In the Fall of 2010 I founded the Department of Architecture
outputting devices. The shop gives us intellectual space to study by
(DoArch) at South Dakota State University. I have engaged the
making. We’ve built Passive Houses, Lamella Arches, Dieste Walls,
development of DoArch as an act of cultural design and practical
Precast Concrete Follies, Cross-Laminated Timber Beams; DoArch
demonstration. Today, we are 160 students in two degrees and
builds architecture. The palatte of our architectural education is
seven full-time faculty teaching a NAAB accredited professional
the “Building Arts”.
curriculum with almost one million dollars in research funding. There hasn’t been a new professional program between Milwaukee and Moscow, ID in over a century. The state is a network of big towns bookended by two small cities. The largest professional office in SD has ten architects. How do we make a small professional program in a small place focused on small practices?
Quality public space and urbanity is the professional measure of our aggregate building practices. The fabric of towns in SD are an under-served urbanism. They are urban but they are not metropoles. How one fashions public space at this scale in this society is an open question that is particularly exacerbated in the communities of SD. The towns of SD are eager to serve as our laboratory. This has
I have fashioned DoArch to fit this place using South Dakota’s
become a focus of the curriculum in a set of protracted engagements
needs and resources as our teaching and research opportunities. I
that address the urban imperative of architecture. We profess that
recruited, hired, and trained a stable, diverse faculty of seven, only
the aggregate effect of our practices are “Public Works”.
one of whom had previous teaching experience. They have shaped DoArch developing their scholarship and instruction. I designed six years of curriculum and we performed it into an architectural culture. DoArch channels our work through Building Arts and Public Works because they are relevant to the communities of this state and possible with this set of personnel at this university.
The Albertian underpinning of the professional program and our place as a liberal art in the univeirsity is that we don’t make buildings or cities. We make models and drawings of cities. Architecture is the last great humanistic form of graphical inquiry. Contemporary representational technologies preference space-making through construction simulation, reinvigorating the fundamental material craft
We had a shop before we had a studio. In the first two years we
of architecture. We profess that the mediation of making buildings
used milling machines and laser cutters as our primary digital media
and cities is the foundation of our discipline.
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Making DoArch