(Re)defining the Dash: Design-Build Perception and Pedagogy

“Artists, let us at last break down the walls erected by our deforming academic training between the ‘arts’ and all of us become builders again! Let us together will, think out, create the new idea of architecture.” – Walter GropiusAside from Mr. Gropius’s stance, current design-build projects often stir opinions and subsequently shake the trees of traditional teaching and academic policies, but two fundamental questions concerning the project type are critical elements.1. Are design-build projects always a linear process: a beginning to an end?2. How can design-build projects be the culmination of collaboration among students and professors, combining teaching and learning?Subsequent to the perceived process, educators continually redefine the dash between the two words. Process fits within the pedagogy of designing and building not merely analogous to that found on a tombstone. Designing and building is the active sense of doing where both entities influence and navigate the other. The project type allows for real-time designing to occur while physically building a full-scale prototype.Design-build learning environments offer a means to engage today’s design students outside typical small-scale representations into development of full-scale inhabitable space(s). Varied in scale and disposition, opportunities focus upon deliberate and expressive inhabitable deliverables where design concepts address materials, function, and scale. The reliance between design and construction phases establishes the foundation of what can be defined as the architectural terminology “creating-making.”Aside from only faculty instruction, opportunities allow vertical learning among students of various years levels and majors to facilitate learning. Students directly involved with the projects (enrolled or volunteer) and employed in the College’s model and production shop share their responsibilities as both instructor and mentor to begin and enhance their journey of combining creating and making. The overlapping of knowledge and approach allows students to see potential and discover how crafting materials from overall dimensions to connection details defines architecture as dependent articulation. The connections are both physical and pedagogical – they are learning process and iterations of creating and making to mentally and physically understand how ideas manifest into physical constructs.In the spirit of creating and making, architecture curriculums explore integration across thinking, developing, crafting, and physical building. The union of creating and making begins when students possess curiosity for bridging between stereotypical designers and constructors, thus recognizing the two aspects of creating are intrinsically linked. Opportunities defined traditionally as design-build projects may be more aptly labeled build-design projects, where the activity of building is the learning component. The project type is a method of real-time sketching. This paper explores the pedagogy of varied design-build engagements and how both faculty and students have advanced the design process and level of design comprehension leading to future cumulative advancement. Various project scales, year level interaction, student mentoring, and timeframes are explored ranging from 3 week course assignments in 2nd year studios, to dedicated elective short-term vertical studios, to extracurricular service learning projects, to a long term research and community based built comparison of traditional and alternative construction types.

Volume Editors
Sergio Palleroni, Ted Cavanagh & Ursula Hartig

ISBN
978-0-935502-94-7