Author(s): Dragana Zorić & Jason Lee
Implemented in the effort to infiltrate architecture with an astute and aggressive climate change consciousness, this paper outlines a re-imagining of the pedagogy of an architecture design studio with that of landscape. Intentionally envisioned as architecture’s reckoning with its own image as the “master discipline” and “savior”, the studio looked to an expanded field of spatial disciplines, especially landscape architecture, in order to step back and re-formulate a conventional understanding of the discipline and its reach. The pedagogy outlined here posits the “unbuilding” Manhattan’s abandoned office spaces, followed by their radical re-invention. Currently, they function as a new type of wasteland, territories consumed and exhausted through a now-defunct use, the product of a once voracious office culture, now fallow. Rife for a productive process of discharge and re-programming through the removal of the skin and façade system, unused high-rise buildings and their massive floor plates become new urban territories to be re-taken and re-utilized. Unbuilding is an act of design, through an aeration and release from a climate-controlled interiority. Often treated as erasure or loss, unbuilding, when viewed as a recursive process of exchange, can be growth. Simultaneously, as sites relinquished, the wastelands become technical lands, “where global knowledge practices and aesthetic categories have converged” to define the land.” Using an interdisciplinary and critical thinking framework, the studio viewed architecture arrested in a disused urban condition as an entry point to implementing living landscapes and enacting real ecological processes. Void of their current envelopes, exposed to the open air, able to be re-connected to each other and to urban links of all varieties, these spaces become a novel three-dimensional territory of, and for the city, an urban parkland like no other. With their access and morphology re-defined, their nature and the nature of “nature” are both re-considered. The impact of this pedagogical approach on student learning and design outcomes resulted in 78% of students responding, via course evaluations, that the studio course strongly increased their understanding of environmental sustainability and ecological principles. Not only did theoretical knowledge improve, but also a facility in practical application in design. Tracking these metrics over multiple years could point to new and useful trends, supporting evidence-based curriculum refinement in relation to climate crisis intervention through the spatial design disciplines.
Volume Editors
Sara Jensen Carr & Rubén García Rubio
ISBN
978-1-944214-48-7