Design-Build: Models for Expanded Impact

Across the United States, design-build studios broadly adopt the pedagogy of a single project for a single client, designed and built by student labor. These projects are accomplished through a mix of traditional and digital construction methods, and often result in meaningful personal experiences, and increased visibility in the community for the architecture school. However, with so few projects, design-build studios have limited impact on the built environment. Nor do these projects often interrogate the basic relationship between design and building in academia. How might one look at different pedagogies that embrace more wide ranging implications for design-build? Is there a way to rethink design-build so that it probes the relationship of architecture design and construction? This paper presents several models currently used in critical practice that could be adapted to academic design-build studios to create broader impact within the built environment.The first model investigates product design. A prototype could be designed by students, manufactured in a factory and installed by a client. By using this model, many of the same projects could be built concurrently, impacting a larger client base. In particular this model would be relevant for emergency housing, and precedents include Kengo Kuma’s Water Block House and Ikea’s refugee shelter. The second model teams universities with manufacturers and fabricators. Students would work with a manufacturer’s product line to envision new applications, or to develop altogether new product lines. Zahner currently works in this way with individual architects such as Thom Mayne and Herzog & DeMeuron. Zahner collaborated with Virginia Tech University in a similar way for the 2009 solar decathlon house, and Rigidized Metals, another metal manufacturer, has teamed with University of Buffalo to consider new uses for its products. The last pedagogical model incorporates the problem solving capability of skilled tradesmen with the design ability of students. This model encourages skilled workers to be the students’ hands as they design details and assemblies. By engaging in this methodology, students could complete projects which are larger in scale and more complex in design. Students could work with local contractors, or nationally recognized sub-contractors who have experience with world class architects. This would bring the design build model that exists in the field into the classroom.Engaging in a product design model, re-envisioning manufacturers’ product lines, and enlisting the problem solving capability of skilled tradesmen all provide opportunities to create a new vision for design-build studios. In addition to forging long-lasting relationships between students and the community, the models presented in this paper could build relationships between the design profession, manufacturers, and the building trade; in turn, these methods could fundamentally change the built environment at a scale unimagined by current design-build studios.

Volume Editors
Sergio Palleroni, Ted Cavanagh & Ursula Hartig

ISBN
978-0-935502-94-7