VIRTUAL MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY

Abstract

As our design settings become increasingly more complex and volatile, with social and political issues of inequity at the fore of escalating ecological issues, the next generation of architects who will face these challenges need to be capable of working within and mediating a myriad of evolving complexities. Traditional architectural education, however, tends to introduce students to design through formal-operational design decision making, focusing on the form and function of a singular design solution as opposed to training them to start with site-specific studies of social and environmental need. Perhaps unsurprisingly with this formal design logic as a shared foundation, in architectural academia our discourses that surround sustainability tend to follow these kinds of logics as well, searching for commonalities and ubiquitous solutions. Sustainability solutions cannot be universal nor is sustainability something that can be solved through a single design application. We require a rethinking of sustainability design education that frames design as an on-going process of continuing place-based inquiry. Through an examination of a series of multidisciplinary sustainability design courses, this paper pushes against the idea of traditional design learning based on a top-down critique of design output, and instead addresses design as a continuing multidisciplinary dialogue that interrogates the context, goals, and conditions of a design agenda. Reframing sustainability design as an on-going, cross-disciplinary, situated dialogue focuses student learning on skills that can be applied in a variety of design contexts and at different scales of design thinking. This focus on communication prioritizes open-minded creativity and situated design learning.