Teaching Almost Natural Things

The paper problematizes the teaching about nature in undergraduate architecture education at a time of an increasing environmental crisis. Looking outside of contemporary academia and the discipline’s response to this crisis through the lens of ecological ethics, the paper describes a teaching pedagogy that challenges how most contemporary undergraduate architecture education teaches about nature in a way that reinforces the hegemony of the nature/society binary that seems implausible and irrelevant with the advent of the Anthropocene. The paper describes a teaching pedagogy that is deployed in various curricular forms (Studio, seminar, independent research) that asks students to think about architecture as an Almost Natural condition that rejects traditional geometric hierarchies, linear part-to-whole relationships, pattern making, and precision, in favor of tactical organizations a blurring of part and whole, deep textures, and the gestural.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.106.37

Volume Editors
Amir Ameri & Rebecca O'Neal Dagg

ISBN
978-1-944214-15-9