Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

This research stresses the urgency for new architectural pedagogies within what Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman identify as “sites of scarcity and zones of conflict.” Identifying a small window of opportunity to center resident perspectives amid the rapid urbanization of China’s industrialized fringe, the fourth-year architectural design studio Shangwang 2050: Between Landscape, Infrastructure, Architecture at Wenzhou-Kean University radically repositioned students and faculty within Shangwang, an urban village along the S2 train line in Rui’an, Zhejiang Province. Here, large-scale infrastructural systems are implemented at dizzying speed, yet without integration strategies across village and territorial scales.
Applying Karen Barad’s agential realism, the research reconceptualizes 21st-century Chinese vernacular as a set of “practices of mattering,” moving beyond fixed building types to emphasize the material-discursive processes through which residents actively reconfigure relationships between infrastructure, architecture, and landscape. The studio embedded fieldwork and community engagement as core pedagogical modules, requiring students to suspend disciplinary assumptions about domesticity, labor, function of building elements, and distinctions between public and private space. This shift enabled a fundamental pedagogical transformation: from knowing subjects studying passive objects to persistently foregrounding embodied resident perspectives as primary sources of knowledge. The studio reimagined the architectural model as a platform for gathering and employed architectural drawing to make visible eight resident-derived material practices: object-oriented urbanism, collaging, overlaying, overriding, extending, mixing, taming, and suspending. These practices will inform future architectural design pedagogy at Wenzhou-Kean by encouraging a shift from imposing conditions to borrowing them, supporting more just and inclusive global futures.