Redefining "Expertise": The Power of Student-Centered Design Projects
Philippines Bamboo Workshop participants pose during market stall construction, photography by Hersley-Ven Casero.
By Elizabeth M. Golden
Elizabeth Golden is an architect, author, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington where she teaches in the areas of design, materials, and building technology. Her teaching, academic research, and creative work are dedicated to revealing the systemic complexities that shape our physical and cultural realities. Golden investigates the relationship between people and their environments, both at the micro and macro scales, analyzing architecture as an index to its larger cultural context.
When I began my career as an academic over fifteen years ago, I remember feeling a distinct sense of loss. Even though the nine-month contract as a visiting assistant professor was temporary, I had a sinking feeling that the demands of a full-time teaching position meant I couldn’t continue working professionally in what my office colleagues affectionately referred to as “the real world.” Despite these reservations, I enjoyed the job enough to make a full transition from professional practice to academia, and I’ve been in my current position at the University Washington since 2010.
Perhaps not surprisingly, my understanding of architectural practice has shifted over these years spent in academia. I’ve discovered a whole host of possibilities at the university that require architectural expertise alongside the specific skillset of an educator. Although I expected a shortage of ways to engage the so-called “real world,” I now recognize that teaching at a public institution connects to the “real world” in a different and perhaps bigger way. It exposes me to an incredibly diverse range of students and colleagues from all over the state, country, and globe, and gives the flexibility to pursue projects connected to timely issues such as homelessness, sustainable housing, and women-centered design.
The most significant discovery I’ve made, however, is that students, despite their inexperience, can be brilliant collaborators, ready to take on the challenges of actual projects. What they lack in skills or professional knowledge they more than make up for with their enthusiasm and desire to learn. Students’ lack of experience can also be positive in that it allows them to approach design problems without preconceived ideas or influences, freeing them to think outside the box. As non-experts, they often appear more approachable to those outside the field of architecture; members of the community or project participants are often more willing to engage with students than design professionals. And, as the student body continues to grow more diverse, a broader array of personal backgrounds and lived experiences make for more sensitive, critically minded architects-in-the-making. As you’ll see in the following projects—the Philippines Bamboo Workshop and the Gohar Khatoon Girls’ School, both drawn from my teaching past—this means more opportunities for finding common ground, facilitating trust-building and inclusion among all people on a project.
The Philippines Bamboo Workshop
This workshop, which I co-led with my colleague Ray Villanueva, one of the founders of Kawayan Collective, was intended to promote social interaction and knowledge transfer between architecture students from University of Washington and architecture students from Foundation University in the Philippines, as well as local bamboo artisans and architects. Students participating in the workshop were not only designers of the built work (a market stall), they also assisted local artisans in constructing a portion of the structure. By observing, designing, and making, students became active participants in a collaborative exchange with the community of Negros Oriental. Many of the program participants hailed from countries with strong traditions in bamboo construction (China, Mexico, Vietnam), and the program also allowed these students a rare opportunity to study and design with a significant, yet underappreciated, natural resource in their native countries.
A bamboo carpenter demonstrating basic joinery techniques to UW and FU students, photography by P. Prinz.
Students interview a vendor at the Valencia market, photography by P. Prinz.
The program convened in Manila, where we toured significant sites, such as the Quiapo Market, to get a sense of county’s culture and history, especially in relation to food. We then moved on to the city of Dumaguete, our home base for the duration of the program. Local architects specializing in bamboo construction toured us through a number of their projects and explained how the material is a culturally and environmentally relevant resource. However, we also learned that it has fallen out of favor due to development, causing a gradual shift from building traditions based on local resources to practices reliant on modern, industrially produced materials. We also spoke with architecture students and faculty at Foundation University in the Philippines who were part of Estudio Damgo, a design-build program focused on reinvigorating the public’s interest in bamboo.
During the building visits, students studied and documented significant details and connections, which later served as the foundation for their own designs. They also completed a series of workshops at Bambusa Collabo, a bamboo farm and work collective, which hosts a bamboo nursery and studio for making furniture and other handicrafts from bamboo. Students learned about bamboo growth, care, and harvesting from craftsmen, who also demonstrated joinery and lashing techniques. Soon, students had enough technical knowledge to participate in the construction of the market stall.
Teams formed from pairs of UW and Estudio Damgo students began the design phase of the project by visiting local markets and interviewing their clients: vendors at the Valencia Market.
In their interviews, the students asked vendors about their preferences and needs for the new stall. From these requirements, the groups developed proposals for the market structure and presented them to Valencia city officials and market vendors, who selected their preferred scheme from the group. These steps were intended to ensure buy-in from all stakeholders and gave students the opportunity to interact directly with members of the community.
A market vendor commenting on team design proposal.
During this phase, the UW students relied on their Estudio Damgo counterparts to communicate with their clients in Bisaya, a situation that some declared as humbling since it required listening carefully and depending entirely on their Filipino teammates to interpret client expectations. From these interactions it was obvious how much responsibility the students felt toward meeting the vendors’ needs, and their earnestness was well-received when it came time to discuss the proposals with the market community. Initially, it was startling to observe how the students were grilled during their public presentations, but soon it became clear that the intensity of the review was simply an indication of how seriously their work was being taken by vendors and city officials.
The market stall was prefabricated off-site and then assembled in full view of market-goers, attracting a lot of interest and excitement. Ultimately, the students’ design explorations generated new and innovative proposals using renewable resources, and the project very publicly demonstrated the material’s potential by featuring bamboo in a significant structure located on the town square. As one student put it, “The process of working and collaborating with people from a culture other than our own, and on a project in a foreign environment, taught our group how to be conscious of responding to the client, culture, environment, and local resources.”
The Gohar Khatoon Girls’ School
The Gohar Khatoon Girls’ School, located in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, was the result of a unique partnership that began as a graduate research studio in collaboration with Sahar, a Washington-based aid organization. After the graduate studio wrapped, the design was further developed for construction by myself, two studio participants—Yasaman Esmaili and Christopher Garland—and the architect Robert Hull from Seattle firm Miller Hull, in collaboration with Afghanistan-based school officials and construction team.
Students were involved in the design and construction of the girls’ school every step of the way, and even though they were not able to visit the site in person, they initiated their own process of critical inquiry that brought many well-informed questions to the fore. The pursuit of these concerns would shape the work through the duration of the studio, influencing discussions between the students and project stakeholders. As I reflect now on the evolution of the project, from a hypothetical studio problem to a fully realized building, it’s astounding how precise the students’ investigation was. Although certainly idealistic, the students were spot on in identifying the issues and problems related to the school and its relationship with the local community and environment that would later emerge during design and construction.
What stands out to me is their recognition that they, even as students, have the potential to make a difference, even in a context that might appear too challenging or distant. The studio demonstrated that small improvements to construction practices and minor adjustments to local conditions could have broad-reaching effects on users and the communities where projects are located. The studio participants were also well aware that designing in a vacuum, without user input, would likely result in a school that didn’t meet the needs of students, staff, and the community—a point that was frequently discussed.
During the studio, students learned from experts and architects from Afghanistan and the U.S., who covered topics such as gender equality, war, religion, and occupation. These issues, which were as much a part of the design as the pragmatic requirements of thermal comfort and budget, brought students to the heart of global realities in an immediate and tangible way. Because it was not possible for the students to visit the site due to security risks, information was gathered through multiple methods; students consulted a broad spectrum of sources, spanning from the cultural to the pragmatic.
Student proposal for school’s south façade, image by C. Garland, A. Thies.
South façade of the Gohar Khatoon Girls’ School, photography by N. Lehoux.
Students began the design process by searching for very tangible data, from the cost of building materials to the number of pupils that could humanely fit into a classroom. They soon discovered that just below the surface of hard numbers and facts, were cultural and political connections, influences, and implications of a broader, less quantifiable order. Research into building material availability in Afghanistan, for example, will soon bring one to realities of corruption, scarcity, and environmental degradation. A study of class size tells the story of population growth, the urgency to educate the masses, and the difficult conditions that young people in Afghanistan are often willing to endure just to receive a few hours of instruction each day. With the ultimate goal of improving school design, the students soon found themselves making decisions against the backdrop of a politically- and culturally-loaded milieu.
As obvious as it seems, most contemporary schools in Afghanistan are built without considering solar orientation or solar heat gain because they are the result of government-issued standardized plans, and most often implemented by foreign aid organizations without guidance from architects. From their study of the standardized schools, the students noted the significance of improving thermal comfort, particularly in winter, since fuel is costly and most municipalities do not have the funds to fully heat their buildings during the cold season. Increasing thermal performance would support student learning and allow schools to remain open during the coldest months of the year. This, in turn, could boost enrollment and instruction hours, while permitting alternative uses for classrooms during times a school typically would have been closed. With this in mind, all of the students made thermal comfort a priority for their proposals. These principles were also incorporated into the actual design of the school, taking the form of south-facing windows and “sunspaces” that maximize solar heat gain in winter while relying on the thermal storage capacity of masonry to hold warmth and coolth to reduce daily temperature swings in the building.
Interestingly, students also self-critiqued their work and identified the weakness of this strategy, even offering solutions to remedy its shortfalls. Large areas of glass could become a hazard in a bomb blast (common in Afghanistan), and in this context—as a Muslim student pointed out to the group—it is neither culturally appropriate nor typical to have direct views into spaces occupied by women and girls. One of the proposed solutions to these problems was to provide enough glazing for heat gain by way of masonry screens, which would also provide thermal mass, block direct views into the classrooms, and reduce the glare from south-facing openings.
Unfortunately, these recommendations were not incorporated into the final design, and the school was realized with large panes of south-facing glass. Shortly after opening day, a truck bomb exploded nearby blowing out most of the windows at the school. Luckily, the building was empty at the time, and Sahar paid to have the glass replaced. And, as the studio participant predicted, the staff reacted to the glass windows by hanging curtains in some spaces to provide more privacy, a situation that is less than ideal for solar heat gain. For a recent update on the Gohar Khatoon Girls’ School, click here.
It is impressive that students designing for such a challenging environment were able to identify and respond to complex problems better than professionals, perhaps because they came to the process with no preconceived design ideas in mind. Students can learn a great deal from their involvement in actual projects, and as both examples demonstrate, students also have the potential to bring more to the process than most of us realize.
From these experiences, I have understood the importance of providing students with a platform for well-informed decision making and creating a studio environment where discussion and critical thought from all participants is encouraged. Real collaboration and commitment occur when people feel their contributions matter. If we enter the design process thinking someone knows nothing or has little to offer, then we probably won’t get much in return. This is as true in the design studio as it is at a firm, where new professionals might find their voices sidelined or discounted due to lack of experience. Whether we’re in academia or working in the “real world”—although can we really separate the two?—and whether we have five years of experience or twenty-five, it’s up to us as design professionals to lift up our less-experienced colleagues. What better way to do this than by valuing and welcoming their uniquely positioned expertise?
The author wishes to thank the student participants in the Philippines Bamboo Workshop and the Gohar Khatoon Girls' School studio for their participation and insight that made each studio a success.