposed entrepreneurial practices to address a need or opportunity they discovered in their research. At a moment that requires a change in business as usual, the premise of this course is to equip students to find opportunities for design to have other, consequential roles “out of practice,” or, within an expanded realm of architectural production. Example Project: To illustrate the course pedagogy, this paper will describe one student project that leveraged EBE research methodologies toward an architecture-adjacent business proposal. The project, “Passive Direct Air Capture: Breathing Cities,” began with an analysis of Climeworks, the company that pioneered the Orca, the first large-scale Direct Air Capture (DAC) plant. Located in a remote area of Iceland near the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant and over a basalt rock deposit, the Orca plant captured about 4,000 tons of CO2 in 2021. Building on the insights from the Carbon Primer segment of the course and the company’s business claims, the students found that for Climeworks to reach its goal of removing 1% of the 33 billion tons of CO2 emitted annually, they would have to construct 82,500 Orca plants. Speaking with Climeworks executives, DAC researchers, energy experts, engineers and others, the students developed an understanding of technical limitations to DAC when understood from the perspective of the larger ecosystem, including the particularities of siting, energy requirements, financial structures, and distribution/storage of the recovered carbon.  The paper will describe the challenges of scaling up and expanding the possible locations of DAC technology and the student’s design and business proposal that addresses those challenges. By taking the current filter technology and applying it within the urban context, the project tests the potential of using high-speed passive wind flow created both in skyscraper blow throughs and at the top of tall buildings to funnel the wind loads into these DAC filters. Replacing an active fan system with passive air flow not only reduces cost, but also CO2emissions added back into the atmosphere from the operational energy sourced from fossil fuels. In addition to their technical analysis, the paper will use insights from the students’ interviews to argue for the cultural significance of moving DAC technology from centralized plants in remote locations to select buildings in urban areas where 70% of greenhouse gasses are produced. Retrofitting existing towers or designing new towers with DAC “hats’ and “hoods” would change the visual landscape of cities, contributing to a culture of sustainability and a greater awareness of climate change mitigation. A cityscape retrofitted to breathe in CO2through this dispersed, passive approach to DAC how people can relate to it. Conclusion: Out of Practice is not a “how-to” guide for reversing the course of climate change by design. What this course attempts to do is empower students with tools for locating, engaging, and learning from active sites of knowledge production out there “in the field.” By forming a clearer picture of the complex and ever-changing web of information, practices, policies, businesses, and technologies that constitute an expanded “field,” students in the course emerge better equipped to formulate good questions, build evidence, challenge the status quo, and imagine new design-informed practices that can contribute to decarbonizing architecture.

“The choice between ethical and aesthetic is not between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil” (MacIntyre in Hagan, Taking Shape, 1996, p. 40) “An object seen in isolation from the whole is not the real thing” Masanobu Fukuoka, Japanese farmer who developed a revolutionary method of sustainable agriculture, from The One-Straw Revolution: An introduction to Natural Farming, Emmaus, Pennsylvania: Rodale Press, 1978) For the past eight years, we have been collaboratively teaching an undergraduate senior studio which was initially conceived through a Mellon Bridging Grant to bridge between the pre-professional 4-year program in architecture at a large public university and a liberal arts undergraduate major in architectural studies.  Each year, as we prepare to launch our students into the profession or on to graduate school, the focus of our studio has been to provide students with the broader systems context in which we as design professional must operate – always thinking of the social and ethical responsibility that comes as the designers and architects of the built environment. We have come to see culture, broadly defined, as being central to an ethical practice, and critical to achieving sustainability and equity goals. Accepting that “culture” can be fraught when used as an instrument of chauvinism or nationalist myths of origin, we can also recognize that it is collectively what gives depth to our societies and sense of being in the world.  As spatial practices that need to be sheltered and equipped, the activities and manifestations of culture frequently occupy the same “space” as the architectural—yet in modern history, the relationship between one and the other is complex and often unresolved, in part because “culture” itself is a social construct that is not easily defined, subject to debate and ever evolving. As we have discussed in previous papers, we have gravitated towards Barbara Allen’s Performative Regionalism as a more behavior-based redirection to Kenneth Frampton’s more formally-based Critical Regionalism, which we feel helps to reconcile some of these baseline dilemmas. Over the years, by understanding that all actions, inactions and patterns of behavior occur within distinct cultural norms, we have worked to embed a research-based design practice into the studio, such that cultural understanding becomes central towards an ethical practice tackling issues of the environment and equity within a global and local context.  Since its inception, the studio has figuratively “traveled” to Japan, to Iceland, and locally on our own campus to delve deeper into these issues (particularly in light of increasing public health, logistical, environmental and financial limitations to actual travel to locales). This paper will focus on the two most recent iterations of the studio. In the fall semester of 2021, we tackled the sustainable enhancement of the food supply in Iceland through the Bee-Breeders Greenhouse Restaurant Competition.  This fall, we have been examining waste streams on our own campus as a prelude to creating a student-centered recycling/re-use hub. In both cases, we are challenging students to design not just a building but systems of use – and to understand those systems, whether they be about food and food production, or waste streams, are a by-product of the cultures in which they are produced and consumed.   Preparatory research topics have included topics such as understanding the geology and geography, social history and belief systems, flora and fauna, food and waste systems, economics, literature and media, demographics, and festivals or events of significance. We have come to feel that this broadly-based research phase helps to embed architecture within a larger framework of relationships. We acknowledge that within the confines of the studio format and schedule, the research only begins to scratch the surface of the possible—however most of our students are gratified by the breadth of what they learn even within a short timeframe, and are often surprised to find themes out of the research that subsequently drive their semester’s design work. However enlightening, we also feel that “research” as a non-design counterpoint to “design” is not in itself sufficient within the curricular intentions of our studio.  We have therefore devised and honed a sequence of exercises that in effect forcibly intertwine the embodiment of research as “information” into acts of “making” that are preludes to (but in fact part of) what might be conventionally thought of as architectural design.  These preliminary exercises have varied This paper will describe not only how the broadly-based preparatory research impacts the students’ design projects, but why and how we derived these intertwined exercises and our evaluation of their impact on the students’ design thinking and development in the studio and going forward. In some respects, many of the exercises may be no different from what many practicing architects might do as a matter of course in an exploratory design process—however, we find that most of our students through no fault of their own lack the life experience and exposure (especially in the U.S.) to examples of performatively rich spaces, and thus benefit from such closely curated exercises.  Some exercises, such as constructing a structural evocation of the noise pollution gradient on a site may be truly novel. The framework for these exercises emerges from several lacunae that we wanted to address in this culminating studio in addition to the broadening of cultural awareness: Historical/cultural awareness and sensitivity Greater awareness of climatic and other forces, seen and unseen A truly integrated approach to passive and active sustainable strategies in the design process The integration of structural intuition and knowledge into the design process While the fourth item—structural knowledge—may seem off-topic, we find that it is integrally related to the other three, and that the exercises in making segue naturally into internalized structural thinking as a key component of design.  Indeed, authors Mark Cruvellier, Bjorn Sandaker and Luben Dimcheff draw a direct connection between structure and culture in their 2017 book Model Perspectives: Structure, Architecture and Culture.  While both instructors are practicing academic architects, we have more than the average structural engineering background, which lets us dip comfortably into structural instruction, particularly from a design perspective. Finally, an important underlying goal to the studio is that we seek to rehabilitate beauty.  If anything, we see the role of beauty increasing in importance, not less—but not purely for its own sake, which can lead to charges of ignoring other issues or catering to the privileged—but a beauty that responds to and inspires the best in us.  Particularly in something like a making exercise utilizing waste material, when discussing the importance of effecting a transformation in order to bring out the possible and exciting in that which at face seems unpromising—we realized we were talking about beauty.  After all, what would be the point of reworking a waste material if it did not yield something that excites our senses or changes our perspective?  Beauty cannot exist in isolation, but as one of an assembly of instruments that help people feel excited, elevated, and inspired to participate in and to care about the life supported by the building, including their own. As one might imagine, students find our lessons both exciting and challenging when presented with so many overlaid objectives accompanied by a heavy workload of tasks that are in many cases adjacent to, but also entirely unlike what they have previously done. We will discuss our findings about what seems to have worked and what needs further development, based on student feedback soon after the studio as well as several years after the course, in addition to our own evaluation.  We will also provide a comparative study with works for other courses and programs such as we find available.  Finally, we will analyze from a pedagogical perspective, the ways in which learning is embodied through making in comparison to knowledge imbued through more conventional techniques, to make the argument that knowledge is more deeply embedded with the challenge and duration required in developing a physical manifestation of a piece of information.

Engaging the masterclass “Eau de Cologne/sour theater” that took place in a recent master-level studio-course of architecture, this paper examines the role of poetry in exploring the stories of a place and in building students’ capacity for storytelling. The masterclass, which lasted for ten days, is titled after a line from Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist poem “Proclamation without Pretention,”[i] chosen to draw attention to the sense of smell in space. Indeed, the students employed poetry to address an element rarely addressed in architectural education: smells and olfactory atmospheres. The masterclass was a collaboration between an architect and a poet and built on pedagogical precedents that have looked into poetry, poetic language and storytelling from an architectural perspective. A few such examples, forming a foundation for the “Eau de Cologne/sour theater,” were: the work of Ciudad Abierta in Chile, a School of Architecture founded in the 70s by poets and still educating future designers;[ii] John Hejduk’s fifth-year course for poetry writing, at Cooper Union in the 80’s and 90’s;[iii] the post professional “History and Theory” program at McGill University’s Department of Architecture under the influence of Alberto Pérez-Gómez, that until 2020 was concerned with the reconciliation of ethics and poetics in architectural practice;[iv] the pedagogies of the Chair of Methods of Analysis and Imagination at TU Delft’ Department of Architecture, where interdisciplinary connections with the literary world (with poetry being one of foci) are regularly tested within the context of the studio;[v] and the School of Architecture in Strasbourg, where poets work with architects to build design studios.[vi] Structures in the language of poetry Departing from these precedents, the masterclass started with an introduction to poetic terminology and language structures, discussing how they can connect to architectural storytelling. We worked with selected poems like Harryette Mullen “Wino Rhino,”[vii] or Tony Hoegland’s “Lucky,”[viii] which took the students from the scale of the city to that of the home. We talked about imagery, meaning the elements of a poem that invoke the senses (or any of the five senses) in order to create a mental image, and explored the potential for imagery in an architectural description of space. We tested for example how students can create an evocative and sensorial description of an imagined space appealing to the audience’s senses and emotions. We defined the differences between abstract and figurative language, explaining the capacity of the latter to appeal to our experiences and capture our imagination more vividly. We discussed how by connecting two similarly unconnected elements or notions, and thus creating a metaphor, we can open up imaginative possibilities for spatial thinking. With metaphor serving as a design tool we envisions unexpected combinations of spaces, programs and materials, in ways that can forwards our architectural sensibility to approach urgent societal needs. Connecting these notions tighter with a focus on smell and olfactory atmospheres, we invited the students to envision spaces where smells and tastes are dominant, like for example their own kitchens. We asked them to create sentences that describe these spaces and their smells, through imagery and metaphors, and edit them by incorporating their peer’s feedback (Figure 1). “The morning breath of oatmeal suffocating the kitchen air,” the “blue-collar coffee maker pulling double shifts on the heavy counter,” and “the vanishing species of jars full of herbs in the open cardboards” emerged though the student’s joyful and surprising responses to our prompts.[ix]  The white space around a poem The introduction continued with the connection between poetry and the space of the page. As the students soon comprehended, the white space on the page of a poem can be equally important as the poem itself, working along with the poem to communicate its content. Precedents from Dadaists and Surrealist poets,[x] or contemporary examples of concrete poetry,[xi] guided the conversation on the way words, lines and sentences can occupy a page and the effect that different spatial configurations can have on a reader. Our emphasis was less on literal visual representations and more on abstract but imaginative formations. Olfactory word maps Following this initial work, we invited the students to walk the hallways of our School and create maps of scents, smells, and aromas. The maps were meant to be made by words alone, communicating in parallel the way the smells spread in space, both in plan and section (Figure 2). Multiple iterations led to results that offered a unique reading of the place. The charted smells revealed traces of stories related to activities that were no longer present in space. The smells revealed stories connected to people’s customs and everyday routines, expressing their voices, like the “microwave stories,” as the students called them, that talked about specific foods consumed specific days of the week. The smells of materials used in balk in our School for model-making were reminiscent of given course’s syllabi and assignments. Moreover, the noted smells brought forward memories of other smells familiar to the students, smells from their homes or the city that served as references in order to describe the School olfactory landscape. The maps led to the creation of narratives that communicate the life of the building, with the students using techniques like personification to give voice to inanimate elements, like the microwave, the floor, or the toilets. Writing a poem in space Building on these narratives, we asked the students to proceed with the writing of a poem. The poem was meant to portray smells of the School, their presence in space, the way they influence our experience of it and the way they connect and bring forward memories of smells from other places. The poems had to include imagery, figurative language and metaphors, capturing smells from the space of the School and the spaces of their memories. This connection between the smells pointed to the fact – and made the students aware – that, olfactory memories interfere with our perception of smells enhancing our experience of place. After multiple iterations and editing of the poems, the students started imagining their poems in the three dimensions of the space of the School. Their task was to write their poems on selected surfaces of the building (thinking always of the white space like in a page) or create surfaces that could become part of the School (temporarily) hosting the poem. The poems had to be communicated to all building’s users.  Questions of scale and word’s materiality imbued the conversation. The students soon realized that the content of their poems and the medium used to write their poems in space could creatively inform each other. Poems written on balloons, that were set free to float in space, expressed the fleeting and fragile character of the olfactory experience of fresh air at the entrance of the School. Words from poems hidden in unexpected cavities of walls and floors (Figure 3), talked about pungent smells form the wood and metal workshop and reminded us how olfactory atmospheres can be pervasive and difficult to get rid of. Threads of stanzas were weaved delicately among building element, like shatters and blinds, narrating the smooth transition from one olfactory atmosphere to another (Figure 4).   A poetry reading for architecture The masterclass came to an end with a poetry reading. We walked across the building, to the locations that the poems were written, and the students recited their work, giving as also hints on how to discover the poems in space, if needed. The guests were both architects and poets. The conversation oscillated between the immaterial word of poetry and the material word of architecture and the way the one informs the other, cultivating architect’s capacity for a storytelling that is poetic and inclusive of many voices. By engaging with poetic language, poetic structures and poetry writing in space the students honed skills on storytelling for architecture. On one level, they discovered and narrated the stories of the place itself, sharpening their observational skills. On another level, they created and shared stories of the place’s olfactory characteristics, employing poetry to express elusive but important spatial qualities. Such knowledge not only fine-tuned their sensibilities as future designers attuning them to the stories of others and how they can be traced, but also empowered their capacity to communicate in expressive ways, ways that can transmit palpably to multiple audiences the spatial qualities they imagine when designing.

Architectural research has long struggled to find a method to fully address the breadth of technical, ecological, and social considerations that inform, contribute to, and experience the built and designed environments. In its desire to be objective and authoritative, architecture has looked to other disciplines for methods to legitimize its own research and analysis. Familiar forms of research include those whose results can be communicated quantitatively using numbers or qualitatively through heavily footnoted text which perpetuate the same voices and opinions. These methods, despite their rigor, are unable to fully describe the multiple interdependencies that must be addressed in architectural research, prompting the questions of whose stories are we sharing, and whose do we neglect in the process? Narrative does not feature prominently in conventional architectural drawings. Orthographic and paraline drawing privilege an understanding of the built and designed environments as property and as objects. We are prompted to think spatially in the context of economic, political, cultural, temporal, and ecological forces, yet summarize these conditions through a consistent framework and scaled acts of precision, where each line translates to an act of separation rather than one of connection. As architects, we have a responsibility to the land from which we extract and that we disturb, those who we displace, the people who build our work, maintain it, and experience its spaces. As architecture strives to create change, new methods for working are required. Acknowledging the shortcomings of traditional research and design methods in architecture, we should begin by looking at the origins and implications of our drawing traditions. The education of the cosmopolitan architect would transform if our shared language of drawing were taught as a deliberately cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary act. The subject of this abstract, a senior level drawing seminar, explores drawing as a tool to organize, analyze, and bridge between quantitative and qualitative data, and to make visible the complex narratives and forces that are often neglected in the act of design. Conversations unfolded through a collective understanding that architectural drawings in the Western tradition are often in service of different modes of destruction. In the form of treaties, surveys, maps, and site plans, they can be the contract that puts the displacement, oppression, and erasure of humans and non-humans, exploitation of land as resources, and carbon emissions into motion.[1] This drawing seminar asked how architectural drawing could move beyond this preparation of instructions for displacement, destruction, and building, but also document the stories of those affected by the built and designed environments, often from their literal points of view. Nishat Awan writes that Western forms of analysis dominate mapping, architecture’s primary form of graphic research, focusing on topographic representations. “The tropes of such map-making do not account for temporality, touch, memory, relations, stories and narratives – in fact it is experience that is altogether removed.”[2] While drawing offers many benefits for research, as a discipline that privileges the visual, how do we also avoid anesthetizing data through its aestheticization? Any discussion of design as research must also address the fact that drawing, the primary medium of design, is a form of knowledge production.[3] Knowing that the reader will also interpret the research based on their own worldview, the constant reflection on biases, ethnocentrism, and situated knowledges was central to all discussions in the course. Students were asked to look deeply and to draw to reveal and to understand, to consider what stories were (often purposefully) excluded from the conversation, and to question the lens through which we read and interpret visual information – while hopefully enjoying the process of drawing. Broadly divided into three sections, the seminar studied research methods and knowledge production, representational methods and ethics, and the application of technique and theory through the analysis of texts, historical precedents, drawing types, tools, and techniques. In their drawing practices, students were asked to incorporate a simultaneity of narratives, temporal and dimensional scales, and locations to identify such effects of the designed and built environments on the communities and ecologies that exist in and beyond the outlined spatial and temporal boundaries of a project site. These drawings wove together multiple stories and perspectives into each research subject, organized and viewed through a series of methodically defined lenses. These lenses outline the key human, more-than-human, and nonhuman actors (who/what), sites (where), and time periods (when) that have played a role in producing their research subject, drawn together to better understand the why of the research question. This approach neutralized assumed hierarchies and outcomes and allowed each viewing of the work to elicit different insights. Research plans were prepared prior to beginning drawing, both to define the lenses and a graphic methodology. Students were required to specify the scales, tools, techniques, and drawing types most appropriate to their subject, and propose how they might subvert the power structures associated with each type. This course also referenced anthropological approaches to field research to acknowledge that multiple actors participate in the creation, understanding, and experience of site. By valuing and seeking the input of often overlooked stakeholders, anthropological methods challenge commonly accepted knowledge systems, although this relationship is not without its own power imbalances. The seminar aimed to learn from interdisciplinary frameworks and references such as Anna Tsing, Raymond Lucas, Donna Haraway, Robin Wall Kimmerer, in addition to those from our own field whose work focuses on cartography and other forms of drawing. The relationship between their work and that of the seminar will be further expanded upon in the presentation. A core value of the course was a technique- and style-agnostic approach to drawing that honored the students’ skills and interests and helped to broaden the perspectives and voices shared. Students were also encouraged to develop site and audience specific forms of drawing practice. The course’s seminar discussions and drawing exercises were intended to provide tools and prompts for students to engage with complex and often heavy questions, using drawings as an active process of resistance to drawing standards, hegemonic forms of knowledge production, the parameters of cartographic projection, and capitalist pressure. Several students in the course returned to traditions of hand sketching and drafting, which in addition to creating a more intimate hand-eye-mind connection were actively resisting subscription-based software tools. Working within a sketching tradition also returned drawing to an act of pleasure, rather than the labour associated with computer drafting, and allowed for co-drawing exercises with stakeholders. Drawing in perspective and using techniques deployed in graphic novels also served as methods of communicating research. While perspectival drawing breaks free from orthographic scale to immerse the viewer, the power structures inherent in a single monocular viewing position were acknowledged and challenged. Similarly, the history of paraline projection in the West and its relationship to military architectural representation was discussed,[4] as was the recent popularity of a heavy line weight denoting the spatial edge of a paraline drawing objectifying the drawing subject and divorcing it from site context. Although an important drawing type for its scalability and clarity, paraline drawings were challenging to use to depict narrative since the viewer is detached and looking onto the scene from above. As a result, the most common application of isometrics and obliques in the students’ research drawings were to highlight the grid and its relationship to capitalism and ecological destruction. Key student drawings to be discussed include research using interviews and photographs to orthographically reconstruct spaces of sex work with a focus on networks of safety and community; a critique of the capitalist-colonial influences on the spatial organization of housework to uplift the voices of racialized people, women, and immigrants; explorations of how our visual perception and relationships with the world are influenced by the way different languages are structured and gendered; and a challenge of conventional representation of borders as dividing lines but for a specific indigenous group as topographically significant regions that were specific sites of connection and community exchange. Engaged storytelling is by no means the solution to systemic issues within academic institutions or the profession, but highlights learning from interdisciplinary frameworks and challenging the traditional tools of architectural production. The resultant bodies of drawings challenged conventional applications of architectural drawing into tools of narrative richness, shifting the line from a tool of separation to one that connects and weaves together past, present, and future, haptic and planetary scales, communities, and sites into proposals for a more equitable, just, and sustainable world.

A story is the most powerful method of inspiring, teaching, uniting, and forging connection. Oral storytelling, in particular, is intrinsic to all cultures. It serves as an intimate way of providing invaluable linkage to ancestral beliefs, values, and history. In West African cultures, for example, a storyteller is a revered profession that is inherited from generation to generation. Known as a griot, they are specially trained as orators, singers, or musicians to keep alive the shared heritage of their family or village. In our technologically advanced modern world, the enduring capacity of the oral tradition to promote connection between storyteller and audience is evidenced in the popularity of TED Talks and Moth events. Storytelling is also an effective political tool for social activism. Why? Because information can persuade someone, but it won’t inspire them. When we listen to a story, we are drawn in as a participant. We start to connect on the most fundamental human levels. According to the non-partisan social justice organization Narrative Arts, “Statistics and lists of facts can communicate information, but stories communicate meaning and emotion, which are what motivate people to act. People don’t relate to issues, they relate to other people—in other words, to their stories.” (Storytelling & Social Change: A Strategy Guide, Narrative Arts) As such, storytelling has become a core tenet of my Public Interest Design (PID) Master’s-level studio.  In a normative studio setting, there is an innate gulf between a student (aka architect or designer) and their usually fictional client or user. There also tends to be a hierarchy of positions where the professionally trained architect is the expert, placing the client / user in a diminished role. In the PID setting, students are tasked with breaching that gulf and establishing a common bond and equitable alliance with a community partner. It starts with the story. Among the first set of assignments in the PID course construct is for each student to explore issues or subject matter that speak to them on a personal level. This is antithetical to typical design methodologies. It can also be an incredibly uncomfortable exercise. The goal, however, is for a student to insert the first-person “I” perspective before even starting a public interest project. In a recent PID studio, Josh S. was circling several topics, including affordable housing in his economically depressed hometown and the potential of repurposing an abandoned mall site. Both salient issues. But what did these issues mean to him? How was he personally impacted by them? Why did he care? When probed to dig deeper, Josh experienced a self-described “ah-ha” memory moment. As an intern, he had been asked to field measure a house which had once been a drug den. Among the detritus he discovered a child’s filthy mattress tucked under the eaves of the attic. It stopped him in his tracks. Imagining what kind of life a small child had to endure in a windowless, airless space struck a chord. And one Josh wanted to revisit. Serendipitously, Josh became connected with a local nonprofit dedicated to serving youth who are at risk. It was founded by a woman named Lena P. who knew struggle firsthand—parents who were drug addicts and drug dealers, early substance abuse issues of her own, a pregnancy at age 13. As an adult, her story fueled a desire to serve as a champion and role model for teens. Lena’s nonprofit now serves as a resource for empowering young people through education and mentoring. When Josh and Lena first met to discuss a potential partnership, he relayed his credentials and the hoped-for goals of a PID project but, more important, he shared the story that had viscerally impacted him and opened up his worldview. Josh adamantly maintains that his story provided the necessary entrée to spark a collaboration based on transparency and common ground. Although they came from disparate backgrounds, Lena P. had faith that Josh had an emotional investment in advocating for youth who are at risk. Over the course of the semester, Josh and Lena continued to bond and worked in sync on an immediate goal for the nonprofit, which was to design a single facility that would integrate their existing teen services as well as those of their extended partnership organizations. Such a one-stop hub for teens would provide a stable and safe haven and coordinated continuum of programming. This is not to suggest that student stories take prime position in a PID project. Our work is grounded in social justice, equitable opportunity, and commitment to community. Therefore, it is paramount that in participatory design contexts, collected stories are treated ethically and with respect. The goal is not to be the voice, but rather the megaphone. It is also imperative to underscore that every step of a project must be guided by the community partner. Students are reminded to listen to what a partner needs, what they want, their concerns, and to transparently keep the lines of communication open. Thus, reinforcing the maxim that projects move at the speed of trust.   This paper will utilize primary storytelling source materials and PID case studies to highlight and forefront effective strategies for integrating first-person storytelling into course pedagogy across various design disciplines. Two working examples include a student who partnered with a local elementary school because he witnessed daily how his two daughters, both on the autism spectrum, struggled to receive opportune educational services. The final project of another student (herself an immigrant to the U.S.) consisted solely of collecting and curating stories from immigrants who were caught in the political crossfire regarding extension of the DREAM Act, and sparked her own personal journey into public activism. We will also explore the efficacy of supplementary tools, such as the creation of personas and journey maps, in helping to lay the bedrock for success. Student case studies are presented using the application of the Massive Change Story Formula developed by designer Bruce Mau and the Institute without Boundaries—expounding on the problem, the community agent, and design interventions as a narrative using the categories of Situation, Solution, Design Team, Users, Realization, and Impact. The difference in this course is the inclusion of a newly established matrix that insinuates and elevates a student’s personal narrative to the first project position, even before a student leaps into the first assignment that focuses on situational research. This underscores the principle that a personal story is foundational to forging a relationship with potential partners. To gauge and analyze success levels of the personal narrative, there are established metrics to help a student navigate their personal journey throughout a PID project. Students are required to present an ongoing visual and written catalog of stakeholder interactions, along with a record of the dialogue that took place with the primary community partner. There is also a reciprocal archival record provided by the community partner, which will be examined. Whether or not a student of design pursues a path of service practice, the skill set that comes with effective storytelling will prove invaluable. Students who are nurtured to embrace the personal story as an essential part of the architectural process will, to expand upon a quote from Nadia Anderson in a 2014 article, “[learn to] value communication as a critical architectural skill and will carry these experiences with them . . . as [a] method for incorporating values of equity and empowerment into their future work.” (“Public interest design as praxis,” Journal of Architectural Education: Design +, 68(1), pp. 16-pp. 27.)

Introduction The Italian architect Carlo Scarpa’s work is known for its close connection to local craftsmanship, bridging history and 20th century tendencies through spaces and details, telling stories about culture, materiality, and the Veneto’s building traditions. Positioning his work in the formal and intellectual framework of 20th-century Architecture history has resulted in a multitude of different interpretations. Scarpa’s professional context and the related knowledge archive have always been much more than his buildings, the different archives of his drawings, and the relevant scholarly work. A large part of knowledge about Scarpa resides in stories. These stories offer a complex picture of the circumstances of the design and execution process.  As is evident from records of Carlo Scarpa’s studio lectures,[i] he was an avid storyteller. Many of his collaborators are and were storytellers. Conversations with his craftspeople and former collaborators bring up vivid narratives surrounding the conception and execution of the work.[ii] More recently, anecdotes and memories have become an acceptable and important part of architecture history. As a result, they have become more accessible, especially in the format of oral histories. Frequently oral histories and informal archives reveal voices rarely heard or documented in the past; they bring architecture history to life and add relevance (especially for students) to the relationship between life and work, authors, and oeuvre. Former collaborators and contractors have recently published their experiences with Carlo Scarpa – representing memories and architectural testimony at once. This paper examines different examples of these informal histories and identifies new knowledge about the design process, construction methods, and collaborative relationships. This exploration suggests an expanded approach to architecture history/theory that includes context and narratives, allowing a subjective and at times emotional framework to complement the traditional repositories of architecture history. Stories from Academia In 2010 long-time collaborator Franca Semi who worked with Scarpa in his practice and as an assistant at IUAV (Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia), published the transcriptions of 21 recordings of Scarpa’s studio lectures and the charcoal sketches that accompanied them. Her accounts not only give a sense of the nature of topics presented (ranging from light, museography, Frank Lloyd Wright, Antonio Canova, Scarpa’s own work such as the Gipsoteca in Possagno and Brion Cemetery, architectural elements in general, and, Japanese architecture in particular, and much more) but offer a clear understanding of the free-flowing narrative, random-seeming topics oscillating between technical instructions around drafting, life lessons, and architecture design. Franca Semi recounts what Scarpa said in one of his lectures about sound (after having described the sound of water in Japanese gardens in detail): “Scarpa, who declared – regretfully – not to know much about music, was obviously fascinated by sounds, especially by solitary notes, small and sensible details of known environments, with evidence directly taken from Japan, from his travels.”[iii]Scarpa’s lectures represent a flow of associations that typically start with buildings or architectural themes but bring in elements of life, or references to art. Giuseppe Barbieri and Giuseppe Mazzariol write about Scarpa’s lectures:  “His lessons were never predictable, growing – like his own thought – out of an image: The happy accents of a detailed, precise, impassioned description of a peach tree in blossom, apprehended in an instant. The road from Asolo to Venice that very morning. The story of a love affair. That tree and the gaps between branch and branch, the color of the blossom and the space around, in between. The life of forms, the form of forms.”[iv] During a studio lecture on February 18, 1976, Scarpa describes his intervention at the Cemetery Brion in San Vito di Altivole, sharing his initial thoughts about the design of the grave:   “I had found the idea to create a type of arcosolio – that how it is called in Pre-Christian times, reemerging from the times of the catacombs – therefore an arch that holds an urn that is more important than many others that were forgotten and that turns into a cover, a bridge if you want, for two spouses. One spouse is dead and is in the urn. The other urn is still empty. Therefore, there is the arch, with the two spousal urns tilted towards each other and the terrain descends a bit: for a type of flirtation of formal symbolic order (a liberty that one can have sometimes if there are no functional or rational obligations), because I thought that there in the evening they would say: ‘hello Nini, how are you’ […] But the formal reason…, that means there is a bit of truth in this: I wanted to exaggerate with the plastic dynamicism that otherwise would be lacking. They would have been too immobile.” [v] Stories from Practice In 2020 architect Guido Pietropoli, a long-term collaborator of Scarpa (also teaching and practice) published “A Fianco di Carlo Scarpa,”[vi] an extensive account of their long working relationship (and friendship). He accounts for personal moments and professional decision-making: “Carlo Scarpa was an instrument of unimaginable precision: he was able to see things that only after he pointed them out became visible also to us.”[vii] The book – while possibly combining subjective impressions, memories and facts – shares information about client relationships, inspiration, everyday life, and the architecture profession simultaneously, an empathetic account that goes far beyond the study of the outcome, the buildings. These and other resources provide insights into the way of thinking that guided design decisions, possibly more instructive than mere precedent studies of the built work. The stories give a human dimension to the designer in question (in this case Carlo Scarpa) as a person, their cultural framework and lifestyle, representative not just of one individual, but offering a portrait of their time and contemporaries. The non-linear nature of Scarpa’s design process becomes clear through the stories surrounding conception and construction, steps forward and back revealing the complex inspirations through which the buildings evolved.  In 2016 the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio (CISA) in Vicenza produced a portrait of Scarpa using testimonies by seven architects, four artisans and one historian who all collaborated with Scarpa during their careers. The interviews are available as video recordings and a book publication.[viii] These expanded oral histories acknowledge the teamwork involved in Scarpa’s buildings, by convention attributed solely to him.  Stories from the Construction Site: Metal artisan Francesco Zanon speaks in the video for the CISA project about his early encounters with Carlo Scarpa (during the Olivetti Store project). At the time of the first encounters, he was 18 years old, at the time of the video he and his brother had continued his father’s metal shop for 55 years. He recalls Scarpa’s frequent visits to the shop and an intensified collaboration between him, his brother Paolo and Scarpa during the work for the Querini Stampalia Foundation. He describes how closely they worked together and how enjoyable and instructive it was for all.[ix] Most likely lacking objectivity, the stories around an architect’s professional and personal relationships, successes, and failures, nevertheless produce a well-rounded picture of the people involved and a complete understanding of the work in its context and time.  Sharing them in the classroom and studio today, these stories confirm the complexity of the design process and the collaborative nature of architecture and design. The narrative lines encountered in the narratives examined, serve as a teaching tool that in combination with scholarly accounts represent the architects not as detached geniuses but as member of their cultural, professional, and social context.  Scarpa’s career was defined not only by being an architect (who had been trained as a painter), but also by being a teacher, an industrial designer, and an exhibition designer. Teaching visitors to his museums and exhibitions about what was shown through the architecture was part of Scarpa’s pedagogical approach to design. The stories analyzed in this project result in an architectural anthropology. Despite revolving around the professional life of one specific architect, they stand for customs common at the time – in practice and teaching. The rich resource of stories and narratives that accompany Carlo Scarpa’s practice and pedagogy confirm storytelling as a teaching tool AND a design principle. The diverse narratives illustrate design pedagogy that can connect seemingly contradictory frameworks of vernacular and contemporary (modern), stemming from the everyday and beyond. The approach serves as a model to suggest that architecture archives should be expanded by diligently preserving the stories of teams and contemporaries, thus creating a more complete record to learn from.

Engaged Storytellers- Drawing Out Stories -Amplifying Voices Until the lion tells his story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.[i] Introduction This paper argues that imagining and telling the story of a better if not perfect situation – a joyful story- a comforting story, a community story can be the impetus to provide a place or places for the story to take place. If we do not know that the lion has told his tale; if we silence her voice or tell only the hunter’s tale, we cannot make a place to accommodate the lion. This paper further argues that promoting our users, builders, clients, owners, community members to tell the stories of their experiences will open paths for seeing both inequity or injustice and potential for opportunities which enable our buildings to better accommodate ‘Others’. It will allow us to acknowledge difference and support valuable cultural traditions and comfortable ways of living. The arguments are based on stories from a number of pedagogical strategies employed in design studios, field experiments, and question framing in support courses to reveal the importance of the critical imagination in design education which aims to accommodate a cosmopolitan world – create not just “ethics in a work of strangers” but accommodation for a world of strangers. [ii] These stories will be told within the framework of the paper. The Power of Stories – Ethics and Memory As children, we are compelled by stories. Especially strong are fairy tales and fables. These often have a ‘moral’ or ‘lesson’ to be learned that remains with us and precipitates memories long after the story is told. Such stories can inspire our thinking, provide new perspectives or reinforce our sense of responsibility. Stories about truth telling (The Emperor’s New Clothes[iii]) or kindness (The Little Match Girl[iv]) remain with us throughout our lives. We also learn from stories in our own lives and in the lives of others. Tales of communities which survived natural disasters or persons who triumphed over disparity; poverty, injustice, marginality or violence also remain in our memory, especially when relayed from firsthand experience. It is well known that relaying a bad experience to a trained listener can assist in the healing process.[v] The Supremacy of Setting – Importance of the Spatial The writer of a novel or a play will quickly impress upon us the power of setting. Places and events occurring within them are affected by their very nature. Visual settings remain with us as images in the memory long after the visit is over. Architects and urban designers create settings for events which inspire the events themselves. The Authority of Authorship- In Whose Voice? Stories from firsthand experience are invaluable. We want to hear it ‘from the horse’s mouth’ (or maybe the lion’s?). This perspective has much to claim in movements like “Black Lives Matter” and other movements that speak truth to power.[vi]Yet additionally, it is often also the clarity or strangeness experienced by an outside viewer that sheds new light on the experience. Often we become so familiar with’ the status quo that we fail to see either the problems or the potential in a situation. We take situations for granted as did the child was the only voice to claim the nakedness of the emperor in The Emperor’s New Clothes. In my research, I often silently observe. I have discovered that altering an angle of vision slightly can add new depth and dimension to our understanding. This illustrates the potential for architecture to empower communities in urban places which have been marginalized and disenfranchised. Through drawing out community stories, we trace the long history of injustice but also celebrate the strength of self-empowered communities thriving through invention and perseverance. Methodologies that Engage Storytelling This paper shares the role of storytelling in my teaching through using examples in my own work, as an architectural educator and researcher. From discussion of the power of Socratic method in voice finding through doing short experiments on inclusion/exclusion in the city and having students explore cases of ‘Otherness’ by sharing research on cities where they have never been (and I have never been), the potential for storytelling as a critical method occurs reiteratively. The methodologies promote asking questions to draw out perspectives from writing about objects from various points of view to the selection of design problems which subvert norms, require a philosophical consideration or open completely new experiences. I will discuss a current course in Advanced Urban Issues which critically explores world cities. I will also include a recent studio for which students designed a mosque in the center of a historical Renaissance  city. It accommodates a multi-ethnic and multinational community currently housed in a renovated garage. I will share some stories told in my research in marginalized American communities that have allowed the articulated voice for justice, equity and diversity to emerge within my classes. The principle underlying is that a multiplicity of ways of seeing and the telling of stories in architectural and urban settings allows responsible and inventive placemaking. Conclusion Exploring ways of seeing nourishes diverse points of views that expand understanding. When we fail to engender a variety of perspectives in architectural education, to be realized in our design practices, we negotiate the world with voices muted. We are like the lion whose hunting tale always glorifies the hunter. In the same light, my work builds upon previous work but also a multiplicity of work by my colleagues whose coteaching and sharing of reviews and perspectives have enriched my understanding. The writer Chinua Achebe transposed the African proverb cited earlier to read “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always will glorify the hunter”.[vii] Perhaps we should say that “Until the lion lioness learns how to design, all designs will accommodate the designer.”  The African Trilogy, 1958.

Background  The term Wicked Problems is often used to describe complex, usually systemic problems that have no straightforward solutions due to competing, changing, and interdependent needs. Popularized in 1973, by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber when discussing social policy, the term is now used in reference to big societal challenges such as social justice, public heath, and environmental stewardship. Due to their complexity, efforts to address wicked problems necessitate expertise across a wide range of disciplines and collaboration across disciplines is an essential part of any solution. (Rittel & Webber, 1973) Collaboration is also an essential to any real-world architectural design endeavor. In response to the ever-growing complexities of the built environment collaborations across architecture, planning, and design professions have become more frequent and the current state of architectural practice reflects this. According to the ‘2020 Firm Survey Report’ produced by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), architectural staff make up just over half, 61%, of employees across surveyed firms; other design professionals make up another 18%. These ‘other’ design professionals include landscape architects, planners, interior architects and designers, and engineers. In fact, 39% of all Architecture firms surveyed in 2019 describe themselves as multidisciplinary. Additionally, more than 58% of firms offer both Architectural and Interior Design services. (AIA, 2020) Thus, between 39% and 58% of all architecture firms are practicing across disciplinary boundaries within a single firm. Whether in-house through multi-disciplinary firm structures or through consultants, the practice of architecture necessitates that teams of individuals with differing expertise collaborate across disciplines towards a common goal.  Collaborations can take many forms, and they vary in method, integration across disciplines, difficulty, and expected results. Intradisciplinary collaborations consist of working on a team within one’s own discipline or very closely aligned disciplines. In cross-disciplinary collaborations, teams are still working within their own discipline, but the team adopts the methodologies of other disciplines. Multidisciplinary collaborations are the first step towards integrated collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, however, the outcomes are generally a sharing of results and knowledge but not an integration of methodologies. Interdisciplinary collaboration has a greater level of integration working cooperatively across disciplinary boundaries, synthesizing the approaches to address a shared goal. Transdisciplinary collaboration builds on interdisciplinary collaborative models but extends beyond academic and professional borders to include community members and other stakeholders. (Stember, 1991, Stock & Burton, 2011)   Purpose of the study As the complexity of problems grow in the face of societal challenges, designers are required to incorporate a wider range of expertise and to view problems from different perspectives. Collaborations across disciplines have grown in response. Furthermore, although it is still somewhat rare for students to work collaboratively at all, much less in teams with students from other disciplines, in traditional models of architectural education, this is precisely what is beginning to happen. This is equally true for programs in interior architecture and landscape architecture. Both Architecture and Landscape Architecture accreditation requirements highlight the importance of collaboration through the “PC.6, Leadership and Collaboration” and “2.h, Collaboration” criteria respectively. (NAAB 2020, LAAB 2021) Similarly, the Interior Archtieture accreditation requirements not only mandate that “interior design students collaborate and participate in interdisciplinary design teams” but also that students understand “the dynamics of team collaboration and the distribution and structure of team responsibilities.” (CIDA 2022) The importance of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research has grown in recent decades (Bruce et al., 2000). Despite previous studies examining more effective ways to collaborate within design disciplines (Park et al., 2019), few studies have examined the dynamic of disciplinarity within a design project in task levels. Fewer studies have examined the experience of design students working with other design disciplines throughout the design process at the task or activity level. Hence, it is important to understand the design students experience during the interdisciplinary collaborative studios in task levels to improve the ways of guiding students during the course for a better education experience.  There is an interdisciplinary design studio course available at [University name redacted for peer review] from the Fall of 2019 onwards. The interdisciplinary design studio is comprised of three sections of 14 – 16 students each. In each section, students from three design disciplines, Landscape Architecture, Architecture, and Interior Architecture, collaborate on design projects throughout the semester. The project topics introduce students to complex, real-world challenges including impacts of climate change, and intersections of health, equity, and the built environment. Further, the project briefs highlight the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration to develop compressive design responses to these challenges.  The purpose of this study is to have a better understanding of the students’ collaborative experiences and dynamics of disciplinarity during the interdisciplinary collaborations at task levels. Specifically, this study seeks to answer the following research questions: 1) How do students feel about collaborating with other design disciplines (e.g., preparedness before the project kickoff, overall impressions from the collaboration experience during the studio)? 2) What is the dynamic of disciplinarity at task-level during the studio projects (e.g., the level of importance of collaboration for different tasks during different design phases, which discipline leads which tasks during a variety of tasks), 3) How do students perceive the quality of outcomes from collaboration versus independent work for different tasks?, and 4) How does the degree of similarity and differences between disciplines affect the performance of different tasks during the collaboration? Methods Students enrolled in the interdisciplinary studio course across the three sections were invited to participate in this study. A total of 46 students from Landscape Architecture (17), Interior Architecture (15), and Architecture (14) were recruited to participate in this study; more than half, 26, participated in the study. Two online surveys were developed to collect qualitative and quantitative data about the students’ experiences during the different phases of the design process in the studio. For the purposes of understanding the disciplinary dynamics for various research and design tasks, the design process is divided into task levels, such as literature review and precedent study, urban/site analysis, programming, schematic design, building and site performance analysis, design development, and design communication. A pre-survey was conducted online at the beginning of the studio to understand the students’ previous experience collaborating with other design disciplines. As a first step, students were asked to indicate their major, year level, and previous experience collaborating with other design disciplines, as well as their expectations for the lessons learned from this course. Students were asked about their expectations regarding the dynamics of disciplinarity during the course’s collaborative activities. At the end of the semester, a second survey will be conducted to gain a deeper understanding of how students have been collaborating with other design students from various disciplines. The online surveys are conducted using Qualtrics, a cloud-based survey platform. The study plan was reviewed and approved by IRB [IRB protocol number redacted for review].  The survey results will be analyzed and synthesized to produce insightful results. For thematic analysis, text analysis will be used to synthesize the data from the surveys, which involves: 1) reading the written survey responses; 2) labeling relevant pieces (coding), either explicitly or implicitly; 3) determining which codes are most important; 4) creating categories by combining several codes; and 5) labeling categories (Bryman, 2012; Charmaz, 2006; Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). A quantitative analysis of survey responses, such as the response to Likert scale questions, will be conducted (e.g., average, mean, data trend), and the results will be visualized and presented in the paper.  Results  Results from the analyzed and synthesized data will be presented in the paper in detail in the following categories. 1) background information (e.g., major, year level, previous collaboration experience) of participants, 2) impressions of collaborating with other design disciplines (e.g., perceived preparedness prior to kick-off of the project, expectations of collaboration prior to the studio, and the overall opinion from the collaboration experience during the studio with other design disciplines), and 3) the dynamics of disciplinarity at task-level (e.g., the level of importance of disciplinary collaboration during the design process for different tasks during the studios, leading discipline in different tasks in various tasks, assessing the quality of outcomes from collaboration versus independent work for different tasks), 4) lessons learned from the collaboration, and 5) level of similarity and differences between disciplines and how that impacted tasks during the collaboration.   Impact Considering the current NAAB, LAAB, and CIDA accreditation requirements emphasize the importance of collaboration and interdisciplinary design teamwork, the results and findings of this study will have positive impact on Interior Architecture, Architecture, and Landscape Architecture design education. In addition, the outcomes of this study can be adapted for other educational institutions and will have utility for faculty and programs seeking to guide students in an interdisciplinary design studio at their institutions.  Another significant contribution of this study is to the body of knowledge concerning the dynamics of disciplinarity in design projects at the task level. These findings may serve as the basis for improving collaborative workflows by focusing on task-level dynamics and outcomes.

Educators, including those in Architecture programs, are being tasked with ensuring students graduate with practical learning experiences leading to high levels of employability. Often referred to as experiential learning or work-integrated learning, these initiatives connect students with partners outside their faculties to have students tackle specific, realistic scenarios and propose solutions. In our setting, Architecture students are given this opportunity through a work-integrated learning Studio, matching students with internal and external partners on timely and relevant project opportunities.  In this case, the co-creative partner is the University’s Architecture Librarian and the project opportunities are two of the University’s library locations. Libraries, as a subset of GLAM organizations (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) are continually in flux but hold at their core the interaction of their users (students, staff and faculty in the case of an academic library) and their collections. But what will academic library spaces look like, with ever-increasing digital collections and off-site storage? Many academic libraries across the globe were designed with the goal of storing maximum collections, however the current use case is starkly different, often resorting to study space as an unimaginative but popular default in a design void that has not been adequately addressed. Library services have become increasingly digital. Librarians and library staff connect with and support their users virtually, and users access library resources from wherever they are. Also, more and more institutions are choosing to store print materials off-site or in high density storage, to free up premium space for study, collaboration, technology, or new services. Without active intervention, academic libraries of the present day, and especially their smaller, non-signature locations, sit on an unknown path. Through this co-creative partnership between architecture educators with the architecture librarian and university libraries, students are working through a series of scaffolded studio assignments with regular input from both architects and librarians. The university’s librarians, invested in their spaces, are acting both as advisors and as clients in providing their feedback and expertise throughout the studio. To begin, students were guided through an exploration of the history of library design, from the libraries of antiquity and their collections of clay tablets, through Alexandria and libraries of Ancient Greece and their adjacent agoras, through the ornate Enlightenment period, into the Carnegie era with thousands of public libraries created for towns and cities that applied and qualified, and finally to the present day and its cutting-edge modern libraries. Combining a context and precedent analysis, students were tasked with determining what architectural and design qualities have served libraries well, to help inform their future.  Even through the first third of the studio, students have brought forward interesting propositions. With a need for future flexibility, how can shelving be designed to actively support a variety of programming? How does furniture delineate and reinforce desired user activities (e.g. quiet study vs. collaboration)? Is the presence of the book critical? Or has it become something of an artifact in digital research and learning environments? Is the presence of books and shelving a quintessential feature for user experience? Instead of print vs. electronic as competing, how can digital programming complement physical collections? What are the variety of affective experiences the library provides, and how can they be continued into future design? In its efforts to be all things to all people, has the library of the present lost its identity, and if so how can architecture help to course-correct an adrift subset of this iconic and ever-important cultural entity. Into the second phase of the studio, the overarching question has evolved to become: libraries and GLAM institutions are primarily concerned with the interaction between users and their collections, and so what will that interaction look like in the academic library of the future? What is the current programming in a typical academic library, and what might it look like in 5-10 years? Students have chosen specific under-addressed university library locations and will be producing drawings, models, diagrams, renders with the ultimate goal of re-envisioning academic library programming. What becomes of shelving, with increased eBook and off-site storage? What becomes of the library information desk, with digital library services? What solutions can architecture present for current spaces that were designed in the era of maximizing print collections, common from the 1960s to 1990s? The final phase of the studio will combine and culminate previous steps into comprehensive final design plans for the two locations to be presented to a review panel consisting of architects, librarians, university administration and leadership. Students have expressed excitement not only at the prospect of their work being considered in upcoming renovation cycles, but also by the transferability of skills acquired by immersing into a cultural space redesign project. This type of collaboration not only provides students with a practical, realistic learning experience, but also provides library leadership with student-led space innovations. Students, and not just that but Architects-in-training, are having a direct and tangible say in the spaces they use. As they are the primary user of campus library spaces, students’ input is now connected into the redesign conversation, an additional mutually beneficial goal achieved through this partnership. At the time of this submission, the Studio is actively underway, therefore findings discussed here represent early progress, along with the exploratory guiding questions posed above, through the first third of the course. By the time of the conference, there will be much more to share regarding this collaboration. Many of the questions posed in this submission will have architectural solutions, strategies and plans to share. We look forward to the opportunity to present comprehensive findings with attendees, and receive feedback, on this co-creative partnership.

MULTI-AUTHORSHIP Why is it that while architecture has always been a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and team-based endeavor, yet its education has mostly focused on the individual? This is especially insistent for those courses in drawing, visual studies, and design communications. The course objectives tend to premise on acquiring skills to enhance the mastery and deftness of the individual students, focusing on cultivating students’ “individual talent and creativity” and not their capacity to work with others1. What might be the alternative methods in which these subjects could be taught more collaboratively by enhancing the potentiality of ‘creative’ co-synthesis? Drawing Together is a project exploring these questions through the ‘collaborative turn’ by drawing towards the multiple rather than a singular authorship. Documenting a period of three years with participants of different sizes, from small groups of two to large collective of twenty plus. Students from different programs and levels engaged in days long drawing sessions.  The workshops are organized through a structured and rigorous progression of research to synthesis, simple to complex, and quickness to slowness, it nurtures a collaborative-friendly drawing approach involving shared contributions. As the drawing project coincided with the beginning and the peak of Covid 19 pandemic, we took the opportunity to embrace the zeitgeist by Drawing Together (in person), and Drawing Together, Not Together (on line).  The workshops begins with speedy studies and exercises that are traversed through contour, gesture and tonal drawings. Techniques commonly used in foundation fine arts classrooms. The burst modules —between 10 seconds to 5 minutes— seeks to stimulate the learner’s intuition, immediacy and to enhance their hand-eye coordination. The process enables a form of tacit knowledge one cannot acquire passively but can only achieved through doing. It also encourages the students to forgo their burden and desire to achieve likeness in portraying the observed subject matter, a tendency often found in less confident students. FROM QUESTIONING TO DRAWING Questioning is an important building block of the project, and it is often instigated at the outset and throughout the course of the workshop. Questions that explores both the cerebral and the practical aspects of drawing, such as: What is a drawing? Is it an instrument of communication, a tool for thinking, or could it be viewed as a process or platform for social interaction? Should we compelled to view drawing aesthetically or could it be a proxy for self expression? Instead of treating drawing as a skillset related to talent, can we accept it as basic literacy on par with writing, math and science? Could drawing be game-like  (such as Exquisite Corpse2) which is serendipitous, creative, fun and even therapeutic? On the pragmatic side, questions and discussions involves modus operandi of drawing, i.e. the determination of methods and processes; drawing instruments and duration etc.  The first set of examples I wish to discuss is Drawing Life, see Figure 1. It involves two people drawing the nude in the studio together. The drawings consist of two 5-minutes sketches drawn by two different students.  The first student makes the initial mark capturing the gesture of the life model. As their first 5-minutes comes to an end, the students are prompted to pass on their drawings to a colleague sitting beside them. Surprised with the prompt, the second group of students are genuinely intrigued with the prospect of drawing upon someone else’s drawing. This disruption to the expected single-authorship, stirred up a unique sense of improvisation that was refreshing to them. Since the workshop is attended primarily by architectural students, they were invited to view these passed-on drawings not only by their aesthetic qualities but also as potential ‘contexts’ for receiving new interventions and co-authorships. Using architectural analogies the drawing exercises encourages students to react upon ‘existing context’, composition, drawing style and technique of the circumstantial conditions.  As the expectation for single authorship fades the drawing became a place for relational authorship, where one builds upon and reacting to the creation of others. In the second example Life of Three Kitchens, see Figure 2. It was conceived by three contributors using triptych as a format to depict their respective home kitchens. The drawings took place in two locations. First, at the studio where initial discussion took place, followed by drawings created individually at home in different space and time. This asynchronous method differs from the first example in that it offers the additional surprise when the triptych are recomposed together in studio for the first time.  As the workshop progresses, we experimented with other methods of drawing together. Working with the framework of supervised (involving the instructor) versus unsupervised (without instructor); Synchronous (drawing at the same space/ time) versus asynchronous (drawing in different space/ times). The scale of collaboration also increased progressively transforming from two, four to eight collaborators. It culminated in the last piece consisting of 20 contributors. Several students were so immersed in the process that they invited their friends and families to join in. Therefore the question of who is allowed to draw became a discussion point as well. The Massive Individual is a 1.5 meters by 10 meters long scroll drawn in graphite during a four days period in June 2021. The drawing captured the mixed fiction-reality whereby the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) stations are contiguous not by their literal connections but through similarities of their atmospheres, paying a homage to the Guy Debord’s Psychogeographic Map of Paris (1957). MTR as an important economic, social, and spatial construct for Hong Kong became the common ground for those 20 plus contributors. It is also a means to explore questions on the individual and the city.  RELATIONAL COLLABORATION In lieu of a few prototypes, such as the design-build studio, architectural pedagogy is premised mostly on single authorship. Some of the most commonly applied group work is often task-oriented such as: Undertake initial site analysis; Develop a construction report; Interface with the community; Building 1:1 installation structure; or propose a large-scale urban project. These forms of collaboration assume that the task is simply to get participants to contribute existing knowledge rather than nurturing the possibility for ‘relational collaboration’3.  The term relational collaboration is described by John Hagel et al, as the challenge of creating new capabilities and knowledge so that the participants, as individuals, can get better as a result of the collaboration. Its goal is an exchange of tacit knowledge and to offer creative autonomy while learning from others. Relational collaboration under the premise of Drawing Together is cultivated through a carefully designed learning environment and framework, including the rules of engagement, atmosphere, time, and space. In this way, it is a scalable collaboration contingent upon the creation of the participants involved.  Relational collaboration is unlike ‘transactional collaboration’ that works in a linear progression, vis-à-vis the Fordist division-of-labor. Although necessary in the production of architecture, transactional collaboration offers very little contribution to the creative synthesis. FORDIST DIVISION-OF-LABOR OR CREATIVE COLLABORATION? There are those who argues for the benefit of group work by referring to practice as its motivation. Claiming the work of a complex project is never the effort of one but instead a team with each playing a particular role in the delivery process. However, such claim offer false equivalence that does not capture the dynamic relationships involved in the academic setting. In business practices, a chain of command is defined according to various explicit or implicit hierarchy, rules, and practices. While at a place of learning, such a chain of command does not exist among peers4. Even when it does it takes place in a different form. Division of labor have always existed in architectural drawings, particularly the kind that involves construction documents. A single drawing often involves a handful of people drawing and redrawing on digital files over the life of the drawing5. And collaborations are enabled through toolsets, such as Xreference in Autocad and Link in Revit etc. However, such collaboration rarely results in creative contribution. Drawing Together offers a counterpoint to these practices by exploring the paradox and challenge of achieving synthetic team work unique to architectural education, that is the challenge of educating a designer’s traditional role as the creative individual yet at the same time allowing them to be contributing team players as well.

This paper discusses the curriculum design of a second-year architectural design studio course and the role, practices and identity of casual academics who teach face-to-face in design studios. The approach to designing the course included decolonizing the curriculum and making it relevant for globally diverse learners. Architectural education and design pedagogy is shaped and interrogated in the Global North or Western Europe and North America and influences various pedagogical approaches in the Global South. Including exemplars, voices, and practices from diverse historical and contemporary contexts enriches and expands our understanding of architectural education, particularly about approaches to sustainability. The studio theme of memory and history was framed as experiencing the site and responsiveness to context for students to articulate form and space and define place. The lectures, exercises, and interactive activities scaffolded student learning under the guidance of tutors or design teachers and emphasised design process, in-progress work, and experimentation through making sketches, diagrams, drawings, and study models. To make the design process and learning to design explicit for students, this course was designed to have a global and inclusive curriculum, engage students in experiential learning through doing/making, develop decision making and critical thinking skills, and enable students to transfer learning to other settings and contexts. Given the diversity of the student body, the course was designed to engage with diverse contexts, avoid single/dominant cultural approaches to memory, history, and context, and to familiarise students with the design process by highlighting the importance of in-progress work produced by them (drawings and study models). The combination of global and inclusive curriculum, experiential learning, developing decision making and critical thinking skills, and enabling transfer of knowledge to other settings and contexts creates a “thirdspace” (Soja, 1996). While the concept of “thirdspace” is often used in the context of internationalisation of curriculum in higher education, this course was an opportunity to create a “a generative, incorporative, dynamic, experimental space of mutuality and exchange” (Harley et al., 2008: 168) and decolonize the design curriculum. To interrupt the dominant power/knowledge nexus, selected content emphasised cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives on building responsibly and sustainably. However, designing such a course was not without discomfort due to being confronted with deeply held assumptions about self and others, and how to position oneself to counteract established practices. Efforts to decolonize curriculum requires broadening and expanding content to make it inclusive, to employ experiential and collaborative learning pedagogies that propel thinking critically about the impact of our actions on the built environment and instil confidence in students that what they are learning in the educational studio is transferable and vital to diverse real-life contexts. The paper also discusses the role of adjunct faculty/casual academic/tutors who teach face-to-face in design studios. In Australian architectural education, teaching design knowledge and skills depends increasingly on casual academic staff, many of whom adopt an apprenticeship model of teaching. For many in these roles, taking up the role of a design teacher or tutor involves transitioning from practising architect and shifting from participating in architectural production as a professional in a workplace setting to teaching design to future professionals. As a casual employee in the university sector, the development of studio teaching expertise is influenced by discontinuous contracts, discrete connections with only a handful of colleagues, limited access to formal professional development programs and distance from scholarship of teaching and learning. The architectural design studio is conceived as a site for teaching, learning, development, and transformation in both professional education for students and the development of teaching expertise for casual tutors. Employing the theoretical lens of social and practice theories (Bourdieu, 1977; Nicolini, 2011), elaborates on our understanding of reflection-in-action (Schön, 1983, 1987) to discuss actions and behaviours of those casual teachers or tutors in design studios who have come into university teaching from professional architectural practice. Tracking and tracing actions and behaviours of tutors provides an elaborated view of the pedagogical ‘work’ that they do in design studios. The professional development of tutors is situated and emergent in design studios (Beaton & Gilbert, 2013; Bell & Mladenovic, 2008; Billett, 2001). In view of the time constraints to attend formal training and the general nature of inductions, tutors learn about and develop their teaching through interactions in design studios and conversations with colleagues (Author, 2022). Their identity as university educators is shaped through learning ‘on the job’ in design studios and they become university educators through their practice, honing teaching expertise ‘on site’ in design studios.

Pale Blue Dot is a first-year graduate Studio in Critical Practice, where students develop a critical approach to architecture. Examined through three areas of engagement: sustainability, the impacts of new technologies, and responses to local and global conditions, students consider the role of the architect and architectural practice in society from a variety of perspectives, including those of observer, critic and designer, and explore the role of architecture as a potential agent of change. The title Pale Blue Dot – inspired by the photograph taken of Earth in 1990 by the Voyager-1 space probe from a distance of 6 billion kilometers – invited students to explore the role of architecture in addressing some of our planet’s current challenges: the climate emergency, mass migration, food insecurity, and unequal access to and distribution of resources, among others. The  studio challenged students to undertake intensive research-driven theoretical and design explorations, and to consider themes and issues that reside outside the confines of conventional architectural discourse to include a broader cultural, social, technological and political context. The explorations helped reinforce the increasingly important role played by research in the larger endeavor of architecture to offer its unique disciplinary perspective to an evolving process that is multidisciplinary, discursive, synthetic and agile. This focus on research, and the emphasis placed on design as a research method in its own right, has formed the basis of the studio. Adapting to a radically shifting context that has shaken our assumptions about architectural typology, public space, urban models and social relations, the current generation of students is rapidly shedding received architectural wisdom to explore new possibilities emerging from the ashes of the old. The projects produced by the students represent a series of propositions. There is a notable difference in attitude, however, when compared with the totalizing utopian visions proffered by our predecessors of the past century. These current projects demonstrate a high degree of maturity and humility in their approach, and professionalism in their execution and representation. Musing on the Voyager photograph of Earth mentioned above, the astronomer Carl Sagan wrote, in his book Pale Blue Dot: “Our posturing’s, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.”1 In addition to conditions caused by the climate crisis, students were asked to draw upon the issues that the global pandemic has created or exposed. David Wallace-Wells’ book The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming, was used as a primer. Wallace-Wells summarizes the environmental challenges through four themes; Cascades, Elements of Chaos, The Climate Kaleidoscope and The Anthropic Principle. This studio is seen as a first step in developing an approach to design as a discursive and iterative inquiry rather than as a finite solution addressing a specific set of predetermined parameters. Projects were conceived open-ended; students initially defined their projects and sites through a process of rigorous inquiry- identifying, researching, defining, and articulating their projects in response to a set of criteria relating to a theoretical position. Drawing and model building as strategies to engage critical thinking were underscored – creating thought frameworks that supplemented traditional research as a mechanism to arrive at a critical position and design intervention. Sites were chosen worldwide with varying projects that engaged: resiliency, the impacts of change, and responses to local and global cultural issues. The studio was divided into three phases–these phases demonstrated diverse techniques and outcomes. Phase 1 illustrated the varied research undertaken through ethnographic drawing and diagraming, each project capturing a resonating prompt from The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming. Phase 2 continued the Phase 1 research through a material investigations culminating in an evocative maquette that became the basis for a proposal. The final Phase 3 proposal revisits the previous phases incorporating viewpoints and delving deeper into the positions that have been formed to arrive at a final project response. PHASE 1:RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS “The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead.” 2  The inception of this studio was a rigorous research and analysis of the students’ chosen context. Using The Uninhabitable Earth as a primer to drive this operation, students identified and explained problems and opportunities based on their chosen site’s general context, physical and cultural data, case studies relevant to the context, and propose appropriate responses which responded to the themes of the Venice Biennale and the Chicago Biennial.  Phase 2: Maquette Exercises Technology and materiality are integral to the design process, not just the way we make buildings work. Materials are the ultimate outward expression of an architectural idea or concept, and materiality can be a driver of design solutions. In this exercise, students were required to investigate material(s) and forms which will form part of the design process and inform the final project submission. The investigation is not usually associated with construction to learn from its physical properties, but rather relates to the themes investigated in the students’ research and analysis. Phase 3: Design Intervention “What will happen at two degrees, or three? Presumably, as climate change colonizes and darkens our lives and our world, it will do the same for our nonfiction, so much so that climate change may come to be regarded, at least by some, as the only truly serious subject.“4 In the final phase, building on the students’ research and maquette exercise, students were tasked with developing a preliminary design addressing one or more of the issues identified in their research. Having generated ideas for a design proposal, students were then asked to develop an intervention functionally and conceptually related to the proposal explored in earlier stages of the work. As students composed their interventions, they were encouraged to consider three primary areas of engagement: sustainability in all its facets; the impact of technologies; and response to local and global contexts. The challenges of facilitating a studio that delved into the disruptions of our time during the COVID 19 Pandemic proved oddly useful. Operating in a hybrid fashion, with 24 students and two professors convening both remotely and in-person, our students directly experienced the agility required to operate within the moment and question the status quo. Students were not only observers, critics and designers; they were also participants embedded in the throes of change. Students focused on 10 research initiatives leading to 10 projects proposals punctuated by 24 individual maquettes in a phase to unfold and visualize unseen aspects and recalibrate chosen themes and positions. Embracing design as research, students oscillated between traditional forms of research and the haptics of drawing and making as a way of thinking and exploring. Ethnographic drawings and other techniques allowed analysis to be measured as well as visualized and experienced in new ways. The investigation of material and form through maquettes helped focus and clarify positions. Though abstract, the models were operational and architecturally driven. Drawings and models allowed for new critical and meaningful perspectives, not only informing but strengthening students’ positions that led to final proposals. Projects focused on a wide range of issues: mass migration, food insecurity, urban systems, affordable housing and the re-thinking of the suburbs, the reimagining of post-industrial cities through the lens of the Anthropocene, and adaptation—the holistic re-engagement of place and circumstance. Common themes emerged through this diverse collection of projects. All engaged in innovative approaches that challenged the role of architects, architecture, urban design, and design in general. The need for architecture to be more adaptive and resilient was a theme shared by all proposals. Projects posited that diversity – in terms of who we are and how we live – needs to translate into new modes of living, and that our environments must be more flexible and malleable in order to accept change over time. Students’ sensitivity to conditions and processes affecting the way we will live strikingly enlightened the debate in the studio, enriching the learning and teaching environment for everyone, including instructors and guests participating in the final review of the students’ work. The theme woven throughout is adaptability. Adaptability means being able to think and act holistically, recognizing the symbiotic relationship between people and nature. Poignantly today; this may be seen as the new radical.  Ultimately, the proposals presented were reflective and projective, challenging conventional ways of conceiving and making architecture and inhabiting our pale blue dot.

As a study conducted on teaching and learning, the main purpose of the present research is to investigate the effect of visual notes on the rate of learning the History of World Architecture (HWA) as one of the theoretical courses in the field of architecture. The research undertaken here demonstrates that visual note-taking as one of teaching methods allows students to attach their own symbols to represent meaning. In light of visual notes, participants are engaged in more self-monitoring events than non-drawing participants. Additionally, the use of visual notes during the learning process of theoretical courses in the field of architecture is an effective strategy to enhance the educational performance of students. Referring to Bloom’s Taxonomy, visual notes are considered an elaborative encoding strategy that plays a critical role in the memory performance. The statistical population of this study consisted of 59 undergraduate architecture students who attended the course of the History of World Architecture and were randomly clustered. By selecting two experimental and control groups, the present study utilized a posttest design. 39 people were allocated to the experimental group and 20 people to the control group. As well as lectures, learners in the experimental group were also required to describe the physical characteristics and geometric-spatial features of each monument and draw its design. The posttest-only control group design was used and the data were collected using a researcher-made test. The validity of the test was assessed based on the opinions of experts, and the reliability coefficient for 29 questions of the test was calculated using Cronbach’s alpha to be 0.84. Data were analyzed using SPSS software and the student t-test. Bloom’s Taxonomy helped to design a learning experience to identify, classify, and outline what students are expected to learn in this course. The results of the study show that the visual notes taken by students on architectural monuments has a statistically significant effect on the rate of learning and better performance in remembering, understanding, and explaining the physical and semantic features of historic monuments of the concepts taught by teachers in the classes of the History of World Architecture. Taking visual notes based on observation, recording, perception, connecting, analyzing, and encoding offers global education, through which learners are engaged in a deep cultural exchange rather than merely transacting.

“What form should the contemporary city take in order to restore the distorted equilibrium between the individual freedom and the collective responsibility?” – Siegfried Giedon* The answer to this question is not simple. The collective realm is seen as a basic element in ensuring positive social relations among individuals, as well as a chance for social inclusion in our cities. However, oftentimes these positive relationships take place less and less spontaneously. Private spaces are replacing public gathering, and when this happens, according to Margaret Kohn’s book, Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space, “the opportunities are diminished.” (1) This unbalanced situation is the point of departure of a critical teaching methodology, resulting from the conjunction of a seminar’s research titled “Politics of Balance” which has led to a recently published book: Manhattan’s Public Spaces, Routledge, 2022.  Both this seminar and book unpack architecture as the result of complex and multiple social, cultural, ecological, and economic relations. An idea which focuses on how public spaces manifest larger cultural, socio-economic, ecological and political processes, and how their design and configuration impacts the nature and character of public experience.  This combined framework affords students a compelling set of connections between the discourses of policy and law, history and place, and their contribution to collective space. The significance of the interrelationship between this teaching enterprise lies in the focus on the evolution of place through a juxtaposition of visual material with social and political histories. An elaboration that consciously builds on the pedagogical role of the past as an aesthetic experience, so students can learn that the most important lesson of history is to open doors into the present, so we can imagine that other futures are possible.  1. The Research/Seminar A semester-long course introduces graduate students of architecture to the awareness of the role that architecture plays as a precondition for political, cultural, and social engagement in the city. Following a process of analysis of the space of the city, its different users and its government, the course presents a series of precedents analysis toward the exploration of the architectural project as an urban mediator and political form. The seminar begins with the acknowledgement of a very basic problem within the collective realm: we are never quite sure what it is or what it is for. We have this general sense that public space is something open, free, and happy. But the reality is somewhat very different and a much more blurred scenario. In this sense, the “other” and the “diversity” is what is missing from the kind of public space in most of our leftover squares, plazas, and pocket parks, and it is what makes it valuable. In a true public space, you might be offended by something or somebody, or by some behavior that is not familiar but this is the principle of what makes a space public, stands for freedom of expression and the joys of human interaction, according to Aaron Betsky. (2) Similar to what Sophie Watson argues in her book “City publics: the (dis)enchantments of urban encounters”, when she says that “public space is always in some sense, in a state of emergence, never complete and always contested.” (3) The learning outcomes of the seminar have two primary goals. On one hand, the first objective of this seminar is to develop the student’s ability to prepare a comprehensive reading of the symbiosis between the architectural project and its context. On the other hand, the second is to empower students with the ability to apply the fundamentals of discussing and exploring civic participation and the engagement within the built environment. The course focuses on these two objectives, with greater emphasis on learning through a series of architectural precedents and its intimate relation with its adjacencies how interaction is promoted, in cities around the world, through actions which take place in the collective and represent small, yet persistent challenges in contrast to the increasingly regulated, privatized, and diminishing forms of public space of our contemporary cities. The challenge of this research/seminar rests then, not just in the analysis of the production of good design, but more importantly, in how to understand the mechanisms for production of space for public use and how these interventions contribute or not to a sustainable and inclusive environment anchored in the already existing built fabric. A reciprocity, which has the potential to strengthen, but at the same time loosen, social networks, spatial systems and everyday language and imagery. A window into the present, that others might not have, which highlights that public space is not a concrete reality but a delicate negotiated condition.  2. The Book The research/seminar discourse contributed to the publication of a book which unpacks three periods of the evolution of the collective realm during the past few decades through the lens of Manhattan: its production (part 1), its revitalization (part 2) and its commodification (part 3). The first part of the book explores innovative contributions after a political and socioeconomic euphoria post World War II. Here, the production of public space is understood as a deliberate making of openness in the city, which is possible thanks to the alliance of incentive mechanisms and corporate capitalism: a process which would become key in transforming Manhattan´s urban landscape. The text begins to explore the city in the 1950s, a critical moment when the monolithic city starts to physically and metaphorically erode. As an example of this, the seminar, research and book dissect Lever House and Seagram Building, innovative proposals that contributed to an important rupture of the urban canyons and obsolete zoning regulations. The consequence of alliances between incentive economic regulations, corporations and modern architecture lay the groundwork for the sensibility and revitalization of the collective space in Part Two of the book. This revitalization focuses on a set of examples where participatory processes are key in the critical engagement of recreational demands in the city. This second part delves into a range of proposals at the time of a special focus of the audience these proposals are thought for: from humble collaborative initiatives, such as three pocket parks in an overcrowded Harlem directed by non-profit organizations for a local community input, to sophisticated proposals by private philanthropists such as Paley Park in Midtown. The unexpected success of these projects led to a proliferation of tiny parks in the city, which introduced the students into a new sensibility of spaces where a full spatial experience and sensory stimuli invited citizens to enjoy as a new way to imagine a post-industrial vision for a reinvented landscape for play. Part Three interrogates the commodification of Manhattan´s public space. A period of frictional identities where antagonistic encounters take place within the neoliberal city. From the ’70s to the ’80s, the seminar and the book analyze a post-economic downturn where, against all odds, Manhattan launched an intensive waterfront revival. Continuing into the ’90s and burdened by the consequences of a prolonged economic crisis, bold solutions such as the bid to be an Olympic host city took place. The case study of Battery Park City (Downtown) and Gantry Plaza State Park (Queens), displays different results in the challenging waterfront strategies that instead of innovation, privileges the imbalance between public and private interests. From this perspective, the teaching outcomes question celebrated spatial initiatives such as the reconfiguration of Lincoln Center and the High Line. Projects which led the city into a controversial era of very profitable solutions through an accelerated renewal and infrastructural revitalization. 3. Cross pollination: The Teaching Outcome The cross pollination of crafting a book while teaching about the impact of conflicting architectural influences, objectives, and interests within the city’s public realm opens up an opportunity which is not meant to have a final state but rather to provide a plastic set of tools for students to acknowledge and appropriate. A teaching methodology which is double. On one hand, to identify and critically engage strategies of architectural production deeply embedded in a socio-political, cultural, ecological and economic context. And on the other hand, to acknowledge that these mechanisms are never closed nor completed but open-ended systems which are results of an opaque layering of networks among the different agents they are designed by and for. From this position, both the book, Manhattan’s Public Spaces, and the seminar ‘Politics of Balance’ addresses a set of questions that may allow it to transcend into a not-so-apparent cause-effects relationships: What are the consequences of urban regeneration politics, the displacement of former activities and the resulting increase in land value? How can historical examples provide a more accurate description of the intensely difficult relationships between contemporary networks of private and public actors? How can the deeper understanding of established relationships in a city positively influence the future success of the renewal of the collective space in other urban environments?

“How shall cosmopolitanism be conceived in relation to globalization, capitalism, and modernity? The geopolitical imaginary nourished by the term and processes of globalization lays claim to the homogeneity of the planet from above–economically, politically, and culturally. The term cosmopolitanism is, instead, used as a counter to globalization, although not necessarily in the sense of globalization from below. Globalization from below invokes, rather, the reactions to globalization from those populations and geohistorical areas of the planet that suffer the consequences of the global economy. There are, then, local histories that plan and project global designs and others that have to live with them. Cosmopolitanism is not easily aligned to either side of globalization, although the term implies a global project. How shall we understand cosmopolitanism in relation to these alternatives?” –Walter Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis (2000) Preface Critiques of an architecture profession primarily driven by economic performance metrics are longstanding (Deamer, Wilson, Scott, Martin). Notes on architecture’s recent unionization efforts call for the necessity of post-postcritical criticism.[1] Reports of “architecture’s toxic work culture” further urge us reckon with the rules of engagement.[2] At the same time, shifting relationships between education and practice are manifest in multi-scalar interdisciplinary practices that reframe the typical market-driven concerns of architect, client, and user (e.g., STOSS, Interboro, Muf.) This teacher’s conference advocates for reformulating the stakes of architecture education and reexamining the principles and values of design practice. It calls for us to rethink and reinvent what is architecture what architects do. Summary This paper will analyse experiments in teaching design studios on global urbanism conducted with students at the University of North Carolina Charlotte from 2017-2021. Discussions with the director at the time, Chris Jarrett, led to international studios focused bringing to students a global perspective and understanding of architecture in larger frameworks. The courses prioritized conflicts and controversies bearing critically on the role of urban design today emphasized awareness of the interactions of built form with culture and environment. They served an audience of students from backgrounds in architecture, social sciences, humanities, and planning.[3] The courses have been part of the development of a cosmopolitan pedagogy, one that is based on the investigation of reciprocal relationships between the local and the global forces acting on images, objects, places, and people. The incorporation of readings from cultural studies, sociology, geopolitics, and anthropology informed by resistance to universal truths about humans, communities, and the built environment frame architecture and education as a kind of critical and literate citizenship in which diversity provides an intellectual framework for understanding of differentials in power and social identity in the world around us. My wish has been to mentor design activists who aspire to enable new models of academia-led practice. The goal is to situate the design studio as a flexible, inclusive, and nimble model for future strategic practices.[4] Thomas A. Dutton addresses the reproduction of biases in the design studio with the concept of the “hidden curriculum.”[5] Paul Nakazawa (Harvard School of Design) uses the term “pre-factual” to describe working in and responding to a context where evidence is still developing, information is incomplete, and debate around the factual and/or scientific foundations is ongoing. He points out that in many cases, analysing existing options may not provide the necessary insights needed to respond successfully because the challenge is one that has not been dealt with before and the facts do not yet exist. Questions arise: How would architectural education test the asymmetries of design studio thinking? How to educate a new generation of designers with the capabilities to develop holistic understandings of socio-cultural and ecological problems of urban development and the role of architecture in it? Theory The cosmopolitan pedagogy interweaves several strands of critique: Arguments by Jane Hutton on “material movements” and Clare Lyster on “network as context;”[6]” ideas of David Harvey and David Gissen on architecture’s “geographic imagination,”[7] and the terms of Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till in Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (2011) and Keller Easterling in Medium Design (2021.) Eastering’s concepts include interdeterminacy (“Medium design, like pool, is indeterminate in order to be practical”) and interplay (“parameters of how things interact with each other.”)[8] She argues: “Entanglements are more productive than solutions. Designers are usually very good at making things with shapes and outlines, but design in the medium is less like making a thing and more like having your hands on the faders and toggles of organization. It is the design of interdependencies, chemistries, chain reactions. It benefits from an artistic curiosity about spatial wiring or reagents in spatial mixtures. You are designing not only a single object but a platform for inflecting populations of objects or setting up relative potentials within them. You are comfortable with dynamic markers and unfinished processes.”[9] Other references include: James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (1998); Bryan Turner, “Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalization and Patriotism,” Theory, Culture, and Society (2002); Aseem Inam, Designing Urban Transformation (2014). Studios My studios are structured according to an issue-finding mode of study (instead of identifying and assigning a problem to be solved in advance). I aim to present a connected world comprised of the socio-political and economic agency of all parties. The main pedagogical goal has been educate students to appreciate the complexity of every issue investigated despite scale. Objectives include the implementation of systems thinking in design- to investigate systems dynamics by designing in time as well as space and diagrammaticaly representing a multitude of states. Investigations are multiscalar, addressing territory, settlement, building, and body. Students are responsible of choosing their project’s specific sites, data, defining the program and type of built form, and positioning them through the lens of the specific studio’s premise. 1. Arctictecture (2016) Fig. 1 The workshop stemmed from an interest in exploring how analytical research can equal invention through mapping. In a four-week exercise students researched and speculated on past and future infrastructural, socio-economic and political transitions in the “vacant” regions of Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Greenland and northwestern Russia. The work depicted the intersecting complexities of geographic, climatic, and cultural pressures operating under exacerbated conditions of chance, risk, and instability. Fact-based investigation was used to support speculative proposals for topographical forms and fictions in the immediate future. Facts were graphically and verbally articulated as ideas and stories through cartography. Investigations built upon class readings on systems thinking. Working in pairs, students prepared hybrid, intelligent research drawings/maps and speculative proposals drawing on the topics of Transportation Infrastructure, Natural Resource Extraction (Oil, Water, Mineral), and Uility/Energy Generation Infrastructure. 2. Research and Design on the 35th Parallel (2020) Fig. 2 The four-week summer research and design studio during the pandemic undertook “armchair travel” for a class unable to particpate in an international study semester abroad program. The course identified heterotopias of abandonment, exclusion, and inequality across the 35th Parallel North. Students researched spatial-territorial definitions, interactions between humans, design and the built environment, and protocols of human ambition. They used social media to interact with people in their various sites around the globe. Design responses at two scales included a relic of quarantine, a prototypical functional talisman understood as a body interface bridging advanced technologies and elemental human life. The second scale, that of a spatial assemblage or structure/building proposal, engaged with issues related to programmatic complements and urban infrastructure. 3. Urbanism beyond Borders. (2021) Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 Urban Design students situated topics of resource extraction, communications infrastructure, financial geographies, and human capital in response to cracks in the capacity of communities and environments to sustain well-being in the Caribbean region. The studio addressed the process of making architecture as an ecology of embedded relationships focused on human and natural systems. The course included seminars in ecological, cultural, and geo-political mapping. Architectural and urban interventions were viewed through the lenses of commons, sharing, and human cooperation, using institutions to steer outcomes and change. 4. Territory Charlotte (2021) Fig. 5 The Master’s architecture studio addressed commons, infrastructures, and ecologies. Students developed urban scale propositions with architectural elements informed by consciousness of design’s territorial and temporal aspects. The approach entailed the identification of an unaddressed crisis and through analytical mapping the revelation of its spatio-temporal dimensions. The creation of a narrative involving in intersection of objects, histories, medias, and spaces was followed by the identification of actors, agents, tools, and resources. Strategies and time frames were sought to articulate new ideas about systems and the ways they relate and interlock. In some cases the work offered frameworks for action rather than specific outcomes. The studio was complemented with experience in local engagement and connectivity as well as work with geographers and municipal planners. Conclusion The conclusion will address obstacles and futures.

This paper will detail the structure of the integrated course cluster at the [program] by [faculty], who redevelop and teach these three required co-requisite courses to the junior cohort of approximately 50 undergraduates each fall. Developed as part of the [program]’s holistic, two-year-long curriculum re-imagination process, the integrated course cluster was first implemented in Fall 2018. Though the courses are still nominally separate in the university catalog – ARCH 3010: Architectural Studio (5 credit studio), ARCH 3050: Architectural Communications (3 credit studio), and ARCH 3216: Critical Concepts in Design (3 credit seminar) – they were conceived and are delivered as an integrated whole by the faculty who work across traditional course boundaries.  This set of courses forms the foundation for our Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies (BSAS) program and transitions from the fluidly sequenced first two years of the curriculum to the intensive final two years. This is also the point at which transfer students from the local community college matriculate into the BSAS degree, so there is a commitment to focus on community building and intentionally fostering an inclusive environment throughout the semester as well. Underlying the move to such deep integration is the [Program]’s position that epistemic grounding in evidence-driven design through a variety of disciplinary lenses is necessary to the critical study and practice of architecture. An overarching theme of zero-waste serves as the conceptual through line for the semester’s work, which supports the program’s imperative that students are educated as activist-architects who have a deep ethic of care for people, places, and the planet. Throughout the semester, students learn to identify and think critically about a design problem, develop techniques and strategies to communicate their design responses, and take those lessons into a collaborative work environment where discourse and risk-taking are encouraged through productive struggle in a facilitated, safe, and friendly environment. This is accomplished by interweaving the three courses into one cumulative experience that uses the historic strengths of the studio model that supports the development of each student’s abilities and interests through a deep interpersonal relationship with each other and their studio professor. During the exploration of increasingly complex projects, students work to holistically address program requirements, develop a creative design response, and resolve technical issues within the broader social, environmental, and cultural context. Critical Concepts in Design (ARCH 3216) explains the definitions of different research methods, how to employ them, their strengths and challenges, and shows examples of their use by architects in the past. Communications (ARCH 3050) teaches techniques of recording information gathered using different research methods, theories of different modes of communication, and best technique for representing design ideas. Studio (ARCH 3010) guides students on how to practice all research and associated communication methods, translate the findings into design responses, validate design proposals by demonstrating their connection to the research method, and reflect on the results of the work. Today’s educators are tasked with nurturing a diverse cohort of students’ abilities in integrative, synthetic thinking, empathetic entrepreneurship, and fostering collaboration through open-ended, real-world projects by working across disciplines and valuing the collective mind over the individual genius.[1] An integrated curriculum model supports such an approach to complex, systems-based issues such as zero-waste, which is the focus of the entire semester’s work. “Waste is a design flaw: in our packaging, in our products and in our buildings and cities. Ecosystems recycle materials indefinitely in circular loops, but the human designed system discards 99% of the materials extracted from the earth within six months.”[2]  As of January, 2018, China has severely limited allowing the import of recyclable goods from many countries including the United States. This has changed the map of the waste stream from global to local scale. It has made [City]’s goal to become a Zero Waste City by 2040 more urgent than ever. To achieve this goal, architects must reconsider waste in all its attributes as a central element to the design problem.  The closure of recyclable waste stream to China has made one thing glaringly evident: waste is not the other of consumption. It is a commodity in and of itself. Unknown to many of us, it has been bought and sold for decades. Waste and worth are part of the often invisible feedback loop of capitalist consumption. Unlike people in urban contexts with limited land, [City]’s public has had a cavalier attitude to the issue of waste since its founding in the mid-19th century. The expansive landscape of [State] has sustained the illusion that we have infinite space. However, the impending reality is that the expanse of our waste streams are growing at a pace large enough to shrink the borders of separation. [State] is expected to double in population by 2060 and will have nearly an additional one million people by 2030. Currently, landfills around [City] are expected to last until 2065, but those predictions do not factor in increased consumption or increased population size. Our landfills may reach capacity much sooner. Add to that [State] has, through private enterprise, historically been a repository for the import of industrial and nuclear waste. After even a brief introduction the issue on the first day of class, students are able to see how the topic of waste is immediately relevant to their social, economic, political, and built context. According to Barbra Davis in her book Tools for Teaching, this is one of the key components to fostering authentic learning. “Authentic learning focuses on complex real-world problems and their solutions. The instructor selects a problem that is ill-defined and that requires sustained investigation and collaboration. Students are not given a list of resources but must conduct their own searches and distinguish relevant from irrelevant information. Authentic activities engage students in making choices, evaluating competing solutions, and creating a finished product.[3]” Faculty further support this approach by choosing atypical research methods, sites, and design prompts for the students such as studying ethnography, existing local bodegas, and asking students to conduct week-long trash audits and design a Waste Commodity Exchange, among many other exercises throughout the semester. Architecture studios utilize problem- and project-based learning strategies to create such authentic learning experiences, which have been shown to produce students who are “more motivated, demonstrate better communication and teamwork skills, and have a better understanding of issues and how to apply their learning to realistic problems” than those educated using traditional models[4]. We build on the strength of this approach to integrate communication and research methods skills into the studio context rather than as discrete courses. Meaningful experiences with research and exposure to complex, professional scenarios while still in school activate students’ quest for information and desire to develop new ideas.[5],[6] Davis describes this approach as guided design: In guided design…students… are led through a complex sequence of steps to solve real-world problems, with the instructor providing feedback at each step. These steps might include defining the situation, stating the problem and goal to be achieved, generating ideas and selecting the best one, defining the new situation that would result when the selected idea is implemented, preparing a detailed plan to implement the idea, implementing the plan, and evaluating and learning from the success or failure of the process and the plan. Guided design serves as a bride from single-solution textbook problems to applied open-ended problems.[7] Open-ended problems support the development of the ultimate learning outcome – transfer – that occurs when students are able to independently apply what they have learned in one situation through the translation to another context[8]. This “adaptive expertise” enables navigation of rapidly changing environments though it is may not equate to traditional academic success in the ability to retain facts and figures.[9] We believe based on student work outcomes, exit interviews, and critical self-reflection that the model is proving highly effective at the objectives of developing critical, reflective, ethical emerging professionals and would value the opportunity to present our work and findings to the Teachers’ Conference audience for feedback.

Analyzing the intellectual debate happening at Cornell School of Architecture in the 1970s between the rationalists led by O.M. Ungers with Rem Koolhaas and the contextualists represented by Colin Rowe, Sébastien Marot[1] coined the term “manifeste situé” or site-specific manifesto to describe the three publications born from this breeding ground: The City in the City, Berlin: A Green Archipelago[2] in 1977, and Collage City[3], Delirious New York[4] in 1978. Beyond the intellectual vanity of these endeavors, they mark the end of a trend that started ten years before at Yale, where architecture education wasn’t focusing on the canon anymore but found its roots in the vernacular commercial environment. When Charles W. Moore took over the School of Architecture at Yale in the 1960s, his ambition was to bring design teaching outside the studio, reacting to a beaux-arts atavism that survived modernism, where design is taught in-vitro within the walls of their ivory towers[5]. Initiated by investigating the New Haven social and urban conditions, this pedagogical project will climax with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s urban design-inspired studio in Las Vegas in 1968 and Levittown in 1970. These systematic explorations of America’s backyard, from railways, dockyards, and factories to industrial edges and vernacular monumental, through sketching, painting, photographing, filming, and reading, aimed to steer design education focus away from architectural forms and toward political space. The ambition was to address the “rapidly developing problems of the urban environment” and relate architecture to a broader culture. Venturi and Scott-Brown’s seminal publication “The Significance of A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas”[6] will redefine architectural education in the years to come.   In the 21st Century, more than fifty years after Moore’s pedagogical project and Venturi’s publication, our paper looks at the relevance of such an education model in the context of Sino-foreign institutions. When architectural education is becoming increasingly homogenous in China, how does working from the existing settings help education be more relevant and students more engaged? Can architecture still be political in such a context? How to redefine the very notion of context when it has become a design mimic in global practices? In our research, we are putting in parallel the 1970s education context in the US and the current condition in China, from a foreign perspective, to question the relationship between architecture education and politics, architectural canons, and vernacular landscapes.

It has been over 100 years since Gropius developed his teaching diagram for the Bauhaus, rooted in abstract experimental workshops on form, shape, and color, centered around building and making [1]. Widely influential, this teaching method changed how many 1920s Beaux-Arts-based architectural schools taught foundational courses for architects. And yet today, for most beginning design studios, our roots are firmly planted in Bauhaus “modern” thinking, which is to say, an introduction to a design studio should start simple, with an abstract non-figurative object exercise [2]. But is this relevant to starting a studio with our current circumstances? How do you create an introduction to design course for architects in today’s post-pandemic world, with social and ecological injustices for the year 2023 and beyond?  This paper introduces a new kind of first-year design studio that goes beyond the Bauhaus model of conceptual beginnings. Instead of starting with abstract lessons, an introduction studio can begin with a response to a pressing social issue centered around building something meaningful in response to social injustice. This paper demonstrates a successful first-year liberal arts studio centered on creating something meaningful for society: an investigation of an object-oriented design process utilizing digital drawings, rapid prototyping, and digital fabrication techniques. This introduction to design class uses the methodology of “design as process” and a creative act marking a synthesis based on observing a problem, interpreting possibilities, and translating a concept into meaningful three-dimensional objects that engage with society and social justice.  The project selected for this first-year studio, design a memorial to the victims of the 1982 Philadelphia MOVE bombing (image_1). The class defines the creative project as marking out a synthesis rather than beginning with a Bauhaus abstraction exercise, presenting a shift in architectural education. Using complex social issues to center the class allows beginning students to engage with a complex social problem, which is, in a way, a form of abstraction [3]. With this methodology, the designs created by the student have meaning and purpose.  Forty years ago, on May 13th, 1982, the Pennsylvania State Police department dropped a bomb on a neighborhood community organization, MOVE, a Black liberation group founded in Philadelphia by John Africa (1972). The bomb killed 11 people and destroyed an entire city block of West Philadelphia. Following the traumatic event, the city erased any memory of what happened, rebuilding the city block with new townhouses without input from the victims [4]. By having the student design a memorial, they engage with spatial justice, creating a memorial object responding to the systemic racism in architecture. The students started with group research on MOVE, and each made a photo essay describing their findings (image_2). Students continue the creative process to develop a memorial design within three memorial typologies: building cuts, sidewalk memorials, and corner memorials on the site of the MOVE bombing. Digital software tutorials for the students were framed around the analysis and transformation of a memorial case study relating to the three memorial typologies: 1) Matta-Clark’s site-specific circle building cuts, Chicago (1970), 2) Mary Miss 9/11 sidewalk memorial, New York City (2001), 3) Mies van der Rohe’s Revolution Monument, Germany (1926)  The course introduces basic 2D and 3D modeling skills and techniques of representation necessary for the description, projection, and fabrication of three-dimensional form. Each case study (listed above) is an exercise in geometrical descriptions, along with learning software commands. There are also valuable history/theory lessons and site strategies for the student’s memorial design when looking deepen into their case study project. For example, Matta-Clark’s building cuts is an exercise in boolean-difference geometry, and transformations of this case study form provided the students with tools to engage with building conditions for interventions within a row and end of townhouses. Mary Miss’s 9/11 memorial, a temporary memorial, can be observed as a lesson in sweeps and blending curves. The project’s theory equipped students with examples of engaging with border and edge conditions. Mies’s Revolution monument, horizontal brick planes taken from the site where Nazis executed protestors from the communist party, is a study of planar surfaces and extrusions. For this preliminary assignment, each student explored a series of descriptive transformations, using degree and structural operations to the object. This assignment aimed to develop a category of form possibilities and introduce students to the bases of algorithm and scripting design (image_3). The student’s transformations and form-generating processes serve as a conceivable analog for designing memorial-engaging corner conditions at the project site. Encouraging students to develop a written narrative is a helpful rhetorical device for first-year design studios. It helps students develop a concept and imagine how others might experience their design. One design goal given to the class was to create a memory object to enable past knowledge to be retained in the present rather than an object to access a historical event. This design goal challenged students to think about their memorial as an active agent for future change, a place for visitors and the local community, encouraging multiple engagements. Other design questions include: a) How does your memorial design respond to people’s physiological and psychological needs of the past, present, and future relating to this traumatic event? b) How does your memorial engage with the setting’s environment and climate change? c) How does your memorial object respond to day/night and seasonal cycles? d) How does your memorial acknowledge social justice, along with being diverse, equitable, and inclusive? The memorial should give back to the community by providing a civic place of contemplative dwelling and daily use.  Each students’ memorial responds to its settings with describable geometries articulated with materials and epigraphs. The students could select from three different locations for the memorial: building cuts, sidewalk memorial, and corner memorial. Since the 1982 MOVE bombing destroyed an entire block in Philadelphia, a memorial in response to MOVE should be strategically woven within the site of trauma.  Site 1: Building cuts: an idea that one or more of the townhouses has been given back to the MOVE community by the city. This site could be at the former location of John Africa’s former house address or the end of the townhouse row. Students were encouraged to cut into the building and open up the rebuilt townhouse to reveal a place of memory. The building-cut memorial expands the idea of what a memorial space can be. Sky and earth cut operations can be on the outside, through the roof, and between two townhouses. Each cut into the building had to be purposeful, with an intention for a program use inspired by their photo essay and narrative. Possible programs include: a) a space that honors the victims but also provides something that people in the community need; b) an opportunity for shelter; and c) a community gathering hall – a place for a festival and interaction between people, spatial nourishment for others. The idea for the building cut memorial is also in response to MOVE’s ideas about community, along with the critique of a wall that divides with current zoning practices in Philadelphia. Site 2: Sidewalk memorial: a sidewalk memorial is an opportunity for students to create a meaningful commemoration that responds to the setting but does not intervene in the existing townhouses. The sidewalk memorial can be both delicate and bold with its intervention. The sidewalk memorial can expand the street by taking over existing parking spaces. It can also reimagine the front steps for the existing townhouses to form a community in memory of MOVE’s philosophy.  Site 3: Corner memorial: the corner site is an interesting memorial typology. The memorial for the corner site should intervene on an edge condition and transform an existing corner condition connecting a public alley space within the MOVE city block. Students can reconfigure an existing retaining wall and design the corning shape in this setting. For this setting, the students explore the two primary ways of making form: subtractive and additive for this civic setting. Students were also encouraged to think about how their memorial intervention could provide shelter, a place for gardening, and respond to climate change and water runoff. Perhaps one could consider this introduction to design course a “recentering” of the Bauhaus teaching method, changing the center of what a student should build their design skills around. In other words, this studio is based on a conceptualization of real social issues of the student’s current surroundings rather than importing an instructor’s own set of abstract exercises [5]. The infusion of theory lecture courses throughout the class offers an opportunity to expose students to a diverse set of theory ideas they can use for their projects. Other pedagogy shifts include meeting once a week for a studio with optional open office hours and encouraging students to participate in collaborative group work, developing skills connected to creating a new framework for a beginning studio-based course.  The final paper will present three top student projects from the studio’s memorial typology approach (images 4 & 5).

“I’ve always known that there’s a statue where that statue is. But I’ve never actually, like, looked at it. It just exists perpetually embedded in the [. . .] landscape like a wallpaper pattern you’ve grown to ignore.” –Damon Young “The Most Racist Statue in America Is in … Pittsburgh, and It’s the Most Ridiculous Magical Negro You’ll Ever See.” (2018) “With defacement the statue moves from an excess of invisibility to an excess of visibility.” –Michael Taussig  Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative There is a lot of talk about monuments these days. The attention is peculiar because monuments have for a long time been denigrated as invisible objects or impotent communicators.1 Even monuments that are offensive to large groups of people have been tolerated for decades or even centuries on the basis that their harm is, by virtue of their background status, innocuous. But the past has changed. It has gotten bigger. It contains more voices now. And so, there is talk of what to do with the monuments around us that no longer fit into our new past. In other words, as many monuments have become visible, and as such, no longer tolerable because they do not represent the present collective self-vision, the world is grappling with these peculiar stone stories amongst which we find ourselves. The practice of dismantling monuments is not, of course, new. Stalin has come down hundreds of times, and he wasn’t nearly the first. For much of history, statues, buildings, location names, and other forms of commemoration have been routinely obliterated in the name of new, more representative, memories. But not always. Some ancient civilizations took a less totalizing approach. Romans for example, practiced a form of erasure wherein portraits, sculptures, and even written inscriptions were smudged or smoothed away in parts to remove offending portions, while maintaining the original piece of art otherwise intact. This practice, damnatio memoriae (the condemnation of memory), was a form of physical forgetting that asserted a new understanding upon an old one, but also and more importantly for this conversation, rendered that disagreement visible. The alteration, if it was to be perceived as an alteration, existed in a way that the offense remained in some way present, a necessary “before.” For years in my architectural studio course, I taught the design of the counter-monument, a form of memorialization that was a challenge to the very premise of traditional monuments.2 Emerging in Europe in the 1980’s in the shadow of the Holocaust and the ensuing “memory boom,” counter-monuments shifted the focus of our public memory to a manner of commemoration that reinforced the duty to remember past events by representing, instead, our relationship to those events. The designs of counter-monuments tended to embrace the collective over a hero, atmosphere over object, and instability and multiplicity over hegemony. Consequently, the goal was to provide an emotional understanding, above an historical evaluation, of the events being recalled. But building something critical is not the same as tearing something down. The final-semester, undergraduate design studio, A New Past, I taught in the spring of 2022 examined – for the first time – the public monument as a pre-existing artefact upon which the architect was invited to act. The studio asked, what are the roles and responsibilities for architects in today’s conversation about the monuments around us that no longer represent or serve our collective memory? Beyond attaching plaques with new narratives, are there ways to recontextualize the existing memorial landscape? Can meaningful edits or revisions be constructed physically into existing monuments (and their extended sites), so that our current understandings can re-mark, and make present a new past? Further, can we develop these designed revisions as memorials to our past mistakes (or, how is every story also about storytelling)? The studio proceeded through four phases as follows: 1: How do monuments tell stories? A reading and discussion seminar on concepts of collective memory, invented tradition, damnatio memoriae and the history of the monument and counter-monument from pre-history to the present. 2: Reading existing monuments. Researched presentations of precedent projects: understanding how past memorials have communicated and established narratives. 3: The shifting landscape. 5-day trip to Monument Avenue, Richmond, VA to see the site of many toppled confederate statue sites; Monticello, Charlottesville, VA to understand new ways that suppressed stories are now being told; and The Federal District monuments and the Fine Arts Commission offices, Washington D.C. to understand national memorialization and the regulatory climate around existing monuments. 4: Re-writing. Finally, each student selected, researched, and designed an architectural “re-vision” of an existing monument of their choosing. Students were charged to (from the brief): “exploit the expressive capacities of architecture to create the past you now choose to remember.” Given the level of the students, a strict methodology was not imposed. Rather, students developed projects attuned to the nuances of their starting monuments’ (hi)stories and contemporary geo-political situations. Their criticisms and alterations took many forms in many cities/locales across the world. This paper will present results of the studio (in abbreviated form) including the background information, the research on precedents, recap of our trip, and, in the longest portion, student projects, including repeating themes and strategies that emerged throughout the course. “[. . .] societies, in fact, reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them, and they do so with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind—manipulating the past in order to mold the present.” –Michael Kammen The Mystic Chords of Memory

The issues of global justice and cultural diversity in architectural education have been discussed for a number of years as our field continues to lack diversity when compared to other professions, and to society as a whole. An important tenet of architectural education is to expose students to a broad range of views and ideas across various cultures, and with the acceptance of this tenet, it is relevant for architectural education to foster cultural diversity and therefore activate the precept of cosmopolitan citizenship. This case study examines how cross-cultural collaboration supports students in their development of cosmopolitan citizenship through the shared story of an architectural design project. In a 2007 article published in the European Journal of Social Theory titled Liberal Citizenship and Cosmopolitan Virtue, William Smith describes the idea of Cosmopolitan citizenship as follows: “The idea of worldliness entails the possession of certain qualities that condition our relationship to this man-made world. It denotes a particular mode of being in the world, a heightened care for the world”. Smith also describes Cosmopolitanism as a commitment towards global justice, democracy, and cultural diversity. While education towards such values has traditionally been grounded in international education and study abroad programs, these are issues which architects regularly face in their practice, therefore making a case for including these goals in architectural education. We are constantly exposed, through social media and various online platforms, to works and ideas outside our cultural sphere, but it does not mean that we gain the kind of insight that can be applied in a professional context by way of these external stimuli. In the context of the globalization of culture, and considering our innate tendency to view foreign ideas through the lens of our cultural pre-conceptions, we can ask the following question: how can we create the conditions for a meaningful cultural experience that would lead to understanding a position different from our own? In architecture, the design brief is the story through which we imagine new ways of thinking, making and being in space. This paper will discuss an experimental studio project developed in the summer of 2022 aimed at introducing students to a different set of cultural positions through a design brief with a strong narrative premise. This approach allowed students to extend the story in various ways according to their own cultural and design backgrounds. We postulate that this experience would help students appreciate diversity of thought through the design of an architectural project, while providing the opportunity to engage in cosmopolitan citizenship. Project Description This project involved architecture students at universities on four continents: Asia, Europe, Africa and North America, who were asked to design a community/craft center in a small town located in Southern Kyushu, Japan. Students were presented with information about the physical site, including the story of its historical, social and cultural context as well as the wood building traditions of the area. The project site was an empty lot where a large samurai residence used to stand, within the historical samurai district in the town of Izumi, formerly a well-established military outpost located near the Kumamoto province. The overarching goal of the exercise was to place students in an unfamiliar context, encouraging them to think beyond their typical design approach. This context was mainly provided through the narrative of the design brief, while joint project presentations allowed students to engage with similarly unfamiliar ideas developed by their peers in other countries and institutions. Prior to the design phase, students had access to a database with information about the physical site. In parallel, students researched Japanese history and culture to introduce broader contextual elements to their design. The project site along with its historical, geographic and social context was then presented to all students via a Zoom meeting led by a Professor of Architecture from Kagoshima University, who has strong professional familiarity with the context. The assigned building was intentionally kept small, at approximately 300 m2 so that students could focus on creating contextually thoughtful design solutions. The project methodology was such that all students had access to the same project data, though each school took a slightly different design approach based on specific pedagogical goals. Though the overall design process had a well-defined structure, each school’s unique approach reflected their local design culture. The variety of design solutions was a key component of this project and allowed students to see different positions within a shared design exercise. Diversity of thought was therefore encouraged and desirable. The main objectives of this exercise were for students to try understanding the local circumstances of the project and the current needs of the local community through the narrative of the design brief. They were also asked to transpose traditional Japanese wood construction and space planning principles into a contemporary expression, thus expanding on the original story. In order to achieve this, students needed to interpret the Japanese narrative through the lenses of their own culture and design education. The group of Japanese students acted as a control group since they were acting within their own cultural environment, while the students from Mauritius, the US and Germany were largely unfamiliar with the context of the brief. Progress design reviews were conducted internally at each school in either a traditional pinup format or using hybrid media such as zoom slideshows and VR. The final presentations for all projects were structured as zoom slideshows with some including a VR walk-through using the Spatial platform. The VR platforms presented drawings pinned up in a virtual space as well as interactive 3-D models of the projects. Final projects were presented in 2 sets of reviews to accommodate the time zones of the various teams. All information was presented in English as a common language, although it was not the first language of most participants, including faculty. Project Outcomes In terms of project outcome, how students interpreted the broader Japanese context according to their own design methodology and cultural understanding was insightful. The richness of the project context allowed students to engage with and develop different design interpretations. While Japanese students developed design ideas in keeping with traditional wood building typologies, the teams located outside of Japan produced unexpected solutions. Students from Germany emphasized a constructive approach inspired by traditional Japanese joinery systems as their main contextual reference: their interpretation of Japanese culture was through technological understanding. The Mauritian teams embraced a design approach inspired by traditional Japanese building forms and introduced innovative proposals in terms of materials and construction techniques. The student group from the US focused on traditional Japanese proportional systems in plan and section as the foundation for their design proposals. The Japanese students, operating within their own cultural setting submitted designs very much consistent with traditional Japanese typology especially in terms of building structure and envelope, though unconventional site layouts were presented. The goal of this experimental project was the production of contextually thoughtful designs from different cultural perspectives. The hope was that students would be able, to a certain extent, to place themselves and their design process within an environment different from their own and therefore produce unexpected work. The final projects demonstrated a fairly good understanding of Japanese design principles and of the specific context and circumstances of the site. While students successfully applied concepts of space planning, proportional systems and structure, they struggled with the placement of their building within an unfamiliar suburban residential neighborhood. The fabric of this historical samurai neighborhood was challenging for European, African and American students. Reflection Though largely positive, the project presented a number of challenges on a variety of levels. The overall context of the project was completely foreign to most students and despite the digital tools and resources available it was still difficult for students to gain a thorough understanding of the site conditions. Since presentations were conducted in English, students hesitated to explain their designs at the level they might have in their first language. Additionally, the final project presentations were conducted using a VR platform, which proved difficult in terms of project legibility. Beyond the design outcomes of the project, seeing how each group adopted various design approaches was invaluable. Both students and faculty realized that unexpected and effective, though not always entirely appropriate, design solutions came from this unfamiliar design process, thereby reinforcing the idea that design thinking from a different cultural position can be of value. Using the design brief as a story to create the conditions for students to identify work produced from a different cultural and design perspective was key to instilling a deeper understanding and appreciation of someone else’s position and as such contributed to the idea of cosmopolitan citizenship.

Emotions are a common human language and as such are a powerful tool for a cosmopolitan, inclusive, and socially-conscious architect. If a pedagogy to support the development of a cosmopolitan architect is rooted in public engagement through lived experience, then an emotion-driven approach may be particularly useful as it can create a common communication platform across disciplines, backgrounds, and values. Additionally, an emotion is engendered by a personal investment in lived experience, thus creating a common connection amongst  individuals relative to a collective imagination. Emerging game-based technologies offer new avenues for architects and faculty alike to create emotion-centric communication platforms, or narratives, as we can all relate to the visually stunning cinematic experiences in popular animated film and the thrill of first-person exploration of worlds seemingly beyond our imagination. This scholarship explores an emotion-focused pedagogy via immersive game-based experiences through an explication of the author’s ‘Biofutures’ architecture course. The course’s pedagogical structure and strategy will be presented – including student design work, key references, and an explanation of supporting technologies – to demonstrate the power of emotion-centric storytelling through video games. It will also demonstrate how such pedagogy is historically and procedurally rooted in architectural history. Both faculty and students alike can engage in immersive game based media, not only to explore new ways to design a better future, but also as a means to engage the public through a common narrative. By speaking through the languages of gaming and emotion, students are empowered to work in an inclusive and cross-disciplinary manner.

Beyond Repair: Architecture After Urban Crisis speculates on ecological and technological concepts for architecture after the end, or for a world beyond repair. Culminating in the design of nine videos and short texts, the project studies how localized crises are part of larger global catastrophes and have a significant impact on human, animal, and plant species, as well as on grounds and atmospheres at large. Developed in the context of an advanced seminar, students used forensic filmic research and other time-based media to review several spatial phenomena that have changed the shape of landscapes and cities. Each investigation arrived at a fictional narrative that fomented a common understanding of architecture and place that goes well beyond geopolitical boundaries and territories. Some of the explorations include: a multi-purpose bridge that mediates climate events and sociopolitical turmoil in Padma, Bangladesh; a restorative sea-wall that protects from toxic emissions and preserves marine biodiversity in Odessa, Ukraine; a genetically-engineered eucalyptus that exacerbated wildfires and moved entire towns underground in Canberra, Australia; a series of mining machinery transformed into seed-proliferating vehicles that restore a damaged ecosystem in Tarkwa, Ghana; and more. Together, these provocations provide ways to reimagine architecture’s role and scope in social and cultural production in the years to come and through deep time.

Architectural space represents a stratum of human interaction comprised of programmed, assembled, and constructed surfaces for occupation. In designing this expanded ground, we transform, shift, adapt its surface materiality including its shape, slope, and aggregate. As architects, we actively participate in an expansive reorganization of Earth’s matter, energy, and form at multiple scales and across multiple grounds. While the output of these spatial interventions tends to manifest as intricate environments and isolated artifacts, their formations are generated from an entanglement of complex ecologies, geologies, and technologies. Whether we consider the products of these exchanges biotic or abiotic in nature, simple or complex in computation, the conditions that manifest their formal and performative qualities are not bounded to any fixed or finite territory – their environmental impact influences an ecosystem of oceans, forests, and quarries and an economy of commodification, consumption, and depletion. In a research seminar at [university], students engaged material definitions of terra firma as its site and program for design inquiry. Students investigated materials beyond a single episode of time and space to integrate research from multiple timescales and multiple terrestrial scales. In addition, embedding information regarding a material’s socioeconomic and environmental influence provided a better understanding to the scope of material specification for placemaking and in models of circularity for the material supply chain. The presented work showcases mate­rial-based, material-scaled mappings, experimentations, and prototyping; students re-defined and re-constituted what we commonly refer to as ground – designing and constructing physical profiles for its subsurface, surface, and super-surface.

The US debate on housing affordability may be at a tipping point. While increasing costs figure into that discussion, government regulation is coming under fire—and surprisingly, from the Left. Research increasingly points to regulatory hurdles as an outsize driver of rising costs, a condition at odds with the call for housing as a human right. Thus, there is surprising political agreement: millions of homes are needed—and fast. Where should they be built, how, and by whom? Well, there is less consensus. Economy is the fifth in a series of design research projects to examine the Accessory Dwelling, a building type with a unique relationship to the socio-economic history and possible future of US housing. Here, we looked at the economy of the ADU and its production—economy in the broadest sense, both as a financial instrument and as the prudent marshalling of resources in their production. The investigation is an explicit attempt to expand upon the question of affordability by engaging the broader micro- and macro-level implications for a particular ADU design within the material and political economy of Houston, Texas. To address these concerns at a commensurate scale, we proposed how to rapidly design and construct thousands of infill housing units using automated design and construction methods. The proposals are both radical and deeply pragmatic, incorporate a high degree of technical resolution, and evaluated by mapping their financial viability across central Houston—a means to demonstrate in stark terms that technical innovation alone cannot create equity in the built environment.

A futuristic perspective of “storytelling” as an educating design tool in an architecture elective course that explores Afrofuturism within Architecture. Afrofuturism offers a critical approach to thinking about future built environments of African and African diasporic communities throughout the world. The course is rooted in a method that introduces Afrofuturism, a school of thought addressing intersections of afro-culture, the use of science and technology to project futures of liberation and innovation, using imagination. A study of Ten Principles of Black Space Design, authored by American Architect Jack Travis, FAIA, NOMAC, accompanies the introduction as a way to understand governing infrastructural, cultural, and environmental design factors existing within African and African diasporic communities. This pedagogical approach offers an opportunity to expose the design student to a global citizen group that has faced environmental design inequities and to engage the student in embracing storytelling as a conduit of change through design. They become the “storytellers” or “griots” – synonymous with the passing of knowledge within African and African diasporic communities. The term Afrofutrism was coined by author and cultural critic Mark Dery in 1993 but evident in the work and black cultural traditions of artists such as Sun Ra and George Clinton in the early 1970’s. Today, narratives of Afrofutrism are represented in film such as The Black Panther, 2018. Further explorations are presented by scholar Alondra Nelson, Octavia Butler – black science fiction writer and Nalo Hopkins – Jamaican fiction writer who weaves futuristic narratives with Caribbean historic and cultural practices.