The Agency of Making and Architecture Education: Design-Build Curriculum in a New School of Architecture

Abstract

Developing a curriculum for Canada’s newest school of architecture in forty years created the opportunity for a commitment to new pedagogy that would address changes and needs in the profession, particularly in the Northern context. The tri-cultural mandate of the school (First Nations, Francophone, Anglophone), and the desire to create a complete design-build curriculum aligned with the community’s commitment for change and the location of the school in former historic buildings downtown. The design-build curriculum means that in each studio year the cohort will design and construct at full scale a project relevant to the context of the school such as the ice fishing huts completed this past year. Optional design/build workshops in the summer in Europe allowed for additional experimentation of construction methods in other specific northern contexts. This paper outlines the larger and specific contexts for the design of the design-build curriculum, the processes of the first year of implementation, the agency of making both for the student and instructors and concludes with a discussion of the trajectory of design-build in the school.