At the Vital Center: The Small Town Studio at Ferris State University

Although the report is now 20 years old, Ernest L.Boyer and Lee D. Mitgang’s Building Community: ANew Future for Architectural Education and Practiceis the most current major report on the state of architecturaleducation and remains a source of inspirationtoday. In Building Community, Boyer and Mitgangagree with previous Carnegie Foundation reports that“higher education as a whole has lost its direction,that it is no longer at the vital center of the nation’swork.”1 To address this deficiency, Boyer and Mitgangproposed seven goals for architectural education andpractice, the seventh of which they termed “Serviceto the Nation.” Although Boyer and Mitgang identifiedseveral examples of socially aware architectureprograms (in the 1990s), they argued that “schoolsof architecture could do more…to instill in studentsa commitment to lives of engagement and service.”2This paper revisits Boyer and Mitgang’s report, inparticular its admonition that architecture programs“should educate students for both confidence andcaring—in service to the nation”3 and considers someof the critical reaction to that report. It then presentsthe work of the Small Town Studio at Ferris StateUniversity as a case study of an architectural designstudio based on a service learning design pedagogywhich has found innovative, low-cost ways to performprojects and engage students in the wider communitydespite omnipresent financial and time restraints.

Volume Editors
Luis Francisco Rico-Gutierrez & Martha Thorne

ISBN
978-1-944214-08-1