Towards an Architecture of Ingenuity and Empowerment

The featured Design Works will present work and discuss lessons learned during a semester long travel studio based in Southeast Asia which was run in the Spring Semester of 2019. The travel group of fifteen students consisted of nine third year undergraduate architecture students and seven planning students, including four Chinese nationals, ranging from second year to graduate level. The students worked in three interdisciplinary teams, each team beginning their two and a half month travel study living together in a separate small town for over a month in relatively remote conditions at homestays in rural Thailand. Students became intimately familiar with these towns, forged strong personal relationships, and built reservoirs of knowledge one conversation at a time. It is our shared premise that architecture exists in these small villages and towns in the ingenuity of the people, that architecture exists in a shared language of making, modifying and reuse. It is a modest but vibrant architecture, an architecture that is alive and evolving, an architecture that is small in scale, accessible, and one that emerges from the people. Students were challenged to engage existing conditions; both empowering and lending coherence to the energies that already existed in the place. This presentation shares the resulting design work and discusses this model of travel study leveraging local University and community based partnerships as a way of building a substantive approach for an architecture which uses social and cultural issues as a catalyst for design.

Volume Editors

ISBN
978-1-944214-31-9