Architecture Live Projects

Pedagogy into Practice

Harriet Harriss, Lynnette Widder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317703471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Architecture Live Projects provides a persuasive, evidence-based advocacy for moving a particular kind of architectural learning, known as Live Projects, towards a holistic integration into current and future architectural curricula.

Live Projects are work completed in the borderlands between architectural education and built environment practice; they include design/build work, community-based design, urban advocacy consulting and a host of other forms and models described by the book's international group of authors. Because of their position, Live Projects as vehicle for simultaneously providing teaching and service has the potential to recalibrate the contesting claims that both academia and profession make to architecture.

This collection of essays and case studies consolidates current discussions on theory and learning ambitions, academic best practices, negotiation with licensure and accreditation, and considerations of architectural integrity. It is an invaluable resource to current and future Live Projects advocates – whether they aim to move from pedagogy into practice or practice into pedagogy.

PART I

Theories, models, and manifestos

1.1

DEVELOPING AN INCLUSIVE DEFINITION, TYPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS AND ONLINE RESOURCE FOR LIVE PROJECTS

Jane Anderson and Colin Priest

Introduction

What makes a project live? How do you structure a Live Project? How do Live Projects relate to education, practice and the community?

This chapter describes the experimentation with and documentation and analysis of a diverse range of Live Projects, discussed in relation to Lave and Wenger’s theory of situated learning via a process of legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger 1996) and findings from OB1 LIVE (Anderson and Priest 2013a), the authors’ programme of Live Projects. From this work we devised an inclusive definition and method of typological analysis that revealed different Live Project models and previously concealed connections between them. This was tested, expanded and disseminated through our development of the Live Projects Network (Anderson and Priest 2013b), an online resource to recognise and connect the multiplicity of participants in Live Project practice.

Initial empirical findings: OB1 LIVE and six factors common to all Live Projects

Our initial analysis of Live Project types and pedagogies came from observations made as tutors running Live Projects with our students (Anderson and Priest 2012). The projects described below demonstrate the reasoning behind our identification of six factors needed to make a project ‘live’.

In 2008 we established OB1 LIVE, a programme of Live Projects commissioned by community-based clients and designed by year one students of architecture and interior architecture at Oxford Brookes School of Architecture. Our first observations of students’ response to participation in Live Projects echoed the findings of Morrow, Parnell and Torrington (Morrow et al. 2004: 98), who describe the high levels of confidence and motivation of their year one architecture students at the University of Sheffield when participating in projects devised to connect creativity and reality.

The existence of a real brief and a tangible end product was clearly important in making our Live Projects meaningful for our students. The first OB1 LIVE Project was ‘Sounds of the Place’ for the 2008 National Architecture Student Festival, London. This followed a familiar “live build” format: a group of students volunteer to construct a temporary installation in a public place in response to a brief set by a student architecture festival. Our familiar role as studio tutors had shifted to that of agents (Anderson and Priest 2012: 54), guiding students through the uncertainties of the building process, including its financial and temporal realities. We realised that it was important to value uncertainty and leave space for a dynamic and non-linear pedagogic model specific to Live Projects.

We wished to establish a workable structure for curricular projects that involved the entire cohort and not just a self-selecting group of enthusiastic volunteers. There was little literature available on the pedagogy of architectural Live Projects and no agreed definition of what a Live Project actually was. Our understanding was similar to that described by Sara: ‘The Live Project is … a type of design project that is distinct from a typical studio project in its engagement of real clients or users, in real-time settings’ (Sara 2006: 1). Our second 2008 project, ‘Weather Stations’, required us to question what was achievable with year one students. The brief was for environmental educational play structures for a new garden at the Donnington Doorstep Family Centre. Very clear parameters were set for this project. We pre-negotiated access to the clients and site, drew up a brief, including a budget, with an agreed product and set a defined start and end point for the project. This project set a template for those to follow and retrospectively we can identify six factors that we consider are common to all Live Projects: external collaborator, educational organisation, brief, timescale, budget and product.

Development

Pedagogical context: situated learning via peripheral participation

In their book Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, analysing five case studies of different apprenticeship models internationally, Lave and Wenger point out that all learning is situated, regardless of its context. They observed that ‘learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community’ (Lave and Wenger 1996: 29). We noted that ‘during a Live Project a mutual trust is built up between students and tutors that motivates learning and starts to develop a shared exploration of what the design process involves and what it is to practice as an architect’ (Anderson and Priest 2012: 53). Lave and Wenger’s statement ‘As opportunities for understanding how well or poorly one’s efforts contribute are evident in practice, legitimate participation of a peripheral kind provides an immediate ground for self-evaluation’ (Lave and Wenger 1996: 111) is a potent description of a positive learning cycle where feedback is obtained in situ and is made significant by its authentic context, and where learning is absorbed by the learner willingly and informs their future practice and own critical judgement.

Live Projects are perceived by some as being too technically or sociologically complex for year one or even undergraduate students to tackle (Jeremy Till pers.comm. at the 2012 Architecture ‘Live Projects’ Pedagogy International Symposium). However, Lave and Wenger point out the important role that learners can play within society and their chosen profession. ‘Legitimate peripherality is important for developing “constructively naïve” perspectives or questions. From this point of view, inexperience is an asset to be exploited. It is of use, however, only in the context of participation, when supported by experienced practitioners who both understand its limitations and value its role’ (Lave and Wenger 1996: 117). With a low-to-no budget and inexperienced cohort, OB1 LIVE Projects looked very different from the typical ‘live build’ projects seen in the architectural press (Stacey 2009: 14–15). We were forced to question what defined a project as ‘live’.

Definition

Documentation, reflection and analysis: OB1 LIVE blog

The next phase of research comprised documentation on our OB1 LIVE blog (Anderson and Priest 2013a) (see Figure 1.1.1) and reflection on twelve OB1 LIVE Projects carried out between 2008 and 2011 (Anderson and Priest 2012). This was combined with experimentation with, and analysis of, different project formats, using them to test different hypotheses. Some of the six factors that we eventually recognised as being common to all Live Projects (brief, product, external collaborator, timescale, budget, educational organisation) were more difficult to identify than others.

Brief: By running a combination of live and traditional design studio projects we observed that both types could include a real brief and site. Without further factors it would be impossible to distinguish them (Mount Place, 2009).

Product: There is a common expectation that the outcome of a live architectural project must be a building but this is not even the case in many professional projects, where the outcome can be feasibility studies, ideas generation (Film Oxford, 2010) or prototypes (Donnington Doorstep, 2008). We realised that Live Projects could end at any point in a similar way to professional projects but that the outcome must be recognised and presented as a product.

External collaborator: An important question was ‘Does there need to be a client to make a project live?’ We tested this in 2011 with ‘Now Showing’, a self-initiated on-campus pop-up cinema project. Although at first this project did not appear to have a client, we observed that students were still designing for a user – their fellow students on campus. They were also required to satisfy the demands of the university campus managers – effectively a client with its own needs to meet. On balance, even this self-initiated project revealed de facto external collaborators for the students to work with.

FIGURE 1.1.1 Screenshot of the OB1 LIVE website taken on 26 June 2013.

Timescale: This is an inevitable factor and it can be difficult to make Live Projects fit within the academic calendar. We found that a broader view of the possibilities inherent to the other factors, particularly brief, product and external collaborator, enabled more imaginative ways to achieve this (The Story Museum, 2011–12).

Budget: A budget is also inevitable but often overlooked, particularly when operating on a make do and mend or exchange basis, as many Live Projects do (Found! 2013).

Educational organisation: Another question that arose in a 2009 project, ‘Tactile model for the blind’, was ‘Are student-led projects live?’ This was a very small-scale extra-curricular commission undertaken by two students. Our very limited involvement to negotiate the terms of the project meant that this was a very marginal case, moving closer to practice than education. The involvement of an educational organisation is a critical factor in distinguishing a Live Project from a professional one.

We had identified six factors common to all Live Projects and tested them to ensure that they offered flexibility in their application to different situations. Through a consideration of their inter-relationship in the context of learning, we formed an inclusive definition of a Live Project: ‘A Live Project comprises the negotiation of a brief, timescale, budget and product between an educational organisation and an external collaborator for their mutual benefit. The project must be structured to ensure that students gain learning that is relevant to their educational development.’

Dissemination

Typological analysis and online resource:
Live Projects Network

In 2012 we established the Live Projects Network (Anderson and Priest 2013b), an international online network of Live Projects to connect students, academics, practitioners and external collaborators involved in Live Projects (see Figure 1.1.). The purpose is to promote the use of Live Projects in education, share best practice, encourage dialogue and contribute to the establishment of a theoretical basis for the study of Live Projects. The site aims to include as diverse a series of case studies as possible for different Live Project models.

From an initial analysis of the first fifteen different Live Project case studies on the network from Oxford Brookes University, McGill School of Architecture, Montreal, and the University of Portsmouth we saw that even very diverse project types shared the six factors that we had identified. Each factor comprised its own spectrum of variables. For example, the nature of the relationship with the external collaborator could range from a commission to a collaboration to a self-initiated project (see Figure 1.1.3). What differentiated each project was where it sat on each of the six spectra.

These points were used to create a pro forma for contributors to the online Live Projects Network and also as filters so that visitors to the site could find projects with resources similar to their own. This allowed projects that might initially appear to be very different in nature to be connected and understood by others planning their own Live Projects (see Figure 1.1.4).

By January 2014 twenty-e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Foreword: Live Project love: building a framework for Live Projects
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: pedagogy into practice … or practice into pedagogy?
• Part I Theories, models, and manifestos
• Part II The question of assessment
• Part III From education into practice
• Part IV Case studies
• Part V Closing thoughts
• Afterword