IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION A

Abstract

What happens when the architecture office becomes a classroom for students of architecture? What do the students witness, how might that impact their education, and how might students be better able to redefine their understanding of their profession? While there is long standing precedent for architecture practitioners as vital partners in classrooms in the academy, the formulation of an office environment operating as an academic classroom presents a new threshold between the two worlds, increasing the dominion of a learning environment, and providing a new pedagogical model for both. Center for Design Research/Payette OpenLAB is a fourth-year integrative architecture studio course immersed in a large architecture firm as an academic semester residency where students produce highly developed proposals for architecture and urban design projects. Here the office becomes a classroom – not for an internship where students work as employees on the firm’s projects, but as a new academic unit where students develop their academic work entirely within the office context with professional practitioners as faculty. Students immediately engage an environment sustaining a deep discourse on what is embedded in the processes of architectural practice, and how the inherent complexities in projects are developed, discussed, and presented, which directly impacts drawings, material practices, and digital fabrications students then produce. A new rhythm, timeframe for decisions, and conceptual and practical framework results that directly informs propositions about architecture. The program develops and sustains academic concerns and professional practice with precision and demonstrates that architectural pedagogy does not stop in the academic world.