From Settlement House to 20K House: Service and Labor in American Design/Build Education

This paper discusses how social engagement in thearchitectural profession fits within broader conceptionsof American citizenship over the course of thetwentieth century. To do so, it provides a historicalaccount of American service learning in the Progressiveand Depression Eras (1890s-1930s) and compares itto community-based design/build education unfoldingin the current era (1990s-present). In so doing, itpoints out the ways in which educators in each periodtook a “pragmatist” approach to aiding the poor whilepromoting the involvement of youth in service learningactivities. It argues that contemporary programscarry forward one of the key contradictions of theProgressive youth-labor model. Namely, they createa division between those who must perform hardlabor to support themselves and their families andthose with the privilege of temporarily laboring foreducational purposes. It concludes by pointing outhow student design/build efforts use the tropes of “thefrontier” and “self-help” to reaffirming the profession’svalue in times of social and economic crisis.

Volume Editors
Luis Francisco Rico-Gutierrez & Martha Thorne

ISBN
978-1-944214-08-1