Automated system test schedule

Abstract

In 2019 as first-year co-ordinator, I co-ran a week-long workshop with a disabled artist (Rachel) through Dis/Ordinary Architecture within the first-year design studio. The Arts Council funded project aimed to challenge the usual mode of engagement with disability in architectural teaching from a ‘niche standard’ (Epstein, 2009) into a creative feed. I use this platform to summarize my findings on how engaging with disabled expertise benefitted students beyond the predicted, opening possibilities of more diverse approaches in the architectural curriculum; through a standpoint of Critical Disability, materialism and Feminist perspectives. Rachel’s workshop sat within a design module focused on establishing alternate and subjective narratives of the student’s site. Initiated by a derive seeking a ‘counterintuitive view of …space’ (Rubin, 2012), the workshop concluded with the creation of a film as catalyst to further design. The interaction with Rachel involved body mapping, lectures and drawing exercises, with the emphasis on embodied, situated experience, guiding the students to explore their own subjectivity through critical reflections, ‘untethering [them] from their grounding’ (Rubin, 2012). Centering attention around embodied knowledge by directing particular attention to non-normative bodies brought the unspoken aspects of education, practice, culture to the fore. The findings of this workshop point beyond the positive impact of this one week by challenging the prevailing mode of architectural studio teaching. It offered to first year students an environment that celebrated diversity rather than  accepting, and therefore supporting, inherited normative and exclusionary practices. The workshop provided an environment which led to non-hierarchical operations, moving away from the ‘empty vessel’, a ‘one-way transmission model of design  education’ (Liebermann, 2019) to an ‘alternative non-managerialist model’ of critical pedagogy.