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Winner: Bilge Beril Kapusuz Balci
Year: 2023
Institutions: Gazi University
Title: Observing/Performing the (Pandemic) Everyday: Photographic Writing as a Curating Tool in Online Architectural Education
Format: Book Chapter
Book Title: Technology and Teaching : Architecture and Interiors in the Age of Digital Design and COVID-19
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Abstract
This paper discusses the pedagogical tools and outcomes of the course “Image Construction and Architectural Photography” conducted by the author at Gazi University Faculty of Architecture, which was held online in the 2020-2021 spring semester due to the pandemic. It will present how the course expands the fields of research in architectural education reaching out the fields of architecture, urban studies and visual culture through an ethnographic lens by means of photography, and also how it decentralizes the limited online learning space throughout the pandemic. The course assigns architectural photography an agency in understanding the built environment as a complex form of social and spatial practices, unlike the conventional use of the medium as a sole representation of static artefacts. Drawing on Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva’s perspective on the day-to-day ethnography of buildings in terms of writing and visualizing space, the course brings forward the observation of “the everyday” in photographic narration of the architectural space, providing students a critical and performative tool of writing architecture in the form of a visual language. The students were expected to observe the pandemic everyday, re-capturing an urban scene/fragment in their neighbourhood for 30 days, yet performing an alternative daily routine. Photography becomes a mediating tool between observation and critical performance, since photographic writing turns into an act of architectural note-taking in terms of collecting multiple forms of space in use. Considering feedbacks from the students, this paper will suggest that photographic writing as a “curating” tool in online architectural education has a two-fold agency: It operates as a method to curate the (pandemic) everyday life in unfamiliar uses of familiar spaces for students and to cure and heal the palsied everyday life of them: a performative and reformative learning process in which the students are both the curator and the cured.
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Winner: Dr. Anuradha Chatterjee
Year: 2022
Institutions: Manipal University Jaipur
Title: In between fiction and space: Feminist studio pedagogy (of letting go)
Format: Book Chapter
Book Title: Space and Language in Architectural Education: Catalysts and Tensions
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Abstract
In my book chapter titled “Ungraspable Criticality” (in the Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design), I have discussed a studio project at UNSW which argued that starting with surface, not plan, in architectural design studios is able to bring about a shift in ‘architectural knowing’ that can defer to the pleasure of not knowing, everything. This paper builds on my scholarship on design studio, and is positioned at the intersection of four complementary critiques in/of design – critique of control in total design; design research, and its associated paradigms of inquiry, rigour, experimentation and uncertainty; rhizomatic, non-hierarchical, non-dualistic non-linear thinking; and generative fragments as processes that help ‘activate conceptualisation processes’. These intersections, orientations informed the fifth semester architectural design studio project at Avani Institute of Design, which was a Cultural Interpretation Centre, Mahean ex-French colony, adjacent to Kerala, but within the Union Territory of Puducherry. The students started with the fictional city of Mahe, as depicted in M. Mukundan’s historical-political fiction, On the Banks of the Mayyazhi, to understand Mahe’s cultural, political, and linguistic complexities. The novel was visualized into graphic tiles (each tile capturing an event, space, and emotion), which were further transformed into distinct architectonic volumes. Students assembled, arrayed, and merged these volumes, negotiating the architectural programme into that, as well as siting, testing, remaking, and retesting them to arrive at a precinct plan, which also contained within it Mahepast and present, fictive and real. While the studio introduced an element of never fully being in control of the artefact, it also subtly mounted an argument against this thing called ‘process,’ as it offered parallel streams of exploration. It proposed a creative methodology in which the structuring of design exploration was neither linear, nor strong, and which enabled students to find their ‘home’ within the broader scheme, instead of adhering to it faithfully.
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Winners: Milagros Zingoni & Magnus Feil
Year: 2021
Institutions: University of Tennessee-Knoxville & Arizona State University
Title: Pedagogy + INTERVENTION – CUMULUS, an inhabitable storm
Format: Book Chapter
Book Title: Emerging Practices in Architectural Pedagogy
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Abstract
The design-build studios propose the opportunity for praxis, where theory and practice intersects, they teach real life skills with focus on learning processes and collaborative design skills. EDIT studio is a participatory design build pedagogy that adds community engagement as the first phase of the complex design build pedagogy. Design build curriculums have developed in the last forty years in Architecture program in North America. Among the most prominently design build programs are the work of Steve Badanes from Jersey Devil and Neighborhood design-build, Samuel Mockbee and his work with Rural Studio, Richard Kroeker’s Freelab and Brian Makay-Lyons’ Ghostlab, both of them in Canada at Dalhousie University, and most recently the architecture programs participating in the Solar Decathlon Competition. Community engaged practices have originally emerged in urban planning and they are now part of many arts initiatives to create place making. Within interior design and interior architecture programs, the pedagogical opportunities for design build curriculum are at the early stages, they are often referred as fabrication, or installations and they often lack of community engagement during the design process. This paper presents and applied EDIT studio, a pedagogy that involves engagement, design, implementation and transformation that proposes a participatory collaboration with youth in the community as the first phase of the design process. It discusses Cumulus, a process and product done in Fall 2018 with ten graduate students in interior architecture and one hundred twenty kids from a local Title I school. The studio also involved a cross disciplinary collaboration with thirty four junior students in industrial design. It describes the contexts and development of a participatory-design-build funded studio done in a Research I university in the southwest of the United States exploring the collaborations with multiple audiences, youth, undergraduate and graduate design students and across disciplines.
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Winner: Sean Burns
Year: 2020
Institution: Ball State University
Title: Collaborative Thinking Through the Dynamics of Site and Architecture in Design Education
Format: Book Chapter
Book Title: Progressive Studio Pedagogy: Examples from Architecture and Allied Design Fields
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Abstract
Designing for a complex world requires architects to think critically, creatively, and collaboratively. To support the development of this skillset, the atmosphere of the design studio in architectural education challenges students to develop ideas creatively and critically reflect upon their conceptual designs for given projects. In design education, thinking collaboratively does not need to be solely defined by the sharing of ideas and information among peers, but instead can be applied to how architecture and its site can collectively inform one another throughout the design process to achieve a desired solution. Often, students are taught to sequentially operate within the design process by observing, recording, and then responding to it conditions with an architectural intervention. This procedure, while beneficial in teaching students to acknowledge and appreciate the contextual environment for their design, can be misguided as it emphasizes the site as a given, invariable constraint that is static and impermeable in nature. Architectural design involves a mediation of the designer’s intentions with the site. As such, students should be encouraged to consider architecture and the conditions of the site as malleable, accommodating bodies. This paper presents a series of projects, introduced to students in their second-year of study, that encouraged students to break the sequence of observe, record, and respond to allow site and architecture to be responsively in dialogue with one another throughout the design process. At the outset of each project, students were asked to blur the demarcations of architecture and site, among the earth and beyond to the sky, towards discovering ways in which the architecture and its contextual surroundings might respect, respond, and support one another to cultivate a desired user experience. These exercises offered students an avenue to creatively and critically maneuver the design process while promoting collaborative thinking between architecture and its environment.
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Acknowledgement:
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AMPS would like to thank and acknowledge the work and insights offered by its academic peer reviewers and awards committee in the selection process for this award.
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