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.

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.

Live projects engage with real communities and are an increasing mode of practice within university design studio teaching. Such projects reflect a growing social and ethical commitment to expand the role of design education beyond the academy. The Live Projects collection of essays represents a diverse group of case-studies of university-led live design projects, gathered into a critical mass of design research that sits between design, social science and building. The focus is on a range of live projects as the vehicle for describing the aspirations, rationale, outcomes, and ultimately speculating on the effectiveness, of this specific teaching model. The case-studies offer a range of local, national and international examples selected to act as benchmarks or critical inspirations for the further development of successful models of design action, and to provide discussion on live project models within the university setting.

The power of design to create a life worth living even in a refugee camp: designs, inventions, and artworks from the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan. This book shows how, even in the most difficult conditions--forced displacement, trauma, and struggle--design can help create a life worth living. Design to Live documents designs, inventions, and artworks created by Syrian refugees living in the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan. Through these ingenious and creative innovations--including the vertical garden, an arrangement necessitated by regulations that forbid planting in the ground; a front hall, fashioned to protect privacy; a baby swing made from recycled desks; and a chess set carved from a broomstick--refugees defy the material scarcity, unforgiving desert climate, and cultural isolation of the camp. Written in close collaboration with the residents of the camp, with text in both English and Arabic, Design to Live, reflects two perspectives on the camp: people living and working in Azraq and designers reflecting on humanitarian architecture within the broader field of socially engaged art and design. Architectural drawings, illustrations, photographs, narratives, and stories offer vivid testimony to the imaginative and artful ways that residents alter and reconstruct the standardized humanitarian design of the camp--and provide models that can be replicated elsewhere. The book is the product of a three-year project undertaken by MIT Future Heritage Lab, researchers and students with Syrian refugees at the Azraq Refugee Camp, CARE, Jordan, and the German-Jordanian University. Copublication with Future Heritage Lab, MIT

Design education in architecture and allied disciplines is the cornerstone of design professions that contribute to shaping the built environment of the future. In this book, design education is dealt with as a paradigm whose evolutionary processes, underpinning theories, contents, methods, tools, are questioned and critically examined. It features a comprehensive discussion on design education with a focus on the design studio as the backbone of that education and the main forum for creative exploration and interaction, and for knowledge acquisition, assimilation, and reproduction. Through international and regional surveys, the striking qualities of design pedagogy, contemporary professional challenges and the associated sociocultural and environmental needs are identified. Building on twenty-five years of research and explorations into design pedagogy in architecture and urban design, this book authoritatively offers a critical analysis of a continuously evolving profession, its associated societal processes and the way in which design education reacts to their demands. Matters that pertain to traditional pedagogy, its characteristics and the reactions developed against it in the form of pioneering alternative studio teaching practices. Advances in design approaches and methods are debated including critical inquiry, empirical making, process-based learning, and Community Design, Design-Build, and Live Project Studios. Innovative teaching practices in lecture-based and introductory design courses are identified and characterized including inquiry-based, active and experiential learning. These investigations are all interwoven to elucidate a comprehensive understanding of contemporary design education in architecture and allied disciplines. A wide spectrum of teaching approaches and methods is utilized to reveal a theory of a ’trans-critical’ pedagogy that is conceptualized to shape a futuristic thinking about design teaching. Lessons learned from techniques

An Essay Concerning the Project considers the practice of architectural design as it has developed during the last two centuries. In this challenging interpretation of design education and its effect on design process and products, Argentinean scholar Alfonso Corona-Martinez emphasizes the distinction between an architectural project, created in the architect’s mind and materialized as a set of drawings on paper, and the realized three-dimensional building. Corona-Martinez demonstrates how representation plays a substantial role in determining both the notion and the character of architecture, and he traces this relationship from the Renaissance into the Modern era, giving detailed considerations of Functionalism and Typology. His argument clarifies the continuity in the practice of design method through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a continuity that has been obscured by the emphasis on changing goals instead of design procedures, and examines the influences of modernity and the legend of the Bauhaus. Architectural schooling, he suggests, has had a decisive role in the transmission of these practices. He concludes that the methods formalized in Beaux Arts teaching are not only still with us but are in good part responsible for the stylistic instability that haunts Modern architecture. Abstract but not abstruse, An Essay Concerning the Project provides clear information for a deeper understanding of the process of design and its results. More so than any other recent text, it shows the scope and richness of the field of speculation in architecture. It presents subtle considerations that must be mastered if an architect is to properly use typology, the means of representation, and the elements of composition and in architecture. Students, teachers, and practitioners alike will benefit from its warning about the deeper aspects of the endeavor of architecture.

Temporary architecture is flourishing in our urban public spaces. Branded ‘pop-ups’ and follies to provide a moment of light entertainment they are in fact borne of a long history of more holistic architecture that is subtly suggesting how we could live, work and play more harmoniously together. Featuring revealing interviews with 13 young, emerging and socially-minded practices from New York and Santiago to London, Berlin and Zurich it also analyses this phenomenon in critical essays by well-respected practitioners and thinkers. Providing a highly personal insight into the architects’ experience, the design process, the challenges they encountered and how it affected their practice it sheds light on the growth of multidisciplinary collectives, community engagement and more participatory ways of designing, making and building. Including highly illustrated and imaginative projects ranging from a floating cinema and tiny travelling theatre, through ad-hoc structures made of found objects and discarded materials, and blow-up plastic bubbles, to a community lido and market restaurant this will open your eyes as to what is possible in architecture.