An Interdisciplinary Architectural Pedagogy for Social Relevance

We live in a time of rapid geo-political change that is expected to accelerate rather than stabilise over the coming decades: More than half the world lives in urban areas, a figure expected to rise to 68% over the next 30 years. Cities are denser and more socially complex than ever before. Rural to urban internal migration continues, but a substantial driver of population transitions is a consequence of inter-national immigration, some of it forced. In fact, there are currently 65 million displaced people in the world; the largest figure in history. These increasingly complex conditions require architects to practice a new kind of critical consciousness about the socio-economic, environmental and demographic multiplicities in which they work. It’s no longer enough to concentrate on the conditions of a site defined by the lines of property ownership. Architects need to adopt a contextually relevant praxis that responds to the multiscalar effects of our changing social condition. To that end, we argue, the emerging generation of architects will need knowledge and methods – often inter-disciplinary – that enable them to read and represent these social complexities and address them through critical design responses. This paper presents a pedagogical approach for a foundational transdisciplinary design studio within a new generalist undergraduate degree in design in which this pedagogical challenge is addressed. It is a core subject in the pathway to professional a master’s degrees in architecture, landscape architecture and urban design.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Teach.2019.61

Volume Editors
Richard Blythe & Johan De Walsche

ISBN
978-1-944214-23-4