Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

In design and architectural education, it is important to expose the students to methods of inquiry that seek to clarify the relationships between human behaviour and the physical environment; to expose the students to a diversity of needs, values, behavioural norms, and social and spatial patterns, and to expose the student to basic organizational, spatial, structural, and constructional patterns. One design method is the one-week-assignment called “Minimal Existence,” where students think about the minimum we need to live or exist. This assignment crosses borders between architecture and landscape design, product design and technology, between vernacular and high tech. The four driving factors behind the design approaches and solutions are: climate, placement, movement and activity. In this context students imagine extreme scenarios. They consider different climates dominated by heat, cold, rain, flood or drought. They design for sites and places in water, under water, in the earth, above the earth, moon, sky, universe. Assumed movements one needs to survive are going, running, swimming, flying depending on the place. And the basic activities sleeping, eating, communicating, covering and also moving have to be accommodated. Students also consider how they as architects can play a creative and responsible role in the context of minimal existence. Therefore, this approach goes beyond an academic exercise. It can generate a certain mindset. And as we can see in the daily news there is a need for help, for shelter and for cover in many regions in the world that are struck by natural or human forces.