Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

Architectural education has transformed in the last decade with dismantled histories, reframed pedagogies, broadened canons. These revisions are visible as inclusive and equitable curricula. Representation, architecture’s means of communication, though, remains largely unchanged. Enabled by digital technology, it nonetheless adheres to age-old conventions, with established methods of drawing and modeling used to convey thoughts and forms and to facilitate construction. To untrained eyes, these communications, from section cuts to axonometrics, are undecipherable. As a millennia-old practice to provide shelter, why does architecture persist in the production of drawings that most cannot understand? Crossing the Pell is an academic infrastructural adaptation project inspired by a US Senator to provide bike and pedestrian access on the Claiborne Pell Bridge in RI, USA. At a length of 3.5 km, the scale of such drawings of this longest cable bridge in New England renders designs portrayed as sections, plans and elevations incomprehensible. As a project of access to be presented to the community, the depiction of the proposals for adapting this bridge required a reconsideration of representation. Using XR technology, the project is not depicted as drawings or renderings but rather as “experience.” VR enables a viewer to ride across the designs on a stationary bike. AR brings the bridge designs into one’s physical environment for close-up interaction with the proposed interventions. Accessible to all, Crossing the Pell has since become an exhibition/installation presented in government, public venues and conferences. Using contemporary tools, a new architectural representation embraces all from ages 3 to 93.