Thinking While Doing: Explorations in Educational Design/Build 9783035613476, 9783035613384

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. Territories of Educational Design/Build
3. History and Theory of Gridshell Architecture
4. The Chéticamp Farmers’ Market
5. Care Ethics in Educational Design/Build
6. The Social Epistemology of Thinking While Making Architecture
7. The Lafayette Strong Pavilion: An Unhurried Building
8. Interdisciplinary Engagement Through Design/Build Education
9. Building as Social Medium: Anthropological Perspectives in Design/Build
10. Student Perspectives in Educational Design/Build
11. The Sonoran Pentapus Pavilion at the University of Arizona
12. The Design/Build Exchange as Knowledge Transference
13. Engineering Considerations in Design/Build Education
14. Theory-Practice Hybrids: The Cape Breton Highlands Gridshell
15. Reflections—A Conversation
Afterword, Part I
Afterword, Part II
List of Contributors
Illustration Credits
Index

Citation preview

Thinking While Doing: Explorations in Educational Design/Build

Birkhäuser Basel Stephen Verderber Ted Cavanagh Arlene Oak (Eds.)

For every student who has worked on a design/build project while in architecture school

Table of Contents Foreword Richard Harris

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Acknowledgements

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1

Introduction Ted Cavanagh, Stephen Verderber and Arlene Oak

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2

Territories of Educational Design/Build Stephen Verderber

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3

History and Theory of Gridshell Architecture Ramsey K. Leung

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4

The Chéticamp Farmers’ Market Ted Cavanagh

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5

Care Ethics in Educational Design/Build Kaitlin Sibbald and Melanie Frappier

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The Social Epistemology of Thinking While Making Architecture Letitia Meynell

111

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The Lafayette Strong Pavilion: An Unhurried Building W. Geoff Gjertson

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Interdisciplinary Engagement Through Design/Build Education Arlene Oak Building as Social Medium: Anthropological Perspectives in Design/Build Claire Nicholas

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10 Student Perspectives in Educational Design/Build Stephen Verderber

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11 The Sonoran Pentapus Pavilion at the University of Arizona Christopher Trumble

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12 The Design/Build Exchange as Knowledge Transference Patrick Harrop, Simon Doucet and Stephen Verderber

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13 Engineering Considerations in 263 Design/Build Education Stephen Verderber Interview with Anthony Spick and Christopher Trumble 14 Theory-Practice Hybrids: The Cape Breton Highlands Gridshell Ted Cavanagh

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15 Reflections—A Conversation Arlene Oak and Stephen Verderber

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Afterword, Part I Thomas J. Mouton

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Afterword, Part II W. Geoff Gjertson

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List of Contributors

357

Illustration Credits

363

Index

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The creative process begins with idea formulation, followed by an ability to transform ideas into a finished project. Thus, for any creative endeavour, a combination of imagination and practical skills is essential. In building design, where it is virtually impossible for a single individual to perform the entire operation of design and construction, this combination of skills is highly complex, requiring an ability to communicate in a specialised, sophisticated way. To study (and teach) design in architecture, a clear understanding of the design process is a prerequisite. However, construction practitioners themselves do not always fully understand the social and personal underpinnings of architectural creativity. For example, in structural engineering there can be much misunderstanding of what constitutes architectural design. Sometimes it is taken to be only the process of sizing structural members. However, for success, it becomes essential that the structural engineer recognise that the design process is about far more—including choosing an appropriate structural system, coordinating with specialists in architecture and environmental design, choosing appropriate materials of construction and identifying the best construction methods. As little as 15% of the structural engineer’s responsibility is analysis, and then merely setting down a satisfactory justification in numbers. This job requires creating a design that meets the needs of the functional brief while working within a multifaceted team to deliver specialist skills alongside others in achieving a successful outcome. Thus, the design process functions as a highly fertile area of study for anthropologists, sociologists, historians and philosophers. Those who teach courses in construction science have a responsibility to provide skills often associated with vocational training. However, education in structural design must be focused on moving beyond the development of practical skills in calculation, drawing and modelling to also instill confidence by means of communicating an awareness of the broader design context. This level of knowledge can then help to drive the entire creative process with the aim of providing effective solutions to complex, multidisciplinary problems. These solutions must not only be buildable and affordable but also provide a physical, visible template on which the occupants of the completed building can impose their own uses. A successful building is one that opens up new opportunities, opportunities invariably not foreseen by those who initially commissioned the structure or even by those who designed the built project. Design creativity that is fully reflective of local cultural traditions and local materiality is the catalyst for ultimate success. Much of the learning that occurs in an architecture design course involves the student’s immersion in the design process in a studio environment. To successfully move across a sequence of studio courses over multiple academic years requires students to demonstrate an ability to work with increasingly demanding functional briefs as they proceed through the curriculum. Ideally, all architectural professional education curricula should include a Design and Make or a design/ build element, but the requisite instructional and faculty resources are rarely earmarked to enable this. In most mainstream undergraduate

Foreword

Foreword

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curricula, the time required to make this type of experience available for every student makes it nearly impossible to incorporate full-scale design/build projects into the coursework. Thus, the full understanding of the design and construction process is invariably delivered to the young graduate by means of tutelage under experienced practitioners, post-university. For a fortunate small number of students in architectural education, there are a handful of institutions in the world that specialise in design/build courses. At the Rural Studio at Auburn University in Alabama, final-year architecture students take two academic terms to design and build a project for communities located in Hale County, Alabama. The Rural Studio was founded by Samuel Mockbee, D. K. Ruth and Andrew Freear, who is originally from Yorkshire, England. It is he who has directed it since 2002. This remarkable curriculum delivers its course to fifthyear undergraduate students, who are immersed in designing/making real projects for real people. The built projects’ successes and failures are apparent for all to see—some of the projects are well cared for, and subsequently thrive, while those that do not meet the needs of the people they are intended for become unused and derelict. At Hooke Park in England, Andrew Freear advised his alma mater, the Architectural Association, on the establishment of their Design and Make Masters Course at their Woodland Campus. In these courses, graduate students develop designs for extending the facilities of that campus. In Finland, Professor Pekka Heikkinen at Aalto University offers a one-year intensive programme focusing on wood and wooden architecture. His Wood Program is a unique and challenging course, designed to attract graduate-level students (as well as recent graduate architects with some professional practice experience). The course deals with topics such as ecology of forests and wood; technical properties of wood; wood as a building material; centuries-old traditions in wood building design and construction; maintenance and renovation of wooden buildings; and modern wood-based architecture. Only the Rural Studio, year after year, delivers large-scale design/ build courses to undergraduates, and the scale of these projects requires time and resources beyond the constraints of a typical undergraduate course. Months are required to achieve the construction of a full-size building structure, and yet only days are often available to achieve such an outcome in a normal course timeframe. To enable aspects of design/build to be incorporated into a more typical undergraduate programme, the process of design needs to be more rigorously studied so that it can be better understood in this learning context. Given how few large-scale design/build courses exist in the world, the success of the multi-year Thinking While Doing (TWD) project is both remarkable and laudable. The recording of what was achieved, in this book, enables others to understand this process far better so they too will be able to structure multi-year studio-based curricula well positioned for the assessment of learning outcomes at the core of the design/build learning experience. A successful work of architecture requires that the structure reflect its local conditions, climatically, materially and socio-culturally. By utilising a multidisciplinary approach to the study of this process, the

Foreword 9

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TWD research project captured these parameters in its fundamental concept. The TWD project has been large, as it was a collaboration between 10 universities in Canada and the United States. It has been a long project, running from 2013 to 2019, and it maintained momentum only achievable due to the commitment, dedication and determination of everyone involved. It is a remarkable achievement. By structuring the project to include the Design/Build Group (dbG), the Design/Build Exchange (dbX) and the Insight Group (IG), there has been a clear and rational division between the design/construction activities and the interdisciplinary study of the fundamental learning. The dbG was led by the professors who coordinated the design and construction of the series of gridshell pavilion structures presented in this book. The interdisciplinary IG team of scholars was drawn from the social sciences and humanities as well as architecture, and brought together a sociologist, anthropologist, philosopher and historian. Building design is a complex process. Successful buildings address the social and material circumstances that form the context of their geographic locale. As described by Arlene Oak in her introduction to the TWD project, in Chapter 1, the research reported here reflects numerous field studies and analyses on topics that include the craft expertise, technical skill development, cross-disciplinary collaboration between academic institutions, the nuances of conversational negotiation and the inner workings of knowledge transference. In good research, the first task is to define the typology at hand. Without this, too many random variables will needlessly blur the results and make coherent interpretation next to impossible. To allow the TWD interdisciplinary research-based team to carry out their studies in a consistent, comparable manner, all of the built structures were held constant to a single typology, and correctly, this decision was made early on. The ambitious scope of this project called for a building type that allowed for creative expression while being of a scale and construction method attainable within the specifics of the individual briefs. The choice of gridshell pavilions met these criteria. The five studios reported are CS1 (Chéticamp), CS2 (Lafayette), CS3 (Arizona), CS4 (Charlotte) and CS5 (Cape Breton Highlands). Of these, four projects were constructed, two in Canada and two in the United States. Chéticamp Farmers’ Market (2014–2016) is the first project and is described in Chapter 4. The Lafayette Strong Pavilion is presented in Chapter 7, the Sonoron Pentapus Pavilion in Tucson at the University of Arizona in Chapter 11, and the Highlands Pavilion in Cape Breton National Park (2016–2019) in Chapter 14. In the first project, CS1, through the simple handling of materials, model making and close collaboration with the structural engineers, the team of students and their teacher were able to establish an understanding of constraints as well as have the member sizes and materials of construction fully endorsed. Although the building span is small, the complexity of the process of design and construction would be revealed by means of the essential knowledge and skill sets acquired through practical experience. The team for this project was small, yet it crystallised a body of expertise ready to be used to seed the following larger projects. In Chapter 7, the second project, CS2, subtitled “An Unhurried Building,” was expressed as a small, highly detailed artefact. What a

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wonderful opportunity – to allow the proper time to maximise community involvement and develop a site-specific project to satisfy a wide range of objectives. This project was created by a team based at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. The initial project schedule of four months eventually extended to 18, reinforcing the need to allow sufficient time to take in the larger process – providing the students with an understanding that design and construction is about more than a linear sequence of tasks. It consists of a complex web of connections and communications, generating a wide range of emotional responses from optimism to despair and back again. The third project, CS3, departed from the others in that it was built in steel, a material chosen in response to the harsh, arid Arizona climate. This built project represents a significantly different design process, providing the humanities-based researchers with an understanding of how the design and construction process in design/build can lead to such different building solutions. The fourth project built, CS5, the Highlands Pavilion in Cape Breton National Park, was the second gridshell pavilion designed by the Dalhousie University–based team, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with much assistance from the US-based TWD faculty studio directors. The level of ambition was raised, with the outcome a sophisticated building carefully situated in its landscape. It also provides its users with a resource supportive of a wide range of activities. Together, the built TWD structures represent an upward knowledge trajectory insofar as the confidence of prior success fueled ambitions for increasingly larger, more sophisticated buildings. It is unfortunate that CS3, the third building in this series, intended for a site in Charlotte, North Carolina, remains unbuilt at this writing due to circumstances beyond the control of the TWD project team. However, there was also something to learn from this, that not all studio-based projects proceed to a successful built outcome. Regardless, much was learned by everyone who worked on this project. The consistencies achieved by employing a single structural typology made it possible to apply at each successive construction site lessons learned from the previous case studies. Similarly, this pre-validated and reaffirmed the structural type as viable in a wide variety of site and climatic contexts. The systematic accumulation of deeper understandings and skills required to work with this structural typology is well documented in this book. This fueled the increasingly progressive upward ambitions of each built project. Forms were chosen that were capable of delivering the requirements particular to each site and building use. Studies conducted in each case enabled the students to acquire an understanding of how their building would sit in its landscape and the structural system that would best resist wind forces, which, for lightweight structures, is invariably the most severe loading condition. The design process progressed through studies of material palettes most appropriate to the locality, and the most appropriate details of construction. Physical scale models were built to acquire an understanding of the engineering principles at work. Once the design was formulated, construction logistics were studied, materials procured, personnel mobilised and construction undertaken. The same procedure was replicated by each university–based student team on each of the constructed projects. As this occurred,

Richard Harris Honorary Professor The University of Bath United Kingdom

Foreword

the humanities and social science-based researchers observed and documented this process at each of the five institutions, capturing the actions and thoughts of participants as the five project teams variously created progressively more complex building forms. The relevance of this research reaches beyond the immediate architectural teaching/ learning environment into the realm of allowing the layperson a deeper understanding of the design process more generally. Through these multidisciplinary investigations of the live process, the complexity of design itself is revealed and set down in this book. The results will be of benefit to both teachers of design and also practitioners. In the contemporary world of competitive design bids and constant pressures to cut costs, there is a tendency for design to be taken for granted as a mere series of tasks to be optimised as a means to reduce construction costs. As a matter of fact, however, the complexities of the creative process require adequate time and opportunity to succeed—with time provided to allow thoughts to build and be set down, and opportunities for interdisciplinary interactions to occur in order for solutions to mature. This book provides the reader with insight into the design and construction process and the way in which the design/build approach informs the university-level learning experience, while simultaneously providing a detailed account of an evolving architectural/structural type. This book is an excellent account of a remarkable project.

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Acknowledgements

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An interdisciplinary project of this scope and duration requires the collaborative contributions of many. In the case of the Thinking While Doing (TWD) experience, over 200 individuals have contributed to the overall effort, spanning two countries. I would like to thank everyone involved; perhaps this book will provide some context to frame the larger multi-year project of which you were an important part. I dedicate this book to you all. First, the impetus for the TWD project was the straightforward and highly effective external governmental support provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), based in Ottawa. There, research is always a priority. SSHRC’s straightforward reporting procedures between the TWD team leadership and home institution (Dalhousie) allowed us to concentrate on the architectural work at hand; this was an indispensable aid from start to finish. We thank the president of SSHRC, Ted Hewitt. We also thank the many people at SSHRC who consistently worked in support of our project and in particular our main contact people: Anna Torgerson, Gianni Rossi and Adam Yates. The partners in the project were Arlene Oak at the University of Alberta, Robert Miller and Chris Trumble at the University of Arizona, Ken Lambla at the University of North Carolina– Charlotte, Geoff Gjertson at the University of Louisiana–Lafayette, Ursula Hartig at Technische Universität Berlin and Blair Pardy at Parks Canada. Important collaborators on the team are Greg Snyder, Letitia Meynell, Melanie Frappier, Stephen Verderber, Patrick Harrop, Claire Nicholas and Johanna Beth Amos. Over the last six years, the TWD project was coordinated out of Dalhousie University with the help of Alex Morier, Philippa Keri Ovonji-odida, Jessica Wyss, Johanna Beth Amos, Matthew Timmons, Christina MacNeil and Queena Crooker-Smith. Additionally, thanks go out to Christine Macy, Dean of Architecture and Planning, and Diogo Burnay, Director of the School of Architecture. The Chéticamp Farmers’ Market: the Dalhousie University TWD design/build team included Xan Hawes, Evan Hoyles, Nina Hitzler, Noah Jacobson, Amanda Kemeny, Kaitlyn Labrecque, Katelyn Latham, Megan Lloyd, John Marshall, Elijah Montez, Fraser Plaxton, Abbey Smith, Daniel Smith and Julia Weir. The hosts at Le Conseil des Arts included Paul Gallant, Joeleen Larade, Clarence LeLièvre, and Stephane Sogne. The University of Louisiana at Lafayette TWD student team consisted of Olivia Almeida, Nouf Alalushi, Richard Arcuri, Joseph Artall, Kelly Bergeron, Jolee Bonneval, Caleb Boulet, Erika Flowers, Joshua Floyd, Patrick Flynn, Emily Girlinghouse, Breanna Hinton, Lavell Johnson, Khoa Le, Brooke Leblanc, Katie Leleaux, Wendy Meche, Benjamin Magallon, Thomas Mouton, Tran Nguyen, Michael Perry, Robert Poche, Jessica Prejean, Daniel Richard, Christopher Rush, Sarah Simar and Adam Traweek. Many thanks to Professor Greg Snyder and his team of TWD students at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His dedicated students worked over two terms to design, prototype, and fabricate full-scale components of their fantastic gridshell structure. The University of Arizona TWD project team consisted of Alex Mayer, Ali Dowd, Andrew Christopher, Antoinette Escobar, Ayse Forier,

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Ben Gallegos, Christina Kukurba, Dan Jacques, Drew Cook, Ed Bilek, Edson Pinto, Emily Cole, Jessica McQuillen, Josh Fowler, Katie Roch, Kevin Murney, Kevin Reid, Kevin Yingst, Kyle D’Alessio, Mahmood Al Musawi, Mathew Sprott, Prabhs Matharoo, Quan Trang, Ryan Stucka, Sarah Brausch, Sophia Urbaez, T. Frederickson, Thong Phan, Trevor Cordivari, Will Ruoff and Zhengchun Jiang. The Cape Breton Highlands Gridshell: the TWD design/build team included 115 people from many different universities. The project was initiated in 2015 with the help of Alex Moirier, Lawrence Freisen, Tracey Bendrien, Stephane Sogne, Cassie Burhoe, Lydia Lovett-Dietrich, and Jessica Wyss. The design/build work that began in 2016 included: from Dalhousie University—Alex Moirier, Philippa Keri Ovonji-odida, Cristien Murphy, Abbey Smith, Cassie Burhoe, Emily Cassidy, Jane Casson, Jasper Crace, Laura Day, Sarah Dede, Karl Gruenewald,Andre Kott, Lydia Lovett-Dietrich, Josh Nieves, Andrew Nocente, Thomas Schreiber-Costa, Xinran Tang, Valerie Chang, Yen Pang (Jim) Chou, Connor Clark, James DeMartini, Robin Ellis, John Mella, Jody Miller, Isaac Neufeld, Ellen Penner, Mahta Safavi-Khalifeh-Soltani, Kyle Smith-Windsor, Adam Sparkes, Mallory Swing, Bardia Tajik, Bingyu Sun, Jinjing Wang, Ning Xu, Jie (Amy) Zhou, James DeMartini, Ben Harrison, and Lachlan MacDonald; from the University of Arizona—Asher Caplan, Marco Contreras, Kyle D’Alessio, John Georges, Jeffrey Moser and Michael Vo; from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte—Matt Allen, Calum Dodson, Alex Shuey and Nate White. The design/build work continued in 2017 and included: from Dalhousie University—Philippa Keri Ovonji-odida, Alix Lanyon-Taylor, John Marshall, Abbey Smith, Jessica Wyss, Kristina Bookall, Megan Burt, Shaili Chauhan, Liam Healy, Lucien Landry, Ruth Vandergeest, Paryse M. Beatty, Alex Caskey, Matthew A. Gillingham, Andrew Secco, Sumaiya B. Taher, Ning Xu, Abdullah Akram and Kimberley Hoimyr; from the University of Arizona—Marco Contreras, Jerrick Tsosie, Michael Hernandez, and Moshe Wilke; from the University of North Carolina Charlotte—Alicia Foreman, Constanza Gonzalez and Drue Stroud. The design/build work continued in 2018 and included: from Dalhousie University—Liam Healey, Hannah Newton, Suet Ying (Julie) Leung, Zewei Zhang, Michael Maclean, Paulette Cameron, Kaley Doleman, Shane Hauser, Chelsea Kinnee, Bea Casiano, Natalie Steele, Kaling Zhang and Andrew Gilmour; from the University of Arizona— Cameron Behning, Jerrick Tsosie, and Ellie Franzen; from the University of Hertfordshire—Sam Healy and Ilona Hay; from the University of Toronto—Esther Bogorov, Peter Dowhaniuk, Oussama El-Assir, Jeremy Keyzer, Aseel Sadat, Lucas Siemucha, Joshua Silver, Anton Skorishchenko, Martin Drozdowski (2017), Timothy Bool and Ramsey Leung (2016). The sponsor/hosts at Parks Canada deserve extra special mention. They are Blair Pardy, Kelly Deveaux and Jerry LeBlanc as does Blackwell Engineering, based in Toronto. At the University of Toronto, the contributions of Stephen Verderber to this book were ably assisted by Timothy Boll, Gabriel Valdivieso, Ramsey Leung and Joshua Silver. Special thanks to Ramsey Leung for the TWD chapter he contributed on the history of gridshell structures, and to Joshua Silver for his editorial work and sustained

commitment in assembling the many moving parts of the TWD book manuscript throughout 2018. The TWD Insight project team included Simon Doucet, who worked diligently on developing the dbX ontology while at the University of Montreal, and more recently at the University of Waterloo. John M. Cays, Professor and Associate Dean at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, simultaneously served as project liaison with the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), based in Washington, DC. Kendall Nicholson, at ACSA in Washington, James Forren and Jean-Pierre Chupin, Ursula Hartig, working with Professor Philipp Misselwitz at the Technische Universität Berlin, along with Peter Fattinger, Simon Colwell, Sergio Palleroni and Nina Pawlicki partnered with Dalhousie University in an Erasmus Mundi grant received from the European Union to develop an educational design/build project database in Europe, a database that was launched in 2017. This was instrumental in helping develop the North American dbX, as was the association with SEED and with Jane Anderson at Live Projects Network. The Insight project team contributions of Arlene Oak were assisted by Amber Appah, Karly Coleman and Robyn Stobbs, all from the University of Alberta. Katie Francisco, Kylin Jensen and Bethany Kraft, all from the University of Nebraska, assisted with the contributions of Claire Nicholas. Jonathan Longrad assisted with the contributions of Letitia Meynell, and Melanie Frappier collaborated with Kaitlin Sibbald; all were based at Dalhousie University. Lastly, and importantly, special thanks are due to our editor for the publisher, Andreas Müller. Andreas, based in Berlin, provided expert guidance and helpful suggestions throughout the development of the manuscript. Thank you all.

15

Ted Cavanagh, Ph.D. Professor of Architecture Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada

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Introduction Ted Cavanagh Stephen Verderber Arlene Oak

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The Thinking While Doing (TWD) initiative was a comprehensive, unprecedented investigation (2013–2019 and ongoing) that focused on the relationship between the rapidly expanding curricular area of design/build education in schools of architecture in North America, and the broad-based implications of this curricular area as a cultural and social activity. Cultural and societal ramifications of the design/build experience were examined from the perspective of the social sciences and humanities, with attention directed to ethics, meaning, communication, understanding and performance in the context of creative practice.The TWD initiative was international in focus, functioning as a consortium of seven universities in Canada and the United States that worked collaboratively to sponsor, design, document, construct and evaluate a series of experimental structures, with each built structure expressing local climatic determinants, social and cultural traditions and indigenous material palettes. The TWD initiative was supported by grants totaling $2.5M (CAD) in support of research in this specialised area of architectural education. Three principal aims were achieved vis-à-vis this grant. First, the establishment of an open-source design/ build exchange database/ontology. This interactive, fluid ontology facilitates the documentation and collegial sharing of precedents in the form of completed and ongoing design/build activities throughout North America. The second major aim of the grant was to support new avenues of inquiry on the interdisciplinary nature of educational design/build (e-d/b) from the perspectives of the humanities and the social sciences. The third major aim was to design and construct a series of experimental structures, representing original contributions to the state of the art in design, engineering and fabrication of open-air gridshell pavilion architecture. The geographic scope of the effort was far-reaching, with faculty members, students and staff at 10 universities collaborating on the TWD initiative from the fall of 2013 to the spring of 2019, led by the home institution, Dalhousie University, located in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The two Dalhousie-based e-d/b studios and built structures were the Chéticamp Farmers’ Market (2014–2016) and the Cape Breton Highlands Pavilion (2016–2019). Other participating Canadian universities were Laurentian University, the University of Toronto, the University of Alberta and the University of Montreal. Participating universities in the United States were the University of Arizona (e-d/b studio and built structure, 2015–2017), University of Nebraska at Lincoln, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (e-d/b studio and built structure, 2015–2016), New Jersey Institute of Technology and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (e-d/b studio, 2015–2016). The work of this international team of institutions, educators/researchers and practitioners has been presented at numerous professional and academic conferences and events and is documented throughout the various chapters in this book. The authors whose contributions are represented here wish to express their gratitude for this rare opportunity to

Introduction TWD

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collaborate on what has been a most interesting and challenging undertaking—a once-in-alifetime opportunity to explore and document an important facet of university-level education while contributing to its knowledge-base, and the transference of this new knowledge. This introductory chapter is presented in three parts, each describing a co-editor’s (presented alphabetically based on last names) motivations and aims with regards to the Thinking While Doing research-based design experience. Ted Cavanagh: I first became enamored with design/build education while an undergraduate architecture student at McGill University in Montreal in the 1970s where, at the time, there were no studios offered on the topic. We took it on as an extra-curricular activity on our own, completely outside of our classes. Working in a small team, we had as our first projects a series of five ferroconcrete playground structures built at schools and parks in various neighbourhoods across the city. I worked on four of them. No professors at McGill at the time were involved in any way whatsoever. However, one classmate, Peter Sijpkes, later became a professor in architecture at McGill. Peter has over the years gone on to design and build many structures with his students, including ice structures. Those of us who worked on these projects bonded closely because they were completely ours— of our own initiative. We built these structures on campus, then transported them to their sites for installation. In a way, it was a laboratory-based experiment and few students elsewhere in North America were doing anything like it, especially completely on their own. It was an unauthorised, guerrilla-like design activity. I conducted my first undergraduate design/build studio as an educator soon after I arrived at Dalhousie University in Halifax more than a decade after those early structures I had helped to design and build in Montreal. The students built a full-scale section of a building. It was called the Building Studio. Currently at Dalhousie, the students in the design/build studios are typically firstyear, first-term graduate students. During that first year, in the last two weeks of July, the whole school at Dalhousie shuts down and everybody goes out and engages in design-build studios simultaneously.

Ten to 12 design/build studio options are offered concurrently each summer for our approximately 140 students. I started this curricular tradition in 1991 and called it Free Lab. Free Lab would be a way to expose each and every Dalhousie architecture student to the freedom and personal empowerment opportunities I had experienced myself as a student. In its current incarnation it runs for 17 days as a three-credit course and has become firmly enmeshed in the cultural fabric of the architecture school, respected by both students and faculty. While Free Lab is interesting in many ways, only so much can be achieved in a mere two weeks because of the many inherent limitations in designing and building a structure in such a short timeframe. The aim pedagogically is to take on an imminently buildable project. So, in a way, it represents a continuation of the guerrilla studio projects of my past. Free Lab structures tend to be relatively easy to design and construct. Nonetheless, for a faculty member directing one of these short studios, it can take three or four months of background work to establish the context and find a sponsor/ client for what is to be built, how it is to be constructed, choose the material palette and the location of deployment/construction. The majority of the Free Lab studio builds have been constructed in the Halifax metropolitan area. When we first conceived the transdisciplinary Thinking While Doing project in 2012, we were not necessarily aiming to build four or five similar projects, typologically. We had assumed we would design and build a more varied series of structural forms, even considering things like beginning with gridshell forms and moving on to cable-net structures, then perhaps into another structural type, or even a dymaxion grid structure. Why are all the structures gridshell pavilions? My interest in this type of structure actually evolved over a number of years. The lamella configurations of the 1960s and earlier were essentially simple structural vaults, a barrel vault where virtually everything is repetitive. Brick vaults are essentially catenary vaults with everything in compression so the next step was to move beyond such historical precedents. These precedents dated from the 1920s and slightly before, as in the case of the catenary shell, the basic brick vaulted shell form, dating

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Canadian-American project? First, there are not many design-build-oriented architecture schools in Canada. Dalhousie is among the leading advocates of this aspect of architectural education in Canada and in North America. This called for a search for architecture schools known for their prior interest, experience and commitment to design/build education in architecture. This led me to approach the University of Arizona (Robert Miller and Christopher Trumble), the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (Geoff Gjertson), where the Acadian-Cajun historical and cultural connection resulted in a unique learning experience for the students of both universities, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (Greg Snyder). This cultural-academic exchange between the United States and Canada has been tremendous. For instance, the students in the Louisiana design/build studio traveled to Nova Scotia while they were actually designing their own structure that same term in Louisiana. They learned firsthand about the structure we were then constructing at the Chéticamp Farmers’ Market and drew from this experience in the design and construction of their structure in Lafayette (the Strong Pavilion). They learned about our design process, the construction process, the built project and pitfalls to avoid. By this point, the Chéticamp gridshell was virtually complete. They brought with them their design schematics and assessed their assumptions and structural calculation software against what actually occurred in the Chéticamp experience. At about this same time I was traveling annually with teams of Dalhousie students down to Louisiana. For four years in a row I took the students across the southeastern US, and we would spend considerable time in Lafayette. The largest group I brought there was 15, and we spent a few weeks working with the local students on their construction site in brutal Louisiana midsummer heat and humidity. With the $2.5M (CAD) SSHRC grant, the initial intent was to design and build the TWD structures in Nova Scotia in close collaboration with the three American architecture schools, beginning with the University of Arizona, then in successive collaboration with the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, followed by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The aim was to bring to Canada the

Introduction

from the late 19th Century work of Antoni Gaudí and later Gaudinists in North America, in Boston. These historical precursors inspired us to move progressively into more complex forms while remaining within a single architectural typology. The Thinking While Doing grant our research-based design team was awarded from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) was the most recent in a series of grants I had received in the past decade on the topic of studio-based design/build in architecture. The first grant I received in design/build from the SSHRC was titled Research Creation in the Fine Arts. Soon thereafter, SSHRC ended this program. In the interim, I decided to up the ante, encouraged by the fact I previously had received two modest grants from SSHRC of about $200,000 (CAD) each, and as this research was being featured on the SSHRC homepage I was concurrently being invited to sit on review panels for other SSHRC grant submittals. I saw this as a strong indication the agency would be receptive to our scaled-up ambitions in the realm of humanities-based research on design/build education in architecture. Although my students at Dalhousie had designed and built a lamella vault and a series of single-vaulted structures, it was decided from the outset, here, to be more ambitious. This led to my seeking out collaborations with other schools of architecture based on the assumption this would further enhance the educational experience for our students at Dalhousie University and place more of a spotlight on the pedagogical merits of interinstitutional collaboration in design/build education. Beyond this, I sought to push the tectonic and formal parameters of the structures we would design and build. The goal was to probe how innovation actually occurs both in the studio setting as well as on the construction site, in the pursuit of better understanding the process of creating architecture. Learning about this process would require collaboration with specialists in the humanities who could observe, document and interpret the sociocultural, ethical and philosophical ramifications of architecture as cultural expression. This is why the Thinking While Doing initiative was not conceived as solely a Canadian project. How did it become a joint

Introduction TWD

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other schools’ students, faculty and expertise, with the collaborations occurring on Canadian soil, but the first test of this format did not go particularly well. The project became too large and complex too fast, and there was no easy way to effectively coordinate the design/ construction timeline required within the limits of the Dalhousie academic year schedule, together with the University of Arizona academic year schedule. The Arizona academic year started weeks earlier than Dalhousie’s, and we therefore lost nearly an entire term of productivity early on due to scheduling problems. While the prospect of sequencing the involvement of three American universities on Canadian soil remained attractive in theory, it proved too complicated to effectively implement. We realised early that if we were to jump from one building type to another we would encounter a very steep learning curve, a learning curve that could slow down or potentially completely derail the entire initiative. Type-jumping would require us all to learn completely new types—continually—and the grant as structured was framed largely to examine and learn from how one design-build team learns and then passes its acquired knowledge to the next team. This process of knowledge transference was fundamental to why we received SSHRC’s support in the first place because, as previously mentioned, our aim was to link the design/build experience with the humanities to the fullest extent. So we struck the initial goal of typological diversity in favour of sticking entirely with variants of open-air pavilion structures. Now the goal would be to push the boundaries of a sole building type. In deciding all five structures would be variants within a single typology, we allowed the interdisciplinary team new opportunities to advance the state of the art in ways otherwise unattainable. The case study chapters appear in this book chronologically, based on when they began. Moving from one design/build studio project to the next within a single building type allowed for comparing/contrasting geographies, climactic variations, socio-cultural variability, and local indigenous traditions with regards to what is built and why, together with individual and collective broader ramifications. The four universities where the design/build studios were based each agreed

to build a structure locally, then join forces on the final structure. This strategy resulted in the design-tectonic trajectory expressed in this book. I am grateful to everyone—and especially for the hard work and commitment put forth by each and every student. Arlene Oak: The Thinking While Doing project is structured to include the Design/ Build Group (dbG), the Design/Build Exchange (dbX) and the Insight Group (IG). The activities of the IG have been conducted through ongoing communication with the dbG (led by the professors who coordinated the design and construction of the gridshell structures). The IG is composed of scholars who work in the social sciences and humanities, with the group consisting of myself, a micro-sociologist who researches the conversations that happen during design; Claire Nicholas, an anthropologist whose research focuses on craft and design; Letitia Meynell, a philosopher who examines the modes of representation from sketches to technical drawings; and Melanie Frappier, a historian whose work focuses on the intersection of science and technology. While the IG also includes the architects Stephen Verderber and Patrick Harrop, the following comments are focused on those IG participants who are not practitioners of architecture but who, instead, bring the perspectives of the interpretive social sciences and humanities to the study of architectural education and the professional practice of architecture. The research project Thinking While Doing: Connecting Insight to Innovation in the Construction Sector (its official title) was granted under the SSHRC project category Research-Creation. As a grant-project category, Research-Creation is important because it recognises the importance of combining modes of scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. In architecture, researchas-practice is typically undertaken autonomously rather than also as a topic of study by the social sciences and humanities, while most social science or humanities scholarship that studies architecture does so through the consideration of its practitioners or its finished products—buildings and other structures. It is fortuitous that SSHRC has Research-Creation as a funding category, although in reality we discovered through the TWD project that it is not always easy to

Evolution of the Insight Group:

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1. Yaneva, Albena & Latour, Bruno (2008). Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture. In Reto Geiser (ed.). Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research. Basel: Birkhäuser. pp. 80–89.

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As noted above, the IG team members explore many of the ongoing practices of architecture, such as sketches (Meynell), and the diverse issues raised by those practices, such as ethics (Frappier). Yet, also as noted above, it can be difficult for scholars in the

Introduction

connect architectural practice to research in sociology, anthropology, philosophy and history. Despite difficulties of time, distance and different modes of working (discussed briefly in chapter 15), the TWD project did achieve this connection. Within sociology, anthropology, philosophy and history, there is increasing recognition that phenomena such as drawing, materials selection and model making involve interesting and complex translations of information from one domain to another, such as from pencil sketch to computer model to a wood lattice structural form. The creation of a building is a combination of social and material circumstances that include craft expertise, technical skill, cross-disciplinary collaboration, conversational negotiation and knowledge transference. My own research examines the talk that occurs in and throughout design practice in professional and academic/ educational contexts, such as when an architect speaks with a client, or when a design student presents their work for critique. Such conversations reveal on-the-ground debates, controversies and decisions that concern, for instance, building program, structure, materials and aesthetics. While the everyday talk of designing and building reveals interesting aspects of practice, it is usually somewhat difficult for researchers to gain access to the social situations where the ‘real’ activities of designing, building and educating are taking place. The TWD project provided opportunities to access these situations—from design reviews to construction sites—and so enabled the IG to collect a rich set of research materials, such as audio and visual recordings, photographs and field notes. These research materials have captured many moments in the moving ‘flight’1 of each gridshell, from sketch to finished form, and so will serve to inform future scholarship on architecture and design-build education.

Introduction TWD

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social sciences and humanities to gain access to those sites of creative production where, for instance, sketches are being sketched and ethical dilemmas are being considered. How did TWD’s particular blend of interdisciplinarity occur? It was Ted Cavanagh’s particular background that proved to be an important catalyst. Ted Cavanagh has established a distinguished record in design/build education and is a historian-theorist of architecture in the field of science and technology studies (STS).2 An interdisciplinary area of scholarship, STS encompasses work by anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and historians. His research in the history of technology and practice led him to an article of mine in the journal Design Studies, where I discussed how, by investigating the mundane talk that occurs during design, we can arrive at a better understanding of the complex collaborations inherent in creative practice and production.3 Ted’s initial proposal for TWD was clearly a rare opportunity to explore further the “live” activities of design and the process of construction through a range of scholarly approaches and theories. Although my work comes from a different academic/applied context than Ted's, my background, like his, encompasses elements of both design practice and scholarship, including studio-based education in textiles, clothing, furniture, products and graphic design, as well as post-graduate studies in history and the social sciences. In particular, my PhD research focused on the conversations that occur throughout design practice: particularly those occurring during design education, where the student as a novice designer learns the explicit and tacit “languages” of design.4 Design education involves acquiring technical skills but also the modes of explanation, discussion and presentation that are the hallmarks of a “real” professional designer. After completing my PhD I worked on projects centred on university-level design education, including urban planning, professional architects and engineers in practice, and research on the presentation of architecture and design through the medium of television. By the time I joined the TWD project, Ted had connected with a philosopher and a historian (Halifax-based Letitia Meynell and Melanie Frappier). After receiv-

ing the grant, the Insight Group took shape as a small, diverse team of scholars who would bring to TWD the reflective insights of (some of the) interpretive social sciences and humanities. While enthused about the TWD initiative from the outset, I was not fully appreciative of its ambitious scope. This changed at the first meeting of the project team, in Halifax in September 2013, when the total group of participants from Canada and the US gathered together for three days. This was when I realised the logistical difficulties involved in following diverse groups working in diverse geographic locales. As a micro-sociologist who studies talk I needed to be personally present to audio-record the “live” interactions of various associated team members and working groups. Fortunately, Claire Nicholas arrived on the scene. I met Claire in 2011 at a conference where she spoke about her doctoral research on the practices of designers and craft artisans in Morocco. As leader of the IG, I maintained contact with others in the TWD group and, along with Claire, undertook micro-sociological and ethnographic studies focused on the diverse groups of students, instructors, engineers and others involved with the design and construction of the various structures. Claire and I observed in the design studios and on the construction sites, taking notes, photographs and producing many hours of audio and video recordings. We listened, recorded and transcribed informal meetings, design reviews, presentations and conference calls. We are extremely grateful to all who allowed us access into their everyday lives, and it has been a privilege to witness the dedication and creativity of everyone involved. More recently, Claire and I, with Letitia Meynell, have disseminated our research findings at conferences, including those centred on architecture and architectural education, such as the conferences of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture; those centred on the social sciences and humanities, such as the conferences of the American Anthropology Association; and those centred on both practice and theory, including the conferences of the Society for the Social Study of Science, and the Design Research Society. Members of the IG are also beginning to publish works associated with the TWD project in venues

Introduction 23

2. Cavanagh, Ted (2008). Diverse Designing: Sorting Out Function and Intention in Artifacts. In Pieter de Vermaas, Pieter A. Kroes, Andrew Light, Steven A. Moore (eds.) Philosophy and Design: From Engineering to Architecture. New York: Springer. pp. 301–315. 3. Oak, Arlene (2011). What Can Talk Tell Us About Design? Analyzing Conversation to Understand Practice. Design Studies, 32. pp. 211–234. 4. Oak, Arlene (2001). Identities in Practice: Configuring Design Activity and Social Identity Through Talk (PhD dissertation), University of Cambridge, King’s College.

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that focus on architecture and its education, as well as on wider scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. By communicating this interdisciplinary work to diverse academic and professional audiences, we in the IG aim to continue the TWD project’s lasting impact. Stephen Verderber: On summer evenings after dinner my mother would open the back door to loudly call out my name, knowing full well I had spent hours pillaging lumber from the neighbourhood’s construction sites after dusk. The postwar suburban neighbourhoods of Skokie, just north Chicago, still had a few unbuilt lots, and my block still had large triangular-shaped parcels at its centre. We 10-to 12-year-olds always called it the prairie. We competitively constructed elaborate structures in it, each trying to outdo the others. Next door to my house was a 12-foot hill that sloped downward into a second unbuilt parcel (where two split-level houses would later be built). I somehow managed to build a three-level structure at the uppermost edge of the slope, next to my parents’ driveway. Using only pilfered materials ad hoc I designed and assembled it on my own. Featuring a ladder and tent-roof on the top level, it was my first design/build construction. Winter months did not go to waste, either, because I created igloo-like structures on the property. Years later, while an undergraduate in architecture at the University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee, my design studio embarked on a three-day wilderness excursion to Rock Island, Wisconsin, a rural outpost on Lake Michigan at the farthest tip of Door County, accessible only by ferry, with no vehicles allowed. Ten four-person student teams designed/ built a structure to live in on a cold, rainy late October weekend—the construction budget was only $100. My team concocted a black, 10-foothigh tetrahedral structure consisting of three diagonal steel columns supported by interconnecting tension cables, with turnbuckles and sheathed in black plastic. Our unusually shaped structure worked as designed while most of the other structures proceeded to collapse in the rain while we were high and dry in hammocks slung from the columns. Later, in graduate school, in Joseph Valerio’s design/ build studio at Wisconsin, we designed/built a bright blue tent fabric structure that featured triangulated tensile columns sheathed in

Introduction TWD

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neoprene double-curvature fabric we sewed ourselves (requiring multiple all-nighters toiling in a local garment factory). It served admirably as a main stage at that June’s Summerfest music festival in Milwaukee. When my son Alexander was age 10, (not coincidentally) I hosted his class at Tulane University where, on the patio immediately in front of the architecture building, teams of three to four children were each paired with a pair of architecture students. Supplied with piles of corrugated cardboard provided gratis by a local arts supply store, teams designed and built kid-scaled structures not atypical of an uptown New Orleans neighbourhood. Years later, six months before Hurricane Katrina, the chair of the board of the New Orleans Homeless Mission met with me to gauge my interest in helping them build a dormitory facility for single homeless mothers and their children. I agreed to take it on as a design/ build studio project at the Tulane University School of Architecture. That spring of 2005 the student team demolished a termite-infested structure on the site while six teams of two students developed a design proposal for a two-level facility with 32 beds on the upper level, with support spaces below. HomeAid, an NGO based in Newport Beach, California, had committed $3.5M (USD) in October 2005 to its housing rebuilding initiative along the devastated Gulf Coast region. The New Orleans Mission was now benefactor of a $1M (USD) grant to build this design/build studio project. Against a chaotic post-disaster backdrop— an event that claimed the lives of 1,840 and destroyed 120,000 structures—we regrouped. Our engineers on the project, as well as the city’s planning department, were in chaos. It was the Wild West. HomeAid ended up hiring a professional contractor to build key parts of the structure. Innumerable hurdles were encountered as we muddled through. The New Orleans Homeless Mission’s women’s shelter earned a First Design Award from the Louisiana Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and a Collaborative Practice Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (2007) and was certified LEED Silver (2007). It was the first LEED building completed in New Orleans post-Katrina.5 Many worked on that project, contributing time and energy under difficult conditions.6

I relocated to Clemson University in 2007, having left Tulane after 22 years in New Orleans, where I had raised a family. In 2012, Ted described to me a large grant proposal he was then developing, and referred to it as Thinking While Doing. He asked if I was interested in working on this grant as part of a cross-border collaboration with other universities within an interdisciplinary team. He was assembling a number of American and Canadian universities to work together on the grant. He asked if I would be a part of the social science and humanities-based portion (IG) and on something he referred to as the design/build exchange (dbX). The dbX was to fill a void in the design/build educator discourse in North America. I would focus on constructing an evidence-based student experience assessment component, and on the dbX database. Later in spring 2018, I assembled a team of eight University of Toronto architecture students to assist in the final construction phase of the Cape Breton Highlands pavilion. From the beginning of the TWD project, the students and my colleagues on this interdisciplinary team have been amazing to work with. This ambitious undertaking provided a once-in-a-career opportunity to collaborate with many creative people, including a social and materials culture specialist, an anthropologist, philosopher, the engineering team, an ethicist and the client-sponsors who hosted the four case-study builds. Structure of This Book Early on in the sprawling Thinking While Doing (TWD) project the team realised a book would be the best way to document everything. It could capture the breadth of the work in its fullest geographic dimensions. Unfortunately, the current status quo in design/build education in North America typically mandates that studio-based work in architecture be presented/published as one-off, autonomous statements with little to no effort to establish any connective thread with similar activities that may be occurring at any other architecture schools. We viewed this as a major missed opportunity in peer-to-peer learning. As exemplified by the renowned Rural Studio, founded by Samuel Mockbee and D. K. Ruth, based at Auburn University, independent

Introduction 25

5. Verderber, Stephen; Glazer, Breeze & Dionisio, Rodney (2011). LEED and the Design/Build Experience: A Shelter for Homeless Families Returning to Post-Katrina New Orleans. International Journal of Architectural Research (Archnet-IJAR), 5(1). pp. 55–72. 6. Breeze Glazer (M.Arch., Tulane University) has worked in Robin Guenther’s studio team at Perkins + Will in New York, and Emilie Taylor Welty (M.Arch., Tulane) is currently a Professor of Practice and Interim Director of the Small Center for Collaborative Practice at Tulane University. Rodney Dionisio (M.Arch., Tulane) is currently an Architect and Capitol Projects Coordinator for the City of New Orleans.

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pursuits continue to prevail, with built outcomes presented only after the fact. By contrast, the TWD team set out to not merely establish an internal discourse within the team but to connect our evolving internal discourse with other, external, contemporaneous discourses occurring elsewhere, such as the Berlin-based design/build exchange initiative that operated from 2014 to 2017 and sought to bring together and coalesce parallel design-build endeavours throughout the EU. That said, this book is structured as a set of context chapters interspersed with a set of build chapters with each build chapter representing a case study, beginning with the first build and culminating with the Cape Breton Highlands gridshell pavilion. It is as much about place as process, and this represents the defining framework of the book, where each geographic locale was instrumental (Figure 1.1). The context chapters function as a parallel, interconnected narrative to the build chapters. Together they draw insights, illuminating socio-cultural, ethical and philosophical ramifications while placing the TWD experience in its broader societal context. Collectively, context and case study become a broader interdisciplinary narrative when established together. As such, the five “build” teams and their allied documentarians worked closely, side by side throughout, with the aim of making sense of what educational design/ build means in its broader cultural contexts. It has been about connecting dots, so to speak, about drawing new interconnections while consciously drawing upon precedent within this specialised realm of architectural education. In so doing, we hope the TWD initiative has advanced the cause from an advocacy perspective as much as from an aesthetic, technical, scholarly or professional practice standpoint. Our hope is for it to be seen as a contribution to the scholarly and professional discourse on the learning and making of architecture. In Chapter 2, salient territories of educational design/build inquiry are outlined visà-vis 10 interrelated dimensions of activity, each expressed as a theorem of sorts. In Chapter 3, a brief history of gridshell structures is presented that draws from various key precedents built in the 19th century through the modern movement and up to the

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Introduction

Introduction 27

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Figure 1.1 Aucoin Boulangerie/Bakery, Chéticamp, Nova Scotia, 2018.

Introduction

present. In Chapter 4, the first of the four built case studies is documented (Chéticamp). In Chapters 5 and 6, ethical and philosophical considerations are explored. In Chapter 7, the second case study (Lafayette) is presented. In Chapters 8 and 9, social, psychological and anthropological dimensions of educational design/build are explored, and in Chapter 10, its engineering dimensions are examined. Chapter 11 consists of the third case study (Tucson), and Chapter 12 describes the genesis, development and structure of the design/ build exchange (dbX) ontology. In Chapter 13, the first evidence-based investigation of the student experience in educational design/ build is reported. In Chapter 14, the fourth case study narrative is presented (Cape Breton Highlands). Editors’ Note

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The TWD initiative as originally conceived and funded by SSHRC was to consist of five case studies (built structures), although only four are presented in this book. The fifth of these and the third to have been built, chronologically (to have been constructed in Charlotte, North Carolina, and led by Professor Greg Snyder), remains unbuilt due to circumstances beyond the control of the TWD project team. Despite this, this design/build studio (based at UNC–Charlotte) provided an exceptional learning experience for the students involved and for the entire TWD project team. Professor Snyder also had a significant role in the design and construction of the Cape Breton Highlands project (Chapter 14).

Territories of Educational Design/Build Stephen Verderber

Introduction

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Educational design/build (e-d/b) need no longer operate as an outsider within the academy. One major reason for its outsider status in the past has been a persistent lack of meaningful connections to broader scholarly discourses within the discipline and practice of architecture. It has thrived, despite the odds, often as a bona fide movement even though there have been remarkably few fiery manifestos to propel its advocates and practitioners. Its expansion and maturity have occurred over the past four decades more through a series of landmark events or moments in a more or less default condition; this condition continues to undercut a growing œuvre of significant built work and pedagogical innovation. To its credit, the movement has prospered while continuing to operate in the margins more often than not, expressing an unusual degree of resilience, inspiration and freedom to experiment outside conventional curricular boundaries. Unfortunately, the full impact of this growing body of high-quality built work and the teaching/learning– by–doing it entails remains rather obscured by an insufficient examination of what it all means. To this end, 10 territories of educational design/

Territories of Educational Design/Build TWD

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build activity are outlined below in an attempt to foster internal connectivity and to connect this emerging field to broader discourses both within and beyond architecture. E-d/b, more often than not, operates in the margins of conventional architectural curricula. In the extreme, it operates in a curricular vacuum rather disassociated from the mainstream. This has, on the one hand, allowed for a degree of freedom and autonomy, although at times, this freedom and autonomy may run counter to the wishes of acquiescent administrators in our current litigious era.1 With this said, if it is to ever evolve into a specialised area with its own rigorous scholarship, and connected to broader scholarly discourses within architecture and beyond, it cannot continue to operate as a stepchild.2 One needless consequence of e-d/b’s current default condition within the academy is that participating faculty continue to face hurdles in attaining tenure. Courses in this content area remain underdeveloped from a research and scholarship perspective, and implications of this become glaring from the standpoint of doctoral education, which for better or worse, remains the main pipeline for budding researchers, theorists and historians. The following discussion seeks to advance the growing international e-d/b movement. Moreover, it makes some sense, here, to attempt to emulate what Alex Krieger accomplished with respect to his overview of urban design education and practice. His influential essay “Territories of Urban Design” provides a roadmap of sorts for the paradigmatic framework that follows.3 Krieger’s essay consisted of 10 streams of inquiry that he viewed as informing both education and practice in the realm of urban design. In the case of e-d/b, the following discussion attempts to briefly encapsulate the rapidly expanding literature through case studies of programs from around the world. Ten territories of e-d/b are identified, each a dynamic, fluid stream of inquiry. Collectively they are interwoven, with each defined by means of examples drawn from one-off case studies as well as multi-year curricular initiatives globally. Evidence substantiating these streams of inquiry continues to expand and for this reason a fuller discussion lies beyond the scope of the present discussion. These foci are by no means mutually exclusive: specific programs and courses

are categorised, however, according to their primary pedagogical focus, with many examples crossing over into multiple territories (and in some cases most of the territories) of educational design/build (Figure 2.1). Virtually every studio project and/or curriculum on this subject addresses the following: 1. E-d/b as Reflective Pedagogy The project/curriculum is a case study in reflective discourse on best teaching practices as much as the making of architecture and other built artefacts. The roots of educational design-build run deep, dating from 19th-century post-secondary training initiatives. The aim has remained much the same for over a century: to conjoin design with the act of building what one has designed and to do so within a unified learning sequence. The act of designing-then-building is the overarching pedagogical objective. Its expression has since become bifurcated and diverse, expressed in small-scale furnishings to large-scale freestanding buildings of at times striking formal clarity and tectonic sophistication. For a variety of reasons e-d/b has continued to function in parallel to digitally driven design pedagogies common in most architectural design curricula today. Still, the underlying premise of e-d/b studios has remained constant—students’ immersion in a real project with a real client. The largest and most well known programs do tend to dominate design pedagogy within their institutions. In the case of the top 10 North American programs, students elect to attend these institutions more often than not because of the institution’s design-build curricular offerings. On the other hand, at institutions offering only episodic studios on this subject, or in cases where only a one-time studio is offered, perhaps never to be repeated, this is typically not the case.4 The Neighbourhood Design/Build Studio is an award-winning e-d/b studio offered by the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington. There, students design and build small community projects for Seattlearea NGOs. Architecture graduates and undergraduates in their final year gain experience with clients, public agencies, materials, assemblies and hands-on construction while

1. Badanes, Steve (2008). The Transformative Power of Architectural Education. In Bryan Bell and Katie Wakeford (eds.) Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism. New York: Metropolis Books. pp. 248–255. 2. Canizaro, Vincent B. (2012). Design-Build in Architectural Education: Motivations, Practices, Challenges, Successes and Failures. International Journal of Architectural Research, 6(3). pp. 20–36.

Territories of Educational Design/Build

working to benefit community stakeholders.5 In Germany, at the Technische Universität Berlin, the module “Design and Building Construction” is considered a foundational subject in the undergraduate curriculum. Students there develop projects in the first semester in a workshop setting with high design valued as much as the ability for the student to integrate engineering concepts. In the second semester the “1:1 Laboratory” introduces first-year students to the complexity of architectural design and construction through working with real client-sponsors, engaging a tight construction schedule and budget limitations. With this “learning-by-doing” approach, students confront with real constraints, forcing them to devise multiple constructible solutions and selecting the most feasible option. Another course taught in Germany is the “Monolithisch Bauen” (Monolithic Construction) project done in collaboration with the Institut für Experimentelle Architektur and the Finger-Institut at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. These courses are premised on learning-by-doing.6 At the University of Stuttgart, the Institute for Computational Design and Construction has produced a number of built structures as the outgrowth of e-d/b studios, structures recognised for their technical sophistication and craftsmanship.7 In the US of the 1960s and ’70s, Christopher Alexander’s students at the University of California at Berkeley designed and built full-scale models using scaffolding and plastic sheeting on-site to test out their design concepts. At the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, students have periodically constructed 1:1 models and various full-scale site installations. Decades earlier, students who worked with Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1940s and ’50s on the construction of Taliesin West in Arizona were also engaged in 1:1 construction projects on the grounds. Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, also in Arizona, has existed for nearly 40 years as an experimental e-d/b outpost in the desert.8 In extending e-d/b into the humanities, engineering and environmental sciences, the student is able to become immersed in:

3. Kreiger, Alex (2009). Chapter 1: Territories of Urban Design. In Alex Krieger & William S. Saunders (eds.) Urban Design. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 18–28. 4. Canizaro, Vincent B. (2012). Design-Build in Architectural Education: Motivations, Practices, Challenges, Successes and Failures. International Journal of Architectural Research, 6(3). pp. 20–36. “Service Learning” is a core aim of most one-off e-d/b studios and multi-term curricula although it is often not defined as such.

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5. Badanes, Steve (2008). The Transformative Power of Architectural Education. In Bryan Bell & Katie Wakeford (eds.) Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism. New York: Metropolis Books. pp. 248–255. 6. Fioretti, Peter (2015). Introductory Remarks. Presented at the EU Design/ Build Conference, Berlin, Germany. 7. Menges, Achim (2016). ICD ITKE Research Pavilion. Retrieved from http://icd.unistuttgart.de/?p=11187.html.

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8. Carpenter, William (1997). Learning by Building: Design and Construction in Architectural Education. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

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Figure 2.1 Territories of educational design/build – conceptual framework

Territories of Educational Design/Build

2. E-d/b as Sustainable Practice The project/curriculum advances the case for sustainable, resilient design and construction practices while invoking non-deleterious ecological consequences.

9. Ibid. 10. The Demonstration House (1948). New Zealand Design Review 1(4). pp. 8–9. 11. Hatch, C. Richard (1984). The Scope of Social Architecture. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

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12. Abraham, Sneha. (2014). Students Recycle Materials to Create Furniture for New Studio Art Building. Retrieved from https://www.pomona.edu/ academics/departments/ art/news/posts/students-recycle-materialscreate-furniture-new-studio-art-building. Trumble, Christopher D. (2014). Interstitial Installation: Site Specific Furniture as an Architectural Microcosm. In John Stuart & Mabel Wilson (eds.) Globalizing Architecture: Flows and Disruptions. Paper presented at the 102nd Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, Florida International University, Miami Beach. 13. Anon. (2014). Samuel Mockbee: History and Philosophy. Retrieved from http://www.samuelmockbee. net/rural-studio/about-therural-studio.

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Sustainable design and building methods have been addressed in architectural education for more than 60 years.9 This work includes the geodesic domes built by Buckminster Fuller and his students at Southern Illinois University in the US, and earlier builds completed in New Zealand in the 1940s.10 Energy-efficient builds were later completed with faculty-student studio teams, often as collaborative efforts between a local university and the local storefront “Community Design Center” (similar to those in the 1960s and ’70s in the United States).11 Further advances were made after the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, up to the current global sustainability movement. Ecological design remains a primary driver and this manifests in projects that feature off-grid solar power, recyclables and off-site prefabrication. Eight students in a sculpture course at Pomona College in California designed and built furniture for that campus’ new fine arts building, using repurposed detritus scavenged from the construction site.12 This practice has been a hallmark of Auburn University’s Rural Studio since its inception. In 1994, after securing a $250,000 (USD) grant from the Alabama Power Foundation, the studio designed and built its first house in Mason’s Bend, Alabama. Its unique feature: donated hay bales for walls. Since then, every Rural Studio build has made use of some type of recyclable—72,000 surplus carpet tiles were used in another house; worn-out tires were reused in the walls of a chapel; Chevy Caprice windshields were used for a roof in another.13 The Rural Studio has constructed more than 80 homes and civic buildings in Alabama, at this writing. Also in the US, the North Studio, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, is a contemporary variant on the traditional Beaux-Arts pedagogical model of architectural education. Focused on developing and constructing conceptually driven projects with nonprofit, public sector sponsor/collaborators, this studio is at once a locus for undergraduate design education within the context of a liberal arts

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curriculum, and a multidisciplinary design workshop committed to seeing concepts carried through to construction. Situated in the Department of Art and Art History, this e-d/b studio was initiated in 2006. Exploring the relationship between architecture, landscape and sustainable design precepts, each project undertaken seeks to balance three objectives: the production of relevant design research, the real-world testing of ideas and the implementation of environmentally responsible built outcomes. Completed builds have won two national AIA (American Institute of Architects) awards and have been featured in professional publications.14 In Spain, the Endesa Pavilion, designed and constructed in 2011 by students at IAAC Barcelona, is a self-sufficient, solar-powered structure. Over a period of one calendar year it was used as a control room for the monitoring and testing of prototypes related to intelligent, renewable energy technologies.15 In the UK, the Waste House was built in 2014 at the University of Brighton’s Faculty of Arts, in collaboration with BBM Architects. A total of 253 undergraduate students, apprentices and volunteers participated in the design and construction of this project for the recycling of reusable building materials. Designed as a live educational research lab, the Waste House collaboration tested new methods of green prefabrication techniques for on-site waste reduction.16 In these examples e-d/b provided a vehicle for the demonstration of how sustainable building methods can simultaneously contribute to: 3. E-d/b as Student Empowerment

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The project/curriculum engages students’ understanding and appreciation of the art and science of building, and hence, succeeds as a vehicle to empower the student. The fundamental aim of e-d/b should be to heighten the student’s skill levels, personal awareness and self-confidence, although unfortunately, this is not always how things turn out. If and when a disconnect occurs, it can be due to having miscalculated the scope of the task at hand. Or she or he may eagerly anticipate working on a real project yet may soon become disenchanted with its onerous technical chal-

lenges. Others may become overwhelmed by the project schedule and the sheer physical workload. Others may lack requisite skill sets and require some remedial training with tools. Perhaps the greatest challenge in the field is to get everyone to function as a unit and to work as a team.17 Self-empowerment can be inculcated through a culture that values teamwork, with the students deriving tangible benefits on a personal level that will serve them well as aspiring professionals. Small-scale projects tend to be more effective at instilling student confidence and empowerment while larger, more complex builds usually require more time, money and can harbour myriad logistical setbacks. Mentoring may be an effective vehicle, but one risk is that the student may be inadvertently relegated to a sideline role. The challenge is to carefully set and then adhere to a project’s size and scope in relation to studio size, commitment of its members and then technical abilities. This is what occurred in the Living Wall studio, which took place in 2010 and 2011 at the State University of New York at Buffalo, in the US. There, first-year architecture students acquire skill sets in designing, building and then living in their own creations.18 Similarly, in the UK, the Architectural Association’s (AA) Design + Make studio was established in 2010 as a 16-month post-graduate design/build program based in Hooke Park, Dorset. There, students collaborate during design, on campus, and then proceed to live on the construction site while they build their structure.19 In Indonesia, in the case of the Singapore University of Technology’s Design Library Pavilion construction project, their City Form Lab assisted in the pre-assembly of various component parts, then the contractor assisted in erecting the structure on-site.20 Similarly, the Parsons’ Design Workshop at the New School in New York City shares with many design-build programs the goal of providing a glimpse into post-academic architectural and building practice via its e-d/b studios.21 In Austria, the design.build studio at the Vienna University of Technology seeks to develop students’ creativity, “against the constraints of the real world.” Founded in 2000 at the university’s Institute of Architecture and Design, the studio has completed numerous projects, including a day care centre for persons with developmental disabil-

4. E-d/b as Placemaking The project/curriculum contributes in a positive manner to the establishment and reinforcement of locality, sense of place and cultural authenticity at multiple scales of inquiry.

14. Huge, Elijah (2016). North Studio. Retrieved from http://ehuge.web.wesleyan. edu/northstudio. 15. Rubio, Rodrigo & Guerrero, Miguel (2012). Endesa Pavilion/Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia—IAAC. Retrieved from http://www. archdaily.com/274900/ endesa-pavilion-iaac. 16. Kawayeh, Merlem (2014). Student Works: This House Made of Trash Teaches a Lesson in Green Housekeeping. Retrieved from http://archinect.com/features/article/103711909/ student-works-this-housemade-of-trash-teaches-a-lesson-in-green-housekeeping. html. 17. Maturity and experience levels can (and frequently do) differ widely within a studio, a source of interpersonal tensions challenging overall team cohesiveness. 18. Nazarian, Shadi, Romano, Chris, Bruscia, Nick & Hume, Matthew (2011). The Living Wall. Retrieved from http://thelivingwall.blogspot.ca.

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19. Introduction (2016). AA Design & Make. Retrieved from http://designandmake. aaschool.ac.uk. 20. Anon. (2013). Student Works: Singapore University of Technology and Design Library Pavilion Retrieved from http://archinect.com/features/article/75126636/ student-works-singaporeuniversity-of-technology-and-design-library-pavilion.html. 21. Goldberger, Paul (2016). Excerpt from Design Workshop: 1998–2005. Retrieved from http://sce.parsons.edu/special-projects/design-workshop. 22. Fattinger, Peter (2016). design.build studio. Retrieved from http://www.dbxchange. eu/?q=node/387.

23. Wellinger, Steffen (2016). NTNU Live Studio–Background. Retrieved from http://ntnulivestudio. org/?page_id=1860.html. 24. Verderber, Stephen (2012). Sprawling Cities and Our Endangered Public Health. London: Routledge.

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A key to student satisfaction in e-d/b is the degree to which the built outcome addresses local as well as broader societal issues of concern. The term “placemaking” itself, however, is broadly defined and is often reduced to a marketing pitch.24 New condo projects in places such as Vancouver, British Columbia, are advertised as creating an ersatz “Sense of Place.” Catchphrases, such as River Place or Prairie View Estates, are absurdly named when, in reality, no such sense of place is to be found anywhere in sight. The main question in the case of e-d/b is the degree to which the

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ities in South Africa in the township Orange Farm, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. This build piloted a subsequent series of socially engaged builds, in collaboration with other architecture schools in South Africa. More than 40 projects, primarily kindergartens and elementary schools, have been designed and implemented by university-based student teams from Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Slovenia. Invited by Austrian NGO Caritas in 2007, the studio designed/built a multipurpose hall for an orphanage on the Indonesian island of Nias. From 2008 onwards, this studio has concentrated its activities in Austria, building permanent projects for social institutions including Parkbetreuung and Caritas. A recent project, the Mobile Urban Lab, was a portable structure for lectures, workshops and exhibitions, and was based on adapted ISO shipping containers.22 In Scandinavia, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) Live Studio has a well-established tradition of e-d/b activity. Live Projects (the term used in the UK and Europe to describe e-d/b) there have included small, traditionally crafted Norwegian boathouses to larger-scale projects built in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Students work closely with local municipalities and with grassroots, community-based stakeholders.23 This synchronization relates closely to:

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studio experience is able to yield buildings and artefacts viewed as meaningful contributors in their surrounding physical and sociocultural fabrics, and the degree to which the outcome reflects locality, i.e., local cultural traditions. Granted, in the confines of a oneor two-semester curricular sequence there is often insufficient time to fully examine the inner profundities of place and its broader ramifications (i.e., symbolism, infrastructural fabric, vernacular traditions and socio-cultural and political contexts), yet these dimensions of the built outcome remain meritorious.25 With this said, the Winterlude Festival occurs each year in Ottawa, Canada. In 2015, Ryerson University Master of Architecture students designed and built a temporary bamboo pavilion with a user-responsive interior lighting system. As a site-specific installation, it proved popular as a gathering place within the city’s Confederation Park.26 In the US, the Detroit Collaborative Design Center (DCDC) is a multidisciplinary, nonprofit architecture and urban design conservancy at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture. Since 1994, the DCDC has worked with over 80 Detroit-based NGOs, grassroots community groups and philanthropic foundations, in addition to the local government, private developers and local design professionals in the promotion of Detroit’s stabilisation. Through the use of participatory design strategies, stakeholders engage in community planning, development and building design in each constructed project. To this end, the DCDC developed a nationally recognised Neighbourhood Engagement Workshop (NEW) process.27 Also in the US, Spirit of Place/Spirit of Design was launched in 1993 at the Catholic University of America. Twenty-two builds have been completed in urban and rural locales in Peru, Canada, US, Ireland, Nepal, Italy and Finland. The studio experience is coordinated with the university’s Cultural Studies and Sacred Space Curriculum.28 In Japan, at the Koshirakura Landscape Workshop, a curricular extension of the London-based AA’s Visiting School, students are challenged to respect and consider “local architectural character, heritage and ways of life.” In 1996, the first iteration was held at the summer workshop in Koshirakura Village, Japan. It became an annual event and a part of Koshirakura’s

traditional Maple Cutting Festival. Participants were drawn from the AA as well as many other schools. Intercultural exchange has been a significant part as students assist local residents. The festival begins with the selection and cutting of a sacred tree in the mountains, which is then carried down into the village for a night of singing and dancing. The following day the tree is carried from house to house to commemorate and celebrate significant events of the previous year–i.e., births, marriages, a special birthday, a new house built.29 Placemaking through e-d/b is closely aligned with: 5. E-d/b as Community Engagement The project/curriculum succeeds in engaging client/sponsors, key socio-cultural stakeholders and broader constituencies in the communityat-large. Most design/build programs partner with nonprofit organisations devoted to community service.30 Often, a cold call or introduction through a mutual acquaintance is a first point of contact in seeking out this type of pro bono assistance. The Rural Studio, in the beginning, offered its services to whoever responded to its offer of help with small renovation projects.31 This led in time to what is arguably the most well known e-d/b curriculum in North America. Similarly, in the case of the New Orleans Women’s Shelter Family Center, a Tulane University studio in 2005 and 2006 (led by this author) worked early on to gain the trust of the client-sponsor by volunteering as mealtime food servers and later volunteering collectively to demolish a dilapidated structure at the rear of what was to be the build site for a 35-bed LEED-Silver certified shelter for returning mothers and their children, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2006.32 A key precedent for the New Orleans build was Design Bridge, a student-run program based at the University of Oregon. Its focus is on projects accruing mutual benefit to design students and to the local community. Buckminster Fuller, a visiting critic in the 1950s and ’60s, built plywood geodesic domes with the students. A related program, OregonBILDS (Building Integrated Livable Designs Sustainably), is an e-d/b studio program at the same university that draws architecture and

6. E-d/b as Critical Regionalism The project/curriculum fuses indigenous building traditions, aesthetic vocabularies and building methods with progressive influences.

25. Bell, Bryan (2004). Finding Clients. In Bryan Bell (ed.) Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service Through Architecture. Hudson: Princeton Architectural Press. pp. 26–28. 26. Bowen, Frank & Bica, Adrian (2015). Winterlude Wonderland. Retrieved from http://www.ryerson.ca/ graduate/news/newslistings/master-architecture-students-createwinterlude-pavilion.html. 27. Pitera, Daniel (2016). Detroit Collaborative Design Center. Retrieved from http://www.dcdcudm.org/about. 28. Price, Travis (2016). Spirit of Place/Spirit of Design. Retrieved from http://spiritofplacedesign.com/about-2/philosophy. Also see Price, Travis (2015). The Mythic Modern: Architectural Expeditions into the Spirit of Place. San Francisco: ORO Books. 29. Canizaro, Vincent (2012). Design-Build in Architectural Education: Motivations, Practices, Challenges, Successes and Failures. International Journal of Architectural Research, 6(3). pp. 24. Also see Egashira, Shin (2016). Koshirakura Landscape Workshop. Retrieved from http://www.koshirakura. org/about. 30. Sokol, David (2008). Teaching by Example: Design-Build Educators Talk Pedagogy and Real Politick. Architectural Record. 10. p. 125. 31. Freear, Andrew, Barthel, Elena & Oppenheimer, Andrea Dean (2014). Rural Studio at Twenty: Designing and Building in Hale County, Alabama. Hudson: Princeton Architectural Press. 32. Verderber, Stephen, Glazer, Breeze & Dionsio, Rodney (2011). LEED and the Design/Build Experience: A Shelter for Homeless Families Returning to Post-Katrina New Orleans. International Journal of Architectural Research 5(1). pp. 55–72.

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33. Canizaro, Vincent (2012). Design-Build in Architectural Education: Motivations, Practices, Challenges, Successes and Failures. International Journal of Architectural Research, 6(3). p. 24. Also see Thallon, Robert (2016) OregonBILDS. Retrieved from https://oregonbilds.uoregon. edu. 34. Sokol, David (2008). Teaching by Example: Design-Build Educators Talk Pedagogy and Real Politick. Architectural Record. 10. p. 125. Also see Dutton, Thomas A. (2016) Over-theRhine DesignBuild Studio. Retrieved from http://arts.muohio.edu/otr/ about.html.

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Design Build Bluff is a nonprofit organisation with a two-fold mission: to build energy-efficient and sustainable homes for the people of the Navajo Nation in southeastern Utah in the US while immersing students in local cultural traditions. Between 2003 and 2014, nine homes were built, all of ecologically sustainable, salvaged and recycled materials. Private fundraising and federal grants provided approximately $50,000 (USD) in funding per build. Students spent the entire semester working out of the Bluff, Utah, basecamp. During the fall of 2010, 22 students built the Windcatcher House, having spent the preceding summer selecting the client (family) and the site, and being engaged in design. The dwelling was completed in 13 weeks. Navajo culture inspired the endeavour, as did a severe yet spectacular desert site context. The private areas of this home are oriented to the east, in accord with Navajo tradition, which holds morning light as sacred. Rainwater is collected in a large cistern, and a trough provides drinking water for horses and irrigation. The focal point is the Windcatcher, a 30-foot-tall chimney at the

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construction management students together to work on builds in the local community.33 Since 1996, Miami University’s Department of Architecture and Interior Design has collaborated closely with community organisations located in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighbourhood on a variety of projects visà-vis the university’s Over-the-Rhine Design/ Build Studio. This studio also provides schematic design for affordable housing and those eligible for tax credit financial assistance—through a federal program administered by the State of Ohio. Builds include the 2004 Cincinnati Freedom Summer Design Charrette for Social Justice, the Washington Park Housing Redevelopment Plan and a senior citizens’ housing development in a neighbourhood then undergoing gentrification.34 Community engagement is aligned with the practice of:

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centre of the parti that provides both cooling and heating. Since many Navajo live off-grid, this dwelling is completely self-sustaining.35 Two other built projects were the Skow House (2013) and the Hozho House (2013). In each, local vernacular traditions and building methods were reinterpreted in a rural context.36 The BaSiC Initiative is a collaboration of faculty and students from Portland State University and the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. Past e-d/b projects have addressed the affordable housing needs of Native Americans and migrant farm workers, offering students a variety of design/build opportunities. A program in Mexico occurs during the winter in squatter settlements in Morelos, whereas the Strawbale Program in Montana occurs during the summer at Native American reservations. This program has built elementary schools, clinics, a children’s library, laundry facilities, houses, literacy centres, urban gardens, wells, cisterns, waste treatment facilities and solar panels.37 The Women´s Cooperative in NAXIÍ, Mexico (2012), was built by architecture students from TU Berlin in Germany with Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). This collaboration is called CoCoon. A jam factory was designed and built for the women’s cooperative NAXIÍ in Oaxaca. The factory was built primarily from clay bricks fabricated by local craftspeople from excavations at the building site.38 This program began in 1998 and is an interdisciplinary course at TU Berlin that gives students of architecture, civil engineering, landscape design and other disciplines the opportunity to design and build a project during a fieldwork semester living in Mexico.39 Similarly, in Australia, the Bower Studio, an e-d/b studio for graduate students at the University of Melbourne, has completed a dozen projects, including a shelter for an aboriginal family living in the Belyuen community in Australia’s Northern Territory.40 Similarly, the Scarcity and Creativity Studio at AHO, in Oslo, Norway, was established in 2012. To date, students have constructed projects in Norway and in Chile. Materials are sourced locally, and local craftspeople help to build responsivity to local terrain, climate and cultural conditions.41 These activities can be effectively interwoven with:

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7. E-d/b as Tectonic Innovation The project/curriculum succeeds in showcasing innovative materiality, new applications of traditional materials and innovative construction methods.

35. Meinhold, Bridgette (2013). Windcatcher House. Urgent Architecture. New York: W.W. Norton. pp. 237–241. 36. Anon. (2014). Skow Residence / Colorado Building Workshop+DesignBuildBLUFF. Retrieved from http://www.archdaily. com/541436/skow-residence-colorado-building-workshop-designbuildbluff/. Also see Anon. (2014). Hozho House/Colorado Building Workshop +DesignBuildBLUFF. Retrieved from http://www.archdaily. com/541420/hozho-housedesignbuildbluff-university-of-colorado-denver.

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37. Palleroni, Sergio (2016). BaSiC Initiative–Building Sustainable Communities. Retrieved from http://basicinitiative.com/ about. 38. Hartig, Ursula (2016). Introduction to CoCoon— Contextual Construction. Retrieved from http://edbkn.service.tu-berlin.de/edbkn/?q=node/365. 39. Hartig, Ursula (2016). A Jam Manufactory for Naxii. Retrieved from http:// edbkn.service.tu-berlin.de/ edbkn/?q=node/399. 40. O’Brien, David (2016). Bower Studio—An Introduction. Retrieved from http://bowerstudio.com.au. 41. Anon. (2014). Building Day #26. Retrieved from http://scl34.aho.no/building-day-26. 42. Quale, John D. (2012). Sustainable, Affordable, Prefab: The ecoMOD Project. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

43. Herman, Gregory (2008). Market Modular. In Brian Bell & Katie Wakeford (eds.) Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism. New York: Metropolis Books. pp. 193–198. 44. Cavanagh, Ted (2009). Diverse Designing: Sorting Out Function and Intention in Artefacts. In Pierter A. Vermaas, Peter Kroes, Andrew Light & Steven Moore (eds.) Philosophy and Design: From Engineering to Architecture. New York: Springer. 45. Gerfen, Katie (2013). Ecohawks Research Facility. Retrieved from http://www.architectmagazine.com/design-build/ eco-hawks-research-facility. aspx.

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Since 2004, the ecoMOD program at the University of Virginia has completed 12 housing units on eight sites. The intent has been to provide high-quality design for moderate-income families by means of off-site prefab modularity. Renovations and upgrades to existing historic residences have also been completed under the umbrella of this program. Five existing historic dwellings have been transformed. Both studios were an outgrowth of the university’s 2002 Solar Decathlon Competition entry.42 The University of Arkansas’ Design/Build Workshop (D/BW) shares a similar goal: the use of prefab components.43 Other schools have explored common materials in uncommon ways. Explorations in tectonics and materiality have included lightweight gridshells fabricated in wood, which are also the focus of numerous studios at Dalhousie University in Canada.44 The University of Kansas’ Studio 804 is one of the most established programs in North America. Its recent Ecohawks Research Facility (2012– 2013), built on the university campus in Lawrence, is designed for conducting research on the conversion of fossil fuel-powered vehicles into battery and solar-powered vehicles. The aluminum strips of the building’s upper skin are interwoven with horizontal aluminum tubes, requiring precise hand-welding at every corner connection. The 20 students in this studio researched the alloy’s properties to ensure every joined surface weathered equivalently, and to this end a series of welding training workshops were held. The parti consists of two enclosed volumes for working on electric vehicles and an open-air workspace. This was Studio 804’s sixth LEED-Platinum certified project.45 In London, the Architectural Association’s Design + Make programme centres on student prototyping and subsequent 1:1 construction. Situated in the English countryside, it is based at Hooke Park, the AA’s Dorset campus for research in timber and alternative rural architecture. Students use a studio and workshop/fabrication space, designing and build-

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ing structures within one of two streams: design concepts field-tested as 1:1 builds and the development of new timber construction technology. Two courses are offered: a 16month MArch course and a 12-month MSc course. Each track includes seminars, 1:1 builds and an independent thesis.46 Recent builds include Driftwood (2009) in London, the AA Summer Pavilion. Additionally, annual projects by second-and third-year students of AA’s Intermediate Unit 2 are fabricated and constructed at Hooke Park.47 One such exemplar is the Tetrahedron (2015), a pyramidal structure fabricated entirely in wood.48 In Japan, the Circle Pack Pavilion (2012) in Tokyo was designed and built by students in the Global 30 Studio in the Department of Architecture’s Obuchi Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. The structure was fabricated from hundreds of bamboo rings ranging from 250 to 450mm in diameter, connected by clear plastic shrink film that provided rigidity and tension to the components when heated.49 In the US in 2009, the Elastic Plastic Sponge was created by students from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and installed at the Coachella Music Festival in California. This structure was derived from a tectonic-driven parti as a kinetic, movable, “form active” structure.50 Similarly, studio3, based at the University of Innsbruck, specialises in contemporary art, culture and experimental architectural “Tangible Utopias,” i.e., the implementation of innovative material palettes and building technologies.51 The pedogological aims and the built outcomes of these programs can be avowedly tectonic-centric while simultaneously committed to advancing: 8. E-d/b as Socio-Political Advocacy

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The studio/curriculum succeeds in improving the socio-economic and political well-being of those for whom the student designs and builds. The Yale Building Project has been in existence since 1967. It began in the context of the massive social upheaval of the 1960s. Each year, graduate students design and construct a building for a not-for-profit entity; completed builds have ranged from rural Appalachian community centres and a health clinic to

pavilions and recreational structures constructed in Connecticut. More recently, single-family residences have been built on narrow, non-conforming sites in economically distressed urban neighbourhoods in New Haven. Recent partnerships have occurred with Habitat for Humanity, Home Inc., Neighbourhood Housing and Common Ground.52 Subsequently new e-d/b programs in the US and elsewhere have been modelled on Yale’s. One such offspring sponsored more than 60 students from the University of Tennessee School of Architecture on design/builds in post-earthquake Haiti, led by John McRae in collaboration with a local NGO, the Haiti Christian Development Fund.53 Completed projects include a solar panel installation, an elementary school, an ongoing survey research project and the design and construction of Caleb House. Its LIFEHouse method is a widely cited how-to manual for rebuilding amid the different conditions in Haiti. A Syrian refuge camp recently built on Benrodestraße in Düsseldorf was designed/ built by students at the Peter Behrens School of Arts/Institute for Social Impact. This was the first temporary installation erected in Düsseldorf for this purpose, providing 200 beds for arriving families in 2016. Additionally, an 18m-long decommissioned public transport bus was transformed for use by refugee children.54 In Germany, since 2006, the Technical University at Aachen architecture program has conducted e-d/b studios focused on projects constructed in South Africa. Full-scale 1:1 mock-ups are first built on campus prior to their construction in the field.55 Some e-d/b initiatives are joint ventures between multiple participating universities. The Guga S. Thebe Children’s Theatre (2014), a theatre and performance space, brought together students from the Peter Behrens School of Arts (HS Düsseldorf), RWTH Aachen University, in Germany, the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta (US) and University of Cape Town, in South Africa. Located in one of Cape Town’s oldest, most hardscrabble townships, this theatre attracts children, adolescents and artists. The theatre seats 200: its parti consists of a system of loosely stacked ISO shipping containers surrounding a central stage element housing a backstage area, soup kitchen, music rehearsal spaces, recording studio and sanitary facilities.56

9. E-d/b as Disaster Mitigation The project/curriculum contributes to furthering the aim of mitigating the deleterious consequences of natural and human-induced disasters, and their painful aftermath.

47. Turner, Brad (2009). Driftwood Pavilion by AA Unit 2 Opens. Retrieved from http://www.dezeen. com/2009/07/03/driftwood-pavilion-by-aa-unit-2opens/. Also see Willock, Nathan (2009). The Architectural Association’s 2009 Summer Pavilion. Retrieved from http://www.contemporist.com/2009/07/03/ the-architectural-associations-2009-summer-pavilion/. 48. Bennett, Valerie (2015). Floating Pyramid and Wooden Tunnel Built in the Woods by Architectural Association Students. Retrieved from http://www.dezeen. com/2015/02/07/floatingpyramid-and-woodentunnel- built-in-thewoods-by-architectural-association-students. 49. Obuchi, Yusuke (2016). Circle Pack Pavilion, 2012. Retrieved from http://www.obuchilab.com/ pavilion/circle-pack-pavilion/. Also see Anon. (2012). Circle Packing. Retrieved from http://archinect.com/lostinpermutation/circle-packing. 50. Petrunia, Paul (2009). Student Works: Rock and Roll Fantasy – SCI-Arc at Coachella: Elastic Plastic Sponge. Retrieved from http://archinect.com/ features/article/88824/student-works-rock-and-rollfantasy-sci-arc-at-coachellaelastic-plastic-sponge.html. 51. Prenner, Walter (2016). /studio3 – Institut für Experimentelle Architektur. Retrieved from http://www.dbxchange. eu/?q=node/1214.

52. Hayes, Richard W. (2007). The Yale Building Project: The First 40 Years. New Haven: Yale University Press. 53. Hancock, Tanner (2014). UT Students Help to Rebuild Haiti. Retrieved from http://www.utdaily.beacon. com/news/2014/jun/11/ ut-students-help-rebuildhaiti. 54. Anon. (2016). Introduction, Design.Develop.Build PBSA. Retrieved from http://www.dbxchange. eu/?q=node/1088. Also see Reitz, Judith, KleinWiele, Franz & Urton, Tobias (2016). Spiel-und Aufenthaltsbus (Playbus). Retrieved from http://edbkn.service.tuberlin.de/?q=node/1362.

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55. Bernhardt, Anne Julchen (2016) Overview, Design.Develop.Build Studio. Retrieved from http://gbl.arch.rwthaachen.de/ddb/. 56. Guga S. Thebe Theatre (2016). Retrieved from http://www.dbxchange. eu/?q=node/1025. 57. Gnaiger, Roland (2016). BASEhabitat – architecture for development. Retrieved from http://www.basehabitat. org/base. 58. Anon. (2016). Introduction, Bauen für OrangeFarm. Retrieved from http://www.orangefarmev.de/verein/wer_wir_sind. php. 59. Tulane hosted 22 e-d/b studios in the first six months after the university reopened in January of 2006.

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Post-disaster strike zones have emerged as powerful attractors for design/build studios. Faculty are drawn to examining disaster strike zones firsthand and assessing how their institution can meaningfully assist. Recent examples include the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (2005); the Haitian Earthquake (2010); severe F-5 tornadoes in Tuscaloosa, Alabama (2011) and in Joplin, Missouri (2011); Superstorm Sandy on the US eastern seaboard in the New York–New Jersey region (2012); and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico (2017). Studios working in these contexts, in reality, can be a hit-or-miss proposition, with relatively few attaining a measurable level of design efficacy or long-term resiliency.59 The URBANBuild program at Tulane University stands out as an exemplar (as does the aforementioned New Orleans Mission e-d/b initiative) for its completion of private dwellings built in association with Neighbourhood Housing Services (NHS) in New Orleans. NHS provides the sites, chosen from among four lower-income inner-city neighbourhoods. This multi-year e-d/b curriculum is embraced locally, and

46. Anon. (2016). Programme Overview, Design/ Make Programme, Live Builds. Retrieved from http://designandmake.aaschool.ac.uk/programme.

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Similarly, the BASEhabitat program based at the University of Art and Design Linz in Austria has collaborated with various NGOs since 2004 to construct a number of e-d/b projects in the EU.57 Also in Germany, the Faculty of Architecture at the Technical University of Munich uses its e-d/b studios to promote social development in southern Africa. Students have designed and built a kindergarten in an underdeveloped region in Africa. Since 2007, it has organised and financed the club building for Orange Farm eV, projects built alongside local villagers who assist in construction and the local sourcing of materials. The collaboration of students from the EU with local African communities promotes mutual understanding and helps to foster deep, mutually beneficial, and lifelong learning experiences and coincides in many ways with the virtues of 58:

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student participation is a graduation requirement in architecture at Tulane.60 In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, students from the University of Kansas visited New Orleans, initiating a series of relatively small-scale design/build collaborations with an ad hoc grassroots organisation, the Porch Cultural Organization in the Seventh Ward.61 In Japan, architecture students from Keio University designed and erected the Fish Arch, a structure fabricated in grooved “fish shapes” of digitally cut wood scraps and assembled as a puzzle. The intent was to inspire and spur on the local community as it rebuilt its fishing industry after the massive 2011 earthquake and tsunami.62 In Australia, following a spate of devastating wildfires, the Monash University Department of Architecture, in collaboration with the Rhode Island School of Design in the US, contributed to the rebuilding of the township of Kinglake via an e-b/d studio focused on the provision of relief worker housing.63 In the US, in 2014, the Center for Public Interest Design offered a two-part course in disaster relief mitigation and reconstruction, subsequently assisting a family of the Northern Cheyenne people in the rebuilding of their home after recent wildfires devastated their reservation lands in southeastern Montana. The studio also rebuilt the stables so the family could reconstitute its sole means of financial support. Students and local volunteers built a wheelchair-accessible, wraparound deck with a new roof and cleared large swaths of charred juniper trees.64 Based in Berlin, Reclaiming Heritage has sponsored recent e-d/b studio builds in Chanco, Chile, and in Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti. These structures were built by student teams from the Technische Universität Berlin and the P. Universidad Católica de Chile. The aim was to reclaim and recycle building materials for use in post-disaster reconstruction while remaining sensitive to local vernacular building traditions.65 The assemblage of diverse expertise from multiple disciplines in these situations can greatly reinforce and extend:

10. E-d/b as Interdisciplinary Knowledge Mobilisation The project/curriculum succeeds in drawing together architecture students and specialists from non-design disciplines, with the shared aim of advancing society. The term “knowledge mobilisation” is rapidly acquiring currency as a rallying cry to accelerate innovative applied research in service learning contexts. But what is the fundamental difference between research and innovation? Research universities are committed to generating new knowledge and are tasked with engaging industry to find new outlets for this knowledge. E-d/b endeavours most certainly extend the reach of the university into society, although the “transfer quotient” of this accumulated body of knowledge remains immaterial if unreported in peer-reviewed venues. Other disciplines are far better at doing this, although knowledge mobilisation, and innovation itself for that matter, are rarely discipline-centric—with the most inspiring builds beautifully blurring the lines that artificially isolate disciplines within the ivory tower. A successful build is capable of advancing both the service-learning and interdisciplinary dimensions of the knowledge mobilisation equation. Here, dissemination is essential. Perhaps the time has arrived for a journal exclusively devoted to e-b/d—a peer-reviewed journal focused on knowledge mobilisation in the discipline and practice of architecture. In Canada, University of British Columbia e-d/b studio students designed and built Lu’s Pharmacy for Women (2008), the culmination of a successful community outreach initiative. This project linked multiple stakeholders, including contractors, city building permit agencies, private sector grant agencies and private donors in a common purpose. The students alone raised $115,000 (CAD) to make the project a reality, including a $50,000 (CAD) Vancity green building grant and the solicitation of a grant of $25,000 (CAD) from the City of Vancouver. This transfer of design knowledge and technology from campus to community was widely hailed.66 Similarly in Europe, TUM.Designbuild is another program that, since 2006, offers EU architecture students an opportunity to engage underserved communities in Africa. Students work along-

Discussion

60. Anon. (2014). Neighbourhood Housing Services, Urban Build—A Partnership with Tulane School of Architecture. Retrieved from http://www.nhsnola.org/ site95.html. 61. Gore, Neil & Corser, Ruth (2008). Insurgent Architecture in the Seventh Ward. Batture: Amnesiascope. 4. pp. 4–11. 62. Meinhold, Bridgette (2011). Japanese Students Build a Pavilion from Thousands of Fish to Support Tsunami Reconstruction Efforts. Retrieved from http://inhabitat.com/japanese-studentsbuild-a-pavilion-from-thousands-of-fish-to-support-tsunami-reconstruction-efforts.

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63. Anon. (2016). Community Shelter at Kinglake Victoria Australia 2009. Retrieved from http://www.frominform. com/#!kinglake-pavillion/ sitepage_20.html. 64. Anon. (2016). Introduction, About CPID. Retrieved from http://www.pdx.edu/ public-interest-design/ about-cpid. Also see Anon. (2016). Montana Design-Build. Retrieved from http://www.pdx.edu/ public-interest-design/montana-design-build. 65. Castrillón, Renato D’Alencon (2016). Reclaiming Heritage, Introduction. Retrieved from http://www.reclaimingheritage.org/html. 66. Waugh, Basil (2008). A Friendly Neighborhood Drugstore: UBC Students Design a Pharmacy for Women in Canada’s Toughest Neighborhood. UBC Reports, 54(9). Retrieved from http://news.ubc.ca/ubcreports/2008/08sep04/pharmacy.html.

67. Kestel, Matthias (2016). TUM.DESIGNBUILD— Architectural Design and Timber Construction. Retrieved from http://www.dbxchange. eu/?q=node/986. 68. Anon. (2016). About CPID. Retrieved from http://pdx.edu/public-interest-design/about-cpid. 69. Anon. (2016). Research Through Making—Introduction. Retrieved from https://taubmancollege. umich.edu/architecture/faculty-research/ research-through-making/2016. Completed studio builds have received awards from the ACSA and P/A.

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The aforementioned 10 streams are by no means to be construed as exhaustive. Myriad internal and external determinants influence the entire process from start to finish. However, a set of rather universal determinants is discernable. This initial attempt to identify these forces is depicted in Figure 2.2. Recurrent socio-cultural, political, economic, climatic, geographical and ecological factors will continue to shape the e-b/d experience, while at once providing a barometer of the current global vitality of the e-d/b movement. Second, the diverse programs and projects reported above function collectively as a roadmap of what is happening, and where. For example, in places experiencing the most intensive, acute effects of climate change, e-b/d studios are actively assisting communities in coping with its dramatic ramifications. In places where the mainstream construction industry remains hesitant to experiment with new materials and methods of assembly, e-d/b studios are actively consulting with product manufacturers to field-test new pre-market products that mainstream client/sponsors would otherwise be unwilling to risk. In poor communities struggling to provide basic social

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side local trades-and craftspeople under the tutelage of architects.67 In the US, the aforementioned Center for Public Interest Design, based at Portland State University, provides research, design, consulting and community engagement assistance to address persistent challenges facing vulnerable communities and ecosystems around the globe. Established in 2013, in response to unmet conditions in underserved communities in the United States and developing nations, the program applies best design practices to the provision of adequate shelter, food, potable water supplies, disaster preparedness, recovery and general interdisciplinary knowledge mobilisation drawing together diverse stakeholders from both public and NGO sectors.68 Similarly, since its inception in 2009, the Research Through Making program, housed in the Taubman College at the University of Michigan, brings together faculty advisors and students to undertake innovative e-d/b studio projects.69

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Figure 2.2 Field determinants of educational design/build–operational framework.

Territories of Educational Design/Build 45

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70. Lawlor, Brian (2013). Knowledge Mobilization Through Interdisciplinary Professional Communication. Journal of Electrical & Electronic Systems, 2(2). Author's Note: An earlier version of this chapter was presented at Working Out: Thinking While Building, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Fall Conference, Halifax, Nova Scotia, October 2014.

services, design/build studios are providing an effective means to draw public attention to critically needed capital investment projects. The intent here has not been to delineate one prescriptive, narrowly defined typology— rather, the intent is to stimulate further debate and discussion. Rigorous research and scholarship on this topic is clearly warranted. It will no longer suffice to lump every program out there into the same bailiwick, treating everything as a single kettle of fish. Such one-size-fits-all approaches do a disservice to everyone and every academic institution committed to furthering the cause of e-d/b globally. It is important to underscore this point if for no other reason than the sheer volume of design/build activity occurring globally in the early decades of the 21st century. This emerging and evolving curricular domain within the larger discipline and practice of architecture deserves no less than a fully rigorous level of classification, interpretation and analysis.70 Having been part of numerous e-d/b design studios both as a student and as a teacher for more than three decades, I have come to the conclusion that educational design/build is less a technical activity or curricular sub-discipline and more of a philosophical worldview held by individuals who represent a diverse spectrum of contributing disciplines, concerns and priorities. It is as much about making an object as it is about community-building – and it is as much about building collaborative skill sets in students as it is about furthering larger social and political agendas. It is about making things in a reflective way without harming the earth and its resources; a way of thinking about sustainability and resilience in the broadest sense, without cliché. What binds its practitioners and advocates together is a commitment to the act of making, to community-building and to enhancing quality of life in the everyday milieu.

History and Theory of Gridshell Architecture

History and Theory of Gridshell Architecture Ramsey K. Leung

Introduction and Definitions

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Shell structures have a long history in architecture, affording possibilities of formal design in a manner that distributes loads efficiently while yielding a tectonically poetic outcome. Defined as a constructed system of three-dimensional curved surfaces that resist applied loads through their membrane transference in-plane,1 a shell structure is a form-passive entity in that its internal structural system does not significantly change shape or contours under varying load conditions, unlike form-active structural systems such as cable or membrane structures.2 Yet while a seemingly infinite number of structural forms may be found through shell design, not all are equal, with differences in efficiency arising through inherent limitations of material choices, amongst other context-sensitive parameters. While innovations in thin-shell concrete construction were popularised from the 1920s through the 1960s by a number of designers, such as Pier Luigi Nervi, Felix Candela or Heinz Isler (Figure 3.1), the history of gridshell development, from the steel structures of the 1890s through to the timber gridshells of the 1970s, is less well

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Figure 3.1 Highway service area in Deitingen, Switzerland, Heinz Isler, 1968, featuring a thin-shell concrete roof.

known. The word gridshell is seemingly a portmanteau of shell structures and space grid structures (a three-dimensionally force-vector active system assembled of linear elements),3 and is synonymous with a lattice shell structure or a reticulated shell structure.4 In contrast to thin-shell concrete or masonry shells, which are designed with a continuous surface, a gridshell comprises discrete elements that follow the surface of the form in a fine, latticed network relative to the overall dimensions of the structure. These elements may be short in length and only pass from node to node, or may cross one another continuously at the nodes.5 Gridshells may also be further classified into two sub-types: strained or unstrained. An unstrained gridshell is composed of either relatively short straight members or pre-bent members then assembled into a shell that is curved and unstrained in its initial state; in other words, the shell does not take on strain during construction. Pre-bent members have included steel, aluminum, or curved laminated timber. Alternatively, prefabricated straight members may assemble into a curvilinear shell by modifying their directionality at key moment-resistant nodal connections (Figure 3.2). Comparatively, strained gridshells are

Vladimir G. Shukov and the History of Steel Gridshell Development 1. Dickson, Michael & Parker, Dave (2015). Sustainable Timber Design: Construction for 21st Century Architecture. London: Routledge. p. 107. 2. Adriaenssens, Sigrid, Block, Philippe, Veenendaal, Diederik & Williams, Chris (2014). Introduction. In Sigrid Adriaenssens, Philippe Block, Diederik Veenendaal & Chris Williams (eds.), Shell Structure for Architecture: Form Finding and Optimization. London: Routledge. p. 1. 3. Engel, Henio (1968). Structure Systems. New York: Fredrick A. Praeger, Inc.

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4. Williams, Chris (2014). What Is a Shell? In Sigrid Adriaenssens, Philippe Block, Diederik Veenendaal & Chris Williams (eds.), Shell Structure for Architecture: Form Finding and Optimization. London: Routledge. p. 239. 5. Adriaenssens, Sigrid, Barnes, Mike, Harris, Richard & Williams, Chris (2014). Dynamic Relaxation: Design of a Strained Timber. In Sigrid Adriaenssens, Philippe Block, Diederik Veenendaal & Chris Williams (eds.) Shell Structure for Architecture: Form Finding and Optimization. London: Routledge. pp. 89 & 101 Chilton, John & Tang, Gabriel. (2017). Timber Gridshells: Architecture, Structure and Craft. New York: Routledge. 6. Ibid. pp. 91, 99 & 101. 7. Beckh, Matthias (2015). Hyperbolic Structures: Shukhov’s Lattice Towers – Forerunners of Modern Lightweight Construction. New York: Wiley. p. 14.

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Frei Otto is often cited as the inventor of the strained timber gridshell, with his 1976 Mannheim Multihalle rightly cited as the exemplar of timber gridshell innovation. However, this was not the first gridshell constructed. Instead, a critically important but lesser known history of the development of gridshell design and construction begins with the expansion of the Russian steel industry in the latter part of the 19th century. With the necessity of prefabricating steel structural members and the large upfront expenses required to fabricate custom casting moulds and joint connections, designers were compelled to incorporate replicable, patterned elements into their buildings. Also influencing the design of new buildings at this time was the desire to erect these prefab structures quickly. This necessitated a consideration by structural engineers of how a building’s prefabricated members could be joined most efficiently, while still aiming for quality control in the replication of its component parts.7 In this era, Vladimir Grigoryevich Shukhov (1853–1939) was arguably the premier structural engineer in Russia. Graduating in 1876 with an honours diploma in engineering mechanics from the highly regarded Moscow Technical Institute, Shukhov benefitted from a progressive program of study that emphasized mathematical analysis. Shukov’s inventive applications of mathematical analysis led to his first prominent designs while working for the Russian engineering firm Bari. By the 1880s, Shukhov had begun to apply his mathematical analytics towards the design and construction of roof systems that required a minimum amount of materials and work, resulting in the construction of his first architectural project in 1890 (in collaboration with the architect Aleksandr Pomerantsev). The three-bay, iron and glass roof for the

History and Theory of Gridshell Architecture

made up of long, initially straight, yet flexible timber laths that then take on curvature when lifted into place to span the entire surface area of a shell. Subsequent to this initial bending process, strain is evenly distributed over the whole structure when the bent laths are combined in a grid (Figure 3.3 and Figure 3.4).6

Figure 3.2 The Muerinsel (Mur Island) in Graz, Austria. Designed by Vito Acconci, 2003.

History and Theory of Gridshell Architecture

8. English, Elizabeth C. (2000). Arkhitektura I Mnimosti: The Origins of Soviet Avant-Garde Rationalist Architecture in the Russian Mystical-Philosophical and Mathematical Intellectual Tradition (PhD dissertation). University of Pennsylvania. pp. 19 & 23. 9. Beckh, Matthias (2015). Hyperbolic Structures: Shukhov’s Lattice Towers – Forerunners of Modern Lightweight Construction. New York: Wiley. p. 15. 10. Ibid. p. 17. 11. Ibid. p. 18. 12. Ibid. p. 19. 13. Beckh, Matthias & Barthel, Rainer (2009). The First Doubly Curved Gridshell Structure: Shukhov’s Building for the Plate Rolling Workshop. In Karl-Eugen Kurrer, Werner Lorenz & Volker Wetzk (eds.), Proceedings of the Third International Congress on Construction History. Berlin, Germany: NEUNPLUS1. p. 1.

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14. Beckh, Matthias (2015). Hyperbolic Structures: Shukhov’s Lattice Towers – Forerunners of Modern Lightweight Construction. New York: Wiley. p. 17.

Figure 3.3 Downland Gridshell, Chichester, England, Edward Cullinan Architects, engineered by BuroHappold.

Upper Trading Rows in Moscow used arched, ultra-light barrel vaults whose lateral deflections were held to a minimum by multiple diagonal cross-ties (Figure 3.5).8 Later that year, Shukhov built the first lattice gridshell in the world made from steel elements of identical size for the roof of a pump station in Grozny (Figure 3.6). In plan, the roof appears to be composed from rhomboid meshes, which were created from two overlapping layers of steel members curved into circular arc segments that traversed two edge beams. As in the vaults of the earlier Upper Trading Rows project, Shukhov utilised a radial stiffening system of circular rods to stabilise the singly curved surface from asymmetric loads.9 Subsequent to these initial projects, Shukhov’s firm, Bari, would go on to build a great number of warehouses and factory buildings throughout Russia using Shukhov’s basic design process as applied to a variety of span requirements, culminating in the contract for several breakthrough structures at the 1896 All-Russia Industrial and Art Exhibition in Nizhny, Novgorod. There, Bari constructed four large gridshells to serve as exhibition halls, achieving spans of up to 32 m and coverage of more than 16,000 m2 of combined open exhibition space; these gridshells became popularly known as “roofs without trusses”.10 While the record-breaking span of these four gridshells was significant, Shukhov’s most innovative structures at the exhibition were his designs incorporating surface geometries of double curvature. In implementing his 1895 patent for a suspended mesh roof, Shukhov modified his compression-loaded gridshell system into a tensile lattice of two layers of steel members. Each set of mem-

History and Theory of Gridshell Architecture

Figure 3.4 Frei Otto’s Multihalle, constructed for the German Federal Garden Exhibition in Mannheim, Germany, 1975.

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Figure 3.5 Iron and glass roof of Vladimir Shukov’s Upper Trading Rows, Moscow, Russia, 1890.

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bers was bent in opposite directions to each other, while suspended from a tensile ring up top and anchored to a compression ring below. These four suspended roof pavilions were prototypical anticlastic steel tensile structures. The largest of these, the Shukov Rotunda, at a diameter of 68 m, utilised a novel steel membrane roof.11 Of further precedent at the exhibition was Shukhov’s water tower (Figure 3.7). The doubly curved surface of the tower was generated by a mesh of straight members overlapping in contrary directions, which were also rotated around a fixed vertical line of revolution and were supported by horizontal rings. While the built tower was constructed from steel, it is notable that Shukhov’s 1896 patent application for the structure initially mentions straight wooden beams as a material option. Additionally, the patent application describes an advantage of the structure as being able to resist extreme forces while using very little material. As a result, Shukhov’s light and efficiently constructed tower design was used extensively throughout Russia in the first half of the 20th century.12 By the following year, 1897, Shukhov’s development of doubly curved surfaces would attain a new level of sophistication in his building for a plate-rolling production hall in the town of Vyska (Figure 3.8).13 At Vyska, Shukhov took his previous design of the singly curved, barrel-vaulted gridshell at Grozny, and manipulated it along a parabolic curve.14

History and Theory of Gridshell Architecture

Figure 3.6 Orthographic drawings of Vladimir Shukov’s unprecedented gridshell mesh roof for a pump station, Grozny, Russia, 1890.

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15. Beckh, Matthias & Barthel, Rainer (2009, May). The First Doubly Curved Gridshell Structure – Shukhov’s Building for the Plate Rolling Workshop. In Karl-Eugen Kurrer, Werner Lorenz & Volker Wetzk (eds.), Proceedings of the Third International Congress on Construction History. Berlin: NEUNPLUS1. p. 8. 16. Beckh, Matthias (2015). Hyperbolic Structures: Shukhov’s Lattice Towers – Forerunners of Modern Lightweight Construction. New York: Wiley. p. 17. The publication in question was Rainer Graefe and Jos Tomlow's Vladimir G. Suchov 1853–1939. Die Kunst der Sparsamen Konstruktion published in 1990 by Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt in Stuttgart.

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17. Otto, Frei (ed.). (1973). Tensile Structures. Volume 2: Basic Concepts and Survey of Tensile Structures. Cambridge: MIT Press. p. 17. 18. Mallgrave, Harry Francis & Goodman, David (2011). An Introduction to Architectural Theory: 1968 to the Present. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. p. 71.

While uncertainty remains as to what Shukhov’s design intentions were for employing this double curvature, his biographer, G. M. Kovelman, claims that the design of the gridshell at Vyska resulted in a weight savings of 40 percent compared to other contemporary roof systems and that this allowed for a rapid method of construction without requiring scaffolding.15 Outside of Russia, Shukhov and his work remained largely unknown until 1989, when a German publication raised his profile within western European architectural circles.16 Yet despite Shukhov’s relative obscurity, Frei Otto was aware of Shukhov as early as 1973, writing that his hyperboloids are “generally regarded as the first engineering surface structures in which roof membrane and structure form one unit”.17 Indeed, a lineage may be traced back from Otto to Shukhov via the Polish architect Maciej Nowicki and his suspended cable roof for the Dorton Arena in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1953; the subject of Otto’s 1953 dissertation on computational modelling.18 For reasons warranting speculation, Nowicki’s grid roof was the first to be built in the almost 60-year period since the time of Shukhov’s low-weight structures19; structures that posited a new formal vocabulary and were decades ahead of their time, but which may, in the future, prove to be timeless. Pre-History of Timber Gridshell Development In light of the climate crisis threatening the welfare of the human species and our shared ecosystems, renewable construction materials, such as sustainably harvested timber, are critically important building blocks for present and future populations and environments. In addition to the currently known impacts of steel and concrete construction that are deleterious to our ecosystems, steel and concrete gridshells can also be economically prohibitive when compared to singularly timber gridshells, due to the specificity required to fabricate individual panels, nodes and connecting members with the parameters of a precise final geometry.20 For example, in the roof of the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court at the British Museum (Figure 3.9), by Foster + Partners with BuroHappold, each node of this inno-

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Figure 3.7 Shukov’s Water Tower installation,1896 Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition in Nizhny, Novgorod, Russia, later moved to Poblino, Russia in 1897.

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History and Theory of Gridshell Architecture

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Figure 3.8 Vladimir Shukov’s metal plate-rolling production hall, Vyska, Russia, during construction, 1897.

Figure 3.9 (Left) Queen Elizabeth II Great Court Roof, British Museum, London, UK. Designed by Foster + Partners with Buro Happold Engineers, 2000.

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19. Beckh, Matthias (2015). Hyperbolic Structures: Shukhov’s Lattice Towers – Forerunners of Modern Lightweight Construction. New York: Wiley. p. 18. 20. Harris, Richard, Kelly, Oliver & Dickson, Michael (2003, February). Downland Gridshell – an Innovation in Timber Design. Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers – Civil Engineering 156(1), p. 26. 21. Ibid. p. 27. 22. Dickson, Michael G. & Parker, Dave (2015). Sustainable Timber Design: Construction for 21st Century Architecture. London: Routledge. pp. 107. 23. ibid. pp. 106. 24. Toussaint, Matthijs. (2007). A Design Tool for Timber Gridshells: The Development of a Grid Generation Tool (Master thesis). Delft University of Technology. p. 13.

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vative steel gridshell was unique and had to be prefabricated to a prescribed geometry, considerably impacting the cost and rate of construction. Timber gridshells, in addition to their carbon sequestration benefits, can allow for a more efficient construction sequence, since the erection of a curved gridshell from an initially flat grid is made possible due to the low, out-of-plane bending stiffness and low torsional stiffness of an individual timber lath.21,22 It is possible that these inherent elastic properties of wood contributed to their use over 3,000 years ago by the nomadic cultures of Central Asia when designing their portable dwellings, known as yurts or gers (Figure 3.10), which featured expanding walls made from timber latticework, arched radial roof ribs, central roof ‘crowns’ that acted as a compression ring and a stabilising peripheral tension band to oppose the force of the roof ribs.23 More than 2,500 years after the first yurt designs, Philibert de l’Orme (1514-1570) invented a structural method to arch over a significantly larger span, when the world’s first composite timber member was proposed for a domed roof.24 In 1561, de l’Orme’s invention used considerably less material than conventional methods by combining two or three on-edge planks of wood. These planks were cut to an arched shape on their longitudinal sides and were joined together with wooden pegs at staggered joints, allowing for the construction of the 41 m spanning domed roof of the Halle au Blés in Paris by 1783. The physical union of two pieces of timber, to form a composite unit, represented the first innovation to optimise the load-bearing behaviour of

History and Theory of Gridshell Architecture

Figure 3.10 Traditional Kyrgyz yurt, Syr Darya Oblast, Russia, 1860, photograph.

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Figure 3.11 Fritz Zollinger’s patented Zollbau Method lamella roof structure, 1921.

timber (at a four-fold increase in a shear-resistant connection, compared to an individual cross-section), while simultaneously minimising the consumption of material.25 Between 1904–1908, de l’Orme’s composite invention was modified for incorporation into a three-dimensional framework known as a lamella structural system (Figure 3.11) by Fritz Zollinger (1880–1945), an architect and building surveyor for the city of Merseburg, Germany26; representing the first significant evolution of space grid structures in the 20th century, following late-19th-century inventions from August Föppl, Gustave Eiffel and Alexander Graham Bell.27 Lamella structures are formed from short timber or steel elements of equal length (referred to as lamellas) that are laid out in an overlapping zig-zag pattern to create a stiff yet continuous rhomboid grid. This grid may either be extended to span a flat roof, or be curved to follow an arched roof. At the interconnections of these elements, either angled steel flitch plates or embedded end bolts are used to transmit shear, compression, limited tension and bending.28 Following the First World War, Zollinger applied his invention, which he patented in 1921 as the Zollbau Method, in response to the German housing crisis, in order to maximally economise the amount of timber used in a roof while still achieving a small-scale “gothic” arch form. Subsequent to his initial housing projects, Zollinger would develop the lamella system for larger spans, which would be used in schools, churches, halls, agricul-

History and Theory of Gridshell Architecture

tural buildings and aircraft hangars.29,30 These shells and their rapid proliferation across Germany influenced a young glider pilot and architecture student who was unwillingly conscripted into the air force – Frei Otto.31 Frei Otto & the Contemporary Timber Gridshell

25. Müller, Christian (2009). Holzleimbau: Laminated Timber Construction. Basel: Birkhauser. pp. 9–10. 26. Allen, J. S. (1999). A Short History of ‘Lamella’ Roof Construction. Transactions of the Newcomen Society, 71(1). p. 1. 27. Bradshaw, Richard, Campbell, David, Gargari, Mousa & Tripeny, Patrick (2002). Special Structures: Past, Present, and Future. Journal of Structural Engineering, 128(6). p. 705. 28. Dickson, Michael G. & Parker, Dave (2015). Sustainable Timber Design: Construction for 21st Century Architecture. London: Routledge. p. 81.

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29. Allen, J. S. (1999). A Short History of ‘Lamella’ Roof Construction. Transactions of the Newcomen Society, 71(1). pp. 2–4. 30. Harris, Richard, Dickson, Michael, Kelly, Oliver (2004). The Use of Timber Gridshells for Long Span Structures. In Proceedings of the 8th World Conference on Timber Engineering. Paper presented at WCTE 2004, Lahti, Finland. p. 100. 31. Otto, Frei (2010). A Conversation with Frei Otto. In Juan Maria Songel (ed.) A Conversation with Frei Otto. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. p. 36. 32. Meissner, Irene (2015). Frei Otto – Lightweight, Adaptable Architecture. In Irene Meissner & Eberhard Möller (eds.) Frei Otto: A Life of Research, Construction and Inspiration. Munich: Detail. p. 13.

33. Nerdinger, Winfreid (2005). Frei Otto – Working for a Better Earth for Mankind. In Winfreid Nerdinger (ed.) Frei Otto Complete Works – Lightweight Construction Natural Design. Basel: Birkhäuser. p. 9. 34. Ibid. p. 11. 35. Ibid. p. 12. 36. Otto, Frei (2010). A Conversation with Frei Otto. In Juan Maria Songel (ed.) A Conversation with Frei Otto. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. p. 36.

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Although Frei Otto (1925–2015) had applied to study architecture at the Technical University (TU) of Berlin in 1943, he was instead conscripted into the Luftwaffe as a pilot. During his first year of training, the atrocities of war shaped Otto’s worldview, which was especially impacted by aerial views of burning cities. In 1945, while serving as a foot soldier, he was captured by the French and spent two years in captivity as a prisoner of war in Chartres, where he was put to work as the camp architect. There, the paucity of construction materials and resources taught Otto to design sparingly during his first experiments in simple lightweight structures.32 Perhaps more importantly than his technical discoveries, Otto’s time in the POW camp allowed him to formulate his philosophical approach to architecture in a radical response to the Nazi “architecture of killing.”33 Otto’s response would be to build with a “lightness against [the] brutality”34 of the heavy, solid buildings that he perceived as representative of a Nazi sentimentality about the homeland. Instead of the massive Nazi monuments that symbolised the eternal permanence and power of the failed regime, Otto sought to build a new architecture that would promote peaceful human universality, co-existence and adaptability.35 Yet Otto’s experience piloting planes, which started as a hobby prior to the war, would prove to be of positive influence in his architectural designs, as Otto would later claim that he “arrived at grid shells through building fuselages of gliders and not by constructing buildings” (Figure 3.12).36 After having finally enrolled at the TU Berlin in 1948, Otto took a year abroad in the United States from 1950 to 1951, where Eero Saarinen and structural engineer Fred Severud would direct him to Maciej Nowicki’s suspended grid roof for the Dorton Arena in Raleigh, North Carolina. The arena’s grid roof effectively carried a saddle-shaped tent membrane between two

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Figure 3.12 Zögling glider under construction in Greece, 1937.

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slanted arches and its computational modelling became the subject of Otto’s dissertation and first book, published in 1953: Das hängende Dach: Gestalt und Struktur (The Suspended Roof: Form and Structure). The book’s investigation into inverted forms outlined Otto’s initial thoughts on membranes, tents and other suspended roof systems, including speculative designs for a school in East Africa and a city in Antarctica.37 In its details, the book illustrated Otto’s pursuit to understand how static force diagrams could be represented, inspiring him to realise that the “same forms are independently present in graphic statics whether they are structures that work by compression, tension, or bending – the difference [being] the preceding sign”.38 With this thought established, Otto would no longer settle for designing a lattice form prior to calculating its loads. Instead, through an analysis of mechanical loads induced by gravity, the form of the design would emerge as a “natural lattice.”39 Thus, the contemporary timber gridshell would be birthed from Otto’s interdisciplinary combination of timber fuselages and inverted force diagrams. The gridshell would serve to represent Otto’s resistance to an idea of design as Gestaltung, or arbitrary form-making; instead favouring a process of Gestaltfinden, or form-finding.40 Although Walter Gropius considered Otto to be a successor to the design methodology of the Bauhaus (and its architecture based on the natural sciences rather than on form), Otto had admitted knowing little of the Bauhaus methodology until much later in his life, claiming instead to have “followed [his] own

37. Mallgrave, Harry Francis & Goodman, David (2011). An Introduction to Architectural Theory: 1968 to the Present. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. p. 71. 38. Otto, Frei (2010). A Conversation with Frei Otto. In Juan Maria Songel (ed.) A Conversation with Frei Otto. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. p. 30. 39. Ibid. p. 37. 40. Frampton, Kenneth (2007). Modern Architecture: A Critical History (4th ed.). London: Thames & Hudson. p. 360.

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41. Otto, Frei (2010). A Conversation with Frei Otto. In Juan Maria Songel (ed.) A Conversation with Frei Otto. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. pp. 28–29. 42. Ibid p. 29. 43. Ibid. p. 61. 44. Ibid. p. 70. 45. Otto, Frei (2015). Architecture Nature. In Irene Meissner and Eberhard Möller (eds.) Frei Otto: A Life of Research, Construction and Inspiration. Munich: Detail. p. 9.

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46. Ibid. p. 11. 47. Otto, Frei (1975). Adaptable Architecture. EL 14. p. 166. 48. Otto, Frei (2015). Architecture Nature. In Irene Meissner and Eberhard Möller (eds.) Frei Otto: A Life of Research, Construction and Inspiration. Munich: Detail. p. 9. 49. Otto, Frei & Rasch, Bodo (1995). Finding Form: Towards an Architecture of the Minimal (Michael Robinson, Trans.). Fellbach: Editions Axel Menges. p. 17. 50. Otto, Frei (2010). The Fundamentals of Future Architecture. In Juan Maria Songel (ed.) A Conversation with Frei Otto. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. p. 8.

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path”.41 Additionally, Otto claims that his static force models and his inversion of traction structures into compression structures were based simply on logic and collaboration with a friend in his POW camp; much prior to learning from Antoni Gaudí’s models of the Sagrada Família.42 Instead of professional precedent or lineage, Otto seems, therefore, to have used biology as a principal source of inspiration, believing that building design and construction was an applied natural science,43 sharing similar principles of form generation, “in harmony with nature,”44 so as to “make a lot out of little.”45 Indeed, in 1961, Otto founded a research group at the TU Berlin called Biology and Building (in collaboration with Johann-Gerhard Helmcke, professor of biology and anthropology), in which biologists, palaeontologists and architects worked together. Importantly, in light of Otto’s aversion to form-making, the objective of this collaboration was not to create biomorphic forms, but instead to better understand the inner profundities of natural formations.46 As such, the motivation to integrate design with ecological systems, at both architectural and urban scales, was a constant plank of Otto’s theoretical position. Indeed, Otto had launched a journal in 1959, EL (Entwicklungsstätte für den Leichtbau) – Mitteilungen (Information from the Development Centre for Lightweight Construction), that advanced his ecological concerns and advocated for an “Adaptable Architecture” in the face of rapid urban development and an “era of concrete bunker architecture,” which he was hostile towards.47 Specifically, Otto was a proponent of consuming “less material, less concrete and less energy,”48 and personally yearned to live under a roof covered with greenery, akin to a garden that was simultaneously interior and exterior and “at peace with the landscape.”49 Disquieting to Otto was his perception that an “ecological consciousness to protect…life as a whole,” beyond solely the human species, was a novelty to the discipline of architecture; proposing instead that this consciousness should underpin the “new great mission" for the architect.50 These ideas found their way into form with Otto’s first gridshell, made from slender timber laths, for the German Exhibition Building in Essen in 1962 (Figure 3.13). Like Zollinger’s lamella roofs and Shukhov’s steel

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Figure 3.13 Frei Otto’s 1962 lattice dome for the German Exhibition Building shown under construction in Essen, Germany. Reproduced in: Happold, E. and Liddell, W.I. (1975). Timber lattice roof for the Mannheim Bundesgartenschau., in The Structural Engineer, 53(3), p. 101.

gridshells, Otto’s five-metre-tall gridshell was built from a lattice of rhomboid shapes, erected from an initially flat grid of overlapping timber laths. By 1967, Otto had built two more timber gridshells, both within his cable-net roof for the Expo Pavillion in Montreal. One gridshell served as a lecture hall for a capacity of 250 people, and the second shell served as an entrance hall.51 Almost a decade later, Frei Otto would achieve worldwide recognition for his Multihalle at the 1975 German Federal Garden Exhibition in Mannheim, Germany, which was the largest self-supporting timber gridshell in the world (and remains so at the time of this publication). Spanning 80 m and covering an area of 9,500 m2, the Multihalle was also the first doubly layered timber gridshell to be built in the world. This feat represented the most significant development in gridshell design theory since Shukhov’s time, as a result of Otto’s experimental design process in principal collaboration with Carlfried Mutschler + Partners; Ted Happold’s group at Ove Arup & Partners; and Büro Linkwitz.52, 53 Broadly speaking, Otto discovered the form of the Multihalle through a hanging catenary model of delicate chains, which were augmented with calculations from Ted Happold’s group at Ove Arup and later replicated with a computer model by Büro Linkwitz to ensure that the final fabricated construction would maintain a stable funicular shape.54, 55 Yet despite the Multihalle’s impressive significance and unintended longevity (since it was originally designed to be a temporary structure), relatively few timber gridshells have been built since 1975.

52. Paoli, Céline (2007). Past and Future of Gridshells (Master thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. p. 59. Also see ibid. 53. Williams, Chris (2014). The Multihalle and the British Museum: A Comparison of Two Gridshells. In Sigrid Adriaenssens, Philippe Block, Diederik Veenendaal & Chris Williams (eds.) Shell Structure for Architecture: Form Finding and Optimization. London: Routledge. p. 240. Also see ibid. 54. Paoli, Céline (2007). Past and Future of Gridshells (Master thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. p. 83. Also see ibid.

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55. Dickson, Michael G. & Parker, Dave (2015). Sustainable Timber Design: Construction for 21st Century Architecture. London: Routledge. p. 108. Also see ibid. 56. Adriaenssens, Sigrid; Block, Philippe; Veenendaal, Diederik & Williams, Chris (2014). Introduction. In Sigrid Adriaenssens, Philippe Block, Diederik Veenendaal & Chris Williams (eds.), Shell Structure for Architecture: Form Finding and Optimization. London: Routledge. p. 2. 57. Adriaenssens, Sigrid, Barnes, Mike, Harris, Richard & Chris Williams (2014). Dynamic Relaxation: Design of a Strained Timber. In Sigrid Adriaenssens, Philippe Block, Diederik Veenendaal & Chris Williams (eds.) Shell Structure for Architecture: Form Finding and Optimization. London: Routledge. p. 92.

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Three different design approaches, or geometries, may be characterised for how the form of a shell structure is acquired, as articulated by Sigrid Adriaenssens and co-editors in their comprehensive text, Shell Structures for Architecture56: Freeform Shells are alternatively known as free-curved shells or sculptural shells, which are generated without considering the structural efficiency of the form. When shaped digitally with computer-aided modelling tools, such shells are often created through the use of higher-degree polynomials (i.e., patches of Non-Uniform Rational Basis Splines or NURBS). Often, the surface form of a freeform gridshell is a conceptual shape sculpted by the designer based on aesthetic preferences or an advocacy of shape as an end in itself. Alternatively, the shape may be based on a spatial articulation of the interior program, or for phenomenological effects in and around the shell. Only after the form is generated is the grid of elements geometrically arranged across the surface of the shell, followed by a definition of the size of the elements. Examples of freeform shells include the 2003 Murinsel Gridshell in Graz by Vito Acconci, or the roof of the Fiera di Milano in 2005 by Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas (Figure 3.14).57 Mathematical Shells are alternatively known as geometrical or analytical shells, which are directly generated through analytical functions. Analytically defined geometries have long been chosen for their convenience in describing the shape of a shell for construction purposes. These functions are often lower-degree polynomials (i.e., hyperboloids, elipsoids and hyperbolic or elliptic paraboloids), or trigonometric or hyperbolic functions (i.e., the catenary). Examples of mathematical shells include any of Shukhov’s gridshells or more recently, the 1996 Berlin Hippo House Gridshell by J. Gribl (Figure 3.15). Form-Found Shells, as advocated for by Frei Otto, are shells derived from the process of form-finding, in which parameters are either explicitly or directly controlled to find an “optimal” geometry of a structure in static equilibrium with its dead load, most often

51. Vrachliotis, Georg (2015). More Thought, Research, Development, Innovation and Boldness Is Required… In Irene Meissner & Eberhard Möller (eds.) Frei Otto: A Life of Research, Construction and Inspiration. Munich: Detail. p. 81. Chilton, John & Tang, Gabriel. (2017). Timber Gridshells: Architecture, Structure and Craft. New York: Routledge.

History and Theory of Gridshell Architecture

Theory of Gridshell Design and Construction: Three Design Approaches

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Figure 3.14 The New Milan Trade Fair, Milan, Italy. Designed by Massimiliano and Doriana Fuskas, 2005.

being self-weight. Form-found shells may include those derived from hanging shapes or physical models, as associated with the funicular structures of Antoni Gaudí, Frei Otto and Heinz Isler. Alternatively, digital models may be utilised to find a form, either through a numerical simulation of the physical model, or through parametrically computing imaginary properties that could not have been simulated physically.

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General Structure and Forces in a Mathematical Gridshell The stability of a shell structure is an innate function of its specific geometric shape. As a tri-dimensional surface, the simplest geometry of a shell design is a dome in which all elements of the dome act in continuous compression to carry external loads through its self-supporting structure. From a structural aspect, there is little distinction to be made between where the roof and the walls of a dome become distinct concepts. If a theoretical shell surface is made of a continuous, isotropic material like metal, the in-plane

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58. Ibid. p. 91. 59. Happold, Edmund & Liddell, W. Ian (1975). Timber Lattice Roof for the Mannheim Bundesgartenschau. The Structural Engineer, 53(3). p. 103.

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membrane stresses acting on a portion of this surface are the primary applications of structural load or action. Correspondingly, out-of-plane bending and twisting moments (and associated shear forces) will act at normal vectors perpendicular to the surface. In other words, the orientation of this theoretical portion of a shell surface has no influence on any force-displacement movements of the shell, since these force-vectors are all perpendicular to the orientation of the surface. In a similar portion of a theoretical timber gridshell, however, the in-plane membrane stresses are not isotropic. Instead, they are physically anisotropic since the structural material of the shell is concentrated in the grid of timber laths so as to only be resisted in the direction of the timber laths. While moderate out-of-plane moments may still be resisted, diagonal forces between parallel laths cannot be transmitted through the initial latticework. As a result, once the grid has been erected into its final form, an additional layer of diagonal strengthening at the joints of the initial lattice provides the shell with in-plane shear stiffness.58 Despite the bolstering of the shell’s in-plane shear stiffness in prevention of shear distortion, a significant increase in the out-of-plane bending stiffness is required of a timber gridshell to resist large live loads and a collapse of the structure, especially for doubly curved forms. This risk of collapse requires particular attention when designing a timber gridshell because of two limitations: the inherent anisotropic directionality of an individual timber lath and the cross-sectional dimensions of a lath because of the need to bend it into shape. In response to these constraints, Frei Otto and his collaborators on the Mannheim Multihalle in the 1970s sought to increase the moment of inertia around lathed areas of the shell by incorporating a second grid layer of parallel laths to the overall shell structure. Even with a double layer of grids, however, extra effort needs to be made to prevent the laths from slipping relative to one another. Otto’s team then devised a solution where slotted holes were introduced into one of the layers of laths.59 Additionally, more recent gridshell designs have incorporated blocking pieces between the layers to ensure composite action over the entire depth of the shell, locking its spatial curvature into place under

History and Theory of Gridshell Architecture

all live loading conditions. Regardless of these innovations to timber gridshell design, however, diagonal flexibility will concomitantly remain throughout the latticework. As well, many contemporary timber gridshells lack rigidity at their outer boundary supports, resulting in a tendency for the shells to deflect by a relatively large amount before failure, as compared to continuous shell structures. That being said, while the stiffness of a timber gridshell is less than ideal for all conditions, this inherent flexibility allows for larger tolerances during the design and construction process.60 Form-Finding Process

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Figure 3.15 Hippo House, Berlin Zoo, Berlin, Germany, 1996.

Reflecting on his form-finding experiences, Frei Otto extolled the use of physical models in his design process, claiming that “those who only trust calculations done on the computer are the foolish ones in [the architectural] profession.”61 Indeed, Adriaenssens and his co-authors believe that “the structural action of gridshells is so complex that even today with powerful and affordable computers, there is still a place for physical model testing [that] can give more accurate predictions of deflections and buckling load than hand calculations.”62 Despite their simplicity, Otto credits his static analysis of physical models for providing a greater approximation of reality in the design of the Mannheim Multihalle, so as to apprehend structural failure modes due to deformation.63 Initially, a wiremesh model of approximately 1:300 scale was made to establish the basic form of the gridshell (Figure 3.16), followed by a more detailed 1:98.9 scale hanging-chain model to determine the fixed boundary supports that would provide the most efficient geometry for the roof.64 This model was then measured using photogrammetry, a technique used to obtain measurements from photographs for the purpose of acquiring three-dimensional coordinates of the connection nodes and boundary supports of the shell surface. Next, a linear analysis of these geometric constraints, in concert with constant force densities and constant external loads, was used to find an initial computational form that resulted in a coarse grid with unequal member lengths. These subsequent coordinates

History and Theory of Gridshell Architecture

60. Adriaenssens, Sigrid, Barnes, Mike, Harris, Richard & Chris Williams (2014). Dynamic Relaxation: Design of a Strained Timber. In Sigrid Adriaenssens, Philippe Block, Diederik Veenendaal & Chris Williams (eds.) Shell Structure for Architecture: Form Finding and Optimization. London: Routledge. p. 91. 61. Otto, Frei (2010). The Fundamentals of Future Architecture. In Juan Maria Songel (ed.) A Conversation with Frei Otto. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. p. 40. 62. Adriaenssens, Sigrid, Barnes, Mike, Harris, Richard & Chris Williams (2014). Dynamic Relaxation: Design of a Strained Timber Gridshell. In Sigrid Adriaenssens, Philippe Block, Diederik Veenendaal & Chris Williams (eds.) Shell Structure for Architecture: Form Finding and Optimization. London: Routledge. p. 93. 63. Otto, Frei (2010). The Fundamentals of Future Architecture. In Juan Maria Songel (ed.) A Conversation with Frei Otto. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. p. 43. 64. Addis, Bill (2014). Physical Modelling and Form Finding. In Sigrid Adriaenssens, Philippe Block, Diederik Veenendaal & Chris Williams (eds.) Shell Structure for Architecture: Form Finding and Optimization. London: Routledge. p. 40. 65. Veenendaal, Diederik & Linkwitz, Klaus (2014). Nonlinear Force Density Method: Constraints on Force and Geometry. In Sigrid Adriaenssens, Philippe Block, Diederik Veenendaal & Chris Williams (eds.) Shell Structure for Architecture: Form Finding and Optimization. London: Routledge. p. 152.

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66. Linkwitz, Klaus (2014). Force Density Method: Design of a Timber Shell. In Sigrid Adriaenssens, Philippe Block, Diederik Veenendaal & Chris Williams (eds.) Shell Structure for Architecture: Form Finding and Optimization. London: Routledge. p. 68. 67. Ibid. p. 60. 68. Veenendaal, Diederik & Linkwitz, Klaus (2014). Nonlinear Force Density Method: Constraints on Force and Geometry. In Sigrid Adriaenssens, Philippe Block, Diederik Veenendaal & Chris Williams (eds.) Shell Structure for Architecture: Form Finding and Optimization. London: Routledge. p. 144.

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then served as the approximate values for a non-linear computer algorithm to find a refined form with a more articulated geometry. This non-linear method of computational form-finding operated by analysing the forces throughout the shell and resolving them to a state of equilibrium while satisfying additional geometric constraints, such as the requirement for the interior grid lattice to be made from equidistant elements.65 The initial linear analysis used to find the computational form of the Mannheim Multihalle is known as the Force Density Method (FDM), which relies on the assumption that the ratio of tension force to length of each grid element in the shell can be constant.66 The FDM allows for the rapid generation of feasible shapes in the early stages of a new project through a simplification of what is, geometrically, a non-linear force problem into simpler systems of linear equations at each node in space; these are then solved for equilibrium. For example, a gridshell would be computationally modelled as a network of nodes in equilibrium, with each node affected by the adjacent cable forces (as defined by fixed boundary conditions and force densities) and a direct load. If the resultant geometric co-ordinates of a single node are unsatisfactory for the designers, they could vary the loads, force densities or boundary conditions to arrive at a new form.67 However, it is unlikely that this initial protocol of linear analysis would satisfy all requisite physical and geometric constraints required of the structure (i.e., specific lengths of elements, specific positions of nodes). Instead of manually shaping each node, however, a non-linear application of the FDM can be utilised as a more efficient way of refining the form of the gridshell. This non-linear FDM works by finding an approximate set of co-ordinates that guarantees a static equilibrium, but which interpolates and optimises these co-ordinates between the initial form (found through a linear FDM) and a set of geometric constraints, such as those mentioned above.68 Alternatively, the Dynamic Relaxation Method (DRM) may be used for form-finding, as it was for the 2002 Downland Gridshell in Chichester, England, by Edward Cullinan Architects with BuroHappold Engineers. The DRM predicts the motion of the gridshell structure through small increments of time

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under applied loading at each interconnected node of the grid, up until the structure comes to rest in static equilibrium.69 Essentially, the DRM is a computational procedure that solves for a set of non-linear equations. However, an advantage of using a Force Density Method for form-finding, rather than the Dynamic Relaxation Method, is that force densities are not contingent upon any information about the material that will be used to fabricate the gridshell. As such, any material choice is possible for a gridshell designed using a FDM. When a material is settled upon, its corresponding axial stiffness is plugged into the calculations without modifying the resultant shape created through the force densities.70 In contrast, the Dynamic Relaxation Method is dependent upon using the correct modulus of elasticity of the material of choice.71 Material Selection & Construction Process

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69. Adriaenssens, Sigrid, Barnes, Mike, Harris, Richard & Chris Williams (2014). Dynamic Relaxation: Design of a Strained Timber Gridshell. In Sigrid Adriaenssens, Philippe Block, Diederik Veenendaal & Chris Williams (eds.) Shell Structure for Architecture: Form Finding and Optimization. London: Routledge. p. 93

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70. Linkwitz, Klaus (2014). Force Density Method: Design of a Timber Shell. In Sigrid Adriaenssens, Philippe Block, Diederik Veenendaal & Chris Williams (eds.) Shell Structure for Architecture: Form Finding and Optimization. London: Routledge. p. 60. 71. Adriaenssens, Sigrid, Barnes, Mike, Harris, Richard & Chris Williams (2014). Dynamic Relaxation: Design of a Strained Timber Gridshell. In Sigrid Adriaenssens, Philippe Block, Diederik Veenendaal & Chris Williams (eds.) Shell Structure for Architecture: Form Finding and Optimization. London: Routledge. p. 93. 72. Ibid. pp. 98–100.

Gridshells have been made from numerous materials including aluminum, concrete, steel, bamboo, wood and composite materials. Each of these materials has its advantages and disadvantages when analysed against fundamental metrics including strength, ductility, weight, durability, economic costs, ecological costs or complexity of construction. Yet an important design decision to be made, which will affect both the material choice and the construction process, is whether the gridshell will be unstrained or strained. In order to build an unstrained shell, the material chosen should allow for curved prefabrication and shape retention. Specifically, the curvature of the gridshell elements necessitates a material that can twist along its length as it crosses the surface of the shell, such that circular members are generally preferred due to their ease of fabrication. While the individual elements will be relatively short, allowing for off-site fabrication from a wide range of materials including steel, aluminum and laminated wood (with a corresponding reduction in time on the construction site), the nodes are likely to be complex, customised and expensive, due to their requirement of joining the individual spline elements. A strained gridshell, in comparison, offers advantages over an unstrained shell with

Figure 3.16 Wire-mesh model of Frei Otto’s Mannheim Multihalle, 1974. Reproduced from Happold, E. and Liddell, W. I. (1975). Timber Lattice Roof for the Mannheim Bundesgartenschau, in The Structural Engineer, 53(3). p. 103.

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regards to its fabrication process. Since the strained gridshell is built from a series of identical splines and components, fabrication is simplified. However, the amount of time at the construction site may be lengthy, in comparison to that of an unstrained shell, since the splines are assembled (via scarf or finger joints) and moulded into shape at the site of construction, which may hinder work on other components of the building. The moulding process of the splines in a strained gridshell may employ a “top-down” technique, as was used with the 2002 Downland Gridshell, where scaffolding was first built to the elevation of the top of the eventual shell roofs, onto which the flat mat of splines was laid out and gradually lowered into shape. An advantage of this technique is that the shell splines are adjusted into shape under gravity and towards a clear target of the perimeter supports of the structure at grade. Comparatively, a “bottom-up” technique may also be employed, as it was with the Mannheim Multihalle, which began with the flat mat of splines laid out at around 1 m from floor level. While the bottom-up technique had the advantage of avoiding scaffolding in Mannheim, it also required the precarious use of towers and forklift trucks. Additionally, it is worth noting that candidate materials for use in strained gridshell construction are more limited than those available for unstrained gridshells.72 However, as Frei Otto learned early in his journey as an architect, propitious outcomes are often revealed under considerably restrictive conditions. When deciding upon a material for strained gridshell construction, consider that locally and sustainably sourced timber is likely capable of being bent into appropriate shape due to its low stiffness in torsion. Additionally, the bending stresses induced by the wooden laths will dissipate over time, due to visco-elastic relaxation and a subsequent reduction in stiffness under the sustained loads of the initial curvature. Since these stresses will dissipate over time, the capacity for a timber gridshell to withstand diverse applied loads can also be maintained over time. Perhaps most importantly for our shared ecology, sustainably harvested timber is a renewable material which transmits an aspiration for a better global future.

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Conclusion The intrinsic beauty of the gridshell emanates from its proposition for transformative praxis across a multitude of scales. When constructed with timber, an implicit association may be made between primordial origins and ethical values through phenomenological affect. Certainly, when designed and constructed with a minimum of renewable materials and work, as advocated by both Shukhov and Otto, a gridshell embodies values of sustainability. For Otto, especially, the tectonic efficiency and lightness afforded by a gridshell design aspired towards an alternative socio-cultural representation of civic form and residential land settlement. Perhaps channelling earlier nomadic cultures that designed portable precursors (i.e., yurts and gers) over 3,000 years ago, the gridshell represents a topographic relationship with the land as something that people belong to and hold in common with each other, rather than something to be owned. This is the ethic of peaceful human co-existence, adaptability and harmony with ecological systems that Frei Otto championed. Yet the ecological consciousness that Otto yearned for is not something that is easily imbued through discourse, as Otto would lament late in his life. Thus, the morphological configuration of a gridshell is perhaps what operates as its primary medium of communication towards transforming a consciousness of domination that is antithetical to our shared ecology. For Otto, what was inherent in an optimised shell configuration represented not a value-free propagation of shape as an end in itself, but instead, a topological ethos: that the way in which its constituent parts are arranged is wholly interrelated and stable when in equilibrium. Through these non-linear relationships, the gridshell provides a lens for an imaginary, or spiritual, space through which a new cosmological consciousness may emerge.

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The Chéticamp Farmers’ Market

The Chéticamp Farmers’ Market Ted Cavanagh

The Chéticamp Farmers’ Market Figure 4.1 Site plan.

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In order to change an existing paradigm, you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. That, in essence, is the higher service to which we are all being called.1 —Buckminster Fuller The series of Thinking While Doing (TWD)-affiliated built projects represents a rare opportunity to add to the existing modelling and testing activity knowledge base integral to the advancement of design/build educational pedagogy. Since models are abstractions of reality, modelling is essentially a tradeoff between generality, realism and precision.2 In a studio course in an architectural school, students are asked to propose a model for a building program or situation, to test it themselves and to present it for testing by a panel of their teachers in an oral review. Mostly, these projects emphasise generality (in a positive sense) at the expense of reality and precision. In a design/build studio, the process is extended significantly to include real material mock-ups and the actual construction of a design (or series of design options) proposed, and that which is accepted by all key stakeholders for further development. Here, the major emphasis shifts gradually to the dimension of realism/reality. An increased emphasis on precision (and as tempered by student skill limitations) leads to confrontations with generality (holding true to concept). As the model approaches realisation, sometimes concept and visual representation are reconsidered. The necessity of testing and critical review permeates the design/ build gridshell series; working on a series of similar buildings tests the projects within a critical framework that establishes a basis for comparative analysis and a series of iterations to monitor improvement. Still high on realism, precision increases through the series, and generality is reintroduced through analysis and comparison. Often truths emerge that intuition alone may not fully comprehend. Knowledge is accumulated by testing iterative models of the whole,

The Chéticamp Farmers’ Market

its parts and inherent processes. It was therefore important to record and document our decisions to pass on to the next design studio in the TWD series of projects. Beginning with the Chéticamp Farmers’ Market (Figure 4.2), each gridshell structure arose from a unique set of local circumstances, each responded to its unique, distinct climatic context. Each design/build studio functioned as an extension of its parent institution’s history/legacy. Coastal Studio 1. Fuller, R. Buckminster (1983). Grunch of Giants. New York: St Martin’s Press. 2. Levins, R. 1966. The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology. Am. Sci. 54(4). pp. 21–431. 3. Macy, Christine (2008). Free Lab: Design-Build Projects from the School of Architecture, Dalhousie University, Canada, 1991–2006. Halifax: Tuns Press. 4. Cavanagh, Ted, Kroeker, Richard & Mullin, Roger (2005). For Want of Wind. Journal of Architectural Education, 58(4). pp. 6–11. MacKay Lyons, Brian (2008). Ghost: Building an Architectural Vision. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

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5. Blundell-Jones, Peter (2002). Modern Architecture through Case Studies. New York: Architectural Press. Andriaenssens, Sigrid, Block, Philippe, Veenendaal, Diederik & Williams, Chris (2014). Shell Structures for Architecture: Form Finding and Optimization. London: Routledge. 6. Cavanagh, Ted (2012). Innovative Structures and the Design-Build Model of Teaching. Paper presented at DesignBuild-Studio: New Ways in Architectural Education. TU Berlin, Berlin, Germany.

Figure 4.2 (Next page) Completed and in-use Chéticamp Farmers’ Market, 2016.

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Since the mid-1980s, the Dalhousie School of Architecture has developed an educational design/build (e-d/b) culture revolving around making. It started with a six-week second-year design studio where students built an architectural building fragment and related it to a 1:20 design model of the entire building. Starting in 1991, Free Labs were introduced. These continue today. Every student experiences a two-week design/build studio, once as an undergraduate and once as a graduate.3 This has created a design-and-build-it culture as a core value in the curriculum. The Free Labs design studios have generated 250 projects during their 25-year history. Notable among the projects have been the 2004 collaboration by three faculty for a children’s theatre that won national and international awards and the Ghost Laboratory, a project that has been extensively published.4 In the last 10 years, the Coastal Studio has offered a semester-long graduate design/build option, completing several innovative structures designed to shelter community activities. Primarily, it is funded research into new ways of building, teaching students the ins and outs of the social construction of technological innovation and working collaboratively across several academic disciplines. Successful building prototypes are donated to community groups or the public for their use. Two projects stand out: a wood lamella barrel vault and a thin brick catenary shell (Figures 4.3 and 4.4). Early-20th-century architects, Häring and Gaudí worked with these construction techniques.5 We utilised these techniques, updating them with advances from recent research and built projects, and pushed the technology by making them thinner and lighter and building them in a northern climate.6

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Figure 4.3 Ross Creek Lamella pavilion, Ross Creek, Nova Scotia, completed in 2010.

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From the perspective of the Coastal Studio at Dalhousie University, the projects in this book represent a step into a more rigorous way of working in e-d/b. Collaboration with other university design/build programs has made comparative analysis of this teaching methodology possible. Each of the five design studios affiliated with the TWD initiative has been assiduously recorded and analysed, collaboratively, by a team of sociologists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers. All five studios and the four resultant built projects are generally similar insofar as they are all variants of a single building type—the open-air gridshell pavilion. Each pavilion structure experimentally tests the technological and social aspects of innovation in terms of its contribution to contemporary innovation in construction technique with regard to this unique building type (see Chapters 2 and 3). As mentioned, these five TWD-affiliated design studio projects represented the rare opportunity to reflect on the possibility of advancing the theoretical basis for e-d/b in architectural technology and design studies courses within the curricula of the four parent institutions (Dalhousie University, the University of Arizona, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte). Here, Coastal Studio is engaged in work that possesses all of the essential dimensions of architectural research—theory, method and their application—where the study of technological innovation and the social and experiential aspects of the built form(s) function as principal foci of research and applied scholarship in the discipline and in the professional practice of architecture.

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The Project Setting

Figure 4.4 Camera Obscura Brick Shell pavilion, Cheverie, Nova Scotia, completed in 2012.

The first of the TWD-affiliated pavilion projects was built in Chéticamp, Nova Scotia, the homeland of the Acadian inhabitants of far eastern Canada. These French-speaking people settled in an inhospitable but starkly beautiful landscape 50 years after the Great Deportation to Louisiana. It is a windy environment. Five to 10 times a year, southeasters called ‘suettes’ blow down from the plateau to the coast, often clocking over 200 kilometers an hour. Chéticamp is a seaport for the crab

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fishery with a very local economy based on cooperative ventures; there are no national chain businesses, unusual for a town of 3,000 (Figure 4.5). The long-lot land division creates a linear town with nearly everyone’s property boundaries including direct ocean frontage. The centre of everyday life occurs along the sole main street of the town. Main Street is a two-lane coastal highway called the Cabot Trail, a heritage tourist route that brings a quarter million people through the town each year. This town is a five-hour drive from the Dalhousie team’s home base in Halifax. For the student team leader (Cavanagh), it was a return to the community where we had built the outdoor children’s theatre some 10 years earlier. The theatre director we had worked with then had expanded his administrative reach, becoming a project coordinator for the local French school board. He was interested in building a visible farmers’ market to attract the passing tourists along the main road through the town; this became the basis of the functional brief for the structure built. Materiality Coastal Studio had previously experimented with gridshell structures on two earlier projects, a tree house for a national park in Canada, and an all-season dining hall for theatre camp.7 Neither of these projects were completed. However, these projects provided invaluable experience with numerous critical issues that would bear on the success of the Farmers’

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Figure 4.5 View through the Chéticamp Farmers’ Market pavilion looking towards the Chéticamp harbour and docks, 2016.

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Figure 4.6 Interior view of the Chéticamp Farmers’ Market pavilion showing the layered, wood lath grid system, 2016.

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Figure 4.7 Interior view, Chéticamp Farmers’ Market pavilion, showing lath layering and interface between structural system and roof panels, 2016.

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7. The tree house project was for Fundy National Park. The Parks Canada field superintendent approached us to build accommodation for a family of tourists in tree houses. The strategy involved finding a sloped site in which a ramp of 6 meters would reach into the trees. The site was spectacular, and the ramp and floor of the structure were built before the new superintendent shut the project down. Coastal Studio continued to work with our original contact who was promoted to oversee the national parks in Cape Breton. The other project was to be located at the theatre camp where we had built a seasonal dining shelter using wood lamellas to form a barrel vault. The gridshell project for them was cancelled in the design stage after difficulties agreeing on the scope of the project. The client was unrealistically ambitious with no secure funding for winterisation and an industrial kitchen. 8. Chilton, John & Tang, Gabriel (2017). Timber Gridshells: Architecture, Structure and Craft. London: Routledge.

Market structure: the type of wood; the most resilient cross-sectional profile of the wood lath elements; the node connection where laths cross one another; the structural performance of the total grid-form shell; the springing of the shell; and the roof-to-wall connections. (Figures 4.6, 4.7 and 4.8). The type of wood had remained consistent through all the prior Coastal Studio projects. Hardwood kept the cross-sectional area of the wood lath manageable. In the tree house, we experimented with ash, but everywhere else we had used red oak. White oak would have been better in terms of weathering, but it was only available in Quebec, 1000 kilometers away. The wood lath is locally sourced green, red oak; green meaning that it is not kiln-dried dimension lumber. The wood is milled while still quite fresh with a very high moisture content. As a result, the wood laths bend quite easily. They were left green for natural bending; this was cost and energy efficient because the wood was not kiln-dried, and it was obtainable from small locally owned sawmills. The choice of wood was based on a simple model tested early in the design process, one of the many modelling tests throughout all of the four built TWD-affiliated open-air pavilions. The tree house and the Chéticamp Farmers’ Market were scaled to be workable with a relatively small group of architecture students. The team pre-tested a series of wood laths with different thicknesses and found that ¾-inch was the thickest 12-foot lath that would loop back on itself without an explosive failure. It was a bit arbitrary, as a calculation, but nevertheless an advance on standard structural design tables that called for the use of 6mm or ¼-inch material in order to achieve the optimum curvature required. The eventual thickness chosen—three times what the tables recommended—bent to failure at a curvature far in excess of what the eventual design required. The thickness criteria was chosen intuitively and this likely contributed to the team’s success in connecting the individual lath elements as they twisted or “planked” through some tight passages in the grid-form. We collaborated closely with Blackwell structural engineers, based in Toronto, Canada, to address the specifications stated in the sparse, previously published materials on this subject. The pre-tests tended to be simple and

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Figure 4.8 Interface between structural shell and concrete foundation with bolted nodal connections, Chéticamp Farmers’ Market pavilion, 2016.

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Figure 4.9 Perimeter seating system, Chéticamp Farmers’ Market pavilion, 2016.

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the results the team attained were endorsed by the structural engineers. In the early stage of the design process, tests concentrated on validating the selection of red oak, with the wood still green and possessing a high moisture content. In hindsight, thicker wood laths would have been better, perhaps; the pre-tests should have been made more precise by investigating shallower curves closer to the actual grid-form design preferred by the project team. This wood species is clear, straight grained and was able to be joined into a continuous lath from one perimeter support to another, on either side. A six-meter span requires laths of lengths on the diagonal of 20 m. To fabricate laths up these lengths, a choice had to be made between scarf and finger jointing 2.5 m pieces, end to end. In the Weald and Downland shell in the UK, finger jointing was used extensively, partly because sections of clear grain oak were quite short, and the lath elements had substantial thickness.8 In our thinner lath elements, finger joints presented a number of practical problems. Structural finger joints are pointed with long overlaps unlike the blunter, shorter type used in moulding; their production is difficult, very difficult if oriented with the saw-tooth pattern visible on the thin side. If oriented the other way, then it is not easy to clamp across all the fingers with even pressure while the glue

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Figure 4.10 a-h Chéticamp Farmers’ Market pavilion design and construction process: lath models, assembled gridshell before springing, raising the gridshell, plaster form modelling and various completed details.

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Figure 4.11 a-h Chéticamp gridshell construction of the scale mock-up on-site, rectifying nodes during construction sequence and completed project.

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Figure 4.12 Wood laths affixed in proper location along foundation edge, Chéticamp Farmers’ Market pavilion, 2016.

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9. Giedion, Sigfried (1948). Mechanization Takes Command. New York: Oxford University Press. 10. Cavanagh, Ted & Kroeker, Richard (2004). Revaluing Wood. In Simon Guy & Steven A. Moore (eds.) Sustainable Architectures: Cultures and Natures in Europe and North America. London: Spon Press.

is curing. Scarf joints were more practical, especially in our remote geographic location, considering the available facilities, tools and skill sets of the construction team. The lath elements did not bend as much at the scarf joints. This local flattening raised questions for further investigation, particularly how the joint performs as the green wood shrinks to its eventual moisture content, while under prestressed bending conditions (Figure 4.9). Several times during the Farmers’ Market project, important design decisions were made because of a combination of cost /expense factors; the site’s remote location; the unavailability of local fabricators for key components; and the relatively limited skill sets of the onsite construction team. In addition, the project team was working with an unusual building type, a type outside of the sphere of experience of local, and even North American, builders. For instance, the glue eventually chosen was imported from Europe, and specially formulated to bond with green wood elements. It is commonly used in factory applications with large presses, and usually for interior construction applications. As we had found when building the prior brick shell, we had to consult first with a number of builders whose experience was only partially aligned with

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our specific application needs in this project. Based on their previous experience, and after gathering together all the best information possible, we decided on the ‘best’ fabrication and construction process that would allow the team to chart a clear path forward. During the wood milling process, each individual lath element is inspected to ensure its integrity (Figure 4.10). An acceptable lath has a relatively straight grain pattern without much deviation, and no knots. If laths are weakened by knots, cracks or decay, this can seriously compromise the integrity of the entire structural system. Here, the organic nature, and reality, of the material we had chosen to work with was pushed up against the need for it to conform to a minimum performance standard.9 Grading is a conventional standard, but it normally restricts the type of wood to those for which there are no widely accepted grading performance standards.10 In our case, as mentioned, there were no local graders available for milled hardwood in that part of Nova Scotia. However, the engineers arrived at a solution, albeit a hybrid one. Our miller

Figure 4.13 Completed Chéticamp Farmers’ Market gridshell showing the precise spacing of nodes, roof membrane, foundation and curvilinear deck.

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possessed softwood grading credentials, and we and Blackwell engineers specified a softwood grade that would meet or surpass the initial quality inspection. The students photographed the individual laths, organised the photographs to reflect the engineers’ minimum performance criteria and sent the file for approval (Figure 4.11). The Design Process

Figure 4.14 Students and faculty from Dalhousie University visiting the Downland Gridshell in Chichester, UK, 2017.

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11. Lateral Office (2013). Arctic Adaptations. Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. Exhibition. 12. Ammaaq, Rosie Bonnie (2012). Stories from Our Land 1.5: Family Making Sleds. National Film Board. Ottawa, Ontario.

During milling, inspection, jointing and assembly, the wood remains relatively moist, bending easily into the desired shape. The wood then dries to create a strong and rigid structure. The laths in a gridshell are connected at nodes; this connection allows the shell to hold its planned shape, as there is only one possible set of coordinates that spatially locates each node. During erection, it is necessary to allow the nodes to move along the cross nodes. In other words, the node connection has to become fixed in its final location but must slide along the other laths as the shell is lifted into place. Solving the nodeto-node connection is extremely important to the effectiveness of the total building. As for architectural precedents, Weald and Downland had arrived at an elegant solution, utilising a series of plates clamped together at the four corners of the structure. This solution is expensive, however, particularly in relation to our exterior application, one that required either galvanised or stainless steel. As an alternative, we had experimented with a slotted lath and bolt system for the tree house. Despite the small size of the Farmers’ Market structure, this bolting technique required the removal of material where it was most structurally necessary and was, therefore, unfeasible. We then proposed lashing as a structural connection for the nodes to avoid a loss of lath integrity. With regards to precedent, Coastal Studio had participated in a studio for a project in Iqaluit in 2013 that was part of Canada’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale.11 One of the construction details our team studied was the qamutik, or indigenous sled, that was lashed rather than mechanically fastened at the joints.12 The lashing responded better to the dynamic loading or the sled being pulled across uneven terrain. For the Chéticamp gridshell, the lashing would be an

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Figure 4.15 a-b Framing and cladding drawings, Chéticamp Farmers’ Market pavilion, 2015.

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Figure 4.16 a-b Construction drawings, Chéticamp Farmers’ Market pavilion, 2015.

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effective way to slide and then cinch the lath elements during the stages of lifting and then, possibly, affixing the lath elements in their final location (Figures 4.12 and 4.13). The node connections at the perimeter of the grid-form are a significant design detail that affects the overall appearance of the building. Deciding where and how the gridform attaches to its adjacent vertical walls determines the overall visual delicacy, or lightness, of the roof itself. Though possible design solutions are varied, this concern remained consistent throughout the design process with regards to all of the TWD-affiliated structures. For the Farmers’ Market, the project team sought to arrive at a design that was as simple as possible to construct in a challenging geographic environment. The perimeter walls were therefore kept low in order to draw the grid-form rather close to the ground. A simple bent steel plate was embedded in the concrete wall and a single bolt connection was made to each wooden lath. Of course, it is never that simple. Holding true to the team’s goal of architectural simplicity would require extensive pre-testing and additional structural design research.

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Design Prototyping

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The form of the Chéticamp Farmers’ Market represents a progression from the previous structures built by Coastal Studio at Dalhousie University. The first structure built had been a simple barrel vault form, in section, a simple circular form generated by a repeated element, a meter-long wood lamella. It featured a repetitive structural unit rather than optimised overall structural form. The second structure had also been based on a simple structural form, a catenary brick arch, with the structural elements deployed so that only compression results. The cross section of that structure varied in both its height and its width. In other words, the brick vault form was purely a structural form. The progression from a simple barrel vault to the catenary brick vault introduced double curvature, creating a stable total form. The Chéticamp gridshell, the third structural type built by Coastal Studio, is more complex, as it is neither a simple repeated unit or a simple structural form per se. Each pavilion in the TWD series of structures was generated

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from a unique set of constraints, constraints sometimes strictly adhered to throughout the design process and sometimes modified by external determinants. Another way to keep the roof-to-wall connections simple was to minimise the number of connections between the wood lath elements and the concrete retaining/supporting wall. The number of bolted connections between the bent steel plate and the lath could be cut in half if this connection is shared with one in the adjacent layer travelling in the other direction. This can occur only if each lath element is resolved at a node connection. This constraint defines the aesthetic language at the perimeter condition of the entire gridform in a very particular way; this is referred to as 'noding out.' It was a bit of a disappointment to the project team to realise that a wood lath fabricated grid-form itself cannot become structurally stable unless it is triangulated by an additional lath or by a structural skin membrane such as plywood. This disappointment is mitigated by the realisation that it is necessary to have some connecting strips to receive the fastenings for the cladding anyway, so they might as well double as structural elements—as stabilisers. Alternately, electing to build a structural membrane such as plywood results in a need to reconsider the structure’s lighting. Skylights need to be allocated to structural low-stress point regions of the grid-form, and the lighting system and material selection of the stabilising membrane must be carefully coordinated with the lath grid system.13 The structural membrane and cladding of this type of structure present the additional problem of a form that is doubly curved, that is, it achieves two-way curvature simultaneously, in two directions. Indeed, this is not as simple as it may seem at first. Any form that cannot be modelled using a single sheet of paper without cuts, tucks or folds is difficult to clad with a sheet membrane material. To maintain aesthetic and structural design simplicity, the Farmers’ Market project team elected to triangulate the structure with a layer of horizontal lath cladding, polycarbonate panels of about one-meter square each. The actual cladding pattern was to be deferred, however, until the design configuration could be mocked up on the completed structure in the field.

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13. The Weald and Downland shell comes all the way to the floor so that there is no wall. The gable ends, however, have substantial structure at the roof-to-wall junction, as do all three glazed elevations of the Saville Gardens shell.

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During the first weeks of the Chéticamp project design studio, 10 students investigated the overall form of the building, the standard node connection and the wood lath material. As mentioned, red oak was selected: the team visited a local sawmill to better understand the species selection and the milling process itself. The Spanish windlass species was identified as a type of lashing worth investigating for performance and for ease of on-site construction. With the overall structure curved in plan, significant double curvature was achieved in the vault form. As in the aforementioned Coastal Studio precedents, this structure would be open at each end; these openings were faced away from the direct brunt force of the potentially 200 kph winds. As a result, the convex side of the building pointed into and would therefore shed the most direct wind forces. In the theatre structure, built 10 years before in Chéticamp, we had learned to let the wind travel relatively unimpeded through the building. In this case, as well, the cells up to eye level would be free of permanent cladding and remain totally open during the winter suette season.

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Figure 4.18 Indigenous vernacular language of the Chéticamp Farmers' Market in relation to its semi-rural waterfront site, 2016.

14. The Weald and Downland shell uses a horizontal lath whereas Saville Gardens uses a plywood structural skin without openings for skylights.

The supporting walls, as mentioned, for the grid-form remained low so that the ‘roof’ would be drawn down close to the ground. The land fell towards the harbour and away from the wind. The leeward walls were exposed at a half meter high and the windward walls retained about a meter of earth. This had the effect of hunkering, anchoring the building down, thereby exposing less surface to the wind. The concave side created a natural shelter for a stage facing the harbour and the road. Raising the earth in a small berm that reflected the curvature in the shell’s plan created the effect of enclosure and a place for an audience to sit. These design decisions formed the basis of consultation with the pavilion’s eventual occupants, and the project’s local client-sponsor. Coastal Studio, over all of its projects, collaboratively solicits eventual users’ feedback and suggestions, much like in conventional architectural practice. The to-be occupants of the Farmers’ Market expressed some concern that the building would be too small for the number

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Figure 4.19 Wood laths undulate, generating a structural apex, Chéticamp Farmers’ Market pavilion, 2016.

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of vendors it had to house each week during the season of its operation. In the end, they agreed to replace the huge round tables they had used up to then with more compact, rectangular-shaped market stall tables. In addition, we made certain the occupants-to-be and the client-sponsor fully understood the nature of our project, as it was by its very nature an experimental structure. Unlike in conventional architectural practice, this project was in effect an experiment in a unique construction technique and it could fail, technically, or even be unrealisable, in the extreme. Lawrence Friesen, of Nomad Design Workshop in London, had led numerous members of the TWD project team through the essential steps and principles involved in gridshell design during a trip by members of the TWD team to the UK in 2016. We learned firsthand that the design process for this experimental building type requires fluid, interactive design prototyping between real, physical modelling and digitally based structural modelling. Arguably, the purest type of double curvature grid-form is built flat, then sprung into its final form (Figure 4.14) by restraining (lifting) the perimeter to attain the designed plan configuration and its grid-form loftness.14 The first step simulates the desired formal geometry of the grid-form vis-à-vis a series of physical models. Various plan configurations were cut into a flat piece of wood, then stretchable fabric was attached around the plan perimeter, and plaster poured into it. This approximated the spring of the shell, from a restrained perimeter condition. It was an exercise in close reading and intense observation and performance measurement. It involved carefully figuring out what the material was doing and why it was doing it. Prototyping is an interpretive, iterative process: folds in a fabric mould, identified when it is subjected to the weight of plaster, reveal locations where some additional surface material must be removed in the next physical model constructed.The various models built in this series of prototypes were subsequently compared for their differences. For instance, the physical models we built correctly predicted the open gable ends would induce reverse curvature, while the digitally based structural models did not. Once the overall form and plan were determined, the

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next step involved approximating the surface area with a grid of corresponding linear members. In the physical model, this grid was created on top of a pattern of the fabric form laid out flat. This was repeated in the digital model using a three-dimensional scan of the plaster model, laying the surface out flat and plotting linear members. Again, each physical prototype was studied closely. The perimeter condition of the linear grid would determine whether it was going to properly node out. In order to node out, the grid created a condition where the base connections would not be in a horizontal line, nor would they be in a uniform arch, front and back. Some further analysis became necessary. Numerous alternative directions presented themselves at this point in the prototyping process. Returning to the concept of the simple base attachment that had noded out, we added three new constraints. First, connection points at the base were defined as nodes. Second, front and back curved walls were leveled on top and divided into an equal number of divisions. Third, the centre front was connected to each end at the back. The next step was to plot the wood laths as geodesics on the scanned surface of the final plaster model. In e-d/b studios, assumptions always have to be made in order to advance the project forward; we only had six weeks left until completion. The studio was 12 weeks long and during weeks five and six, we had traveled to the southeastern United States to visit other small structures built in fragile coastal landscapes, many design/build projects among them. The visit included the work of Auburn University, Tulane University, Mississippi State University, the University of Houston, the University of Texas at Austin and UT-San Antonio, as well as our partner TWD-affiliated project team at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. We then returned to Halifax in week seven to build a 1:2 model of the Chéticamp structure on the front lawn of the architecture school.

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From Design to Construction The concrete floor slab of the unconditioned structure experienced small temperature differentials between the ground plane and the

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Figure 4.20 Comparison of three digital models depicting discrepencies between the original design and on-site as-built geometric configuration, Chéticamp Farmers’ Market pavilion, 2016.

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air, similar to a sidewalk condition. Therefore, there was no need to build below the frost line. The potential of the slab to crack was insignificant when weighed against much shorter curved concrete walls—a substantial savings in time, labour and materials. These walls were formed using bent 1×3 inch lumber laminated into a curve. However, students constructing the taller back wall considered this wasteful of labour and material, a view that changed after suffering a blow-out and unwanted thickening of the wall that required extra concrete. To this end, an experienced concrete crew worked with the students during the concrete pour and taught them about concrete finishing techniques. Embedded in the wall was a simple bent plate with a bolt hole to accept the lath. The angle was approximately the slope of the shell. A local metal shop made the plates and the students suspended them in the formwork and attached them to the reinforcing in the concrete walls. It became clear that our engineers viewed the bolt connection as insufficient. Their proposal sandwiched the lath between thick steel plates with extensive bolting. This solution transgressed the intent of creating a simple connection at the perimeter nodes. There was no easy resolution, as proposal after counterproposal remained in disagreement. We decided to move ahead and bolt the laths directly to the plates, understanding that the engineers would not give

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Figure 4.21 Chéticamp gridshell pavilion in context, 2016.

their approval. A final resolution on this issue was therefore deferred, with a retrofit later conducted in the field. Often, certain potential problems identified in design are not completely solved until out in the field. But these can eventually consume a significant part of construction time. They require constant vigilance, and resolution. In time, a stronger version of the bolted connection was developed with Blackwell engineers based on recent, unpublished doctoral dissertation research that proposed steelbonded-to-wood connections (Figure 4.15 a-b and Figure 4.16 a-b). Wood blocking was bonded to an embedded steel rod and a steel base was inserted into the space between the laths. The connectors were built in the shop in a controlled environment to ensure accurate assembly and curing and then installed as a retrofit on-site. After 12 weeks, the shell was sprung and the nodes and perimeter bolts held the structure in place. However, further adjustments were necessary before everything could be locked in place. One of the challenges of e-d/b is that there is often work remaining to be done after the core academic ‘design term’

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15. Chilton, John & Tang, Gabriel (2017). Timber Gridshells: Architecture, Structure and Craft. London: Routledge. 16. Dewey, John (1934). Art as Experience. New York: Penguin Putnam. Sennett, Richard (2008).The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press. 17. Cavanagh, Ted (2016). Dream or Dilemma: The Unconscious Construction of the Modern House. Journal of Architectural Education. 70(2). pp. 300–310.

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ends. We had already deferred decisions and some finishing work. But there was more shear blocking to do, locking down the form; cladding to add after pre-testing against the winter suettes; and a new base connection to retrofit after some research and test loading in the engineering laboratory on campus. Coastal Studio hires undergraduate work-term students to work in the autumn after the graduate summer studio concludes. This introduced e-d/b to new students who could later elect into the graduate studio the following summer. Prototype modelling and testing is an excellent means to develop expertise in this building type.15 Prototyping with physical and digitally based models approximates the physical world; testing helps designers to understand probable performance levels over time or during specific–i.e., climatic or seismic–events. The models are created to examine various possibilities: for instance, loading models isolate specific modes of failure predicted in assemblies, computer-generated models economise through scale and/or resolution. Design prototyping allows detection of temporal and/or spatial changes in important variables relative to accepted laws, theorems and empirical relationships “in forms that permit (quantitative) inferences to be derived from them.”16 Numerous modelling methods were explored during the design process, including a 1:2 scale prototype, digitally based structural design models and various plaster cast models. Blackwell engineers had examined and assessed various structural theories and had themselves altered their initial assumptions during the Chéticamp Farmers’ Market design process. Multiple interesting conversations transpired between the engineers and our British consulting experts, where many initial assumptions were challenged and many subsequently revised. Despite all of this work, as previously mentioned, the solving of some problems was left to be reconciled out in the field. When the structure’s roof was erected, but before its completion, some discrepancies were detected. This occurred due to the handing over of the project from the original student team to a second group of student/ builders who were in their work placement phase with Coastal Studio. Their task was to infill between the laths with shear blocks and

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in the process lock down the nodes into their final locations. Each lath was marked with the location of each lath it crossed. This was to ‘fine-tune’ the structure, although many of the laths would not comply. The wood had developed a mind (or model) of its own and, after a couple of weeks of frustration, we decided to listen to the messages being conveyed by the wood itself (Figure 4.17 and Figure 4.18). More specifically, numerous obstinate wood lath elements refused to hit their marks or, when forced to hit their marks, they ‘complained’ in various ways. Sometimes they broke, but more frequently they caused the overall form to change-distort somewhere else in unexpected ways (Figure 4.19). Soon the team developed a keen eye for the ‘correct’ overall form, realising something was visually off about the structure as it stood in its near-completed state. The as-built structure was further measured in the field using a sophisticated piece of survey equipment (see chapter 13). This portable device targeted each node with a laser, creating a three-dimensional array that was then exported into a computer-based model of its as-built status, and then compared to its ‘ideal’ designed form. There were now four versions: the as– built actual building, the architectural physical models, the digitally generated structural model and this site-surveyed digital model (Figure 4.20). When we overlaid the three computer-generated models a number of discrepancies were identified. It turned out that there had been a glitch in a baseline computer model that subsequently caused misalignment when installing the laths in the field. This error, quite probably, could only have been detected using the on-site digital survey device. After discovering the discrepancy between the various models, we could have simply left it as-built and added reinforcing to the structure to suit its new configuration. Instead, the student team rebuilt it over the next few months into a form very closely approximating the final architectural and structural models. With this step, the wood laths glided into their modified locational placements and the shear blocking was completed before the onset of winter 2016.

Postscript Coastal Studio projects, built by faculty-directed student teams at Dalhousie University, tend to utilise innovative construction processes.The structures themselves are lean, the process is critical and nuanced, and innovation becomes necessary as there are often few relevant architectural precedents to directly learn from. Conventional construction such as light-wood frame structures, also, for its part, affords valuable teaching lessons while much less difficult to analyse and fabricate in the field.17 Four years later, the Chéticamp Farmers’ Market pavilion has successfully withstood 250 km/hour winter storms, with only minor damage sustained to the roof cladding. Three subsequent TWD-affiliated gridshells have been built since, and the Chéticamp structure has functioned as a valued prototype for the other TWD project teams. Each subsequent e-d/b student team has learned much from this project in their quest to balance design and construction tradeoffs with formal aesthetic concerns, realism and precision (Figure 4.21).

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Care Ethics in Educational Design/Build

Care Ethics in Educational Design/Build Kaitlin Sibbald Melanie Frappier

The Relationship Between Ethical Problems and Design Problems

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Design problems are messy problems. Unlike pure mathematical problems that may be solved by applying formulaic principles to derive a solution, design problems are hard to define and often become more complex and multifaceted as proposed solutions are pursued.1 What often makes design problems complex is that they are located in dynamic physical and social processes in the real world. They are therefore weighty, changeable and hard to define. For any given problem, new features may emerge as a solution is pursued, often requiring tradeoffs between elements that lead to a far-from-perfect result.2 These features that make design problems challenging and complex are shared with ethical problems.3 Like design problems, ethical problems occur in specific physical and social spaces, are frequently complex and hard to define and can be approached from many different perspectives. Educational design/build (e-d/b) therefore requires an in-theworld ethics for these in-the-world problems. While ethical codes outline professional values or identify ethical and unethical practices, they often do not give guidance on how to

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work with ethical dilemmas embedded in the real-world context in which they emerge, entwined with the already complex design process. In order to move from a code of ethics to practice, a frame of reference to interpret ethical and design problems that gives credence to the entwined and socially located nature of the two is required. This chapter describes how Care Ethics may fill this role within an e-d/b context. The hope is that by understanding the complexity of ethical problems and using Care Ethics to provide an ethical orientation to this complexity, e-d/b practitioners will have a more effective set of tools for addressing the problems and challenges that arise in practice. To offer a blunt analogy, we need to treat each ethical problem, not like a mathematics problem with a pure and ideal solution that works in theory, but like a design problem where real, physical, material constraints shape the kind of solution that will be most successful. Some Ethical Factors in Educational Design/Build

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1. Dorst, Kees & Royakkers, Lambèr (2006). The Design Analogy: A Model for Moral Problem Solving. Design Studies, 27. pp. 633–656. 2. Ibid.

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3. Ibid. 4. Verderber, Stephen (2014). Territories of Educational Design-Build: Toward an Evidence-Based Discourse. In Ted Cavanagh, Ursula Hartig, Sergio Palleroni (Eds.) Working Out: Thinking While Building: Paper Proceedings, ACSA Press. pp. 174–185.

As Stephen Verderber has described in this book and elsewhere, 4 the activities of e-d/b programs and courses can be understood to have 10 spaces or territories of action. Each of these resonates with a variety of ethical questions. The territories outlined in the lefthand column (Table 5.1) suggest particular questions posed on the right. These questions are not a definitive list, but instead outline some of the ethical determinants involved in the problems and issues encountered in the practices of e-d/b, highlighting the complex entanglement of e-d/b practice and ethics. What is Care Ethics? Care Ethics is a comparatively theoretical paradigm that critiques traditional ethical theories (e.g., Utilitarianism or Kantian deontology) and emphasises the importance of the specific context in which ethical dilemmas appear. Care Ethicists argue that by ignoring the context in which ethical dilemmas arise, traditional ethical theories fail to appreciate the importance of communication and

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Table 5.1 Ethical considerations.

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relationships in our everyday ethical lives.5 Excluding these considerations might not be an issue if they were not inherent to the architectural profession. However, the importance of communication and contextual relationships are evident from an examination of the codes of practice that regulate architecture practice. These values appear in the tenets listed by major architectural associations, such as those prescribing honesty,6 full disclosure7 and numerous other elements of almost every code of professional conduct (e.g., RIBA, CHPA, AIA). These values are especially important for e-d/b, where, as Verderber’s “Territories of Educational Design/build” indicate,8 communication and relationships between and within various architectural team members, organisations and users are important. This shared preoccupation with context, communication and relationships suggests that Care Ethics should be well suited to guide ethical practice and decision making in e-d/b.9 As the name suggests, Care Ethics is based on the orientation to, and the actions of, caring and thus is distinct from the more rationalistic and impersonal approaches to ethics associated with Utilitarianism and Kantian deontology. In Bernice Fisher and Joan Tronto’s influential work Towards a Feminist Theory of Caring, the authors define “care” as “a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our world so that we can live in it as long as possible.”10 Fisher and Tronto identify five core elements of Care Ethics: caring about, taking care, caregiving, care-receiving and the integrity of care. The first four of these are identified as phases of practices of caring and, as we will see in the next section, they can be fruitfully projected into phases of the design process. The final element, the integrity of care, speaks to the necessity of putting these phases together into an integrated practice. One cannot address each phase of caring alone but must weave them together for effective, ethical caring. According to Fisher and Tronto, ethical actions arise from attentiveness to the world, that is, caring about how we develop, maintain or restore the world.11 In other words, caring about is synonymous with identifying needs.12 It is important that we accurately understand the needs of others and do not

just project our own perception of their needs onto them. It is therefore important to have a dialogue with others and to ask questions in order to fully ascertain their needs from their perspective since the needs that we identify change depending on our knowledge, which itself changes depending on which questions we ask, what we are taught and what values we believe are important.13 We can see the importance of this approach in the design process where an instance of caring about may be to hold a focus group with the future users of a building to determine what their particular needs are for the structure. Through listening to this focus group and directing their attention towards what is needed, the architects may discover that, for example, there are important cultural reasons for the building to face north, or it may be especially important that the building have ample parking because people will come to it from far away. Yet since most stakeholders will have only cursory knowledge of building techniques and materials, caring about demands that architects go beyond the needs explicitly stated by stakeholders to identify and present possible issues stakeholders have failed to raise while doing so in a way that respects their values and autonomy. Fisher and Tronto’s second element, taking care, involves responding to the needs identified while engaging in caring about. This second phase, the “design phase,” involves not only taking on the responsibility of caring, but also taking responsibility for the consequences of this response. In this phase, the persons engaged in taking care must have enough knowledge to predict the outcome of the caring act to know that it will meet the needs identified.14 Taking care involves making a judgment call and choosing one action over another, with enough resources to provide care.15 To extend the example above, if the entrance of the building is culturally mandated to face north, it may be difficult to accommodate the amount of on-site parking required. Taking care requires responding to both of these needs and taking responsibility for balancing competing interests and finding new solutions. The third element, caregiving, is the physical work of construction, maintenance and repair that occurs during the caring process.

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5. Riley, D. (2013). Hidden in Plain View: Feminists Doing Engineering Ethics, Engineers Doing Feminist Ethics. Sci Eng Ethics, 19. pp. 189–206. 6. OAA: Ontario Association of Architects (2014). Code of Ethics. p. 1. 7. AIBC (2015). Architectural Institute of British Columbia. Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. p. 5 8. Verderber, Stephen (2014). Territories of Educational Design-Build: Toward an Evidence-Based Discourse. In Ted Cavanagh, Ursula Hartig, Sergio Palleroni (Eds.) Working Out: Thinking While Building: Paper Proceedings, ACSA Press. pp. 174–185. 9. Gilligan, Carol (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Noddings, Nel. (1984). Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Oakland: University of California Press. Noddings, Nel. (2002). Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy, Oakland: University of California Press. 10. Fisher, Bernice & Tronto, Joan (1990). Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring. In Abel, E. and Nelson, M. (Eds.) Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, Albany: State University of New York Press. pp. 35–62. 11. Ibid. 12. Pantazidou, Marina & Nair, Indira (1999). Ethic of Care: Guiding Principles for Engineering Teaching and Practice. Journal of Engineering Education, 88(2). pp. 205–212.

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13. Fisher, Bernice & Tronto, Joan (1990). Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring. In Abel, E. and Nelson, M. (Eds.) Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, Albany: State University of New York Press. pp. 35–62. Von Forester, Heinz (1989). The Need of Perception for the Perception of Needs, Cambridge: MIT Press. 14. Ibid. 15. Fisher, Bernice & Tronto, Joan (1990). Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring. In Abel, E. and Nelson, M. (Eds.) Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, Albany: State University of New York Press. pp. 35–62. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid.

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It involves incorporating the wider context into caring to make sure that identified needs are fulfilled and that new needs are addressed as they arise.16 While taking care may involve making a general plan for action, caregiving involves adapting that plan to address needs as they change in the activities of care. This phase not only requires knowledge and skill, but also inventiveness and creativity, as the caregiver brings about the responses and solutions envisioned in the taking care phase. For Fisher and Tronto, caregiving allows ongoing care to occur as needed.17 To build on our previous example, suppose once a plan is developed that accommodates both a north-facing building and parking, the municipality will not allow parking in that particular area because it is too close to protected wildlife. Caregiving may involve engaging in further, ongoing discussions with building users to perhaps readapt the original plan so that although some important aspects of the building do not face north, perhaps the building can include a second, north-facing door that could be generally considered as the “main” entrance, therefore making the building ostensibly “north-facing.” Care-receiving is the fourth phase in Fisher and Tronto’s caring process. It involves the response given by those who are receiving care. Here, the relational character of Care Ethics and its commitment to repair and responsiveness to real needs comes to the fore as the quality of the care is tested by the experience and response of the care-receiver. Conflict may arise in this stage if the needs identified in the initial caring about phase or actions taken in the taking care or caregiving phases do not reflect the needs of those who are receiving care. Learning from how those who receive care respond to it can influence how caring is done in the future. In our architecture example, care-receiving addresses how the users respond to their new building and whether or not the solution of the secondary, north-facing door is acceptable. If the users respond well, then the architects may consider incorporating a similar solution in future builds; however, if the users respond poorly, the architects may need to seek out alternative solutions. The fifth element defined by Fisher and Tronto, integrity of care, is not a phase in the caring or design processes, but a more

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general lens through which the entirety of a process is focused. Integrity of care has been described as a prism through which the other elements or phases of care are refracted to create a focused, caring outcome.18 Integrity of care is the constant act of self-reflection in which architects engage throughout the project as they constantly re-evaluate ways to balance the various needs of the stakeholders with the available resources. It is important that each phase is undertaken with integrity in order for any project to be not only “successful,” but also ethical. Mapping Care Ethics to the Design Process

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What is particularly indicative of the suitability of Care Ethics for e-d/b is the ease with which the elements of Care Ethics may be mapped onto the stages of the design process. Marina Pantazidou and Indira Nair19 show how design and an ethics of care are linked as they explore how the stages of design—including identification of a social need, conceptualisation, feasibility analysis and assessment of a designed item—map on to Fisher and Tronto’s elements or phases of caring.20 Just as the location, cost of materials, proposed use and sustainability of a project all impact what it means for the project to be successful, particular people, contexts and relationships have an important impact on what it means for a specific decision to be ethical. Following Pantazidou and Nair,21 we can see how Care Ethics mirrors the e-d/b processes, addressing the categories that Verderber presents as the “territories” of design/build.

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Caring About: Identifying the Stakeholders’ Needs The initial stage of any sustainable architectural project involves not only identifying material and economic needs, but also cultural, social, environmental and political ones. For example, a public-housing residence project may explicitly identify the needs of the project as having a low-cost, community-oriented design that maximises efficient space usage. Including caring about or attentiveness (the first step, outlined above, in the caring process) ensures that the identified needs are

indeed the relevant needs. In order for these needs to be relevant or correct, in relation to the end-users of the residence, the design process should take into consideration the perspectives of those who will likely use the space, as well as the needs of the organisation that is commissioning the project. Questions arising out of Verderber’s territories of community development, sustainable practice, placemaking, reflective pedagogy and socio-political advocacy may highlight important issues to be taken into consideration at this initial stage. These considerations include, but are not limited to: What rights, interests and obligations do different stakeholders have with respect to the project? What responsibilities do builders have with respect to vulnerable and minority stakeholders? How will the team determine that a project is meaningful? Taking Care: Conceptualisation Fisher and Tronto’s second element, taking care involves assuming responsibility for caring by identifying ways in which to respond to a need. These activities map on to the Conceptualisation stage of the design process. Using the example of a public-housing residence, this stage involves brainstorming ways of meeting the needs identified in the previous phase of caring about. The stage of taking care also involves considering many possible ways of developing a project that is low-cost, community-oriented and that uses space efficiently. Questions arising include those associated with Verderber’s territories, such as sustainable design, disaster mitigation, tectonic innovation and critical regionalism. These all play an important role in this stage and may help focus a project through answering questions such as: What responsibility do architects have towards the environment? How can this responsibility be balanced with the cost of materials and the restraints of time? Are sustainable designs functional and safe? What kind of disaster must be responded to, and in what way? What level of risk is acceptable when dealing with new materials? How do you balance different groups’ interests? Considering such questions allows practitioners of e-d/b to conceptualise designs that are ethically responsible.

Caregiving: Feasibility Analysis, Production

18. Pantazidou, Marina & Nair, Indira (1999). Ethic of Care: Guiding Principles for Engineering Teaching and Practice. Journal of Engineering Education, 88(2). pp. 205–212.

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19. Ibid. 20. Fisher, Bernice & Tronto, Joan (1990). Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring. In Abel, E. and Nelson, M. (Eds.) Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, Albany: State University of New York Press. pp. 35–62. 21. Pantazidou, Marina & Nair, Indira. (1999). Ethic of Care: Guiding Principles for Engineering Teaching and Practice. Journal of Engineering Education, 88(2). pp. 205–212. 22. Torrington, Judith (2006). What Has Architecture Got to Do with Dementia care?: Explorations of the Relationship Between Quality of Life and Building Design in Two EQUAL Projects. Quality in Ageing and Older Adults, 7(1). pp. 34–48.

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Caregiving, the third stage in Fisher and Tronto’s theory, maps on to the Feasibility Analysis and Production stages of Verderber’s e-d/b territories. As outlined earlier, caregiving involves acting in an ongoing way to sensitively meet the needs identified. This stage would involve choosing the design of and building a home that best balances stakeholders’ identified needs, that is simultaneously low-cost, community-oriented and adapted to both the clientele’s health issues and the caregivers’ workplace needs. This step involves recognising that the design team are key members in the ethical implementation of caregiving; through their design and construction work, they become caregivers through the contributions their buildings make to a given community and environment. For e-d/b educators, this third design stage is a subtle balancing act because the build is a crucial aspect of the e-d/b learning process. It gives students the chance to develop various manual and design skills in situ. It is central

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It is extremely important to continue to maintain a close connection with the most vulnerable stakeholders involved in the project; the caring about still remains essential. For example, if our public housing project is designed for seniors, a number of specific questions will arise as the first designs are drafted: Will the floor plan be easy to navigate both for people with memory challenges and for people with mobility issues? How can we best regulate the need for natural light—and hence windows—with the sensitivity some seniors have to surfaces, like windows or doors, that radiate excessive energy out? Will a brightly coloured community space filled with craft material confuse residents with Alzheimer’s into thinking that they are at school? As Torrington points out, “Successful spaces [for people with dementia] are those that carry unambiguous meaning,”22 but without knowing the needs of these people, identifying the design elements that will make the project feel “domestic” will be impossible. As such, when the conceptualisation stage occurs in a manner infused with continuous reflection on the needs of the stakeholders, care is taken in the design.

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to the engagement and empowerment of students, as noted by Verderber. Yet the building process is also one where miscalculations and mistakes can have large financial and emotional impacts on the clients. So while the build offers various ways in which a team of student designer-builders develop their capacities to support each other in a work setting and act as ethically responsible designers and builders, it is also a stage where significant harm can be done to the stakeholders—both through the choice of design and its construction. This raises questions such as: What are the responsibilities students have to each other as part of the team? How is responsibility shared during the team process? How is conflict dealt with in a team setting? To what extent must educators intervene in the built outcome and how should they balance between the fact that students often learn by trial and error and their collective duty to follow best practices? Care-Receiving: Assessment and Responsiveness

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The fourth step that Fisher and Tronto identify in Care Ethics is care-receiving. In design, this is where design elements are both assessed and addressed, it is where the designers judge whether the relevant needs were met to answer shortcomings of the design or construction. With regard to our example of a community-housing residence, this step involves assessing how users benefit from the low-cost, community-oriented space, and whether they are able to use the place in an efficient, safe and enjoyable way. It also involves seeing if the project is lacking in any significant area that can be remediated, and taking responsibility for the consequences. This stage involves questions that arise in Verderber’s territories, including interdisciplinary knowledge mobilisation, critical regionalism, tectonic innovation and socio-political advocacy. Questions to ask in association with this phase may include: How has society been advanced? How do different groups respond to compromise? What obligations do architects have to other disciplines? What obligations do other disciplines have to architects? Whose knowledge has been considered valuable, and when? What information would be valuable to future practice?

How do you know if people’s well-being has improved? What new materials were used in successful and unsuccessful ways? In mapping the different stages of care onto the territories of e-d/b, we can see how ethical problems are intrinsically related to complex design problems. Assessing the success of an e-d/b project in terms of Care Ethics may help to broaden e-d/b practitioners’ attentiveness to ethical issues and spur their creativity in responding to unexpected challenges and unforeseen needs in future projects. While the phases of care have a certain logical order, in practice, they are part of an iterative, looping process. E-d/b involves making plans and modifying them during the building process as different problems and opportunities arise. After an initial assessment of an element of a project, it may be necessary to re-conceptualise before continuing with the building process. Because all of the phases of care remain active through the process, a Care Ethics approach is well suited to re-evaluating changing needs and relationships as designing and building processes unfold. Indeed, a design team may find that what they initially felt was an important need may prove later to have been insignificant, and that instead another, more pressing concern arose in its place. To meet this new requirement, a further re-conceptualisation of the design may be essential. While it is important to recognise that there may be many different ways to meet a given need, it is also important to admit that a perfect solution may not be possible. In order to meet one need, another may have to be sacrificed. For example, with our community-housing residence, in order to maximise the use of the space, some elements of a community-oriented design may have to be sacrificed. This sacrifice may require a value judgment about what needs are most important. Further, such a situation directly points to the significance of assessing the effectiveness of the care provided, with the architect critically reflecting on which value judgments were most successful, and which will provide the most useful guidance for the future.

23. Lagueux, Maurice (2004). Ethics Versus Aesthetics in Architecture. The Philosophical Forum 35. pp. 117–133. 24. Pinkus, Rosa Lynn, Gloeckner, Claire & Fortunato, Angela (2014). The Role of Professional Knowledge in Case-Based Reasoning in Practical Ethics. Sci Eng Ethics, 21. pp. 767–787. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Noddings, Nel (1995). Teaching Themes of Care, The Phi Delta Kappan, 76. pp. 675–679. RIBA, Royal Institute of British Architects (2018). Code of Professional Conduct.

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29. Ibid. 30. Campbell, Ryan C., Yasuhara, Ken, & Wilson, Denise (2012). Care Ethics in Engineering Education: Undergraduate Student Perceptions of Responsibility. In Proceedings – Frontiers in Education Conference. Piscataway: IEEE. Presented at the 42nd Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference, Seattle, Washington. 31. Noddings, Nel (1995). Teaching Themes of Care, The Phi Delta Kappan, 76. pp. 675–679. RIBA, Royal Institute of British Architects (2018). Code of Professional Conduct. 32. Ibid. 33. Von Forester, Heinz (1989). The Need of Perception for the Perception of Needs, Cambridge: MIT Press.

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To this point, we have demonstrated how Care Ethics can play an important role in the design/ build process. However, as e-d/b is a pedagogical practice, it is important that we also examine how caring can be taught, so that ethics is understood not as something abstract that exists alongside architecture, but rather something that is inherent to it.23 It therefore follows that if one is to be a good architect one must be ethical. Yet this correlation may not be clear to architects in training, who may not understand why they have to become both thoughtful ethicists as well as accomplished architects. It is therefore important that, in teaching architecture, and design/build in particular, ethical development be given a prominent role.24 The advantage of the Care Ethics approach over virtue ethics or the mere application of deontological codes of ethics is the naturalness with which its values and questions mesh with the design process. The analysis of the ethically charged elements of the design/build project happens as the project unfolds and reflects the students’ experience in the design/build process.25 Taking time to talk about ethical issues and dilemmas throughout the design/build project reinforces the situated nature of ethics and consistently reminds students of its relevancy. Moreover, Care Ethics make clear to students that morally relevant facts often emerge out of technical knowledge (e.g., the sustainability of particular materials).26 Helping student architects recognise that technical facts carry moral weight is important for helping them learn how to frame problems so that solutions can emerge.27 For example, technical knowledge about the longevity of a certain material’s structural stability carries moral weight when the life span of a building and its relevance to a community is considered. Knowing how different materials compare in this respect is not only a technically relevant fact but a morally relevant one because it involves the well-being of those who will occupy and use the building well into the future. Being aware of what information is morally relevant and taking responsibility for ethical problems that arise are key to ethical caring. Admittedly, teaching the attentiveness required to understand Care Ethics is more

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Teaching Care in Educational Design/Build

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involved than teaching students to simply memorise an ethical code or to list the principles involved in an ethical theory. Indeed, in order to teach Care Ethics, those teaching design/build must provide students with the experience of being cared for themselves. This requires that teachers demonstrate the qualities of a good caregiver and that they give students the opportunity to do the same towards each other and towards the teacher(s). What steps can an educator take to teach Care Ethics during the design/build process? The following elements have been recommended to help teach caring to students. First, the teacher should effectively assume the role of caregiver to students.28 This role involves building trust between teacher and student. One way to do this is for the teacher to cooperate in student activities 29 and be actively involved in the processes of design. It also means that the teacher should pay attention to the particularities of each individual student and take into consideration and treat as important those elements of their individual lives when structuring and managing the design/build class. Being flexible with deadlines, helping students solve interpersonal conflicts within their teams and being sensitive to the cultural and social backgrounds of each student are some ways that the teacher can do this. As well, it is important to give students opportunities to develop the skills and resources that will help them to be caring individuals. Research suggests that while students may understand they have a responsibility for caring, they may lack an appreciation for the complexities that must be addressed, and the interdisciplinary and collaborative approach needed to address them.30 This can be facilitated by incorporating social questions into the technical learning environment and by stressing an interdisciplinary, curiosity-driven approach to their education.31 This questioning nature shows students that technical elements, such as material choice and structural design, are not separate from the people who will experience and incorporate the built space into their lives. E-d/b’s inherently interdisciplinary approach already works in favour of this element. Caring also implies a continuous search for competence.32 A teacher can serve as

a model for students by admitting where their knowledge ends, working actively to fill in gaps in understanding and demonstrating attentiveness towards practice, thus encouraging students to do the same. Admitting vulnerability and allowing for ongoing self-reflection opens space within an e-d/b project for students to care for themselves, their peers and others involved in the project. Finally, encouraging students to ask questions and helping them to gain greater insights into others’ lives and perspectives33 will help the students to become comfortable seeking out knowledge and fostering caring attitudes in future projects. Teaching students that not only is it important to consider the needs of others, but also teaching them the ways in which they can obtain information about what these needs might be gives students the skills to understand that care and compassion are integral parts of architectural practice. Conclusions In sum, Care Ethics provides a useful lens through which to examine ethical practice in e-d/b. It readily maps onto dynamic designbuild processes and the aforementioned territories and can provide guidance in areas specific to e-d/b, particularly in connection to the experimental nature of many design/ build projects. Furthermore, a Care Ethics approach highlights a number of critical values shared by many architects who practice e-d/b, including the values of open communication, positive relationships, creative problem solving and sustainable design and construction practices. Architecture that is produced with care may have a much higher probability of being caring architecture, allowing the concept and phenomena of Care Ethics to continue long after the design/build process has taken place. In order to teach an architect to practice this type of ethics, design/build educators can act as effective role models by providing care for their students and by encouraging their students to reflect on their decisions and the many people affected by them.

The Social Epistemology of Thinking While Making Architecture Letitia Meynell

Introduction

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In this chapter, I consider the process of design through a philosophical lens to bring into focus the challenges of harnessing the resources of a collection of diverse people in order to imagine a building into reality. From a philosophical perspective, design falls into a fascinating epistemological lacuna. While there are endless tomes written on the character and production of knowledge and a considerable literature on the nature of fiction, there is far less written about the epistemology of design and architecture (Sabine Ammon’s work is a notable exception1). Neither factual representations nor straightforwardly fictional images, design drawings and models are, in effect, fictions that produce facts. Objects—in the case of architecture, the objects in which we live—come to exist through the production of and engagement with pictures and models. It is tempting to think of creativity as a product of genius—a mind articulating a vision and then bringing it to pass though directing the labour of others. However, in contemporary industrial design and architecture the process is rarely so solitary, abstract or linear.

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Design is a social process, just as construction is. While a chief designer or architect may be the central pivot or shaping force of a project, they do not create alone. They are constrained by multiple different actors, both human and material, and they must inspire and inform many of these actors so that, as a group, they can create this new and previously unimagined object. Typically, no single drawing achieves this. Rather, a series of drawings and models are produced in a variety of different styles for a variety of different audiences representing fictional possible future entities until somewhere in the process a part of reality comes to be as a result of being represented by some collection of them.2 Now, if we think of fact and fiction as contraries, the process of fiction creating fact is mysterious—facts are fundamentally about the way reality is, fictions are fundamentally about the way it isn’t.3 Rather than treating fictions as claims or representations that are not factual, I instead follow Kendall Walton and treat them as props for the imagination.4 Walton’s analysis of the content of images will help us specify the challenges of communicating the vision and practical instructions expressed by design images across the diverse actors required to construct a building. While Walton offers a comprehensive account of representation that emphasises its dependence on imagination, he does not directly engage the subject of design. Happily, Wölfel, Krzywinski and Drechsel (hereafter WKD) offer an analysis of the iterative interactions characteristic of the design process, which bounce between externally given constraints, design concept, character and the process of building itself.5 We will find examples of these in the educational design/build (e-d/b) projects that are the subject of this book. In WKD’s account external visualisation through the production of various images and models plays a crucial role, but they pay little attention to how these images are used collaboratively by designers and builders. Fortunately, Eugene Ferguson’s work in engineering drawing offers a functional taxonomy of types of design image that addresses their communicative role.6 These insights into the design process will help us appreciate how the practices of e-d/b pedagogy provide students with access to the creative social practices of design, the various barriers and

obstacles to completing a build and the role of images in negotiating them. Design as an Iterative Imaginative Process Design begins in not knowing. As WKD note, At the start of a design process, the designer has no concrete image of the goal she/he could aim at. He knows just a few constraints and contradictions as well as [a] little about the path leading to it. Notions about the process, the environment and implementation of the design object do exist, but these are neither precise nor verifiable.7 From this ill-defined position, the designer must navigate a creative process that results in an object through iterative reflections and explorations of the stipulated requirements and constraints of a project (which undergo repeated clarifications, re-interpretations and revisions as the project evolves), the fundamental character of the object, including the basic concepts informing it, knowledge relevant to the project and the process of building the object itself (Figure 6.1). As distinct possibilities are envisioned, and design decisions are made, a final design gradually accretes. The design process is really only complete once the promised structure has been built (and perhaps not even then).8 As WKD explain, “Visualization is essential to this iterative and parallel development in order to make complex issues transparent, to understand the underlying structure and to identify objectives.”9 While in the design of small objects or mainstream architectural pedagogy this process might be quite solitary, in larger projects and in e-d/b projects, the process is a social one. Here, visualisation plays an additional role in coordinating the multiple stakeholders and actors in the project. They must not only imagine and endorse the structure that might be built but they also need to believe that it will come to exist. The accretion of the design into a viable project, represented by a stack of images and models, serves to convince, motivate and direct the various actors involved in completing the building itself.

1. Ammon, Sabine. (2017). Why Designing Is Not Experimenting: Design Methods, Epistemic Praxis and Strategies of Knowledge Acquisition in Architecture. Philosophy & Technology, 30(4), pp. 495–520. 2. Ibid. Also see Yaneva, Albena & Latour, Bruno (2008). Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture. In Reto Geiser (ed.). Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research. Basel: Birkhäuser. pp. 80–89. 3. Ammon, Sabine (2017). Why Designing Is Not Experimenting: Design Methods, Epistemic Praxis and Strategies of Knowledge Acquisition in Architecture. Philosophy & Technology, 30(4). p. 512.

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4. Walton, K. (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 5. Wölfel, Christian, Krzywinski, Jens & Drechsel, Frank (2013). Knowing, Reasoning and Visualizing in Industrial Design. The Knowledge Engineering Review, 28(3). pp. 287–302. 6. Ferguson, Eugene S. (1992). Engineering and the Mind’s Eye. Cambridge: MIT Press. 7. Wölfel, Christian, Krzywinski, Jens & Drechsel, Frank (2013). Knowing, Reasoning and Visualizing in Industrial Design. The Knowledge Engineering Review, 28(3). p. 291. 8. Yaneva, Albena & Latour, Bruno (2008). Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture. In Reto Geiser (ed.). Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research. Basel: Birkhäuser. pp. 80–89.

9. Wölfel, Christian, Krzywinski, Jens & Drechsel, Frank (2013). Knowing, Reasoning and Visualizing in Industrial Design. The Knowledge Engineering Review, 28(3). p. 290. 10. Ibid. 11. As Stephen Verderber explains in Chapter 2 in this volume.

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The first of the components identified by WKD are constraints and requirements.10 Spelling out these constraints and their origin helps us to appreciate the many actors, value judgments, manifest facts and knowledge (expert and otherwise) that guide the imaginative process and ultimately the build. Obviously, the client is the source of many of the initial constraints. They have a problem that they would like this new structure to solve or a function that they would like it to fulfill. Moreover, the client, as the one providing the necessary material means for the project, is arguably the ultimate arbiter of which constraints (beyond those determined by physics, liability risks and building codes) are non-negotiable. Beyond the constraints that are entailed by the function of the building, the client brings their aesthetic, ethical and political values, which also operate as constraints. These range from basic aesthetic preferences about what kinds of shapes and structures the client finds beautiful to political questions about who the structure is intended for and how these users are meant to inhabit it. A structure can keep people out or invite them in; it can be experienced as a place for anyone and everyone or only an exclusive few; and it can facilitate interaction or separation. As architects have always known, buildings influence how we live in them, thus architecture necessarily engages ethical values about how this new place should shape the lives of those living in it. Certain architectural firms have explicit values statements and, similarly, design/build programs typically have strong moral commitments to environmental sustainability and community-building.11 These basic, high-level constraints can interact and produce a cascade effect of secondary functions that serve the primary functions and values. More mundane constraints also shape design. The budget, availability of materials, as well as local people with relevant knowledge and skills are all at play and, of course, building codes and inspectors must all be satisfied. Questions of risk and liability provide constraints of their own and, indeed, in some cases they may be enough to scuttle a whole project.

The Social Epistemology of Thinking While Making Architecture

a. Basic Constraints

The Social Epistemology of Thinking While Making Architecture

Consider the Cape Breton Highlands National Park e-d/b project (Chapter 14). Parks Canada wanted a structure for their main campground that could house events, providing some protection from intemperate weather. This function implies certain constraints such as size and weather-proofing. Moreover, this client has certain non-negotiable value commitments. As a crown corporation they have a mandate of public service, but as a park they also have a commitment to sustainability and conservation. These constraints align with some of the value commitments of the Coastal Studio in particular, and e-d/b pedagogy generally. Initial constraints can interact, producing yet more constraints. For instance, the location and site of the build can determine what it means to fulfill a basic function. Protection from intemperate weather in Cape Breton means protection from wind, snow and rain; on the west coast this includes protection from the fierce suette winds. Contrast this with its counterpart project in Arizona, where protection from extreme weather conditions means providing shade (Chapter 11).

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b. Character and Concept

12. Wölfel, Christian, Krzywinski, Jens & Drechsel, Frank (2013). Knowing, Reasoning and Visualizing in Industrial Design. The Knowledge Engineering Review, 28(3). pp. 290–291. 13. Ibid. pp. 295–296

Even with this prodigious set of complex, interacting external constraints, there is still a substantial possibility-space left for designers to explore. Character and concept are initial ways of narrowing this down. The design concept has a substantial, subjective component, often influenced by the biography, preferences and culture of the designers. Even when the basic design concept is brought by the client, the designer interprets how this concept will inform the final design. WKD identify mood boards and concept sketches as ways that designers explore the concept—what they want the designed object to mean or suggest—early in the design process.12 These ideas and images are driven by the designer’s sense of what they want the user to experience when using the object.13 Like concept, character is fundamentally about how users are intended to occupy and experience the built structure. While WKD treat them as two sides of the same coin, concept and character may not be tightly linked. Consider the Sonoran Pentapus Pavilion

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Figure 6.1 Visualisation of the iterative design process from conception to project completion. Reproduced from “Knowing, Reasoning and Visualizing in Industrial Design,” Knowledge Engineering Review 28 (3), p. 290

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Figure 6.2 A pangolin, pictured in Sri Lanka, 2010.

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14. Studio Pangolin (n.d.). Studio Pangolin: Design Build Studio – University of Arizona. Retrieved from http://www.studiopangolin. love/. 15. Wölfel, Christian, Krzywinski, Jens & Drechsel, Frank (2013). Knowing, Reasoning and Visualizing in Industrial Design. The Knowledge Engineering Review, 28(3). pp. 287–302. 16. Ibid.

project designed by Studio Pangolin students at the University of Arizona in Tucson. It is easy to see how the pangolin (a family of scaly mammals, Manidae) offers a central concept and a key design element to this project (Figure 6.2 and Figure 6.3); the overall shape suggests the curve of a pangolin’s back and the cladding suggests the pangolin’s scales. In this way, the concept adds to the various constraints explored in the previous section: a range of aesthetic possibilities that help to determine the design. However, the character of Studio Pangolin’s pavilion has little to do with a small, scaly mammal. Instead, the project was designed with the following characteristics in mind: The project will be a SCAPE that merges landscape and architecture to create a symbiotic environment for plant and human inhabitation. This project will WALK THE WALK embodying and expressing the principles, values and aspirations of CAPLA [College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture], the premier institution in sustainable design, planning and management for arid regions. The project will be a NEXUS, introducing new circulation paths to connect existing corridors and will be programmed to maximize value and create stimulating spaces for the CAPLA community. This project will optimize human COMFORT by introducing shading systems, planning for a variety of ergonomic conditions and creating a safe environment for all users.14

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Here we see that on top of the aesthetic commitments implicit in the concept, there is another set of characteristics: the merging of landscape and architecture to suggest plant-human symbiosis; the reflection of institutional values around sustainable and arid region-appropriate design; the creation of a corridor intersection and meeting place; the creation of a shady, safe and inclusive space. The character of this structure is intended to facilitate certain ways of being and interacting, both with other people and the surrounding vegetative environment. The broader social meaning, the intended character and the experiences of the intended users are all crucial to the design. Obviously, the lines between concept, character and basic constraint—especially values—are not hard and fast. As WKD rightly maintain, there is no clear flow chart determining their order but rather an iterative process of trying to imagine how to interpret and meet these commitments and constraints through which the building-to-be gradually emerges (see Figure 6.1).15 For the projects discussed in this book, this possibility-space was firmly circumscribed by the choice of the gridshell as the basic architectural form. Nonetheless there is substantial freedom within the constraints set by the gridshell design and this is where concept and character provide further content to the design.

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c. Knowledge

Figure 6.3 Rendering of the University of Arizona Gridshell pavilion, Tucson, Arizona, 2016 (see Chapter 11).

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WKD apply the term “knowledge” rather more broadly than philosophers typically do, but their intent is to identify the types of quotidian and technical knowledge that a designer brings to a design.16 Some of this will be acquired through formal education and follows clearly articulable scientific principles, such as how to build a load-bearing arch or cantilever. This kind of knowledge is empirically verifiable and intersubjectively assessable— it’s the kind of thing that most philosophers happily identify as “knowledge.” However, as with other forms of artistic education, much of what is learned is tacit, rather than explicit, and more subjective in character. Like students of the visual arts (e.g., painting, sculpture), students of architecture develop portfolios that create a foundation

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for their professional practice. The technical skills of the discipline, the basic engineering knowledge of building, as well as the stylistic norms of the current culture are all developed under the guidance of professors, beside which personal creativity and individual style are fostered. Architectural experience increases this knowledge base, so, for instance, once a designer has solved a particular design problem in one project, they are likely to bring a similar solution to comparable problems in the future.17 Again, this type of practical knowledge may be tacit or explicit, depending on the type of problem at hand. The Interplay of Constraint and Freedom in Choice The creativity of design understood in this iterative process is not characterised by some ultimate imaginative freedom, but rather though imaginative, rule-bound play within constraints. Indeed, insofar as the adage necessity is the mother of invention is true, it is because creative freedom is contextual. Opportunities and innovations arise in specific places. One can see this by reflecting on what it means to be completely free from constraints. What are the conditions for such maximal freedom? The void of space seems as free from constraint as humanly possible, but in such an environment one would have nothing at all and thus lack the positive freedom to achieve or create anything. The objects in, and the character of, the world around us provide constraints that close off some possibilities while simultaneously suggesting and opening up others. Although, strictly speaking, these suggested possibilities were there all along, they may have gone unnoticed in the sheer vastness of a less circumscribed possibility-space. In turn, in the imaginative accretion of designs through the iterative processes described by WKD, the possibility-space of what the final object might be evolves until a single, possible object is determined as the one to be actualised.18 This gradual accretion means that each design decision not only closes off possibilities for the future of the building, but also suggests and clarifies design opportunities.

Visualisation and Three Types of Design Image With the iterative, social, local character of design described, we are equipped to consider another crucial tool in this process—visualisation, which is often externalised in drawings, models and other visual media.19 As noted above, concept and character are often initially explored visually, but images play a variety of crucial roles throughout the design process. Once we articulate these basic roles, we can weave them into the account of design offered by WKD, which will provide us with a general vocabulary for thinking about the social and visual processes of design. Eugene Ferguson identifies three functional kinds of sketches that are employed in engineering, which can be generalised to articulate three distinct kinds of epistemic roles that design images more generally play.20 First are thinking sketches which “focus and guide nonverbal thinking.”21 These are the externalisation of thoughts that help designers visually explore and develop their ideas about concept and character, which enable them to try out possible designs and solutions to various design problems. These thinking images also serve as a kind of extended memory, allowing designers to keep track of fleeting ideas and inspirations that otherwise would be lost. The mood board and concept sketches that WKD identify as crucial visual tools early in the design process are paradigmatic examples of thinking images. The epistemic role here is solitary, supporting the design process of a single epistemic subject, in contrast to the other two types of design image which are communicative with and to other persons. Ferguson’s prescriptive sketch is often the penultimate picture in a design process: this type of sketch functions to direct the draftsperson in making the finished engineering drawings.22 More generally, however, we can identify this functional kind of design image as one that specifies what is to be built in the final, determinate design and is thus intended to guide builders in the execution of the project. These prescriptive sketches include the formal architectural drawings that are approved by engineers and inspectors. Because these images determine what is built, they come to accurately represent the

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17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ferguson, Eugene S. (1992). Engineering and the Mind’s Eye. Cambridge: MIT Press. 21. Ibid. p. 97. 22. Ferguson, Eugene S. (1992). Engineering and the Mind’s Eye. Cambridge: MIT Press. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid.

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verifiable, empirical facts about the finished building, even while they may fail to capture the building’s character, concept or social meaning. In general, any image that determines the final design, prescribing what is to be built, will be a prescriptive image. Talking sketches typically appear earlier in the design process. They are members of a class of deliberative image, which typically do their work before the prescriptive architectural drawings are rendered. These are the go-to tools in the social practice of design. As Ferguson notes, when designers are talking about the objects-to-be and various building processes they often do so with a pencil in hand, sketching the features under discussion. Whether a designer is arguing with a colleague about the feasibility of a design feature or clarifying some aspect for a hired hand, talking sketches are pervasive (Figure 6.4).23 They may even be collectively drawn by the people deliberating, with a pencil being shared between speakers as they attempt to understand or convince each other.24 The general function of deliberative images in design is to facilitate consensus within the relevant group of actors on the myriad decisions that go into determining a design and building it. I think a fourth kind of image must be added to Ferguson’s utilitarian list—something I will call vision images. These are the pictures and models that intrigue and inspire. They are designed to get viewers to invest in the project (emotionally, perhaps financially and/or institutionally), convincing them that it can and should be built, through helping them imagine what the building will be like. Often, detailed scale models or artist’s drawings are created for this role, but other types of images may be strategically deployed also. For instance, a technical drawing that accompanies an artist’s rendition in a presentation may serve more to exhibit the technical skills and professionalism of the designer than to help the target audience imagine the building. In those moments when the only evidence of the building-to-be is a hole in the ground and a pile of rubble, the vision image holds the promise that it will all work out in the end, even when, in reality, its future is by no means certain. When considered alongside the iterative design process described by WKD, one can appreciate the central role played by vision,

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Figure 6.4 Design process sketch, Cape Breton Highlands pavilion, 2016.

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thinking and deliberative images.25 The architect’s job of convincing, motivating and directing various actors is achieved through getting these others to adopt the architect’s vision—a vision that is communicated through images and models. The problem is, how can the various actors know that they are envisioning and agreeing to the same thing? The simple answer is they can’t, and when we understand how the content of images is determined it is easy to see why.

25. Ferguson’s types of sketches are best thought of as functional kinds, since certain images are able to play more than one role. For instance, what starts as a thinking image may become central to a presentation to a client and thus become a vision image. A deliberative image may explain or convince a builder of a certain aspect of the design and so become prescriptive. Although this understanding departs from Ferguson’s original schema, this functional classification better meets the needs of a social epistemology of design. 26. Walton, Kendall L. (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 27. Ibid. pp. 40–41. 28. Ibid. pp. 140–144 & 294–324.

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29. Meynell, Letitia (2012). The Politics of Pictured Reality: Locating the Object from Nowhere in fMRI. In Robyn Bluhm, Heidi Lene Maibom & A. Jaap Jacobson (eds.) Neurofeminism: Issues at the Intersection of Feminist Theory and Cognitive Neuroscience. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 11–29. 30. Walton, Kendall L. (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 31. Ibid. pp. 40–41.

Walton’s Analysis and the Challenges of Collective Imagining with Images According to Walton, representational images are props in games of make-believe that work to create coordinated collective imaginings.26 Two features of representations are particularly relevant in the design context: 1) that their content is fixed through what Walton calls “principles of generation” (PGs)27; and 2) that their content is importantly underdetermined and even incomplete in a number of distinct ways.28 These two features have both positive and negative ramifications: each individual brings their own cultural and personal background and cognitive and perceptual skills to an image to see it from their own perspective. This subjectivity is what helps viewers, importantly, make what they imagine their own; further, this helps them to imagine the building-to-be in their futures. However, this subjectivity also means that, when considering images, individuals will attend to different features and will fill in, in their own way, aspects of the building-to-be that were left out of the image itself. The problem with such personal readings is that the flexibility of image interpretation is prone to produce disagreements about what is actually represented in the image.29 This interpretive challenge sits alongside iterative interactions between concept, character and constraints, leading various actors and audiences to disagree about what content should be in an image and what depicted structures are most viable or desirable. The seriousness of the problem can be appreciated when we consider the extent to which we use our imaginations to fill out what is not actually present in an image but is inferred from what it depicts.

Figure 6.5 Cape Breton Highlands Gridshell pavilion, Nova Scotia, longitudinal section drawing, 2016.

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Consider, for example, when one part of a depicted object is occluded by something else in the scene; even if we don’t know exactly what is supposed to be there, we fill it in with something plausible. We don’t, for instance, look at an artist’s rendering of an office building that only shows two walls and assume it’s designed like a doll house with no fourth wall and then comment on the inadequacy of the design. We understand the tacit rules of interpreting images and that we are to read into the image the existence of occluded features. On top of this, we have knowledge of the physical structure of office buildings and know they tend to be total enclosures. What is it that explains both the fact that there are right and wrong ways of imagining the scene depicted and that we all know what they are? This situation is where Walton introduces the concept of PGs.30 These principles include the cognitive capacities, habits of mind, cultural conventions, stipulations and background assumptions that we bring to marks on a page and through which we glean their content. We often do this work so naturally and effortlessly that we do not notice that we are doing it. Other PGs, however, are acquired skills that take considerable effort to learn and apply.31 Compare the capacity to see objects in simple line drawings—a capacity often practiced and unconsciously honed throughout our lives—versus seeing the object depicted in a technical drawing in third angle projection, which must consciously be taught and learned. In design processes, concept, character and constraints can also act as PGs prescribing what is to be imagined.

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When someone creates an image, they draw on those PGs readily available to them. In design, often, such images will be communicative—a deliberative or prescriptive image—but sometimes these will be thinking images. However, even if a thinking image is produced purely for a designer’s private use (because the PGs employed are either biological traits, culturally inculcated, discipline-informed practices or project-specific commitments) it will often be intelligible to others with similar cultural and disciplinary backgrounds. Of course, if an image is communicative, a designer will make use of the standard styles and genres, employing PGs they expect their audience to be able to deploy because they want their image to be understood. It’s worth drawing attention to the fact that the content of an image is not only determined by perceptual and cognitive skills but also by our background knowledge. Here the trick is that what is known is culturally and historically located. So, for instance, in our society we have considerably more knowledge of engineering-relevant physics than anyone would have had 1,000 years ago. Would the master builders of Durham Cathedral have believed that the Cape Breton Highlands gridshell would stand up from looking at the drawings (Figure 6.5)? Perhaps, but only by the grace of God, as they would have neither known the relevant physics as working principles, nor the relevant construction practices, nor the relevant experience of similar structures to understand how it could stand. Perhaps a 21st-century architect could explain it to them well enough for them to believe it, but they would have to put their faith in someone, whether that was God or an architect. The open-ended nature of design that I have described as a gradual process of accretion adds another way in which an image can be incomplete. Unlike the above example of occlusion where the wall, though not depicted, is properly inferred to be part of the imagined building, early design images often have murky aspects that, though obliquely referred to, are not yet sufficiently specified to be depicted in any detail: sometimes a generic filler is in its place; sometimes the image is simply unfinished. It’s as if the designer is saying of these aspects, “don’t worry about

this bit yet, pay attention to what I want you to look at and let’s decide on that first and then we can fill in the rest.” The viewer is left to either fill in the details or bracket off the architectural feature to be determined at a later date. The extent to which it is possible for viewers to find such an image intelligible–that is, whether they are able to see the buildingto-come as a real possibility–will depend on their own sense of what good design requires and what features of a structure must be fixed in order for a design to move beyond fanciful play to the production of a plausible picture of possible objects.32 Once we really appreciate the diversity of these different kinds (cultural and disciplinary) and sources of PGs, and how different skill levels may be, we can begin to appreciate the challenges of getting all viewers to imagine the same thing even when they are looking at the same image. The difficulty is all the more acute because of the open-ended, iterative, character of the design process. We can see ways in which collective imagining and the gradually accreting decision process that characterises design is likely to create conflict and disagreement. It is not simply that people may disagree about the substance of the design but, particularly when people come from multiple disciplinary and lay backgrounds, and thus view the images using quite different PGs, they may simply see different things in the same image. This attention to the social epistemology of design images foregrounds a particular role for the many client meetings, project meetings and community consultations (such as charrettes) that typically accompany architectural projects. These are not only points of negotiation and decision, but they are places where, through practicing collective imaginings, relevant PGs are communicated and acquired. Collective Architectural Practices and Design/Build Pedagogy We are now equipped to see how e-d/b pedagogy offers important learning opportunities that may not be available in traditional architecture classes. In “Building Consensus: Design Media and Multimodality in Architecture Education,” Nicholas and Oak explore

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32. For an interesting example, see Nicholas, Claire & Oak, Arlene (2018). Building Consensus: Design Media and Multimodality in Architecture Education. Discourse & Society, 29(4). pp. 442–449. 33. Ibid. p. 436. 34. Ibid. p. 436. 35. Yaneva, Albena & Latour, Bruno (2008). Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture. In Reto Geiser (ed.). Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research. Basel: Birkhäuser. pp. 80–89.

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some of the ways in which architectural education requires students to develop skills of persuasion that convince their audience through “the ‘convergence’ of multiple design media on the same ‘idea’ or gestalt.”33 This convergence requires not only technical competency in the production and presentation of images, models and so forth but, “It is also a social achievement: an effect of composing and coordinating multimodal semiotic media according to shared representational and communicative conventions.”34 This kind of collective imagining, characteristic of the design review (or “critique”) is standard fare in architecture education. However, there are certain architectural skills of communication it cannot test or even reveal. First of all, because student designers and their student-professor audiences often share many of the same or similar PGs, the difficulties of communicating through images across disciplinary or expert/lay lines will not be encountered or even addressed. While such encounters are often frustrating and may be thought to take away from the real substance of the design itself, they are in fact an important part of architectural practice. Clients should, and builders must, understand what is to be built and having the architect help them to see the building-to-be through images is a crucial part of this. The fact that e-d/b projects have real clients and engage real builders and craftspeople provides examples of these communicative encounters and may even include opportunities for students to negotiate them themselves. Secondly, you can’t really simulate the design process without some kind of “object in the world” as the intended outcome. As Bruno Latour and Albena Yavena have pointed out, the tumultuous character of architectural design is not limited to the ever-revisable stack of images; the materials and the building itself transform.35 Although the focus of these authors is on the changeability of the built structure, their point is that the materials, the location, and those who pass through the site interact and affect each other. This instability is yet more acute in the building process itself—sites are found to be unsuitable for the planned concrete foundation, glue fails with a particular wood that has been chosen, a key material is unavailable— and so the design changes. Certain design

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failures, like epistemic failures more generally, are discovered when the real world pushes back. Finally, despite the many setbacks that real building projects encounter, the shared vision must be strong enough for everyone to continue to believe that the structure can and will be built. It must be remembered that it is not simply the content of the design that is communicated but the vision and commitment that make a project possible. The conduct and comportment of architecture professors who lead e-d/b projects provide strong role models of professional engagement in achieving this remarkable feat. The design/build students themselves are not only followers here: they too have a role to play in fostering and guiding this collective imagining, particularly when the design/ build process itself involves students in client consultations and charrettes. The best way to learn how to inspire and coordinate a diverse group of people in the project of imagining a building into reality is by doing it.

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The Lafayette Strong Pavilion: An Unhurried Building

The Lafayette Strong Pavilion: An Unhurried Building W. Geoff Gjertson, AIA

The Lafayette Strong Pavilion: An Unhurried Building Figure 7.1 Site plan.

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When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.1 – Henry David Thoreau Introduction

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The University of Louisiana at Lafayette School of Architecture and Design’s Building Institute was founded in 2002 by this author, along with Professors Edward Cazayoux and Hector LaSala. Professors Cazayoux and LaSala had been engaged with educational design/build projects (e-d/b) for 20 years and yet these courses were not known pedagogically by this name or described as “service-learning.” They were simply called “hands-on learning.” Excerpted from the official UL Building Institute web page, the Building Institute’s statement of purpose reads: The Building Institute (BI) is UL Lafayette’s integrated project delivery, develop design/build institute. The Building Institute provides an opportunity for students to act. It is founded upon the belief that the act of making meaningful architecture requires our students to take responsibility for their designs: culturally, socially, politically, fiscally and technically. Students design and build projects ranging in size from small site installations such as seating and play areas to large-scale projects such as pavilions and housing. Our students work hand-in-hand with local contractors to build projects that achieve sustainability standards such as the National Homebuilder’s Green Building Standard, or LEED. The Building Institute is structured through a graduate design studio in the fall, the construction documents course in the spring and the construction course in the summer. Students receive academic credit for

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1. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden (1854). 2. Anon. (2016). Building Institute. Retrieved from http://architecture.louisiana.edu/community-research/building-institute.

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The institute was formally launched by means of the donation of a historic 1850s Acadian home and a corresponding monetary gift for start-up expenses. The restoration of this structure was completed in 2003. Over time, the scope of the program has evolved, been expanded and further clarified. However, like many e-d/b programs in North America, the institute has been opportunistic, accepting service-based projects where there was a need. Social justice and sustainability issues have been at the core of these projects, including multiple installations for a homeless shelter, a playground for the Boys and Girls Club, affordable housing and the US Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon competition. We continue to take pride in the societal contributions the institute has achieved through these architectural and social enterprise interventions. The institute, throughout, has remained committed to its core mission of addressing local sites and social needs and in building relationships with local charities, grassroots advocacy organisations, allied professionals and industry. To maximise the level of community involvement, the operative format and the curriculum need to remain somewhat flexible. The program operates as an architectural elective and is taught every semester, including summers, by one to four faculty members with one faculty member serving as team leader to provide coordination and continuity. In the summer, as mentioned, the course operates as a paid internship for the student leaders.

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each course and, in addition, several team leaders receive paid summer internships that allow them to accrue NCARB (National Council of Architectural Registration Board) IDP (Intern Development Program) credit. The Building Institute provides students in the School of Architecture and Design a link between knowledge and understanding by providing a place for direct building experience. This experience not only teaches the craft of how materials are assembled but also team collaboration, conflict resolution, financial management and client communication, with a structure in place that allows participation in service-learning, thus institutionalizing pedagogy and service.2

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Figure 7.2 Lafayette Strong Pavilion, Louisiana, 2017.

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The curriculum of the typical institute studio course, like most traditional architecture studios, begins with a syllabus and project brief. Details, including program and scheduling matters not immediately specified in this syllabus/brief, are later articulated through client/sponsor meetings and a preliminary design charrette exercise. Course goals and the criteria for student learning evaluation are predicated not only on the student’s performance, but also on her or his ability to grapple with real-world constraints often faced by architects in daily professional practice. This e-d/b learning context presents students with the challenge of meeting a prescribed schedule—often compressed to fit a tight timeline within a single academic year—while concurrently producing a tangible, measurable, physical outcome then subjected to the approval and judgment of a real client/sponsor with real needs. Students are therefore evaluated based on the outcome of the overall built project plus one’s individual contribution, together with the ability to work together effectively within a team context, with this latter facet of one’s performance largely judged based on anonymous peer evaluations. The overarching pedagogical intent of the institute is to engender a critical, poetical and ethical design and building delivery process. Often, because of unforeseen programmatic, budgetary and scheduling restraints, this process is shaped and reshaped by improvisational yet collaborative design decision making as much as by pre-specified project management, technical criteria or construction timetables. The teaching/learning of ethical and critical design principles in e-d/b curricula requires faculty mentorship within highly experiential learning environments. These principles carry through from the studio to the construction site, where professors serve the dual role as mentors for their apprentice students and as architect-of-record for the completed studio project. In this manner the overall program continually strives to inculcate in each student a broad understanding of professional responsibility and collaboration without stifling students’ own independence and creativity.3 It is widely known that many universities’ e-d/b programs exist within the pedagogical margins of their institutions, although as mentioned, it is indeed officially sanctioned

at UL Lafayette.4 In fact, participating faculty have received faculty service-leadership, teaching and research awards from the university for completed, institute-based projects. As concluded in “House Divided: Challenges to Design/Build from Within,” e-d/b programs like the Building Institute tend not to be fully integrated into the curriculum.5 They are seldom required courses and as optional electives they remain in the margins. Colleagues and institutions often question the academic value and rigor of e-d/b even though students and community partners almost universally proclaim its importance. Origins of the Lafayette Strong Pavilion The functional imperative for the Lafayette gridshell had been put in place well in advance of any prospects for engagement with any local client/sponsor. The mandate of the team’s grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) was the primary driver at the time of project inception; we were drawn together with SSHRC as the primary granting/funding agency as client/sponsor through sheer serendipity.6 Based upon a previous design/ build project, the COURhouse (a market-rate, affordable and sustainable infill home built by the Building Institute),7 Gerd Wuestemann, executive director of the Acadiana Centre for the Arts, arranged a meeting to discuss the possibility of future collaboration. In particular, we discussed the proposed Art Park along Camellia Boulevard in Lafayette, Louisiana. Public art has long been a passionate topic in the community, and as such we found ourselves in a synergistic position: the idea of an open-air gridshell fit perfectly into this context as both a public art artefact and as a work of architecture (Figures 7.1 and 7.2). A comprehensive master plan of this proposed art park acknowledged that, despite a locally rich musical, culinary and artistic tradition and culture, the architectural design quality of the overall built environment of Lafayette left much to be desired. In the 1970s, as in many fast-growing communities, the downtown core was abandoned as the suburban districts began to sprawl. This, combined with an acute absence of smart growth zoning codes, created large-scale, inhospitable,

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3. Gjertson, W. Geoff & LaSala, Hector (2005, May). Accelerated Fabrication: A Catalytic Agent within a Community of Change. Journal of Architectural Education, 58(4). pp. 12–17. It should be noted that although the professor serves as the mentoring architect-of-record, UL Lafayette requires a separate professional-of-record, for liability purposed, outside of the university.

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4. Gjertson, W. Geoff (2013). A House Divided: Challenges for Design/ Build Programs in Architecture Schools. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACSA Fall Conference: Local Identities Global Challenges. Washington: ACSA Press. pp. 23–35. 5. Ibid. 6. Thinking While Doing: Connecting Insight to Innovations in the Construction Sector. Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Partnership Grant. Cavanagh, Project Director. Gjertson, Co-Applicant. March, 2013. 7. Anon. (2013). COURhouse. Retrieved from http://ulbuildinginstitute. com/2014/09/courhouse/.

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non-pedestrian environments throughout the metro area. Public art and architecture were at long last being discussed and increasingly viewed as tangible vehicles to enhance the local cultural experience of the public realm. The installation of a structure of this type, on the Camellia Boulevard site offered by the city, was perceived by many elected officials and members of the community to be a positive step in the right direction. From the outset, Joey Durel, the parish president at the time, was enthusiastic about the idea of a project of this type and scope—even before any visual representations of the design concept had been shown. From start to finish, the Lafayette gridshell project would eventually span four academic semesters, through fall of 2014 to the fall of 2015. Although initially projected as a four-month project, it actually took 18 months to complete. During the Fall 2015 graduate studio, nine students generated individual ideas, and each developed an individual design proposal, eventually working together to shape the final design proposal. The final design and form finding of the gridshell benefited immensely from the contributions of each studio member, with each student’s independent research invaluable to the collective effort. The final outcome was truly a synthesis of the team members’ varied and diverse perspectives and methods. Toward the end of the first fall term, and once a final design was articulated, the students worked collectively toward producing design development drawings and building a half-scale mock-up of the gridshell. Following these steps, during the Spring 2015 elective design/build course, two graduate students and seven undergraduate students took on the role of advancing the detail specifications of the gridshell, working very closely with engineers and material suppliers. Subsequently, in Summer 2015, 13 graduate students began prefabricating components and overseeing the installation of the foundation by a local building contractor. Finally, during the Fall 2015 semester,11 graduate students assembled the final gridshell. The public dedication was held on January 2, 2016. The City/Parish of Lafayette, Louisiana, is now the owner and caretaker of the structure. Due to the life span limitations of timber structures in the hot, humid climate of southern Louisiana, it is projected the

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gridshell will likely need to be disassembled with its materials recycled by 2035 with the intent of replacing it with a new structure on the same site.8 Ultimately, as with most public endeavours of this nature, any definition of “success” is greatly indebted to the local citizenry-at-large. The project team presented the final design proposal to various committees consisting of the parish president and staff, city/parish council members, a neighbouring church and various local grassroots groups no less than 10 times before gaining formal approval to begin construction. While local citizens remain the primary stakeholders and beneficiaries, in the end, the only public taxpayer dollars spent on this structure were for sidewalks and the use of temporary construction equipment on-site. Midway through the project the faculty and students decided to dedicate and name the Lafayette Gridshell, the “Lafayette Strong Pavilion” to honour the strength, resilience and unity of the Lafayette community following the local Grand 16 Theatre shootings in which two women were killed, in July 2015. The Lafayette community started a Lafayette Strong campaign to focus on the existing humanitarian community’s strengths. The gridshell theatre commemorates Lafayette’s resolve.

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8. The new structure intended to be built in 2030–2035 will not necessarily be a gridshell. 9. Anon. (2015). Camellia Boulevard Gridshell Pavilion. Retrieved from https://www.indiegogo. com/projects/camellia-boulevard-gridshell-pavilion#/.

Throughout the project, fundraising was of utmost concern for the student-faculty team. Staking out a new fundraising path, we decided to try online crowd-funding the gridshell. An online platform was seen by the team as the best way to raise the $10,000– $20,000 (USD) needed at minimum to complete the project. We began by producing a promotional video with one of the university’s animation professors and tried using a local online crowd-funding site, Civicside. com. However, since this process was new to the university, it took several weeks to gain formal approval from the provost and UL Lafayette University Foundation. Ultimately, Indiegogo.com proved a better choice, as it supported partnerships with nonprofit organisations such as ours.9

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Figure 7.3 Lafayette Strong Pavilion, Lafayette, design prototyping: plaster cast models exploring gridshell permutations, 2014.

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Our student-faculty team was the first to rally behind a campaign of this type at our university, to generate needed public interest, awareness, support, and subsequent donations. Beyond this, the students and faculty ourselves willingly contributed our own money to the campaign in support of our collective vision. This fundraising campaign eventually raised over $10,000 (USD) with the remaining $18,000 (USD) required for the escalating cost of the gridshell provided by the not-for-profit Lafayette Public Trust Financing Authority. The total budget for the project would eventually escalate to approximately $80,000 (USD) exclusive of in-kind contributions of student labour and discounts/donations of many materials and subcontractor time and labour. Schematic Design and Design Development

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The project, as previously mentioned, was conceived in early 2014, and we formalised most stakeholder agreements during that summer. By the start of the fall semester that year, although the grant funding had not been fully secured, the student-faculty team was determined to begin work. The program narrative, as “assigned” for the project, was “An Interpretive Pavilion for the Camellia Boulevard Art Park.” The design process and operative parameters for the Lafayette gridshell had been spelled out in the semester’s studio syllabus: We will begin with form finding. That is, the process of designing or actually “finding” the shape of the gridshell. We will use computational or digital models (Rhino, Grasshopper, and others) as well as physical or analog models (wood & plaster). There are an infinite number of structural forms available. Engineering is critical to the design of a gridshell. We will work directly with Blackwell Engineering’s Bryan Schopf & Anthony Spick in Toronto, Ontario, also Lawrence Friesen, an Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, consultant to GENGEO, and Tutor at the Architectural Association (formerly with Buro Happold) and also our local engineering consultant, Randall Hebert, PE.

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Figure 7.4 Overlapping wood laths and blocking node connections, Lafayette Strong Pavilion, Louisiana, 2015.

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Research into gridshells, form-finding, and half-size and full-size mock-ups will lead to the construction of a gridshell pavilion for the City/Parish of Lafayette, Louisiana. The Lafayette gridshell is one of five being built by four schools of architecture: UL Lafayette, University of Arizona, University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Dalhousie University. These structures are part of a Design/Build Exchange (dbX) initiative being funded by a Canadian SSHRC Grant, based in Ottawa, Canada. The purpose of this grant is to share best practices among the schools and within the construction industry. By comparing each structure and its design and construction processes (each in unique climatic environments) the grant will document best practices in teaching, logistics, material science and design. Parallel to the built projects, the Design/ Build Exchange (dbX) network, database and website will be established as a part of the grant which will link and provide research to all schools in North America (and beyond) carrying out design/build studio projects. This pavilion will provide: »»Protection from the direct sun for 20 persons (minimum) »»Foundation and paving

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»»Built-in seating for seven persons »»An enclosed and ventilated storage area to accommodate tables/chairs

»»Signage/map/interpretive information about the sculpture park and sculptures/artists »»Lighting for informational purposes, and security provisions »»Durability/low-maintenance for an approximate 15 to 20-year life span10

In retrospect, it is almost humorous how naïvely ambitious the initial project brief was in terms of its construction timetable. We anticipated the studio participating in hands-on work with Habitat for Humanity during the first two or three weeks, followed by completing schematic design in five weeks, then completing design development and a halfsize mock-up in five weeks, completing a full set of construction documentation in three more weeks and then beginning construction during the last two weeks of the first semester. This schedule proved far too ambitious, but the students remained deft, fleet-footed and adaptable to delays, changes and unanticipated obstacles thrown at them on the fly. As such, we completed the half-size mock-up and a minimal set of viable technical drawings by December 2015. However, at this time, it became apparent that the schedule and budget were inaccurate. Inadequate funding meant we would need to begin to identify potential sources of additional support. Additionally, the lack of direct experience with this type of design/build structure on the part of the student-faculty team precluded any more accurate forecasting in terms of scheduling or budgeting. Students began the design process by analysing the site’s macro and micro conditions, identifying constraints and parameters for construction. In parallel, abstract form-finding processes using plaster, fabric and wood began to generate a catalogue of many possible forms. The initial purpose of using plasterformed models as a form-finding exercise was based on the theory of catenary volumes. Catenary volumes as expressed in this context are a three-dimensional translation of much simpler two-dimensional principles of catenary curves: As defined by Merriam Webster, a catenary curve is “the curve assumed by a cord of uniform density and cross-section

that is perfectly flexible but not capable of being stretched and that hangs freely from two fixed points.”11 The inversion of such a curve along the vertical axis, then, expresses the most direct path of force resolution. This principle was applied in three-dimensional space and it began to inform us of the most efficient volumes upon which we should then base the form of our evolving structure. Boundaries were cut through rigid boards; fabric was stretched over these boards and plaster was poured into the voids. The boards were suspended high enough from the work surface to allow for stretching and deformation of the fabric, allowing catenary volumes to take shape under the force of gravity. Once the plaster shapes were set, they were removed from the forms and studied in great detail. To create openings, the plaster forms were sliced to form gables or arches. The initial exercises were purely abstract—mostly explorations of the capabilities and limitations of the plaster form-finding process itself. As this experiment unfolded, instances were noted where certain shapes caused bunching or excessive (or insufficient) deformation. This plaster model-making process was indispensable, helping us to become familiar with more structurally favourable forms and the limitations of such a system. Following the completion of the team’s site explorations and documentation, a series of design proposals were examined in relation to the site. Here, the forms began to take on a far more precise and purposeful direction. Close coordination with the team’s computer modelling subgroup members helped this process along with respect to both the plaster modelling and parallel computer modelling as a means to achieve an eventual resolution of the final form-finding phase (Figure 7.3). Of particular significance at this point in time was the face-to-face input to the project provided by Fraser Plaxton, a Master of Architecture degree student at Dalhousie University. He had been a key member of the student-faculty team that had just completed the erection of the Chéticamp Farmers’ Market gridshell in Nova Scotia (see Chapter 4). Fraser’s confidence, expertise and keen enthusiasm was immediately impactful, especially in the digital modelling process, giving the UL Lafayette students further motivation, skill sets and self-confidence. In addition, the

Engineering, Documentation and Governmental Approval The spring semester, institute-affiliated coursework consisted of construction documentation, the procurement of subcontractors and miscellaneous suppliers prior to the start of construction in the summer term. The scope of the project, however, included this and far more. The baseline tasks for this semester as defined at the outset were as follows: 1. Designing the roofscape cladding system 2. Structural load testing with the ULLafayette engineering department12 3. Finalising the construction documents 4. Prototyping the roof cladding with Begneaud Manufacturing13 5. Ordering all materials and equipment for construction 6. Obtaining all applicable building permits and the initiation of site-work 7. Guiding/assisting the forming-up of the concrete foundation walls 8. Observing foundation pouring and on-site grading 9. Fabricating the structural node plates and milling all lath components 10. Producing assembly instructions for the summer erection of the structure 11. Developing and performing in Water Warp.14

11. Catenary (n.d.) In Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ catenary. 12. The engineers did not ultimately require this testing.

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13. It should be stated that Don Begneaud of Begneaud Manufacturing became a major partner and collaborator in the design and fabrication process of the Lafayette gridshell. 14. Gjertson, syllabus. ARCH 482. Spring 2015. The proposed Water Warp project was an interdisciplinary, multi-media performance encompassing architecture, dance, video and music. The theme of the Festival of the Arts where it was preformed was water. Water was the generating theme for the Lafayette gridshell. A halfsize version of the gridshell was the primary set piece for the performance. The half-size gridshell was constructed in fall 2014 and was reassembled for the ArTECH Fusion Event on March 20, 2015. It was the reassembly and raising which was incorporated into a multi-media performance with dancers ritually elevating the structure and creating space.

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Two continuing graduate students (one for academic credit, one as a graduate assistant) and seven new undergraduate students enrolled in the course. In addition to the extensive list of tasks outlined above, the

10. Gjertson, syllabus, ARCH 501. Fall 2014.

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entire Louisiana-based student-faculty team as it was composed at that juncture traveled to Nova Scotia to present their design to the Thinking While Doing collective research team, and then visited the recently completed structure in Chéticamp, Nova Scotia (Figure 7.4). In addition, the UL Lafayette student-faculty team met and collaborated with the UNC Charlotte, U of A and Dalhousie University faculty-student teams in Charlotte, North Carolina in a form-finding workshop in February of 2015.

Figure 7.5 a-b Lafayette Strong Pavilion, Louisiana, constructing foundations, 2015.

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15. Although students have done foundation work in the past, the Building Institute has found that subcontracting this work is the most efficient and productive way to begin a project (especially due to the need for heavy machinery). 16. Blackwell Engineers of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, were hired as the engineers for all of the gridshell projects throughout the TWD grant.

pressures of fundraising weighed heavy on the team. But the most difficult aspects of the project were negotiating with the engineers who were spearheading research of their own alongside this project and gaining approval from the city/parish council for a public art project in what they perceived was an already over-privileged, wealthy part of town. Due to these complexities, most of the tasks were delayed by several months. The concrete foundation, scheduled to be poured during Fall 2015, did not start construction until May 2015. We held invited bids for the foundation work, and after receiving two bids, JB Mouton, LLC was selected (Figures 7.5 a-b and 7.6 a-b).15 An interesting—and entirely unanticipated—outcome of the project was that the halfsize mock-up model was used as the set in a multi-media project consisting of video and animation, music and a dance performance. Together with Professor Ashlie Latiolais, we coordinated the architectural aspect of this performance art project along with performing arts and music faculty, who choreographed and staged it. It was held at the UL–Lafayette College of the Art’s ArTECH Fusion in Spring 2015. This performance became a means to fully re-envision the structure as an object, space and interactive armature in the public realm. Procurement and Prefabrication After nearly a year of tirelessly working on the project, there was still much to do. Initially we were optimistic that the student-faculty

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Figure 7.6 a-b Full-scale mock-up of a structural termination joint, Lafayette Strong Pavilion, Louisiana, 2015.

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team would build the gridshell during summer 2014. After all, they had gotten through the formidable gauntlet of engineering and governmental approvals. Little did they know that the hardest and most disappointing aspects of the project lay just ahead. We had planned to top out the structure by the end of July (the end of the summer semester) and later install the perforated aluminum cladding in early fall with a formal dedication in October (Figure 7.7 a-b). However, after sorting, grading and beginning to scarf-joint the white-oak rift-sawn laths, load-testing was preformed. The joints broke immediately. Different types of glue were tested and multiple consultations with engineers and suppliers ensued. At the insistence of the glue manufacturer and based on testing of this product in the past, Blackwell Engineers16 encouraged the team to continue on the specified path. As an extra measure of protection, two stainless-steel screws were added to each of the over-1,000 scarf joints. This was quite time consuming: every joint required four clamps, predrilled holes for the screws, application of a two-part polyurethane glue mixture and 24 hours of set time. The problem was not necessarily with the glue itself, as specified, but with the required size of the laths–11/8” thick × 13/4” wide. At such thickness, the kiln-dried, rift-sawn timber members proved too stiff to bend properly. When loaded with intense weight and forced to bend immediately, these joints failed (Figure 7.8). To meet the moisture-resistance and strength criteria, white oak was chosen, and the only white oak available that could meet the specified straight grain characteristics of the engineer— no more than a 1:10 grain slope—was kilndried and rift-sawn wood. This material is extremely expensive, very stout and is typically used for interior millwork such as cabinetry and trim. Despite the failed trials, the perseverance of the students alleviated some of the concerns of the faculty coordinator, although this was certainly a gloomy moment of doubt for the overall life of the project. I eventually had a revelation when speaking to an elderly, local master woodworker. One must imagine wood not simply as an inanimate building material, but as a living thing. The fibers of the wood literally had to stretch and lengthen.

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Figure 7.7 a-b Construction detail drawings showing nodal connections and foundation interfaces, Lafayette Strong Pavilion, Louisiana, 2015.

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We had spent week upon week trying to force the wood to conform to our will, until finally realising that to properly bend white oak, we had to slowly and gently coax it— allowing it to deform in its own time. Ultimately, a team totaling 13 graduate students, fortified by a supplemental force of graduate students arriving from Dalhousie University (who spent two weeks in residence in Louisiana), were only able to process and glue half of the wood. Scaffolding was set up and some of the long 40-foot laths were draped over it, allowing the wood to deform under its own weight. Elastic cords and ropes were added to keep the wood elements in place should bad weather pass through. The foundation was completed by the subcontractor and the steel baseplates and piping were installed although actual gridshell erection had to be postponed to the Fall 2015 semester (Figure 7.9 a-b and Figure 7.10).17 Construction

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17. Randy LeBlanc of Metal head was also a major partner and collaborator in the design and fabrication of the Lafayette gridshell.

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We became optimistic once again, after letting the wood take its natural course through the extended timeframe of the bending process. Note of caution: one must always remain somewhat optimistic and naïve to try to build anything with students at such a large scale, under tight time constraints and while beholden to a bevy of stakeholders. The team anticipated finishing the procurement and gluing of all wood during the first six weeks, erecting the frame during the next four weeks, varnishing it and installing the cladding during the final four weeks and finally dedicating the structure in January. The construction of the Lafayette gridshell can be roughly divided into 50 major steps. In reality, this list branched off into several hundred sub-tasks: 1. Foundation and site grading by subcontractors 2. Sourcing materials 3. Ripping and grading wood 4. Organising lengths to best utilise wood 5. Scarf-joining and gluing of wood laths 6. Testing of breakage 7. Installation of baseplates 8. Welding and installation of steel pipe by subcontractor

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Figure 7.8 Gluing of scarf joints during lath assembly, Lafayette Strong Pavilion, Louisiana, 2015.

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18. On average, at least one scarf joint broke each day during erection (approximately 50–75).

9. Fabrication of aluminum components by subcontractor 10. Staining of wood on scaffolds and as erected 11. Placement of laths on scaffolding 12. Installation of weights and ropes to pull laths into curves 13. Bending of wood on site 14. Attachment of one side of laths, first layer 15. Attaching other side 16. Re-scarfing and gluing broken joints18 17. Installation of second layer of laths 18. Installation of temporary clamps at nodes 19. Installation of third layer of laths 20. Wetting of installed laths with fire hose/ water tank 21. Installation of fourth layer of laths 22. Installation of edge beam shear-blocking 23. Trimming and sanding of excess lengths of laths at gable ends 24. Varnishing of wood 25. Bug treatment of wood by subcontractor 26. Placement of disc spring washers 27. Torqueing/tightening of bolts with pneumatic torque wrench 28. Ordering of additional hardware (Team initially miscalculated the number of nodes by 30%) 29. Installation of cladding 30. Installation of lights by subcontractor 31. Fabrication of wood seating 32. Cutting templates for steel plates 33. Fabrication of steel plates by subcontractor

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Figure 7.9 a-b Lath preforming on site during pavilion construction, Lafayette Strong Pavilion, Louisiana, 2015.

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Figure 7.10 Applying glue to connection node discs, Lafayette Strong Pavilion, Louisiana, 2015.

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19. Although the primary engineers originally called for cable bracing, additional shear blocking, and load-testing, the local engineer, who was ultimately liable for the structure, did not require it.

34. Welding of steel plates by subcontractor 35. Dedication plate design by students 36. Fabrication of dedication plate by subcontractor 37. Landscaping 38. Scoring of concrete by subcontractor 39. Sealing of concrete 40. Installation of sidewalk by city 41. Installation of bike rack by city 42. Installation of sculpture foundation 43. Installation of sculpture by artist 44. Installation of signage 45. Adjustment of lighting 46. Adding more flood lighting and dedication sign lighting 47. Adding shear blocking 48. Adding rivets in cladding 49. Installation of rubber protective caps on bolts 50. Pre-rusting and oiling of steel19 Many gridshells are assembled flat and sprung into shape at one time (See Chapter 3). The stiffness of the white oak laths precluded post-forming the shell, and instead, almost in a manner of basket weaving, we assembled the shell one lath at a time. It took several months to bend the almost 10,000 linear feet of laths to eventually assemble the grid framework. The 360 nodes connecting the wood elements required very large

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5/8”× 9” bolts and a specialised spring disc assembly to maintain compression on the node even in the event of wood shrinkage. A translucent waterproofing, pre-weathered gray stain and over 40 liters of marine varnish were applied to help protect the wood. The steel at the base was allowed to rust and was oiled. The final crowning glory are the 40 rectangular, prefinished white 2’5” × 4’6” perforated aluminum panels which are held off of the gridshell by aluminum struts positioned at graduated angles in order to provide shade to the structure’s inhabitants during Louisiana’s many hot and humid days (Figure 7.11 a-e).

Completion and Formal Dedication By the end of the Fall 2015 semester, the project was complete enough to have a faculty/ student party on-site with food and refreshments. It was a time to celebrate together with all of the School of Architecture and Design’s faculty and to show off the work. During the winter break, three student leaders under my supervision finished riveting the roof cladding plates, tightening bolts, adding shear blocking, installing the storage covers and the dedication plaque and aided in landscaping. In addition, this team poured a concrete foundation for the first sculpture, which was installed by the park’s artist on-site (Figure 7.12). Christmas 2015 arrived, and brightly coloured lights were placed on the structure to celebrate the yuletide season as much as the culmination of a long, arduous design

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Figure 7.11 a-e Illustration and sequence of the pavilion lath-grid construction system, Lafayette Strong Pavilion, Louisiana, 2015.

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and building process. All that remained was the formal dedication ceremony, scheduled to take place the day after New Year’s. Nearly 50 people attended this event and smiles were evident all around, even tears of joy. In particular, the family whose home used to exist on the site was honoured. The outgoing parish/ city president, Joey Durel, was able to revel in one final success on his last day in office as all the students glowed with pride, standing by his side. Troubleshooting and Lessons Learned

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Figure 7.12 Members of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette student pavilion construction team, Lafayette Strong Pavilion, Louisiana, 2015.

The Lafayette gridshell e-d/b project proved, ultimately, to be a great success—a highly rewarding experience for the students, faculty, everyone else on the design and engineering team and the general public alike. The project came to symbolise all that is good about public/private sector collaboration. A gridshell structure can be quite technically challenging to build, with the result quite beautiful to behold as a work of sculpture as much as a work of architecture. And an equally beautiful object to experience spatially. As an object and space, it requires—even demands—the viewer/visitor to contemplate and consider the universality of art and architecture in the world-at-large. It challenges the vision and skills of the builders and challenges the expectations of the visitor. It is unique. It is unlike anything else in Lafayette, Louisiana. For some in the local community, its uniqueness alone is a sign of the community’s forward progress. Perhaps this is because communities of this size (110,000) tend to consider art and unusual architecture as only the provenance of much larger cities. Of course, there were critics who believed public funds should not be “squandered” on a useless structure. Such criticisms, however, and thankfully, remained a minority viewpoint (Figure 7.13 and Figure 7.14). The high-tech (digital and parametric modelling/scripting) and low-tech (hand-bent and crafted) nature of the project was both unusual and refreshing. Regardless of the seemingly accurate digital simulations, empirical findings from physical models and intuitive assembly processes proved to be more predictive—a fail-safe, indispensable measure— in the process of building at full scale.

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This reality reinforced the fact that, even in an age when digital design and fabrication are seen as representing the cutting edge of architectural research, manual skills and handcraft remain valuable and necessary. The success of this project ultimately rested in the hands of 20-somethings and their determination to make it succeed no matter what (Figure 7.15). This project, like all e-d/b projects, is really about student ownership, commitment and leadership. It could not have been successfully completed if not for the enthusiasm of these 27 young men and women. With this said, there were moments when I thought the entire project might simply go bust—representing a huge waste of time, energy and money for everyone involved. This was scary. It was a risk, with an unpredictable outcome on the other side. But this unfamiliar territory led to dramatic results that a mere adherence to old habits and preconceptions could not have possibly yielded. After 15 years of teaching in the curricular area of e-d/b, I have learned the ultimate lesson to be gleaned from this gridshell

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Figure 7.14 Students affix nodal connections and make finetuned adjustments during late-night construction, Lafayette Strong Pavilion, Louisiana, 2015.

20. Gjertson, W. Geoff (2014). LOTECH/ LABORINTENSIVE fabrication by digit (hand) & a proposal for a synthetic masonry system. In Ted Cavanagh, Ursula Hartig & Sergio Palleroni (eds.) Working Out: Thinking While Building: Paper Proceedings, ACSA Press.

project experience: patience. With inner grit, perseverance and grassroots community support, things will eventually work out. Having faith in each student and affording the team adequate creative space are the keys to success both in the built work and in the larger context of their architectural education. Therefore, every stakeholder must be understanding and flexible. The pedagogical value of student-centred learning in e-d/b must not be underestimated or rushed, and future partnerships should be undertaken with careful consideration of this. In terms of structural typology, ultimately, gridshell design and construction is highly specialised and in many aspects therefore represents a one-off, or even “boutique” approach in the making of architecture: a complex, specialised, comparatively rather time-consuming proposition. While these structures are unquestionably efficient from a structural standpoint, they can be quite labour-and resource-intensive on the construction side, due to the high structural performance requirements and integral nature of each of the thousands of components. But

Figure 7.15 Two c-clamps hold shear blocking components in place, Lafayette Strong Pavilion, Louisiana, 2015.

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low cost and expediency are not definitely virtues (especially when it comes to student learning or the quality of construction), for they must not become the ultimate goal in any endeavour of this type. In fact, inefficient, handcrafted, labour-intensive projects such as this can still offer much promise for the future of architecture (Figure 7.16, Figure 7.17 and Figure 7.18 a-d). The digital-fabrication and mass-customisation movement in architecture at this time, and in society-at-large for that matter, emphasises speed, efficiency and the maximum reduction of human labour. Though these processes have great promise in highly developed regions of the world, the vast majority of places on this planet do not have access to these technologies (and may not for some time). Undeveloped regions of the world do possess an enormous labour pool. Therefore, the question should be: How can labour-intensive, handcrafted architecture such as gridshell structures be deployed to create new economies and new jobs in diverse “architecturally underserved” regions throughout the world at this time?20

Figure 7.16 View of the Lafayette Strong Pavilion completed in its suburban park site context, 2015.

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Figure 7.17 View of the Lafayette Strong Pavilion exhibiting the interplay of light, colour and materiality, 2016.

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Conclusion In the architectural profession, and the construction industry, design/build as a project delivery system is growing and, academic programs can provide a proving ground for optimising and expanding this system. The community service component of e-d/b sets an example for the profession by better educating the underserved public as to the importance of design. And through design/ build, designers sustain the design process during construction and can introduce craft at every level. Architectural educators and practitioners therefore can draw insights from this design process, construction sequence and the built outcome. As this particular building type was unfamiliar to the project team, the learning curve that had to be mastered was formidable. As a consequence, considerable up-front research and pre-testing had to be preformed of sheer necessity. To their credit, the students carefully responded to the client/sponsor throughout; it was a process consisting of numerous design iterations, explored both individually and collectively. As an integrated team, a final design was arrived at and this resulted in more meaningful collaboration, a greater degree of stakeholder engagement and in the end, a better design than would have otherwise been the case. E-d/b programs such as the Building Institute at the University of Louisiana at

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Lafayette instill in future architects the capacity for agency and the immersive rewards to be accrued through self-initiation, perseverance and teamwork. The profession cannot simply sit back and wait for the public, marketplace or private sector developers to demand a higher level of design quality. The profession, as guided by the schools themselves, can and should initiate change in this respect. Universities are being called upon to set the example by becoming agents of change, and e-d/b programs provide an ideal opportunity to do this. These initiatives have become more and more essential to the profession’s very survival. Programs such as this can also be strong investments for the firms themselves, investments of time and money in their local universities and communities to fund e-d/b initiatives. Likewise, university administrations can generate many positive benefits by making broader, more thorough commitments to e-d/b curricula. Professional program accreditation bodies should more robustly require e-d/b curricula as a component of accreditation criteria and should

Figure 7.18 a-d Construction details and assemblies were engineered to withstand hurricane-force winds, Lafayette Strong Pavilion, Louisiana, 2016.

Figure 7.19 (Next Page) Public dedication ceremony, Lafayette Strong Pavilion, 2016.

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allow for greater Intern Development Program (IDP) experience hours for interns and students (Figure 7.19).21 Unfortunately, too often a “build-it-at-anycost” mentality, as Stephen Verderber has referred to it, has yielded less than satisfactory results.22 The push to complete a studio project on time takes precedence over all else, and it is a mistake to allow this syndrome to implant itself in any e-d/b curriculum. The student should be able to pursue the making of structures in an unhurried manner if at all possible. The mantra of unhurried building does not mean that sustainability or close attention paid to occupants’ needs are to be dismissed. Instead, architects should be able to conduct careful, thoughtful observation, to carefully plan and then implement that plan, then proceed to carefully construct in order to reach goals preset at the outset and modified accordingly as the project/process unfolds. Unhurried building must be the mind-set of the owner/sponsor, architect, contractor and the receiving community. It must be the mind-set of everyone involved throughout the entire process. E-d/b expresses a somewhat alternative paradigm in some ways to the current mad rush toward total digital fabrication in architecture and its labour-minimising ramifications. Yet it continues to stand as a solid approach to design, construction documentation, supply-chain control and building craft. When these processes are needlessly hurried or short-circuited, overall quality declines but more importantly, sight is lost of the architect’s most critical responsibility—namely, protecting the health, safety and welfare of the public and ecological realm.

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21. Gjertson, W. Geoff (2015). Housing Shrewdly: Refashioning the ReadyMade. 2015 ACSA/AIA Intersections Proceedings—Intersections Between the Academy and Practice. Washington: ACSA Press. 22. Verderber, Stephen (2014). Constructing an Evidence-Based Framework to Document and Advance Design-Build Within the Academy and Beyond. In Ted Cavanagh, Ursula Hartig & Sergio Palleroni (eds.) Working Out: Thinking While Building: Paper Proceedings, ACSA Press.

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The Lafayette Strong Pavilion: An Unhurried Building

Interdisciplinary Engagement Through Design/Build Education Arlene Oak

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This chapter proposes that architecture education in general, and educational design/build (e-d/b) in particular (also known as design/build education1), can form fruitful alliances with some of the theoretical approaches that are significant within the social sciences (and humanities, but this chapter focuses on the social sciences, particularly interpretivist sociology2). As a scholarly discipline sociology is engaged with theorising about social groups—classified by, for example, gender, social class or location in urban or rural settings—with many forms of sociology and related social sciences (e.g., socio-cultural anthropology/ethnography) also engaging with less abstract categories through widely accessible discussions of people’s social lives within the everyday settings of education, work, family life, etc. Considering architectural education through the lenses of particular social science approaches can contribute to these scholarly and general conversations, through highlighting the ways that human-made material environments are created and encountered. Further, by bringing perspectives from sociology and socio-cultural anthropology to architectural education, opportunities are opened up for students, teachers and others to reflect upon its often-tacit social and cultural underpinnings.

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1. Kraus, Chad (Ed.) (2017). Designbuild Education, London: Routledge. 2. Wilson, Thomas (2010) Normative and Interpretive Paradigms in Sociology. In Jack D. Douglas (Ed.) Everyday Life: Reconstruction of Social Knowledge. New York: Routledge. pp. 57–79.

In this chapter, I will first outline the scholarship I’m broadly referencing in association with architectural education, then will discuss architectural education’s fruitful collaborations with specific aspects of both traditional and newer perspectives in sociology. My comments here are principally concerning the specificities of e-d/b, because of my ongoing participation in the Thinking While Doing (TWD) project through the activities of the Insight Group (IG) (as already outlined in the introductory chapter to this book). As noted in the introduction, the IG was included in the larger TWD project partly to consider e-d/b in ways that could contribute to fields of scholarship beyond architectural education. In this capacity, I work closely with a socio-cultural anthropologist (Dr. Claire Nicholas) whose research considers aspects of expertise in craft production and design education, while I, a sociologist (more specifically, someone with a background in social psychology, history and design practice), explore the relationship between communication and collaboration during TWD’s activities of designing and making. Together, Claire and I have undertaken the sustained collection of qualitative data that we are analysing in relation to various research concerns such as: how are design dilemmas resolved, questions answered or controversies settled? How does social consensus emerge to the extent that the stabilisation of decisions can be represented in the material form of a built structure? The data we have collected includes video and audio recordings of many of the “real” circumstances of educational design/build: from students working and chatting in studio settings, to discussions held in project juries and reviews; from conference-call meetings between professors, engineers and students, to on-site debates concerning how best to proceed with construction (Figure 8.1 a-b). Unfortunately, we were not present for all the relevant TWD-related activities, but since 2014 we have endeavoured to capture a diversity of practices that provide a fairly wide-ranging sense of what is going on. (I’ll be referencing some of the data in this chapter: in particular, examples of talk that has occurred in various TWD-related settings.)The data acts as evidence that indicates precisely how the

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Figure 8.1 a-b Students in a design review demonstrating the result of gridshell prototyping concept models, 2015.

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Figure 8.2 Presentation material just prior to a design review session, 2015.

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3. Elder-Vass, Dave (2010). The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 4. Rand, Ayn (2008 [1943]). The Fountainhead. London: Penguin Books; and, Vidor, King (Dir.) (1949). The Fountainhead. Burbank: Warner Brothers Studios.

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5. Jones, P. (2011). The Sociology of Architecture: Constructing Identities, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press Stevens, Garry (1988). The Favored Circle: The Social Foundations of Architectural Distinction. Cambridge: MIT Press. 6. Latour, Bruno (2013). An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

particularities of what happens during designing and making can be highly relevant to wider scholarship. The scholarly context of this chapter is interpretivist sociology; by that I mean those approaches that seek to understand the meanings that people themselves give to their thoughts, beliefs, actions and relationships. Interpretivist scholars typically use qualitative methods such as interviews, observations, note-takings and the recording and analysis of social life that has occurred in “real,” natural conditions (i.e., everyday-life settings that would have happened whether or not the researcher was present, rather than researcher-generated experiments). The work of interpretivist sociologists (like much of the work of their more positivist associates in this broad academic discipline, though using other methods and analytic approaches) has often been engaged with discerning how, in society, individuals and groups manage the apparent dichotomies of “agency” and/or “structure”: with the concept of agency associated with an individual’s autonomous motivation and structure affiliated with the stratifications, constraints and dynamics of large social groups.3 For instance, to put it in simplistic terms, which matters more for achieving consensus on a construction site: an individual architect’s will (agency) or the organising norms and often taken-for-granted constraints asso-

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ciated with corporate clients, policy makers, city councillors, planners and insurance regulators (structure)? The debate between the impact of agency and/or structure was represented in the famous, though fictional context of professional architecture practice in Ayn Rand’s book of 1943 and director King Vidor’s movie of 1949, The Fountainhead.4 Here, Howard Roark’s distinctive, individualistic voice as a maverick architect was first subjugated by others before overturning the dominant, traditionalist paradigm to contribute to emerging ideas of what could be considered “good” in (Modern) architecture. While The Fountainhead ’s example of tension between agency and structure played out on screen through various images of buildings, it has been more usual, in scholarship across the social sciences, to have the relationship between agency and structure presented through discussions of more abstract social relations (between, say, wealth and poverty, work and the economy, gender and sexuality and race and ethnicity), rather than through considerations of people’s creation and/or use of the built environment.5 The general lack of attention to material culture was an unfortunate lapse in classical approaches to sociology and other social sciences as these fields emerged and were formalised in universities through the 19th and 20th centuries: unfortunate in part because leaving the creation and consumption of the material world off the scholarly agenda meant a lack of sustained theorisation that might have contributed to improvements in, or at least increased awareness of, architecture and other forms of design. More particularly, the general lack of consideration to the built environment also left the theories and methods of most social sciences disconnected from everyday materiality through which culture is lived.6 This lacuna is particularly surprising, given that design in general, and architecture in particular, is an ideal topic through which to consider sociological questions of agency and structure since architecture requires both individual creativity and systematic collaboration with multiple others: for example, typically, to achieve even the most mundane structure, one or more architects must work with and mobilise diverse communities, sharing and

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developing a particularised vision for a new building with groups of commissioning clients, engineers, planners, construction crews and end-users.7 Recognising the shifting relationships between agency and structure within architectural processes is an important part of learning to become an architect, with various projects assigned with the intention of more or less explicitly developing an individual student’s imagination. In the context of e-d/b, projects range from those with a relatively high level of constraint (e.g., the code restrictions of building a house) to those more experimental projects that often do not contain, and so are not limited by, forms of infrastructure such as plumbing or electrical wiring. It is into this latter category that the TWD projects fall, with each structure understood as an innovative experiment in and through the gridshell typology. Nevertheless, each gridshell also had to engage with diverse groups to be realised, and so negotiations between agency and structure were apparent throughout each project. The nuances of some of these negotiations or process dialogues can be seen in the following two excerpts of talk from a project review (aka “jury” or “critique”) held at one of the TWD studio locations. Here, students present one of the nearly completed gridshells at a term-end review. The audience consists of students who have participated in the design/build course, their professor and invited guests/critics—some from the university (such as the dean and other senior-level professors and administrators) and others— mostly professional architects—from outside the institution. The first excerpt of talk below comes just after students have presented a series of drawings and renderings that outline the development of the project: from the initial idea of the gridshell alone to much more ambitious plans to transform a large portion of the campus area that surrounds the gridshell. Here the talk of Luke (a pseudonym for the professor) reveals the relationship between agency and structure in the history of this particular project. He talks of both, “campus constraints and what is feasible” (structure) and also about the power of individuals to “dream big” (agency) and to make, and listen to, an audacious suggestion that transforms

the entire project from a one-off structure to a potential transformation of a large section of the university (Figure 8.2). Luke: When I go through this and think about where we began I can think about our conversations regarding campus development constraints … and I thought you were so nuts, Susan, when you put it out there [i.e., to develop the area far beyond the gridshell] and I like to think I dream big but I was also, you know … I get held back by what’s gonna be feasible and then you blew the doors off … and now it really does look like a big dream, it’s viable. The second excerpt features a visiting reviewer, a professional architect, whose words are from the same review, but several hours after Luke’s comments. Here the visitor talks generally about architecture as a profession and emphasises the importance of the architect’s agency to move beyond structural constraints when working with others. He also notes that architecture education doesn’t make the performance of agency within the constraints of collaboration an explicit part of training. However, although he considers the process through which he learned this skill to be mysterious (“how the hell did I learn to do that?”), he nevertheless did acquire this important knowledge (“it musta worked”). Ken: I think the … ability to look around corners and … suddenly your brain’s generated six other issues – people love it when their architects can do that – honestly the skill of designing a building is almost secondary if you’re a visionary if you can sit at a table with a client and see an opportunity – if you can look at a building and – by doing something to that building, create something that he needs, not just the building but the deal, the process, how they set it up, how they get the investments, they love it when their architects can do that and that’s a bit of training that we don’t seem to acknowledge … how the hell did I [learn] to do that? … I only went to one school [but] it musta worked … the thing is, architects are a natural fountain for this kind of inspirational thinking.

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7. Yaneva, Albena (2012). Mapping Controversies in Architecture. London: Routledge. 8. Oak, Arlene (2009). Performing architecture: Talking ‘architect’ and ‘client’ into being. CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts, 1. pp. 51–63. 9. Wenger, Etienne (2000). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Both of the excerpts above feature wellestablished architects; one a professor and the other an active professional, speaking in front of a group of students. Their words clearly communicate to the novice designers that architecture happens within and through conditions imposed by institutions and economics; however, within those constraints it is also important that the students know that, as architects, they should “dream big” and act as a “fountain for … inspirational thinking.” In these instances of talk we see established architects speaking within the context of an end-of-term assessment review, but their words range far beyond addressing the pros and cons of the specific building under discussion; their words also indicate norms and beliefs about how architects can and should behave when engaging with others. In effect, their talk is helping to socialise the students into the behaviours associated with the membership category “architect,”8 a community of practice9 where learning occurs tacitly as well as explicitly. This brief overview illustrates how the themes of agency and structure, so central to the traditional concerns of classical sociology, are clearly significant to, and preformed within, the setting of architecture education, specifically, in this case, e-d/b. The presentation of these themes as important elements of everyday practice that students should be aware of (and successfully, if tacitly, acquire) indicates that the interconnections between autonomy and constraint are threaded through architecture and its education: accordingly, the domain of architectural education is a highly relevant location for theorising and debating the sociological concerns of agency’s relationship to structure. The aforementioned disinclination of traditional interpretivist sociologists of the 19th and 20th centuries to consider forms of material culture (such as architecture) meant that sociology largely gave both the built and the natural environments a wide berth; however, this is beginning to change. Recent trends in wider culture and scholarship have seen greater attention paid to the role of technology in everyday life, with debates in contemporary academia occurring through concepts such as transhumanism, posthumanism and the new materialisms.10

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As I selectively and briefly outline below, these discussions are impacting the interpretivist social sciences in ways that are leading to some change in certain theories and methods so that, instead of conceptualising individuals and groups in relation to relatively abstract categories (such as social class or ethnicity), it is becoming acceptable (in some scholarly venues) to consider people not only in relation to each other but also in direct relation to the material worlds of buildings, products and infrastructural networks. Accordingly, some sociologists (and other social scientists, such as some socio-cultural anthropologists) have displaced agency as a solely human characteristic to instead consider the co-constitutive relationships that exist between people and material things. For example, the sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour questions whether, if a person slows their car to drive over a speed bump, the inclination to reduce speed resides in the person or in the road? He argues it resides completely in neither: instead, the materiality of the asphalt speed bump is woven together with the driver’s cognition and bodily response so that the object (speed bump) and behaviour (person) converge.11 For Latour, not only is there a pragmatic element to this convergence, there is also a moral one. That is, since society has decided it is “good” to drive slowly in certain settings, the speed bump acts as a kind of material reinforcement of a social consensus concerning “correct” behaviour. Latour’s work, along with that of other scholars such as Michel Callon, John Law and Annemarie Mol, is often referenced in connection with the (somewhat contested) term Actor-Network Theory (ANT).12 Before considering some aspects of e-d/b in relation to an ANT-oriented approach, I’ll first outline some of ANT’s particular interests, to support the position that architectural education is a rich location for ANT-related considerations. In ANT the “actors” (i.e., those who have agency) are dispersed around distributed networks of human and non-human relationships: that is, networks of people and things; with some of the “things” considered in ANT’s diverse studies including scallops,13 transit systems,14 hotel keys,15 research techniques16 and a spoken word.17 Arising in connection to the historical and sociological

The problem with buildings is that they look desperately static. It seems almost impossible to grasp them as movement, as flight, as a series of transformations. [but] ... a building is not a static object but a moving project.23

11. Latour, Bruno (1992). Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts. In Bijker, W. & Law, J. (Eds.) Shaping Technology/Building Society. Cambridge: MIT Press. pp. 225–259. 12. Callon, Michel (1984). Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay, The Sociological Review, 32. pp. 196–233. Law, John (2008). Actor-Network Theory and Material Semiotics. In Turner, Brian S. (Ed.) The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, 3rd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 141–158. Mol, Annemarie (2010). Actor-Network Theory: Sensitive Terms and Enduring Tensions, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. Sonderhelft, 50. pp. 253–269. 13. Callon, Michel (1984). Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay, The Sociological Review, 32. pp. 196–233. 14. Latour, Bruno (1996). Aramis, or the Love of Technology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 15. Latour, Bruno (1991). Technology Is Society Made Durable, The Sociological Review, 38. pp. 103–131.

16. Law, J. (2009). Assembling the World by Survey: Performativity and Politics, Cultural Sociology, 3/2. pp. 239–256. 17. Mol, Annemarie (2014). Language Trails: “Lekker” and Its Pleasures, Theory, Culture & Society, 3. pp. 93–119.

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18. Latour, Bruno (1993). The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 19. Fallon, Kjetil (2008). Architecture in Action: Traveling with Actor-Network Theory in the Land of Architectural Research, Architectural Theory Review, 13(2). pp. 80–96. 20. Yaneva, Albena (2012). Mapping Controversies in Architecture. London: Routledge. 21. Ibid. 22. Latour, Bruno & Yaneva, Albena (2008) Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture. In Reto Geiser (Ed.) Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research. Basel: Birkhäusser. pp. 80–89. 23. Ibid. p. 80. Emphasis in the original. 24. Ibid. p. 85

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In this article Yaneva and Latour are concerned with “the long succession of transformations”24 through which a building evolves, those transformations that occur as, for instance, architects walk the site, sketch on a napkin, model in foam or in a CAD program, negotiate with a client or engineer and deal with the on-site problems of, say, pouring concrete or welding in bad weather. In ANT-oriented studies of architecture, the concern of traditional sociology to trace individualised agency in relation to abstract social structure instead becomes a concern to trace how multiple agencies interact under particular circumstances as actors assemble and disassemble to create, maintain and reproduce the fleeting and long-lasting character of everyday life—including the built environment. In the two extracts of talk from the endof-term review that were considered earlier, we saw that issues of agency and structure are discussed and presented to students as constitutive elements of practice, and so it is highly relevant to consider architecture education through established terms and modes of sociological enquiry. In this chapter, however, I am concerned with architecture education, and especially e-d/b, also being recognised as an ideal location for exploring some of the newer perspectives from the social sciences—such as ANT.

10. Adams, Catherine & Thompson, Terrie Lynn (2016). Researching a Posthuman World. London: Palgrave. Coole, Diana & Frost, Samantha (2010). New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press. More, Max & Vita-More, Natasha (2013). The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

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study of laboratory science and its relation to and impact on wider society,18 the work of scholars who take an ANT perspective on design is growing in influence, including within theorised studies of architecture.19 In work that explores architecture through ANT, scholars advocate against dividing the understanding of architecture into the usual, separate categories of, for example, “technology and society,”20 or “materiality and meaning.”21 As Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva22 note in their article, ‘‘Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture”:

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Figure 8.3 An architecture student at work in the studio, 2015.

25. Schön, D. (1984). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books. Schön, Donald A. (1985). The Design Studio: An Exploration of Its Traditions and Potentials. London: RIBA.

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26. Yaneva, Albena (2013). Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design. Rotterdam: na010 publishers. 27. Yaneva, Albena (2012). Mapping Controversies in Architecture. London: Routledge.

E-d/b is a fruitful site of investigation through these less dualistic approaches because through this mode of learning real design and building are happening; therefore, discussions about the associations between, say, tools, materials and skills are grounded in the particular actualities of everyday practices rather than through relatively abstract concepts such as creativity or experiential learning (Figures 8.3 and 8.4). Design/build is a valuable site of investigation for contemporary approaches within the interpretivist social sciences because it is also where real tertiary-level education is happening, so ideas about, say, the socialisation of novice “reflective practitioners”25 in relation to educational objectives can be explored through the real contexts of program requirements and project reviews. For theorists who want to trace how assemblages of actors come together then disperse through the “flight”26 of decisions that eventually become buildings, e-d/b offers a place to track the associations between, for instance, rain, wood, rebar, engineers, clients and concrete, but at a scale that is more manageable than on a very large construction site or in a professional studio.

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As well as the complex associations inherent in the technological processes of designing and building, e-d/b can also yield insights into social performances, such as how students manage a peer-based group project alongside their other coursework, or how professors deal with program administrators, colleagues and university liability officers. Together, professors and students involved in this type of work engage materials and technologies, alongside the needs of a (typically external, community-based) client, and within the institutional requirements of their university’s regimes of assessment (both for students and professors), as these modes of judgment play out in the socio-political conditions of contemporary, neo-liberal higher education. Any social researcher who has access to a design/build program therefore has access to several extremely important issues that are relevant to contemporary society including: how are performances of creativity and limitation marshalled into viable built structures that themselves become agents; how is making—from sketching to pouring concrete—enacted through the interplay of cognition, sociability and materiality; and how is higher education called upon to perform itself through practice-based contexts that consciously engage diverse publics? To give some sense of how the assemblages of e-d/b are displayed in ways that accurately represent their complexity, and so are significant to those forms of social theory that engage with the intricacy of human/material relations, I’ll return to the same project review whose data was discussed earlier. The following talk happens early in the day, when students are first presenting to the gathered critics. Here a student gives a fairly long narrative of encountering and overcoming adversities concerning both the gridshell’s cladding (the perforated metal that covers the structure) and also the final digital scan that is required for the engineers to determine the building’s safety. The student’s talk, accompanied by images on the screen he is standing next to, references several phenomena, or what Yaneva would call “controversies”27—that is, those unstable situations that exist outside the formal design decisions but that require resolution for the structure to proceed.

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The student’s talk reveals some of the hidden but interrelated actors whose agency impacts the building’s “flight,” including materials selected, the project’s budget, an error made by the manufacturer of the cladding, the timing of a national holiday, construction scheduling (in relation to the academic term), local climate conditions, aesthetics, 3-D laser scanning technology, student commitment and skill, engineering requirements and approval, the construction of the edge-beam and student camaraderie.

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Figure 8.4 Students were trained in welding techniques as part of studio coursework, 2015.

Carl: Another story is about the cladding– we ordered some cladding in town with specs we were given–and received these and were all very happy with the perforation [in the original test panels] but it turned out the test panels weren’t actually at the specs that we asked for so when we ordered $7,000 (USD) of material to do the final cladding we received something that was drastically different [from what we thought we would get]–it shipped from Houston on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving–when we realised this, we had a minor panic attack and I think Luke nearly shut down for about 10 minutes but we all gathered again for a pow-wow – we started to look at whether we could drive back to Houston to get the right stuff. We looked at how long that would take – 14 hours over our Thanksgiving break – we looked at renting a U-Haul because those panels were pretty big; we decided it was not an option when we found out that the panels we needed would have to be specially cut and would require seven to eight weeks to be ready. So we looked again at what we had received and did a sun test and it looked okay and then we cut a few into shape and saw they did shed water and looked good up there. We went forward with it and were all pretty happy … again, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving we started 3-D scanning the shell, this involved taking a laser pointer and pointing it at every intersection on the entire shell – something like four thousand points. Mary and Albert scanned intersection points until 4:00 AM on Thanksgiving morning–thousands and thousands of scans which led to a detailed overlay drawing, where the blue and red

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Figure 8.5 Students consulting construction drawings on the construction site, 2016.

174 28. Beauregard, Robert A. (2015). Planning Matter: Acting with Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Yaneva, Albena (2013). Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design. Rotterdam: na010 publishers. 29. Latour, Bruno & Yaneva, Albena (2008) Give Me a Aun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture. In Reto Geiser (Ed.) Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research. Basel: Birkhäusser. pp. 80–89. 30. Ibid. p. 80.

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31. Mol, Annemarie (2010). Actor-Network Theory: Sensitive Terms and Enduring Tensions, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. Sonderhelft, 50. p. 262. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid.

overlays were a comparison of the design [drawing] with what we actually had built out there. We overlaid the images because of the way we constructed the shell and it’s impossible to get it perfect so we had to look at the variances in the tolerances and have the engineer analyse that and decide if it was good enough to reach our five times structural strength requirement. You can see there’s definitely some variation but overall it’s pretty close – then this image (showing another drawing) looked at the edge-beam ribbon – a section through it – and one of the more significant things was that the centre and the top (edges) were very, very close all the way down to the edge ribbon and were approved as “adequate” (by Whiteco Engineering) so nothing more needed to be added to the edge. I don’t think any of us were ever any happier in our lives. Clearly, participation in this project goes beyond the cognitive and embodied activities of individual agency in relation to institutional structures. Although specific persons are mentioned—Luke, Mary, Albert, the engineer— their agency, in the terms of ANT, is distributed, existing in relation to that of materials, nature, technologies and various social conditions and constraints (Figure 8.5).28

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The talk extracted above, and the ideas of ANT in general, will come as no surprise to most architects or educators of architects, and Yaneva and Latour29 themselves note that it is obvious to architects that a building emerges over time and through the complex interactions between designers, clients, planning policy, tools, technologies, site, materials and budget. However, in general, most social theorists, like the wider public, do tend to see buildings and other objects mainly as completed structures, or as photographs or drawings, and not in their processes of becoming or use (what Latour and Yaneva call their “flight”).30 This limitation means that most theorists, and other non-designers, usually understand the material world as being “out there”: separate from the social world of contingency and interaction. This incorrect perception of separation matters because it tends to blind people to recognising that society is not externally ordered from “centrally set laws, rules and regulations,”31 but instead is accomplished in an ongoing manner, in large part through the condensed social relations that are the material “things” of everyday life: the cell phones, laptops, road networks and multiple other items—including buildings— that are central to communities, modes of governance and economies. By studying architecture education to help us recognise and acknowledge that the material and the social are continuously connected through process, we might also recognise that broad concepts such as “society” or “culture” (as the objects of study for fields such as sociology) could themselves be profitably reconsidered as open-ended and ongoing “modes of ordering”32 rather than as external disciplines that are somehow abstractly “out there.”33 Collaborations between social theorists and programs of e-d/b can thus help to broaden the understanding of what is to be explored within the social sciences and thereby also help to broaden ideas of what exactly “society” is. By extension, collaborations between social theorists and programs of e-d/b can also help to broaden understandings of what architectural education is, of how it may happen in the explicit settings of the studio and construction site, but also through tacit

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phenomena, such as the narratives through which are told the stories of negotiating personalities, managing materials and developing curricula. As we can see, architectural education, and particularly design/build projects such as those of the multi-year TWD initiative, are highly relevant to both traditional and newer perspectives (e.g., ANT) within the interpretivist social sciences in general and sociology in particular. While for some in architectural education, becoming more closely linked to other realms within the academy, such as departments of sociology and anthropology, may not seem like connecting to the real world, nevertheless by so doing, the actual realities of designing and building may be transported more fully to those fields, through which are educated many theorists, policy makers and better-informed citizens. By fostering stronger linkages between architecture and the social sciences within the context of higher education, the resourcefulness of architects and their cross-disciplinary engagement with the natural world—site, climate and natural material considerations (the human-made world of tools, technologies and other materials)—and the human-human world of interpersonal relationships, all can become far better understood and appreciated by a wider audience. The complex social interactions that occurred within the TWD initiative demonstrated how interdisciplinary research collaborations connecting architectural education to forms of social theory can offer novel insights to multiple scholarly disciplines and fields of creative professional practice.

Building as Social Medium: Anthropological Perspectives in Design/Build Claire Nicholas

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This chapter examines the “culture” of educational design/build (e-d/b) and its relationship to student engagement and professionalisation. How do the activities of cultivating engagement, teaching architectural knowledge and sensibilities and creating community come together in design/build education? What sort of architects (and buildings) are formed in the process? This chapter also models how cultural anthropologists think about and study a topic like architectural education, and more specifically, the design/build programs and settings of the Thinking While Doing (TWD) projects. The discussion draws on theories developed mainly within the sub-disciplines of social and cultural anthropology and ethnographic research conducted over the past three years among the faculty and students of the four different TWD schools. E-d/b, a form of learning-by-doing (and thinking while doing), is widely recognised by its practitioners and supporters as inspiring high levels of student commitment and enthusiasm (Figure 9.1).1 As a cultural anthropologist, part of my objective has been to understand how the “real stakes” of a design/build project, which involves “real” clients and partners and the “real” material and social consequences

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of building, figure into student engagement and the development of a sense of a design/ build culture or ethos. To that end, I look at the practices within design/build studios that foster a sense of group identity; the narratives that reinforce the core values of design/ build against those of mainstream architecture (basically, “what makes us different”); and I consider the intensity of group experiences and the stories or comments that reference those formative moments in the professional biographies of teachers and students.

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Into the Heart of Darkness: Education Design/Build and Rites of Passage

Figure 9.1 Student lofting wood laths, 2018.

On the most basic level, e-d/b, like other forms of education, is a crucible out of which emerge qualified journeyman architects (not quite masters, but more than apprentices), ready to enter professional practice. At its core, then, a design/build education can be thought of as a process of transformation (of people, relationships, materials, spaces and knowledge). Since the beginning of its disciplinary history, anthropology has been interested in rituals and practices of social transformation – transitions from adoles-

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1. MackIntosh, Lara and Phillips, M. (2017). Learning about Architecture: The Act of Making and Being. International Journal of Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design. 11 (1). pp. 1-13. 2. Van Gennep, Arnold (2004 [1960]). The Rites of Passage. (Monica B. Vizedom & Gabrielle L. Caffee, Trans.). New York: Routledge. 3. Turner, Victor (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.

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cence to adulthood, or unmarried to married, for example. The rituals that accompany and mark transformation are typically called “rites of passage,” a phrase first coined by the folklorist Arnold van Gennep.2 During rites of passage, initiates are separated from mainstream social norms, structures and settings and enter what anthropologist Victor Turner has called a “liminal zone”—a bounded social context in which intense physical and psychological experiences reshape the initiates, inculcating the values, beliefs and relevant knowledge, myths or history of the group.3 The transformation is later recognised (and completed) by ceremonies marking participants’ re-entry into the general public—as new social beings. These processes are crucial for the reproduction of the social and moral order in a given cultural context. The educational experience of the TWD design/build programmes is marked by numerous large and small rituals of transformation. At the largest scale, the university educational experience itself might be considered one long liminal experience, on the other end of which we (parents and society more generally) hope students re-emerge as viable adults and professionals. But this liminal experience applies to architecture education broadly. What is of interest in this chapter is how e-d/b is marked as a kind of subculture within the larger cohort of novice architects. What are the specific rituals that distinguish design/build and convey its cultural ethos to novice architects? Let’s start at the beginning, the initiation to the design/build studio, an initiation that often begins with remarks, narratives and storytelling—not only about the project specifics—but also about the spirit or ethos of design/build and the community which sustains it. During a class meeting for one TWD project, a faculty member recounted to his students how he would normally begin the semester with a screening of Hearts of Darkness, the behind-the-scenes movie-documentary account of the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (itself a re-visioning of the Vietnam War as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness). The film Hearts of Darkness captures the numerous near-catastrophes in making Apocalypse Now, including a civil war in the Philippines during shooting, gross monetary overruns, physical

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Figure 9.2 Documenting the design process: nearly 40 design meetings were videorecorded for analysis, 2014–2018.

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and emotional breakdowns of cast and crew (including Coppola) and a major natural disaster. The showing of Hearts of Darkness to students about to engage in an e-d/b project is only partly a joke—it is also meant as a notso-thinly-disguised metaphor for the physical and emotional intensity of the design/build experience itself, of the likelihood of minor and major crises and setbacks along the way, and the thick friendships and social bonds forged in the process (though sometimes fraught with interpersonal conflict). In other words, design/build is like going to war. Coppola himself is known to have claimed that Apocalypse Now was not a film “about” the Vietnam War, it was the Vietnam War. Interestingly, in this instance the architecture instructor mentioned his use of Hearts of Darkness to “qualify any kind of design/build project” during a debrief after one of the large-scale TWD cross-institutional meetings. During this meeting, his students’ schematic design for their particular gridshell had been under intense scrutiny and discussion. This cross-institutional meeting was also the first time his students had heard the “war stories” of student groups from the various other institutions and gridshell projects, through which they had caught a glimpse of some of the realities and challenges of the building typology. When asked about how they felt after the three-day meeting, one student suggested

I know I’m very interested, and I think you should be interested individually, in how this experience kind of provoked you, how it maybe would get you to take stock of what we’re up to, but maybe more importantly, how it might have prompted you to think about design activity and the kind of collective community of, you know, the people—our peeps so to speak. Who we communicate with, who is our community, right. I think obviously other kinds of academics are our community, other student bodies are our community, and, so what’s your takeaway from this?

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With these words, the instructor worked to connect the shared intensity of sustained examination and critique of the local students’ work, alongside exposure to the challenges and frustrations that might await them, to a collective professional identity that is larger than the specific studio itself: the design/build community. Entry into a design/build studio course partly prepares students for the intense (and hopefully intensely rewarding and transformative) experiences to come; when students enter the “liminal zone” of long days in the studio, workshop or on the construction site, they are often in effect (at least partially) removed from the normal, everyday schedules of non-design/build students. Through undertaking e-d/b, a particular group of students encounter projects of substantial duration and embodied experiences of physical challenge. Such shared phenomena bond

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that “we could watch movies about comeback stories,” while another added, “yeah, the underdog [as in, ‘we are the underdogs’].” It was at this point that the instructor brought up Hearts of Darkness and said to his students: “I chose not to show that at the beginning of this semester because I thought that it casts negative and pessimistic suggestions. But now that you have somewhat of an inside scoop I can show it to you freely and unapologetically.” The students laughed at the joke. Not by accident, the instructor turned this opening banter immediately to the “takeaways” from the TWD workshop, one of which was the existence of a larger academic design/build community, as he noted to the assembled group:

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students to one another and to the project at hand. For instance, in one TWD e-d/b site, students worked for several months of their summer (in a for-credit studio course), five or six days a week, at times in conditions of high humidity and high heat, performing repetitive tasks such as gluing and clamping wooden laths for hours on end. In another case, a group of students tied rebar for eight hours a day over several weeks, bent over and painstakingly twisting lengths of wire around the intersections of steel rebar, plagued by irritating and sometimes-biting flies (Figure 9.1). A third TWD-related example is where students spent several weeks of a semester jackhammering and removing existing-site concrete and excavating and redistributing massive quantities of soil in order to make room for the concrete footings for the new building they had designed. Of course, the collaborative efforts are not only devoted to construction activities. Students also bond together over hours spent in their university’s studios (including all-nighters before a design review), where they develop presentation drawings, complete scale models and finalise prototypes. In short, the demands of the design/build studio during the liminal phase (which can last for the majority of the semester and is especially time-intensive in the construction phase) can take students away from relationships and activities that fall outside the purview of the design/build project at hand. This phase can cause tension or strain on those outside activities and relationships, but it also cements (pardon the pun) the ties between group members and (in the best of scenarios) generates a kind of devotion and level of engagement unheard of in many other kinds of university coursework (Figure 9.2 and Figure 9.3).

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Design/Build Narratives as Social Texts

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4. Geertz, Clifford (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid.

Its function [the Balinese cockfight] is interpretive: it is a Balinese reading of Balinese experience, a story they tell themselves about themselves.4 The above quote by prominent anthropologist Clifford Geertz from his well-known essay

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on the Balinese cockfight points to the way many anthropologists view “culture.”5 For Geertz, the cockfight is a kind of social text, what elsewhere he refers to as a model of and for Balinese life and worldview.6 Culture itself is made up of an assemblage of social texts and cultural forms like the cockfight; it is at least in part the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. So how does this insight apply to design/build architectural education? As anthropologists, part of our task is to pay attention to the stories, narratives and representations produced by those we study: stories told not only for our benefit (we are usually outsiders) but also for the benefit of “insiders” and those seeking to become, in this case, professional architects. But design/ build “culture” also seeks to distinguish itself from traditional architecture education and practice. Accordingly, instructors and students recount stories and experiences that present a particular ethos and approach to “being an architect” or possessing a particular kind of architectural knowledge. Narratives and stories told, often in the studio setting or during breaks on the construction site, communicate the values of design/build architecture, from instructor to students and between students themselves. Some of the celebrated qualities of an architect who has been educated in design/ build include an enthusiasm for risk-taking

Figure 9.3 The TWD team’s anthropologist, Claire Nicholas, collecting data during the design/build construction process, 2016.

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and hands-on engagement with (sometimes messy) materials and projects, a rebellious or mischievous spirit or attitude and a disposition towards experiencing a highly personal relationship with a given structure. An experienced design/build architect will of course, ideally have a collection of memorable stories often filled with dramatic events: crises and triumphs. These events might include materials failure, unreasonable clients, weather-related disasters, the recollection of the first glimpse of a construction detail built at full scale, exhaustion at the end of a full day of tying rebar or site excavation or the satisfaction of a “real life” completed structure that you helped make. In other words, telling stories about design/build is one of the ways a person performs his or her “street cred” as a design/build architect and communicates to novice architects the professional and personal core values of the culture. To give one example, during one of his studio classes, an instructor involved in the TWD project paused in a practical discussion about the technical aspects of their gridshell pavilion to recount a memory of his first design/build project (as a student). Below are a few illustrative quotes from his story, recounted to a group of students gathered in the space of the university studio classroom: I mean, for me, I’ve done lots of different kinds of design/build projects, and I’ve had lots of different flavours of frustration. But the thing that is consoling is when that thing goes up, when you see that actually enacted, it’s chilling. I mean it’s really chilling. You know I like to tell stories (the group laughs).

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He continues: So, when I was in graduate school, a friend of mine and I won this little inschool competition to build a gate for the international festival in [large American city]. Uh, and it was, we had two weeks to do it, and we had fifteen hundred dollars to do it. …We actually built this in the hallway of the school at [private university]. [Private university] did not have a shop at all. I mean, like, zero, like not a drill in the building. Not a handsaw in the building… So we made this in the crit room, and this

was a little school, 200 students, everybody knows what’s going on, so if you’re making a mess in the building everybody knows about it, so we made a big (whispered) fucking mess, and it was awesome. (someone giggles) I mean, it was just, like exhilarating… And when we got it up [the structure] it felt awesome. I mean it was just the most bitchin’ experience I had had up to that point in time, so, you know, that’s kind of like my initial kind of, like, design/build kind of endeavour with an idea about it. Um, and it was pretty exhilarating, and we had all sorts of things kind of flying around in terms of cryptic kind of references. You know, you gotta entertain yourself ‘cause nobody’s gonna do it for ya (group laughter). So, long story short, there’ll be stories (group laughter) from this, this project at the [Name of local gridshell site]. Part of what is conveyed in this story is the emotional quality of the design/build experience. The highs and lows of the endeavour emerge clearly (although the triumphs mainly characterise this story). The collective effort that goes into these projects also contributes to the kind of bond that can form within the studio or team in question. Finally, this narrative serves to position the design/build architecture student as a bit of a rebel, a person who enjoys pushing boundaries, challenging authority and fundamentally being a person who thrives in the high-stakes context of “making stuff.” Other stories told when TWD students got together were more along the lines of cautionary tales or “lessons learned.” At one of the TWD’s group workshops, a student-faculty presentation on the individual gridshell of one of the school sites included a narrative that highlighted confusion and miscommunication between engineers and architects, and between student cohorts. It also conveyed the difficulty of ensuring continuity across student cohorts, and anecdotal reports of hours of labour going into fixing problems that had been missed by (or accidentally generated by) previous student cohorts. Some of the lessons learned that were recounted included insights about discrepancies between physical and digital models and the built structure; how different versions of digital models

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can cause confusion; and the importance of surveying the as-built gridshell structures at various key moments along the way. Other lessons related concerned the constructability of the structures and specific aspects of building processes (Figure 9.4 and Figure 9.5). In this particular presentation, both students and instructor disclosed the mistakes they had made, or the instances of miscommunication they had encountered, through periodic self-deprecating and/or sarcastic remarks. But even in a narrative punctuated with anecdotes of errors, what was simultaneously conveyed was the authority and wisdom that comes from having actually dealt with or overcome the frustrations of constructing a real, built gridshell. Tales of struggling with recalcitrant wood laths and shear blocking referenced the gap encountered between drawn or scale model and the full-size, built structure. To circle back to the beginning of this section, part of what is preformed through such narratives of “lessons learned” is the kind of architectural knowledge and sensibilities that are cultivated through the practices of design/build, including knowledge of how materials behave and how construction processes unfold—knowledge that most traditional architecture education almost entirely neglects.

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The Building Is the Social: Humour and Collective Representations

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At the outset of this chapter, I raised several questions about student engagement and design/build education. All of the TWD gridshells (both small and large) were collaborative and collective endeavours, requiring communication and coordination with fellow students, instructors, external stakeholders, engineers and many others. Critical to the success of these projects, then, was a developed sense of group ownership, mutual responsibility, and commitment to each project (and to fellow collaborators). As described earlier, these qualities are partly developed through long hours of working and struggling together, even living together. In the following section, I discuss how humour and jokes serve as a kind of social glue that thickens the bonds between group members and deepens student engagement.

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7. Carty, John & Musharbash, Yasmine (2008). You've Got to be Joking: Asserting the Analytical Value of Humour and Laughter in Contemporary Anthropology. Anthropological Forum, 18(3). pp. 209-217. Douglas, Mary (1975). Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1940). On Joking Relationships. Journal of the International African Institute, 13(3). pp. 195–210.

Figure 9.4 Students and their instructor fabricate components on campus, 2015–2016.

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Several of the anecdotes and stories related in the previous section contain elements of humour—self-deprecating remarks, sarcasm and incidents that were made funny over the passage of time. Indeed, cracking jokes, telling amusing stories and teasing fellow group members is a near constant feature of the design/build experience on the TWD projects and presumably on others as well. A number of works, both in classic and contemporary anthropology and sociology, insist on the social and psychological “function” of humour and joking in relationships.7 Joking with another person, or within a group (or conversely, keeping humour out of the interaction), says something significant about the relationship between those individuals, their position within an organisation (for example), and in practice moderates tension, conflict and emotion in everyday interactions. Shared jokes and humour also mark what social anthropologists and sociologists call “in-group” and “out-group” boundaries (Figure 9.2). In other words, if you are “in on the joke,” you are probably part of the group, not an outsider. Inside jokes and humour in the design/build context are often jokesabout or references to shared experiences of the design and construction processes. They literally contribute to the making of and reinforcement of a collective identity. In the heat of the moment, jokes may also serve to make light of a paradoxical social situation or a painful disjuncture between the designed plan and reality; they enable individuals to make light of or distance themselves from failure, mistakes, etc. In other words, humour releases the pressure valves of collaboration and consolidates the collective identity of the group. Here, I give just a few examples of this dynamic, in part because context-dependent or situational jokes tend to lose much of their impact upon retelling in a different context. One of the more remarkable aspects of doing fieldwork among the various TWD studio cohorts was the extent to which we (Oak and Nicholas) found ourselves asking about or trying to parse inside jokes and references. Sometimes, but less often, we were “in on the joke.” Inside jokes and references to shared experiences or local contexts and individuals were sometimes literally embedded in the gridshell itself (in one case,

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Figure 9.5 Student studio workspace, 2016.

imprints and reliefs were pressed into the concrete foundation of the structure). On another occasion, the same human cutout or clip art figures cropped up in several different photomontage renderings and occupation drawings, operating as a kind of running joke throughout the course of the project (and within its visuals). Clever visual references might be quasi-hidden in a presentation slide, noticeable only to those in the know or to a fastidious viewer. Some inside jokes referred back to incidents involving members of the studio cohort, or the larger TWD grant (on one occasion, a figurine in a final design review was made to look like one of the TWD instructors). Jokes among the student participants working on the “big gridshell” often referred to shared experiences that had nothing to do with design or construction–for instance, laughing together over a night in the group’s collective housing, where one student’s very loud snoring was self-taped to play back for others, or a remark about something that took place at the previous night’s beach bonfire. It is important to note that in the interactions we witnessed, instructors participated in joking relationships with students, engaging in teasing, clowning around, making fun of

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8. Durkheim, Emile (1995 [1912]). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. (K. E. Fields, Trans.). New York: Free Press. 9. Ibid.

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themselves or things they may have done in the past. This situation is indicative of the relatively close relationships that can form between students and instructors in design/ build studios, where faculty might work side by side on the construction site and so get to know students well enough to be invited to a wedding and/or to host social gatherings with students outside of the course-based program. Another important facet of group formation and student engagement is the creation and use of shared symbols or collective representations, including naming practices. Emile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of both sociology and anthropology, famously analysed the role of symbols in society in his study The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.8 For Durkheim, the religious practices and beliefs of totemism in Aboriginal Australia constituted the purest context in which to understand the origin of religious thought and experience, and the very basis of society and the social order itself.9 While the analogy to religious experience can only be stretched so far with regard to how it applies to the various TWD gridshell projects and their communities, it is nevertheless striking how invested one studio cohort was in naming their gridshell (and their studio) with a “totem” animal. Another sought a name that identifies the gridshell strongly with its local community and its strength and cohesiveness in the wake of a local tragedy which occurred in the midst of the gridshell’s construction. In other words, the building is not merely a structure with particular programs or functions, the building is the social, or at least stands in for a particular community and its symbolic investments. All TWD projects struggled to define the nature of the gridshell typology—the students, instructors, engineers and others were united in this exploration, though not always in the built response. One instructor emphasised the importance of developing a common language for naming the various elements of the gridshell—creating a nomenclature to enable clear communication and insights drawn across the TWD projects, and for future gridshell design and construction. In this way, the TWD studio cohorts were not merely participating in traditions and symbols handed down from “the ancestors” but

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were actively engaged in naming (and therefore reifying) the key features of the gridshell typology itself, in creating the symbols and points of reference for their own collective endeavours, and thereby defining the group in terms of common objectives and a new language for building. Rites of Passage, Part II, Marking Endings (and Professional Beginnings) In this final section, I circle back to the notion of the rite of passage. Certainly, one of the critical moments in this process from novice to journeyman (or semi-professional architect) involves the final review or critique (crit). Final reviews were often marked by what Van Gennep10 and Turner11 refer to as rituals of re-incorporation, where those who have experienced transformation are re-integrated into the larger community, their new status celebrated, and the vitality of the community affirmed. In large part, this re-integration took the form of comments about the value of what the students learned through the design/build process, an acknowledgement of their expert performance, and meta-commentaries (verging on manifesto statements) about the unique pedagogical qualities of design/build education and how it positions young professionals in the larger discipline. One TWD instructor began his studio’s final crit with comments on his pedagogical philosophy: I would say there are four principle things that I think about with this studio. I would say one that I hold at the forefront is educere, and that’s the Latin root for education, which means to draw out. To draw out. We need to set the students on fire. We need to draw out. We do not need to fill… Students first. Let these guys bear as much responsibility, seize as much opportunity and as much accountability as possible. Second point: pragmatism. Not the dumb practical sense, but in the greater philosophical, consequential sense that everything that we do has consequence. A presentation has consequence. Your drawings have consequence. Gravity is a consequence. Budget is a consequence. And does your project suck? That is also

a consequence (someone laughs). Third point: collaboration. Not Kum-ba-yah, just teamwork. This is about collaboration being the consensus. A constructed consensus made of individual contributions. This isn’t divide and conquer. This is ownership by everybody. Authorship by no single individual, right… Fourth point. I would say I consider this to be a practice laboratory because we can tick here and say integrated project delivery. It’s out there… Most of our students are gonna go out, and it’s gonna be a top-down practice model that says pick up the red mark, do this, do that. And I wanna see that you guys start to see this as opportunity for how an office should be structured when you run the show. These comments very clearly position design/ build education as both a professional and a moral education. The instructor’s emphasis on consequences, accountability and responsibility, on teamwork and collective ownership, affirm the core values of the design/build community (of educators and practitioners). Note that discourse on aesthetics, the architect’s vision or architectural theory are absent from this opening statement, though all TWD projects (and most design/build projects) are concerned with beauty or elegant design in various ways. In the final moments of another design review, a guest critic and former student of the program offered his reflection on the value of design/build education in the professional realm: More importantly looking at how you used the digital realm and the analog realm together… Just because we have a computer does not mean that it dictates how we design now. It is simply a tool in which we can make new design possible. And so, in saying that we can’t forget to relay what we’re doing in a computer to the tectonics of what’s being put together, and when you start to design something in a computer and then have it come to fruition in your hand and see a detail come together and realise that this isn’t going to work or that the material isn’t working in the way that you had modelled it because what is in the computer has absolutely no relation

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10. Van Gennep, Arnold (2004 [1960]). The Rites of Passage. (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee,Trans.). New York: Routledge. 11. Turner, Victor (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. 12. Durkheim, Emile (1995 [1912]). Elementary Forms of Religious Life. (K. E. Fields, Trans.). New York: Free Press. 13. Bourdieu, Pierre (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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These remarks highlight another core value of design/build education, namely, the importance of “making,” of working with real materials and at full scale, preferably for real clients. The guest critic implies, when he comments, “You won’t just be someone who knows how to use Grasshopper and knows how to use Revit,” that design/build experience will set the students apart from those with a traditional architecture education— where most of the “building” occurs on paper, in the computer, or in a scale model—in the realm of the hypothetical. Students with design/build experience grasp the fundamentals of a design and how it might be built, in a way that transcends dependency on software that will very likely be obsolete in five years. The final design review also presents an occasion for students to perform their newly acquired mastery of architectural knowledge, construction techniques and grasp of the gridshell typology. What makes these presentations compelling goes beyond expertly executed drawings (though these may be part of the review as well). It is the performance of authority grounded in experience—hands on, hard-fought, lessons learned—that audiences of guest critics frequently comment on. These performances might include images of students working on the construction site, testing node connections, or explaining the iterative production of IKEA-like construction drawings and full-scale prototypes. They also, in some instances, include narratives of student engagement and commitment that make reference to the heightened emotional or affective attachments to the project and the team, or to prior experiences that approach what Durkheim referred to as “collective effervescence”: a sort of shared amplified experience of euphoria or intense emotion in the accomplishment of collective activity.12

Building as Social Medium: Anthropological Perspectives

to a living object or how a piece of fabric is gonna fold…So, understanding that and being able to take that knowledge and bring it back into a computer… and you’ll become a much better designer that way, and you won’t just be someone who knows how to use Grasshopper and knows how to use Revit, because in five years, there will be new technology, and so you don’t want to be the person that gets a job because you know Revit.

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In the example below, a student speaking during a final design review makes just this sort of reference, as he stands in front of a screen with a slide that reads, in large pink letters, “LOVE.” This is the secret category, that’s not on the mantra, that has really enabled all this to happen. I’ve never, I sincerely mean this, I’ve never met a single person I think who cared about their studio project as much as all of us do. It’s astonishing, I can’t even believe it. Because, the amount of work people do, the sincerity we’ve done it with, the way we work with each other, it’s just terrific. It’s—there’s been no equivalent to it, at least in architecture school, for me. Then, in a final nod to design/build “culture,” this student tempers his emotion-filled comments with humour, going into a sequence of photos with quotidian shots of people at work on various aspects of the construction site, feeding a cat, sharing popsicles, smiling for the camera with concrete-spattered safety vests, dumping water on one another on a particularly hot day, a group shot of the students on the construction site with the students’ brand name for the studio itself and a final joke: one last image [suggestive with a double entendre] “We like it hard.” At this, the audience cracks up and erupts into applause. As something of a coda to this chapter, it is worth pointing out that the way “research participants” (often called interlocutors or actors) appear in this text is also a noteworthy feature of ethnographic writing. Especially since the 1980s anthropologists have been attentive to the politics of representation and the importance of foregrounding and making space for the voices of interlocutors alongside that of the researcher. Anthropologists regularly struggle to find a balance between translating the “insider’s point of view” for non-insider audiences (including other scholars and cultural outsiders), and writing a text in which one’s interlocutors (in this case, e-d/b students and faculty) are able to “recognise themselves.” In other words, the trick is to produce an analysis that does not “objectivise” (as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has put it) its “subjects” or treat them as mystified or blind to their own cultural practices.13 Indeed,

we are much indebted to the TWD students and faculty for their own insights and reflexivity about their practices and the “culture” of design/build, and view them as collaborators as much as “objects” of study.

Student Perspectives in Educational Design/Build Stephen Verderber

Introduction

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Numerous professions, including law, the health sciences, education and engineering, have for the past decade been engaged in a process of seeking to reappraise their professional stature and the meaningfulness of their contributions to society. In order to achieve this reaffirmation, and particularly in the realm of research endeavours, the term evidence-based knowledge has become widely adopted.1 Evidence-based perspectives in the generation of new knowledge hold promise, by extension, as a vehicle to facilitate critical inquiry both within and beyond contemporary architectural discourse and in architectural education. The operative assumption here is that verified, knowledge-based perspectives can provide a more legitimised framework for the documentation of advancements and can thereby help propel new advancements forward—and in turn mobilise this new knowledge into broader discourses and help in its dissemination throughout society-at-large.2 Concomitantly, the underlying assumption adopted in the present discussion is that evidence-based approaches, as applied

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in teaching, research and in professional contexts, hold validity and can be mutually reinforcing. It is important, however, to first broadly identify pertinent socio-cultural, political, economic, climatic, geographical and ecological determinants as they relate to the issue or problem at hand. This provides the necessary operative framework, one that can be logically extended into the realm of educational design/build (e-d/b). It is assumed here that such an approach can help in fostering best practices and state-of-the-art advancements in this facet of architectural education. It is further assumed that in so doing, experiential learning-based collaborations between students, clients, community sponsors and various other external collaborators can be enhanced and improved significantly, leading to more fruitful outcomes. One such manifestation of an evidence-based approach in pursuit of e-d/b disciplinary advancements is the design/build exchange (dbX) ontology.3 The e-d/b movement continues to be hamstrung by an absence of evidence-based, systematic assessments of its experiential learning dimensions. This reinforces an inability to clearly pinpoint which pedagogical approaches are most effective, which are less than successful and why. Why have so few surveys or one-on-one “exit interviews” been conducted with the students in these courses? The absence of such systematic internal or externally based assessments has reached a critical point where the movement itself will plateau unless verifiable and replicable protocols are developed and utilised to collect salient information on current educational best practices. It represents a line of inquiry needing to reach far more deeply into the relationship between these studios, all associated coursework and the degree to which these courses fit (or do not fit) together and as part of a broader architectural curricular (and institutional) mosaic. The e-d/b programs that have proven, highly regarded track records as effective university/community partnerships have much insight to offer, if only they were systematically studied through an evidence-based lens. Similarly, those programs whose built work is most widely lauded in formal/aesthetic terms have much to offer; programs whose students are the most satisfied with their learning experience have much insight

to offer; and those whose faculty members have been able to launch and sustain, year after year, effective and productive curricula have much insight to offer in this regard, and so on. The question arises, How best to measure these diverse programmatic attributes in a way that others can both rely upon and learn from? Their strengths, challenges and opportunities can be examined by means of systematic assessment centred on performance—in the studio as well as in the field— without ignoring or sidestepping the enormous legal and other types of risks associated with implementing e-d/b curricula out on the construction site. These risks range from concerns for legal liability within a litigious culture to the uncertainties of working with community-based client/sponsors who themselves may have very little experience working with students, to the very nature of collaboration itself, including the value of assiduously maintaining open lines of communication throughout a project. “War stories” on these facets of e-d/b are legion, manifesting in curricular folklore that tend to be associated with the best and most well-known e-d/b curricula, such as that associated with the legendary Rural Studio at Auburn University. The aim of the investigation reported below is therefore to systematically explore the student’s perspective, and second, to comparatively examine five design studios whose shared goal was to construct a structure within the context of the Thinking While Doing (TWD) initiative funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), representing the largest grant ever awarded in support of architectural research on this subject. The TWD Student Survey In response to the absence of evidence-based assessments of the experiential learning aspects of the design/build experience from the student’s perspective, Thinking While Doing was conceived to include a survey research component emanating not from any single institutional or client-funding agency priority list of concerns, but instead centred on the student’s direct experience. This component

1. Hall, Heather & Roussel, Linda A. (2012). Evidence-Based Practice: An Integrative Approach to Research, Administration and Practice. Burlington: Jones and Bartlett. 2. Verderber, Stephen (2005). Compassion in Architecture: Evidence-Based Design for Health. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies. This book was recognised with a Places Research Award in 2006.

Student Perspectives in Educational Design/Build 195

3. The dbX ontological roadmap is multi-faceted, addressing educational pedagogy, format, trials, tribulations and built outcomes. 4. The response scale in Parts A, B, D and E was “Very Strongly Disagree” (Column 1), “Strongly Disagree,” “Disagree,” “Neutral,” “Agree,” “Strongly Agree,” to “Very Strongly Agree” (C7). In Part C the scale was “Never” (C0), “Almost never, a few times a year or less,” “Rarely, once a month or less,” “Sometimes, a few times a month,” “Often, once a week,” “Very often, a few times a week,” to “Always, every day” (C6). For Part F, students were asked how satisfied they were with the design and/or built outcome. This scale was “Extremely Dissatisfied” (C1), “Very Dissatisfied,” “Dissatisfied,” “Neutral,” “Satisfied,” “Very Satisfied” to “Extremely Satisfied” (C7).

TWD

therefore consisted of the development of a survey administered to participating students at each TWD host university. This resulted in a four-page survey being completed at the four participating (partnering) universities where the five case study structures were designed—Dalhousie University, University of Arizona, University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The TWD Student Survey instrument was designed with the aim of exploring five fundamental aspects of the student experience: Self-Empowerment—as defined by a set of questions centred on the extent to which the student felt in control of his or her own abilities and the sense of freedom to self-define a role within her or his studio setting; Outlook/ Goals—assessment of the link between the studio and a future career trajectory; Course Engagement and Satisfaction—the degree to which the daily demands of the studio are able to be accommodated and if these demands are having an adverse impact on a student’s personal life; Logistical Considerations—the extent to which the physical environment of the studio and then later the construction site were conducive to meeting global learning objectives and if the specific project’s schedule and team/task assignment strategy and method were productive (or counterproductive) in meeting the shared goals of the studio and the construction phases; Outcome Assessment—questions probing students’ assessment of the built structure itself as an artefact in terms of relationship to site context, formal properties, ecological sustainability, appropriateness for its intended occupants/users, and acceptance by client/sponsors and local community constituencies. These survey questions, totalling 61 in all, were each accompanied by a seven-point Likert rating scale. For these questions, the student was asked to assess the extent he or she agrees/disagrees with each statement.4 These survey items were followed by an additional two questions, each of which required a short handwritten response. In each case, one line was provided for the respondent’s written response. Here, the leadin statement was: “Regarding the interior appearance and layout of this structure, name (A) three or more features you are particularly

Student Perspectives in Educational Design/Build

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196

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Student Perspectives in Educational Design/Build 197

Figure 10.1 a-b Responses to the TWD student questionnaire/survey concerning self-empowerment and personal goals/ outlook regarding their future.

TWD

pleased with, and (B) three or more features you would change, and how.” Next, this same format was applied to assessment of the exterior appearance of the structure and its immediate site environs. Three lines were provided to list three or more features one is pleased with, three lines to list three or more features one would change, and if so, how? Finally, three lines were provided to list any major repairs anticipated in the near future (ranked in priority order from one to three). The concluding section of the survey consisted of nine background questions (survey items 62–70) focusing on the respondent’s gender, country of citizenship, native language, the length of time in months he or she has been a member of her or his studio/ project team, university identification, the status as a full-time or part-time student while in the studio, level of educational attainment (undergraduate/graduate), age and date the survey was completed. The TWD survey was completed by a total of 102 students at the four aforementioned universities, of whom 52 were male, and 50 were female. The majority of students were Canadian (71%), with English the first language of 91% of all respondents. The average time of engagement in the studio was 5.2 months and nearly all students were full time at the time of the survey (94%). Of the 102 students, 52 were undergraduates and 50 were graduate students, and their average age was 24.2 years. The majority of respondents had been a member of the studio from the beginning of the first (project launch) term (77.4%), while some others had joined later in the project cycle, i.e., during a second term or the subsequent summer (22.6%). The survey was pre-tested in the summer of 2015 at the University of Toronto by a group of graduate students. The result was a more condensed survey, with rephrased and new questions added. After this step, the institutional human subject review boards of the participating universities granted approval to proceed. The surveys were mailed to each studio faculty project leader, who then had students anonymously complete the survey at the conclusion of the first design term. Additional surveys were completed by students in a second design/build studio term in some

Student Perspectives in Educational Design/Build

cases, either on campus or out on the construction site. Each faculty project leader then returned the completed surveys to the University of Toronto for data analysis. The analysis of the 102 completed surveys occurred in the fall of 2016. For survey questions 1 to 61, statistical means and standard deviations were tabulated; these variables (treated as independent) were then subjected to stepwise multiple regression analyses whereby each of the aforementioned nine “background questions” at the end of the survey (treated as dependent variables) were regressed in relation to the 61 agree/disagree survey items that comprised the bulk of the survey. As for the handwritten response data, a critical ethnographic approach was adopted based on content analysis.5 In this perspective, the physical spaces and artefacts produced are considered as having accrued through interpersonal practices and exchanges.6 Content analysis methodology involves identifying key terms and phrases which signify expressions of this interpersonal experience.7

198

Results

TWD

The survey findings were first analysed as a function of each participating university but are reported below across the five studios in relation to each of the 61 agree/disagree survey questions. In Figures 10.1a-b through 10.3a-b, this information is reported as summarised across the five studios: CS1 (Chéticamp), CS2 (Lafayette), CS3 (Arizona), CS4 (Charlotte) and CS5 (Cape Breton Highlands). For each of these survey questions, a mean response (X) and standard deviation (SD) was computed. Students’ responses to each survey question can be comparatively examined. Next, building upon this foundation, the stepwise multiple regression analyses are reported (below), whereby students’ background information is examined in relation to the 61 questions reported in Figures 10.1a-b to 10.3a-b. This makes it then possible to learn why the students responded as they did—with the background factors’ predictive power helping to “explain” salient underlying patterns in the data. Of the nine background questions subjected to the stepwise multiple regression analyses, four were found to be

5. Schwandt, Thomas A. (2007). The SAGE Dictionary of Qualitative Inquiry. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications. 6. Krippendorf, Klaus (2004). Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications. 7. Neuendorf, Kimberly A. (2016). The Content Analysis Guidebook, second edition. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications. Students’ written assessments were tabulated‒i.e., key words and frequency distributions.

Figure 10.2 a-b Responses to the TWD student survey concerning engagement with the project and with one’s architectural education along with satisfaction.

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Student Perspectives in Educational Design/Build

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Student Perspectives in Educational Design/Build

statistically associated with the 61 foundational questions. These items pertained to the influence of the particular studio the student was a part of, the length of experience (time) working on the project, the gender of the student, and the student’s level of educational attainment, i.e., whether the student was an undergraduate or graduate student at the time of the survey. These statistically salient interrelationships are summarised below. 1. The Function of the Studio and Project

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Figure 10.3 a-b Responses to the TWD student survey concerning design/build project logistics, space attributes and the quality and appearance of the completed structure.

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Significant differences were identified between the five studios with regards to the following 20 foundational questions: Course engagement/satisfaction issues: “While on campus I feel self-directed and focused” (C17: p