Potemkin Fabrications: Administrative Gymnastics, Messy Boundaries, and the Alternative Facts that Enable Design-Build Pedagogy

Celebrated as a mechanism for engaging ‘real’ projects much of the contemporary design-build literature foregrounds the action-learning embedded in the physical act of making a piece of architecture at full-scale. Participating students and faculty comments regularly highlight the direct encounter with the materials and method of construction as well as the collaborative, cross-disciplinary nature of community engagement. Brian Mackay-Lyons, founder of the Ghost Lab in Nova Scotia, argues that “Pragmatism is the best teacher” and “Technology is best learned by making” and he links design-build to, “The apprenticeship model of architectural education—its roots in the master-builder tradition of the Middle Ages.” (Mackay-Lyons 2008, p 135 and p138) However, the conventional fixation on the construction process and final products obscures the complex, often unappetizing, ‘behind the scenes’ logistics necessary to implement, and sustain, new pedagogies.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.FALL.19.19

Volume Editors
Amy Larimer, Deborah Berke, Diana Lin, Drew Krafcik, John Barton & Sunil Bald

ISBN
978-1-944214-24-1