The Design-Build Studio

Crafting Meaningful Work in Architecture Education

Tolya Stonorov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317307952
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The Design-Build Studio examines sixteen international community driven design-build case studies through process and product, with preceding chapters on community involvement, digital and handcraft methodologies and a graphic Time Map. Together these projects serve as a field guide to the current trends in academic design-build studios, a window into the different processes and methodologies being taught and realized today. Design-build supports the idea that building, making and designing are intrinsic to each other: knowledge of one strengthens and informs the expression of the other. Hands-on learning through the act of building what you design translates theories and ideas into real world experience. The work chronicled in this book reveals how this type of applied knowledge grounds us in the physicality of the world in which we live.

 

 

Chapter 1
Time Map

Graphic History of the Academic Design-Build Studio Case Studies

 

 

Tolya Stonorov and Danny Sagan with drawing by Tolya Stonorov

 

 

 

Time Map

The Case Study Time Map is a family tree of sorts. Each design-build case study program in this book is shown at the year it began. An iconic project for each program is drawn in the dashed rounded rectangles above. Any key design-build influence or important connection is also placed at the year it began and the connections between these programs are drawn in blue. The red dots are placed at the year the program commenced (with a corresponding number in the center) and continue for as long as the program stayed active. The gray 10% transparent tone shows the rise in the number of academic design-build programs over the years.

The history of the design-build studio is a complicated and sometimes convoluted one. This graphic time map locates the influences and inspirations of the programs specifically chronicled in this book, but it does not assume to be comprehensive.¹ If the relationships between the programs that are documented here appear complex, it is representative of the interconnectedness of this movement. It is important to note that at one point in the history of this movement, almost everyone involved knew each other. Because there are so many programs now, this can no longer be said. However, we are at least all related, if not directly, then through our relationships with a common ancestry. We are also connected in how we choose to pursue the making of buildings and in how we ask ourselves questions. Are we artists or technicians? Which should guide our process, the idea or the artifact? Are we true Modernists or are we an extension of a long tradition? Do we follow the trajectory of the machine or do we live solidly in the realm of hand making? These dichotomies, seemingly as centrifugal as Nietzsche’s classic Dionysian and Apollonian, try to find resolution in the Design-Build movement. Living romantically on site while constructing rationally and critically derived forms, we live both metaphorically in the Bauhauses of the cathedral builders and the radical space of Ant-Farm’s media burn. We are the utopian children of Buckminster Fuller, dreaming of the universe while practically reasoning over the cost and weight of each nail, following every Btu.

Design-Build was born out of a tradition of radical pioneers. Therefore, it is not surprising that the design-build process lives and breathes in the research wings of architecture schools. In some cases it continues to change the methods we all use. In many cases it makes us all more inclusive and pluralistic. What cannot be refuted, is that by bringing the once radical notion of design-build into the academy, and into the lives of students, we have indelibly altered the landscape of what is possible.

Suggested Reading

EDBKN/European DesignBuild Knowledge Network Consortium. (1 June 2016). dbXchange.eu. Accessed: 5 June 2016.

Goodman, Anna Gloria. A History of Community Design/Build in the United States in Four Moments. Globalizing Architecture/ Flows and Disruptions: Papers from the 102nd Annual Meeting of the ACSA, 2014, 503–512.

Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 23 December 2012–15 April 2013, Organized by Leah Dickerman, Curator, with Masha Chlenova, Curatorial Assistant. 2012. www.mo­ma.org/i­nte­ractives/exhi­biti­ons/2012/in­ven­ting­abstra­cti­on/?page=home.

Lloyd Kahn, Shelter, Shelter Publications; 2nd edition (May 1, 2000)

Note

1 All information is based on communication with the case study authors and individual research.

Figure 1.1 Case Study Time Map

Chapter 2
The Future of Community Engagement

José Galarza

Perceptions of Social Responsibility

When architects talk about community engagement what do they really mean? The image conjured for many is a humanitarian abroad, or locally a weekend volunteer, with a shovel in hand and pencil behind the ear. The cumulative effect of these service-oriented idealizations is that community engagement stays at the periphery of contemporary practice, happening only in spare time, if at all.

Figure 2.1 “Lime Kiln in the Hinterbrühl” by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller was painted in 1845, and depicts, for its time, a conventional scene of pre-industrial building material production

In contrast, pre-modern building production was for most regions necessarily homegrown, informed by the availability of materials at hand and inherited technical expertise. Assuming a group’s political sovereignty, most traditional societies’space making was a relatively accessible activity, supported communally, and formally representative of one’s own culture. Even up until the end of the 19th century, the cultivation of building materials was considered a social responsibility. A decree in Great Britain, for example, required that lime pits where lime was being slaked had to have been soaked for a generation before the lime could be used.¹ These plasters were unique according to the geology from which they were harvested, and required for each a particular sensitivity, a kind of craftsman dialect. The transition from lime plaster to concrete as a common building material mirrors well the influence of industrial-scale production to conform building practice towards uniformity and formal abstraction. This influence prevailed to the extent that today a small-scale harvest of materials directly from the land, or the overlay of traditional cosmologies in a b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Time Map: Graphic History of the Academic Design-Build Studio Case Studies
• 2 The Future of Community Engagement
• 3 Manifesto for Handwork: Quality, Material, and Ideas
• 4 Manifesto for Digital Fabrication: Control, Craft, and Agency
• 5 Case Studies: Fast Build – Less than One Semester Programs
• 6 Case Studies: Build – Semester-Long Programs
• 7 Case Studies: Long Build – Semester-Plus Programs
• Conclusion
• List of Image Credits
• Bibliography
• Index