Design-Build

Integrating Craft, Service, and Research through Applied Academic and Practice Models

Daniel Winterbottom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317393986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Design-Build provides everything you need to know about how to embark on a design-build project within a studio or professional practice setting. Design-build models have increased across academic programs worldwide, allowing students to address the real-world challenges of working in the community using a participatory design process. In practice, they offer a full partnership between the designer and builder to elevate design concepts and reduce project costs.

Written by an experienced practitioner and educator, this book offers contextual background on the development of the design-build model in pedagogy and practice, guidance from inception to conclusion for classroom and field usage, discussions on the shift to community-engaged design and inspirational examples from international case studies. Illustrated in full color throughout, it looks at structuring a design-build firm, best-practice, efficiency and the limitations of design-build as a practice model.

This is the fundamental guidebook for those interested in developing or working for a design-build professional practice, academics leading design-build programs and students interested in social and environmental justice, education, and practice through a design-build model.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Tell me, and I forget

Show me, and I remember

Let me do, and I understand

After Confucius, China, 5th century BC

Introduction

Designing and building is the fundamental partnership of the enterprise of placemaking. The model known as design-build merges these two aspects of creating that are usually learned and practiced separately. In the landscape architecture pedagogy, a design-build program allows students to realize their designs in the real world through a participatory process requiring adaptation and collaboration. Many of these academic design-build programs are exploring and testing new ideas in landscape architecture and reaching out to underserved communities ­(Figures 1.1 and 1.2).

Figure 1.1 Gathering pavilion in a housing development for refugees located in Gothenburg, Sweden, created by ON/OFF.

Photo credit: Daniel Winterbottom.

Figure 1.2 The simple stacking method of standardized milled lumber creates a sense of privacy for those seated with transparency and light at the upper levels.

Photo credit: Daniel Winterbottom.

In a similar vein, in professional practice, design-build firms are creating places of ecological and social significance with therapeutic connections to nature. Looking forward, the design-build approach is growing, in part due to cost efficiencies but primarily because it offers two opportunities: the full partnership of the designer and the builder throughout the process, and the elevation of craft and sustainable practices. Since being recognized by the American Society of Landscape Architects, design-build is becoming an accepted form of project delivery by states, counties and cities across the country and the world. Firms are expanding the scope of their projects well beyond the residential to include commercial, public art, ecological restoration, small-scale community parks, storm water interventions and even infrastructure projects. Design-build firms do not share the same structural model. Variations among and within the firms allow flexible approaches depending on the type of project. The examples of firms presented here include several in Europe as well as the United States. Given the vitality of the model, it is surprising that few academic opportunities are available to students who look to participate in a design-build studio. In architectural education there are dozens of design-build programs. In the United States, the number of landscape programs that regularly offer design-build studios is much smaller. This book will cover most of them. In the chapter on case studies, five professors and a lecturer describe their academic programs using the design-build approach.

As a landscape architect, I transitioned from professional practice to teaching at the University of Washington. I’ve witnessed in the academic sphere that there is a bit of trial by fire for the graduating student entering any profession. Most landscape architectural programs offer semester or summer internships and practicums, yet many students remain unprepared. Practitioners complain that students lack the practical skills to effectively integrate into professional environments, and the firm will need to assume the bulk of the responsibility for training, mentorship and professional licensing. Academics respond that professional programs are not trade schools, and they align their intellectual focus on training the next generation of innovative designers who are futuristic in their thinking. The students are often lost between both the camps of application and theory, and when they enter practice they feel increasingly ungrounded. They may aspire to bring design thinking shaped by their education in theory, research and studio-based design. Then they may flounder in the context of real-world constraints of time, costs and regulations. As a practitioner and a teacher for the last twenty-five years, I wonder if alternative educational models might reduce the division between practice and academia to offer students better support and preparation in the challenging transition to professional practice?

The typical landscape architecture curriculum embraces a gamut of learning, from science-based research to the exploration of “new planning”, advanced representational and fabrication technologies, design theory and techniques of practice. As programs adjust course offerings to meet the digital revolution and to be ecologically relevant, the opportunity for students to learn the craft of building becomes overlooked and ever more difficult to address in an already crowded curriculum. The design-build teaching model answers this challenge by reconnecting students to the craft of making and to the participatory effort of designing and building.

I’ve attended studio reviews in landscape architecture departments across the United States, Europe and Asia. I rarely hear students describe the material character, expression, meaning or detailing of their designs. Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, in The Eyes of the Skin, observed that the current obsession, solely with the visual, results in a disengagement from the sensual, phenomenological and emotional content embedded in a multi-sensory experience. This removal from the sensory leads to an alienation and disconnection from our environment. Though Pallasmaa was critiquing the state of architectural expression, his assessment might reflect on landscape architecture as well. Landscape architects do differ from architects in their focus on ecological repair and a design/nature integration. Yet in studio reviews, many presentations and evaluations are based exclusively on visual representation. The deeper experiences we can find at the intersection of the built and natural environments are often overlooked.

Material transformation, expression and assembly can harmonize the visual, offering tactile, audio, olfactory and metaphorical awakenings in the user. Most students are well aware of the makers’ movement, the ethical use of materials and the crafting of our built environment to honor and respect cultural traditions and values. Many strive to reference history and time in their designs. They aspire to elevate their use of natural materials, especially in urbanizing environments. In their design studios they rarely experience full material expression and they lack opportunity for reflection when their ideas are not actually applied.

Craft and beauty have deep traditions in the practice of landscape architecture. Professor and former chair of the landscape architecture program at the University of Virginia, Elizabeth Meyer, has argued that beauty has an important role in landscape architecture and attracts people to a specific place, reflecting high value equal to ecological performance.

But we are also sustained, and regenerated, through abundance, wonder, and beauty. The performance of a landscape’s appearance, and the experience of beauty, should have as much currency in debates about what a sustainable landscape might, and should, be as the performance of its eco-logical systems.¹

Masterful detailing is emblematic in the fences, bridges and structures that, in part, define the iconic parks of Olmsted and Vaux (Figure 1.3). The rusticated features of post and beam wood construction, cast iron bridges, urns, stone walls and abutments merge with and celebrate natural materials and forms.

Figure 1.3 The Gothic Bridge in Central Park, New York City. Designed by Olmsted and Vaux, it marries the forms of nature with the properties of the steel to create a powerful gateway. The railing and carriage bollard details are in harmony with the forms of the cast iron beam supports.

Photo credit: Jake Rajs.

The parks endure as well-loved landscapes of retreat in highly urbanized environments. Expressionist sculpting in concrete defines Lawrence Halprin’s urban fountains and parks (Figure 1.4). Created by innovative rough board forming, their tactile qualities elicit metaphor and sensuality. These mesmerizing flows, forms and textures reference the geology of canyons, buttes and escarpments. Halprin hiked and sketched to find and study these magnificent places in the western United States.

Figure 1.4 The Keller Fountain Park, Portland, OR, is a masterpiece of cast concrete and choreographed water flow. Lawrence Halprin incorporated his studies of natural rock forms into this sculptured landscape.

Photo credit: Jeremy Bittermann.

In Michael Van Valkenburgh’s Tear Drop Park, a powerful rough-hewn, bluestone wall uplifts between the towers of lower Manhattan. The experience transports the viewer through time and back to the Hudson River escarpments and quarries of upstate New York (Figure 1.5).

Figure 1.5 The tactility, craft and geological references expressed in this stone wall at Tear Drop Park, New York City, represents the deep relationships Michael Van Valkenburgh has established with craftspeople.

Photo credit: Adrian Marshall.

These highly regarded placemakers integrate a deep and evocative sense of beauty, place and cultural history. Each reflects a high level of, and deep appreciation for craft, art and materiality. These examples are frequently shown in landscape history courses, so why are students not provided the opportunity to digest, emulate and explore craft as an essential element of our profession? Are craft and materials rejected as unnecessary for aspiring young landscape architects? Do professors lack the knowledge or incentive to convey craft and its meaning? Departments of landscape architecture do grapple with an ever-expanding curriculum. Subjects taught over many years may lose their perceived relevance compared to new subjects emerging within the field of study. The outcome is that accreditation reviews find that students are graduating with a minimum understanding of construction methods and systems, and are consequently less prepared to explore the rich world of craft and assembly, to innovate with new fabrication technologies, and to design with material expression and tactility in mind.

In the design-build model, many of the concepts and skills introduced in the curriculum are honed and synchronized, and the inter-connections among the concerns of design, construction and technology are brought to light. As this model integrates design and construction, each intention is able to be considered from both points of view. In design-build studio projects students can intensively explore, in a coherent manner, specific focus areas of professional practice. These subjects of focus span green technologies and sustainable design, therapeutic gardens, social justice and equity, and environments for children. Students can be given the opportunity to work with specific and diverse communities of whom they may have little knowledge. In twenty-five years of leading the landscape architecture design-build program at the University of Washington, we have explored areas of personal interest including trauma, social injustice, health and therapeutic environments, violence and poverty, displacement and mental illness/incarceration. Past projects include a clothes washing facility for women in declining health in a remote Mexican agricultural community; school gardens for war refugee families living and working in a Guatemalan garbage dump; gardens for children with HIV/AIDS; a rooftop garden for adults and children with cancer; and a mother/child garden in a women’s maximum-security prison. Recent projects are healing gardens for veterans, for refugees and for those incarcerated. In the past five years we have lived and worked in a Croatian public mental hospital through our international design-build study abroad program.

These social justice foci are then manifested using a rigorous application of craft, art and detailing. Social justice ethics and material sensibility are brought forward together to overcome what Pallasmaa notes is a consumption of the visual at a loss of the social and sensorial, as he comments:

The hegemonic eye seeks domination over all fields of cultural production, and it seems to weaken our capacity for empathy, compassion and participation with the world. The narcissistic eye views architecture solely as a means of self-expression, an intellectual-artistic game detached from essential mental and societal connections.

He then elaborates that “the world becomes a hedonistic but meaningless visual journey.”² This removal of the sensory leads to an alienation and disconnection from our environment. “The current industrial mass production of visual imagery tends to alienate vision from emotional involvement and identification, and to turn imagery into a mesmerizing flow without focus or participation.”³

In design-build studios students take on multiple, overlapping roles including that of facilitator, advocate and instructor, as they solicit input, address competing and contrasting nee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• BIOGRAPHIES
• LIST OF ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION
• Chapter 2. PEDAGOGY
• Chapter 3. PRACTICE AND MATERIALITY
• Chapter 4. EVOLVING EDUCATION, SHIFTING PRACTICE
• Chapter 5. CASE STUDIES
• Index