Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Phoebe Crisman
Drawing on the work of artists, photographers, filmmakers, landscape architects and others, a studio pedagogy was developed to investigate the ways that different artistic disciplines see and represent leftover urban spaces. An important aspect of this approach was the simultaneous engagement of students with multiple venues for exploration both inside and outside the studio. A series of interrelated projects and events—architecture studio, symposium, exhibitions of relevant student and symposium participant design work, and film series—were conceived around the idea: site out of mind. Through various modes, students encountered and investigated the unacknowledged sites that pervade North American cities, but are rarely recognized or tackled by designers: edges and gaps between one thing and another resulting from a collision between scales and uses, leftover spaces under, over and along elevated highways, railways and other immense infrastructural elements, or large urban voids and ruined places. They considered a range of scales from the city to the materials of which it is made—ranging from a 2,200-acre landfill to built interventions within the University of Virginia School of Architecture. In these locations, design is rarely attempted and architecture’s normative language, methods and means of representation are not enough. This seemingly problematic condition ultimately provides an opportunity to create new types and scales of design. This paper examines the benefits of interdependent, diverse modes of investigation, and in greater depth, the pedagogy created for a fourth year undergraduate architecture studio.
Volume Editors
David Covo & Gabriel Mérigo Basurto
ISBN
0-935502-57-2
