I try to teach my students that the world is theirs to design. And it needs their help. My pedagogy has been principally shaped by my experiences in the field, responding to disaster. Today’s young people will face a lifetime of climate-driven catastrophes on a planet that is hotter, more crowded & more dangerous. Education must reflect the world they will inhabit.
Most of the classes I’ve taught (studio, non-studio, undergraduate, graduate) take a simple form: find a problem that’s important to you and go solve it. Don’t worry about whether it folds neatly into some prescribed discipline, profession, or aesthetic. Do what is required to solve the problem, and if it requires breaking some rules, traditions, or conventions, go for it.
Community Based Approaches to Disaster was a course designed for the Harvard Global Development program at the Harvard Extension School, which prompted students to use the latest techniques in community-based planning to develop responses to disaster vulnerabilities in their own communities.
SUSTAINABLE DESIGN CAPSTONE (ED 106) is the capstone course for the Sustainable Environmental Design majors at the College of Design at UC Berkeley. The course challenges students to identify a sustainability problem in the Bay Area and solve for it at multiple scales. Students work in teams to research, document, & ultimately understand a significant environmental problem - the thornier the better. They are given wide latitude to propose different kinds of solutions, including built solutions, websites, programs, & mobile applications.
Designing Sustainability was a course I designed and implemented to introduce incoming Sustainable Environmental Design students to this emerging field. By design, Sustainable Environmental Design is a major, and a field, without hard boundaries. Students are encouraged to explore all possible definitions of those terms, and understand how a liberal education involving the built environment at all scales can help prepare the leaders we will need tomorrow.
Contradictions in Disaster & Resilience was a graduate research seminar I taught at UC Berkeley in the Spring of 2018 as well as the Spring of 2019.
The seminar asked students to critically examine the searing contradictions present in contemporary resilience thinking, such as:
If we know disasters are coming, why don’t we prepare for them?
Why do people rebuild in the exact same place, in the exact same way, after a disaster?
Why do insurance companies make more money when a disaster strikes, and what does that say for our collective incentives for preventing disaster?
The students had the option to produce a final project, and you can see those here.
EVERYTHING GOES TO HELL PT. 3 was the conclusion of the EVERYTHING GOES TO HELL sequence. It was hosted in the Fall of 2019 at the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. Like its precursors, the undergraduate design studio ultimately asked students to select their own site and program. Students were tasked with finding an urgent, impending or ongoing disaster, and then solving for it appropriately.
In this final sequence, students branched out even further into what might be called a ‘disaster.’ Some students took on the U.S. Border crisis, the Opiod crisis, and other slow-moving, man-made crises.
Their work illustrates something profound: we tend to think of an earthquake as an act of God, and a border crisis as fundamentally political. And yet both disasters take shape in the same way: through a steady program of poor prioritization, a lack of accountability, and the absence of moral leadership.
These factors eventually get built into the built environment, and set the stage for a disaster in the future.
EVERYTHING GOES TO HELL was a 3-part studio sequence I envisioned when I was still actively doing disaster field work. During that time, I had plenty of occassions to think about how to teach disaster & resilience in an academic architecture studio format. I concluded that it would have to challenge the existing boundaries of the Beaux Artes model in the following ways:
One: It would have to be place-less. Students should be taught to find disaster that are going to happen and respond pre-emptively to those. The world has had enough academic design studios focused on emergency shelter. There are plenty of solutions out there.
Two: The program would have to come from outside architecture. Meaning, students would have to find a site, and develop a program based on what that community needed at that time. Critically, they would have to defend that choice, and prove that the program wasn’t developed by the whimsy of an architect, a studio instructor, a developer, or any such characters.
I was lucky enough to begin this series at WashU, and conclude it at UC Berkeley, and I would like to thank both those institutions for giving me a chance to do so.
I have only included several examples from each of the studios, but all of the projects were extraordinary. I found that when students are given an opportunity to go out and prevent disaster, they embrace it.
EVERYTHING GOES TO HELL PT. 2 was a continuation of prior work at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. It was hosted in the Fall of 2019 at the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. Like its precursor, the undergraduate design studio allowed students to select their own site and program. Students merely needed to prove that they were solving for a compelling problem of disaster & resilience.
Students engaged in issues as diverse as the seismic preservation of medieval churches in Italy, the possibility of water-wars in a post-petroleum Middle East, and the possibility of a devastating tsunami on the coast of the Pacific Northwest.