Out of Practice: Learning through Entrepreneurial Tools

The architecture and construction industries, which are notoriously slow to adopt change, are having to adapt to new climate realities very quickly. In particular, reducing the embodied carbon associated with buildings (and not just carbon related to operational energy) has emerged as a widespread mandate for design and building professionals. However, the ways to achieve these ends are still very much in flux, and knowledge around architecture’s carbon economy is concentrated in a small subset of sustainable designers, builders, and industry leaders. This course, however, is not a“how-to” guide for reversing the course of climate change by design. What this course attempts to do is empower you 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 will emerge better equipped to formulate good questions, build evidence, challenge the status quo, and shape new design-informed practices to address the various spatial, social, and environmental needs of the coming century. To illustrate the course pedagogy, this paper will describe one student project that leveraged EBE research methodologies toward an architecture-adjacent business proposal.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Teach.2023.65

Volume Editors
Massimo Santanicchia

ISBN
978-1-944214-44-9