Architecture and Beyond
(Asynchronous - Online Only)
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Visualizing Health Equity: Toward Spatial Justice in the Jade District View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Karen Kubey
Visualizing Health Equity contributes visions for an equitable future, where everyone in the Portland, Oregon Jade District has the opportunity to lead a healthier life. With Jade District community environmental justice frameworks as a starting point, the studio explored connections between the built environment and racial and socio-economic health inequities, examining the full role that architecture and urban design can play in reducing those inequities. The studio affirms that architecture is never neutral, but rather always communicates cultural values. This paper analyzes simultaneous attempts to produce more equitable architectures and a more just studio pedagogy. The studio combined undergraduate and graduate architecture students and one interior architecture student. We began with three one-week individual exercises investigating environmental and spatial justice concepts. Students then worked in groups of one to three on designs for our site, which sits along a busy corridor and is currently occupied by an auto body shop. Studio prompts emphasized relational visualization skills and empathic design approaches outside of normative architectural practice. Presenting final projects through short videos helped students to focus on the narrative aspects of their proposals and encouraged a synthetic presentation of research and design. The experimental studio produced thoughtful results while also exposing limits of imagination and empathy. Students were asked to design for resident priorities and the community group’s intersectional approach to climate, health, and housing. They developed design proposals centered on affordable housing and community spaces, on a site in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Oregon.
A Participatory Approach to Exploring Learning Spaces Based on Design-Based Research View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Serveh Naghshbandi
My study developed a multilayered approach, exploring learning spaces for doctoral education. As an exploratory process, it supported the development of design methodology and domain theory based on Design-Based Research (DBR). It identified the main conceptualizations of learning space from doctoral students’ points of views and developed a participatory model to make students’ multiple voices heard. Intersection of Production of Space in Architecture and Situated Learning theory in Education enabled me to build an integrated conceptual framework to explore doctoral students’ perceptions, lived experiences, and imaginations of learning spaces. Three research questions reflected theoretical and practical aims. I developed a multi-phased research through three sequential phases: questionnaire, Photovoice, and prototyping, which respectively addressed subjective, objective, and co-constructed aspects of spaces. Thematic Analysis informed the data analysis process. Findings suggest that while doctoral students emphasized individual space as a necessity in any PhD journey, they viewed a learning space beyond its physicality. Participants’ experiences reinforced that learning is embedded in communities of practice in doctoral undertaking. They implied creation of communities can turn any space into a place. Participants imagined spaces that support physicality (individual and shared spaces), liminality (in-between and on the margins), and (re)-configurability. Design principles included: Learning space is a layered multi-faceted phenomenon; Learning space is an indicator of support; Learning space has a potential to improve and sustain well-being; Learning space is a changing entity.
From Ecology to Architecture: The Notion of Human Habitat as an Interdisciplinary Model in the Pedagogy of the Design of the Built Environment View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Daniel Felipe Marín Vanegas, Jorge William Montoya Santamaría, John Munoz Echavarria, Ricardo Benavides Uribe
In the beginning, the notion of habitat had been conceived in life sciences and ecology studies fields. Subsequently, it began to be extrapolated by housing researchers as a useful term applicable in urban-rural studies. As shown, the habitat itself is an interdisciplinary concept that crosses and bridges several fields of knowledge, such as natural sciences like biology and human sciences like architecture. In this way, this research aims to state that the human habitat conception of dwelling is a better approach for teaching built environment design in programs related to construction, architecture, civil engineering, and even other engineering and human sciences fields. This, by means of validating a multidimensional model that put this notion into practice with an interdisciplinary group of students from eight different bachelors programs; additionally, this is shown through the articulation of the integrated sustainability dimensions with the variables that are brought forward from the ecology, converging in a cross-disciplinary pedagogic model. Ultimately, the implementation of this development entails a transition of the notion of the dwelling towards a notion of human habitat, which in turn also implies several changes in the teaching paradigms for designing, not only human-oriented spaces but also nature-oriented ones. At last, we conclude that this transition fosters a more complex insight on the human intervention in nature and the built environment that overcomes the simplistic insight of traditional housing projects.
Design Strategies for Visually Engaging Solar Skins: Between Dynamic Displays and Energy Generation View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eleonora Nicoletti
The human experience of urban spaces is influenced by the physical characteristics of the settings. Architectural skins play an important role in people’s perception of cities, while also impacting the energy performance of buildings. Within the context of the climate crisis, facades need designing to enhance people’s experience of urban open spaces and reduce buildings’ carbon emissions. Architectural envelopes which can act as visual attractors, such as media facades serving as dynamic digital displays, can increase buildings’ operational energy use. On the other hand, active solar technologies may be integrated into facades to supply buildings with renewable energy generated locally and meet zero-energy building standards. This invites consideration of how façade designs may be conceived to attract attention and interest, thus engaging people visually in public spaces, without needing operational energy, and offer, instead, opportunities for energy generation. This research explores the design of architectural skins which can stimulate visual engagement passively, by minimising operational energy use and facilitating the building integration of active solar technologies. Through an interdisciplinary review of literature and design cases, this study considers architecture’s communicative role, aspects of visual perception, and examples of architectural skins with the ability to attract attention. It examines advances in active solar technologies, discussing challenges and potential for integrating them into visually engaging building skins. The conclusions suggest design principles as passive strategies for embedding dynamic digital media and active solar technologies into façade designs.
The Lines We Draw: A Critical Look Circulation in Architecture View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jacklynn Niemiec
In 1928, Alexander Klein published work on graphic models for housing. These drawings evaluated prototypical floor plans through seven criteria: pathways, traffic areas, free area, shadows, eye-level section, sequential spaces, and interior elevations. (Lueder 2017) Klein sought to rationalize design solutions: cross-referencing movement with other qualitative factors such as spatial perception. (Pai 2006) The circulation diagram endures as an undifferentiated line, forcing assumptions about use, destination, and physical ability—among others.. Isolating circulation as a system unto itself, rather than digging deeper into possible subsystems, adjacencies, and intrinsic data limits its potential as a process drawing. This paper surveys a series of circulation diagrams alongside three library buildings. The graphics are assessed through view, line, color, and layering and compared to experiential views of the building along the diagram’s path. A narrow, windowless hall may provide the shortest path but has little benefit to well-being. Or, as in the case of the newly opened Hunters Point Public Library, a feature stair may be a dynamic feature, but is only accessible to some. (Spivack 2019) Reconsidering the circulation diagram as a composite of path, space, and data leaves room for indeterminacy, resulting in a "synthetic mapping" of space. (Vidler 2000) A circulation path may represent function and efficiency, but it also defines a singular experience. While the multiplicity of scenarios cannot exist within a single diagram, the diagram can evolve to become a tool for making the "complexities of diverse human occupation of built space" visible. (Boys 2017)
The House We Build: Games and Gamification View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jon Drummond, Ralph Kenke, Nicole Carroll, Nathan Scott, Rewa Wright, Zi Siang See, Jack McGrath, Paul Egglestone, Mario Minichiello
Games and gamification has moved from a way of entertaining game players to an effective research and education tool often used to explore social issues. The decision to use interactive audio-visual elements as our main design research tools, leveraged the cognitive capabilities of the participants and their desire to take relevant actions, make tangential choices, and participate in formative decisions regarding urban planning in Newcastle, NSW. Through the House We Build game and accompanying website, animation, citizen survey, we demonstrated that community members could productively participate in the urban planning process. Players of the House We Build game experienced the wider consequences within their community of their urban planning choices, such as where to build a mid-rise apartment block so that the community would eventually have enough points for a pool. The House We Build aimed to achieve greater engagement of citizens with the Newcastle City Council urban planning department, creating a non-threatening pathway for dialogue through a gamified feedback network between council and community. This project was developed as a population engagement and elicitation research tool, in response to a need to engage citizens in urban planning processes in an equitable and inclusive manner. In the framework of the city itself, there has historically been hostility surrounding urban planning decisions, and citizens have felt isolated and disengaged as Newcastle transitions from being a major port and coal mining town, into a connected Smart City which aims to rank as one of the most desirable lifestyle locations in Australia.
