School’s Out: Exploring Learning By Doing Methods In On-Site Design Build Architecture Workshops

The paper details current endeavors by the authors to explore and expand notions of sustainable design through two design-build festivals hosted during the summer of 2022 that each re-engaged historical architectural sites in ecologically diverse contexts. The paper first outlines the history of design-build pedagogies in the United States, from the founding of some of the country’s first colleges of design to contemporary manifestations of festival architecture as seen in pop-culture contexts. Next, the authors detail how this history impacts the site, structure, and organization of the two research projects presented in the paper: one in a temperate forest ecoregion of North America located on the historic site of the 1969 Woodstock festival, appropriating research into laminate wood construction previously conducted by the authors; and the other in the Błędowska Desert of Poland, an area of anthropogenic desertification in Central Europe, which aims to expand research in silt-casting conducted in labs at Arcosanti, Arizona, onto rapidly transforming sites across the Atlantic. The following projects and observations provide a lens into the participatory research methods and engagement strategies unique to the design-build festival model and argue for the festival model’s capacity to adapt to site conditions, transform contemporary forms of architectural production, and engender a framework of community resilience; all the while amplifying contact and collaboration among groups of interdisciplinary experts through hands-on exploration at a construction site. As an illustration of how festivals allow designers to rethink the materials that are used to build, the paper examines the development of generative material processes and robust construction systems (in particular, laminated wood and silt-cast composites) as both a pre-festival site of research and a means of hands-on, on-site design exploration, invention, and evolution. The paper specifically addresses the relationship between structure and infrastructure in the context of the design-build festival, describing the application of the aforementioned principles and prototypes as implemented in two pavilion-scaled structures—in each case, a site-specific and environmentally-sensitive design—conceived as part of a larger communal infrastructure intended to galvanize resilient, even if temporary, communities of artists, architects, writers, researchers, and musicians during the festivals.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AIA.Inter.22.18

Volume Editors
Gail Napell & Stephen Mueller

ISBN
978-1-944214-42-13