Architecture beyond the Studio: Reflecting the social and cultural dimensions of design proposals

This teaching project implemented a new interdisciplinary educational format at the D-ARCH, which teaches Master of Architecture and senior Bachelor students to reflect and rethink their own design work through the lens of the humanities and social sciences (HSS). The outcomes of this teaching project were texts and presentations, in which the students summarize their HSS research and make concrete proposals to redesign the architecture project.

The goal of this teaching project was to bridge the omnipresent gap between design and HSS in architecture education. Over the past decades, teaching at the D-ARCH has been dominated by design-based education. This means that students spend most of their time in design studios guided by professional architects. HSS subjects, such as history, cultural anthropology or sociology of architecture, are treated as “side-subjects” and taught apart from design. The consequence: the students’ design project and their HSS-related work often have barely any reference to each other.

To treat design and HSS as sperate entities is a disadvantage for architecture students, since it has recently become crucial for architects to be able to establish relations between design and HSS. This has two reasons: firstly, the scholarly discipline of architecture is experiencing an increasing academization. This is also visible in a growing number of research-based PhD and MA programs at the architecture departments in the USA, UK as well as in central Europe. In these programs, skills of HSS, such as literature research, writing and critical reflection of one’s own design work are important. Secondly, public- as well as private clients such as real estate developers more and more expect architects to consider social and cultural aspects in their design proposals. Hence, professional architects need HSS knowledge, in order to be able to reflect on and express the social, and cultural implications of their building proposals towards architecture juries, politicians and the wider public alike.

The project was integrated into the existing D-Arch curriculum by combining an elective course with the teaching format focus work, accommodating a maximum of 25 students. The elective course, spanning the semester, comprised four sessions, each requiring the mandatory group presence of all students. In each of these sessions, tutors engaged students with various HSS texts on architecture-society relations and provided guidance on reflexive writing. Additional to these recurring elements, each session delved into distinct aspects of students› HSS research, aligning with the text due at the semester’s end.

Between sessions, students completed tasks assigned by the lecturers and participated in individual feedback sessions to assess their progress. Tasks included searching for HSS literature related to their design projects, writing and revising texts summarizing their research, reviewing peers› texts and preparing presentations showcasing their work’s progress. Tutors facilitated the process by distributing handouts outlining tasks for the subsequent group sessions.

The semester comprised four group sessions, each dedicated to a specific theme:
Aspect: Students presented an aspect of their design project they aimed to investigate from an HSS perspective. They also provided feedback to peers on their chosen aspects.
Sources: Students sought HSS literature related to their chosen aspect, presenting an overview of their research activities and sharing quotes from relevant sources.
Argument: Continuing their literature research, students explored architectural references related to their research interest. They presented arguments demonstrating the connections between their research, design project, literature, and architectural examples.
Abstract: In the final session, students drew conclusions from their research and outlined plans for independent research during the focus work phase.

Upon completion of the elective course’s four group sessions, students decided whether to continue their research in the focus work course or conclude the course. During the focus work phase, students deepened their research, identified new HSS literature, and produced a focus work text of at least 10 A4 pages. Tutors facilitated an additional group session where students submitted draft versions of their focus work and provided feedback to peers. Tutors then offered detailed written feedback on the drafts, followed by personal discussions with each student. After approximately one month for finalizing focus work texts, students and tutors convened in a final session where students presented their research to two guest reviewers invited by the tutors for a discussion on the students› texts.

The project goals were achieved insofar as every student was able to identify aspects in their architectural design projects, that had more than just spatial and constructive implications but were also socio-cultural and/or socio-economic. Beyond identifying them, students also learned how to search for literature dealing with these aspects from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences and using it to rethink their architectural projects as well as to make concrete proposals on how to redesign them informed by the HSS.

During the process one of the learning goals, namely, to exhibit their findings as well redesigned architectural projects in form of new drawings, images, models, or classic visualizations from the discipline of architecture, proved to not be achievable for students within the time frame of an elective course and focus work. Therefore, the expectations towards this learning goal were in the beginning reduced to just designing a poster containing the most important quotes of the research together with plans and images, where the redesign was hinted through highlighting, censoring, or zooming into certain corners of the initial architectural projects. In a second step the tutors decided to also skip this step and focus more on the precise verbalization of the envisioned redesign. These critical texts reflecting the student’s own work proved to be very successful with regard to reflecting what impact they can have in society as designing architects. Having to submit a working progress version of their texts every four weeks also proved to be valuable for monitoring and investigating this reflection process.

Already the first semester proved that one of the most unexpected benefits of this teaching project was how the setting empowered students to constructively criticize each other’s progress and to therefore not only learn from the tutors but also from one another in a moderated peer-to-peer process. During the group sessions students were not only assigned the task to present their own progress, but they also had to read and reflect the working progress of one peer and present their reflections on their peer’s progress in front of everyone, including new literature suggestions, pointing out strengths as well as weaknesses of their peers´ papers. These presentations then initiated vivid group discussions, within the whole group on each student project.

Especially this last lesson learned could be easily translated into other settings through integrating opportunities thoroughly formulate develop and share peer to peer feedback in the courses.