Designbuild Education adopts the intellectual framework of American Pragmatism, which is a theory of action, to investigate architects’ compelling urge to build and how that manifests in collegiate designbuild programs. Organized into four themes—people, poetics, process, and practice—the book brings together new essays by some of today’s most well-known designbuild educators, including Andrew Freear from Rural Studio and Dan Rockhill from Studio 804, to shed light on the theoretical dimensions of their practice and work. Illustrated with over 100 black and white images.

The Design-Build Studio examines sixteen international community driven design-build case studies through process and product, with preceding chapters on community involvement, digital and handcraft methodologies and a graphic Time Map. Together these projects serve as a field guide to the current trends in academic design-build studios, a window into the different processes and methodologies being taught and realized today. Design-build supports the idea that building, making and designing are intrinsic to each other: knowledge of one strengthens and informs the expression of the other. Hands-on learning through the act of building what you design translates theories and ideas into real world experience. The work chronicled in this book reveals how this type of applied knowledge grounds us in the physicality of the world in which we live.

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 and mechanisms for accommodation, adaptation, and implementation of a ‘trans-critical’ pedagogy in education are conceived to invigorate a new student-centered, evidence-based design culture sheltered in a wide variety of learning settings in architecture and beyond.

Learning by Building challenges today’s architects and students to experience the energy and creativity of construction. Based on the example of famous architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, who considered construction an integral part of the design process, "design-build" is standard practice in growing numbers of today’s architecture firms. Architect and professor William J. Carpenter explores ways to integrate construction into architectural education, bridging the gap between theory and practice—between designing and building. Mr. Carpenter traces the history of construction in architectural education, from medieval times, to Jefferson’s Monticello, to the German Bauhaus. He cites twentieth-century artists such as Richard Serra and Donald Judd, whose work is generated by the process of making; like the artist, "the architect should be immersed in the potential of construction." Ten in-depth case studies of schools that have incorporated design-build into their curriculum illustrate how construction studios help future architects learn real-life pragmatics and collaboration. Through text and photographs, Mr. Carpenter recounts the diverse experiences of high-profile schools such as Cranbrook and Yale University, providing models for other schools that wish to include design-build in their curriculums. Mr. Carpenter also gives a helpful outline of the practical details involved in design-build, such as team issues, legal issues, and built applications of the process. Learning by Building is a wake-up call to architects and students alike to immerse themselves in the process of architecture—to rediscover, or witness for the first time, the excitement of building.

Steve Badanes, Jim Adamson, and John Ringel believe an architect's job does not stop at designing a building, but that it extends to constructing it as well. Now working into their fifth decade, Jersey Devil, the loose-knit group they founded in 1972, bands together under this design/build ethos that an architect's place is just as much on the job site as it is at the drawing board. The trio pioneered design/build practice and their influence has spawned more than one hundred design/build programs. Jersey Devil's process and expertise are unpacked in this Architecture Brief, providing students and teachers with a toolkit for design/build education. Through stories, didactic commentary, and sample exercises, the Design/Build complements nuts-and-bolts content with Jersey Devil's philosophy and perspective, allowing the book to impart practical instruction while acting as a valuable guide for navigating the elusive challenges of design/build. Themes touch on socially responsible architecture, intuition and intentionality, detailing and fostering craftsmanship, group work and collaboration, off-the-shelf components and nonstandard applications, educational reform, ethos and risk, good life and play, the politics of building, and university-community relations.

This book is designed to be of interest to many different audiences due to its cross-sectoral and transdisciplinary content. It will appeal to those within architectural higher education as well as to spatial practitioners, students, civic and governmental organizations engaged in socio-spatial projects. The book is (1) an academic source of critical and practice-driven knowledge on experiential architectural design learning, (2) provides methods for other ways of learning in the form of design-build and live projects and (3) offers design inspiration for community-engaged spatial practices relevant to both educators and practising architects and designers.