Embedded and Hopeful: A Curriculum for Change

Abstract

The next generation of architects will face unprecedented challenges involving ecological collapse as well as related issues of culturally embedded social and political inequities. Architectural education has a key role to play in addressing this ongoing environmental crisis. Site-specific social and environmental design approaches need to become a core part of our undergraduate architectural curriculum. Students tend not to gain enough experience working within multidisciplinary teams and collaborating with community stakeholders, especially early in their design education, and both of these experiences can offer students an expanded set of skills and understandings that can help them to mediate local social and environmental complexities. This paper exemplifies a learning approach in which architecture students work with students from a variety of other disciplines to create design proposals for the transformation a failing mall into a local sustainability hub. Students work through concurrent social and ecological goals throughout their design experience, and through cross-disciplinary team-work, the students learn to examine sustainability and social agendas through different disciplinary lenses. The students also benefit from an immersive learning approach. Community members and local business groups involve the students in discourses which help students to define project goals to better address local social and environmental issues. This exposure to actual local needs provides a cognitive and ethical foundation for the students’ design approach. As our design settings become increasingly more complex and volatile, with social issues of inequity at the fore of escalating ecological issues, the architects who face these challenges will need to be capable of working within and mediating a myriad of local complexities. Through a critical examination of this course’s learning outcomes, this paper demonstrates a potential trajectory for a hopeful architectural design pedagogy, one that can better address a future shadowed by the implications of climate change.