Pedagogy 2025
Abstract
Architectural design education has recently been part of the ‘outward turn’ of academia, with an increased emphasis on real-world design problems, participatory design, and design-build projects. The Building Beauty architectural program integrates these approaches into a holistic design approach, focussing on fostering a sense of place and adapting to the needs of building occupants. The one-year program was founded in 2017 by former students of American architect and theoretician Christopher Alexander (1936-2022), together with new partners. It builds on and continues Alexander’s integrative teaching approach based on his theory of “wholeness” and aiming to design environments that have “life.” This approach combines theoretical study with introductory and advanced design studios concentrating on real-world projects and involving students in real construction and making. This paper will discuss Alexander’s teaching methods and focus on the final studio assignment of the Building Beauty program: the Integrated Design and Construction Project, a community-based participatory design-build project that engages local partners and craftspeople. The projects include the incremental transformation of the garden of the Sant’Anna Institute in Sorrento, where the program is based, and projects that students taking the studio online have carried out in their local communities worldwide, such as a rooftop community garden in Malmo, Sweden and a community gathering place in Detroit, MI. Lessons for the future of built environment pedagogy will be formulated based on interviews with students and instructors, and on contextualizing the Building Beauty program within the growing number of community-engaged design-build studios, such as those at the universities of Auburn, Utah, and San Francisco.
Isabel is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Cincinnati, where she teaches undergraduate design studio and drawing. She recently defended her PhD at Carleton University in Ottawa about spiritual atmospheres and representation practices in the design process of Peter Zumthor. She completed her Bachelor’s in Architecture at McGill University, her professional Master’s in Architecture at TU Delft and obtained a Master’s in Architectural History and Theory at McGill. Isabel has also lectured and participated in courses of the Building Beauty Program.
Yodan Rofè is Senior Lecturer of Urban Planning and Design at Ben-Gurion University (BGU), Israel and Course Director at “Building Beauty: Creating living wholeness in the built world.” His research interests include: beauty, order and complexity in the built environment, informal settlements, urban morphology, sustainable urban design, cognition and feeling in the built environment and street design. He is currently researching the urban codes of informal settlements, the role of global and local attributes in determining the success of urban public spaces, and the impact of the physical attributes and perceptual qualities of urban streets on our sense of well-being and mental health.
Or Ettlinger is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and former Associated Member of the Cluster of Excellence “Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory” at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His experience spans the fields of architecture, software engineering, digital imaging, information visualization, and theory of art and architecture. His book The Architecture of Virtual Space formulates a theory of virtuality and studies the history of architectural creations intended for pictorial mediums. He founded and leads the “Creativity Studio”, an interdisciplinary educational framework. Or also teaches in the Building Beauty Program.
3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Thursday 20th November, 2025