Studio Exercises: Bridging the Ethical and Aesthetic

This paper will focus specifically on a pedagogy that emphasizes making as a critical method for integrating and translating learning about cultures, sites, and pressing sustainability issues into three-dimensional material form. We will describe our work in crafting two closely curated making exercises. We sought to integrate enough technical content without becoming overwhelming for the student, while considering how to transition from the knowledge embodied in lectures into learning embedded through making with one’s hands. Four premises underlie our teaching and these exercises: 1. Culture, broadly defined, is central to an ethical practice, and critical to achieving sustainability and equity goals. 2. Sustainable architecture has as much to do with controlling and using gradients of spatial enclosure and tempering as it does with sharply dividing tempered interior climates from the exterior. 3. Structural thinking fully integrated into design is an essential facet of sustainable architecture. 4. We seek to rehabilitate beauty. The role of an intelligent beauty that inspires the best in us is only becoming more important. The overarching topic in the fall of 2022 was material flows as we examined waste streams on our own campus as a prelude to creating a student-centered recycling/re-use hub. The projects described in this paper are two preliminary short making exercises upcycling waste to make a vessel and to develop a site forces model in anticipation of the culminating building design. We believe that making and working with tangible materials must remain central to the training of architects as we strive to bridge the ethics of working within a changing climate with the aesthetic.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Teach.2023.66

Volume Editors
Massimo Santanicchia

ISBN
978-1-944214-44-9