Designbuild Pedagogies for Social Change

This volume explores the transformative social change at the heart of designbuild education. From Black Mountain College to Rural Studio, designbuild was once viewed as a subversive critique of architectural education separate from the mainstream. Yet designbuild courses have exploded in popularity in the last decade so that nearly all schools of architecture boast designbuild programs or projects.

With that widespread acceptance of designbuild comes a range of approaches and outcomes, from hands-on material and technological experimentation to the construction of large-scale projects addressing social challenges of their time and place. In Designbuild Pedagogies, leaders and innovators in designbuild pedagogy from around the world expound on the methods they use to approach their work and the potentials they envisage for this expanding mode of teaching. Collectively, these pieces frame designbuild as a radical form of education that shifts academic paradigms toward social justice. This book is structured into three main sections, The Past, The Present, and The Potentials and includes pieces by established practitioners and emerging voices from the US, Mexico, Chile, South Africa, Ecuador, Argentina, Thailand, Germany, the UK, and Australia.

These provocative chapters make for an accessible and inspiring window into designbuild’s future and will be of interest to faculty and students of architecture and related design disciplines.