THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2014 - 2:30PM - 4:00PM BUILT WORKS 2
PLAY PERCH: A CASE STUDY OF DESIGN BUILD IN THE CURRICULUM Larry Bowne, Syracuse University Sinead Mac Namara, Syracuse University This paper describes, analyzes and assesses a student-initiated design build project: a classroom and outdoor learning environment for a preschool that provides an inclusive education to children with traditional and special needs. Play Perch, an award-winning 250-sf building, was realized outside the normative studio sequence by a collaborative team of students and volunteers from architecture, engineering, industrial design, and sculpture. The authors, a structural engineer and licensed architect who served as faculty advisors on the project, assert that community-service design build has a long and storied history in architecture education and presents an opportunity to ignite debate about design both outside and inside the profession. Who is entitled to good design? Do children need good design? Does design for the physically disabled only need to meet minimum legal standards? What does design for those with non-physical challenges look like? How does the architecture profession protect its professional boundaries while also educating its consumer about the value of design? Small-scale structures such as the one described in this study are an arena in which the architect has ceded much ground to the contractor, the interior designer, and the HGTV aficionado. This paper presents a design build project undertaken at a prominent university in the Northeast as a student-faculty collaboration structured as an independent study course. The project started out as a $4000 tree-house on the existing nature trail of a school internationally renowned for a curriculum that integrates education for students with a range of abilities and challenges, both physical and mental. Over the course of a single academic year, the project grew to a $40,000 multi-phase installation incorporating landscape, architectural and interior design. The project represented an opportunity for our students to think about the issues outlined above and present their own response. The teaching, evaluation and assessment of this course and project represents an opportunity for educators to think about the role of both design build and service learning in architecture education and to draw conclusions about how best to deploy both to maximum effect. The nature of the project and the expertise of the faculty in question were such that the project also required comprehensive resolution of technology and structure in the design process, and as such can be further seen as an experiment in the integration of building technology and structures into the design pedagogy. This paper presents a description of the collaborative course that was developed between the students and faculty to capitalize on the opportunity that was presented. The design process, the budgeting sequence and the curricular implications (given the success of the project and the student demand for future collaborations) are also presented.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF THINKING: DEWEY’S SYSTEMATIC INFERENCE James Sullivan, Louisiana State University Dewey’s Architecture of Thinking This paper considers the architect’s habits of thought via John Dewey’s theory of ‘Systematic Inference’ found in his seminal text How We Think. Dewey’s theory proposes a radical combination of deductive and inductive reasoning. According to Dewey, conclusions are not drawn by simply constructing details into cohesive wholes (induction) nor by deriving details from an assumed whole (deduction), but rather through negotiation between the two. Systematic Inference, then, is comprised of a reciprocal movement between detail and whole - between “the partial…data to the suggested comprehensive entire situation and back from this suggested whole…to the particular fact” (Dewey). This combination of detail and whole is radical in that it disrupts the apparent rigor and consistency of both inductive and deductive reasoning and places the detail and the whole on a single plane of negotiation. Systematic Inference, this paper argues, is an appropriate but uncultivated description of an architect’s basic habit of thought as one reconciles particulars and details with overall architectural wholes. While Systematic Inference may be found at many points in a building’s development, perhaps most fertile ground for its explication is located where formal aspirations meet constructional demands. At this place, Systematic Inference unites what Marco Frascari calls in his seminal essay the Tell-Tale-Detail, the construction of construing and construing of construction by insisting that an architect construct her thinking about an architectural whole by thinking about how the architectural whole is constructed and vice-versa. In doing so, Systematic Inference alters linear quality of deductive thinking that holds construction and details as subservient to an assumed architectural whole. Instead, Systematic Inference, when made explicit as a way of thinking, formally establishes construction and detail as indispensable participants in the formation of that architectural whole. If it holds that Systematic Inference is best made explicit where formal aspirations meet constructional demands, then design-build work is likely the most fruitful educational activity to make evident Systematic Inference to students. This is because design-build requires students to contextualize their formal aspirations within the demands of construction. Any overall whole must be understood as a tentative entity that will be radically revised as it accounts for the detail it includes. This paper utilizes a design-build summer project as a model to discuss the role of Systematic Inference in bringing about an architectural project. This project is an open air pavilion the foregrounds constructional and structural issues in the formation of the compositional whole.
WORKING OUT: thinking while building Abstract Book - 7