Studio 2.0

"If you try to organize your design teaching that way, you will find the traditional studio format does not help. Learning a skill demands exercise, and exercise demands failure and time to try again. The jury invited to a design studio does not ask what the student learned, but only looks at what is produced at the end."

-J. Habraken, Questions that Will Not Go Away, pg 18

Someone recently ask what my "best" project was in school. I think that depends largely on how you define the idea of the "best." If you define it in terms of the end product, then my "best" project was completed during my senior year at Clemson in a traditional studio setting (Fig. 1). I was in studio a lot and surrounded by my friends, and the end project can be thought of as a culmination of this experience and the viability of bouncing ideas off of others in the studio setting. However, if you define "best" in terms of the project that I learned the most from, then my best project was without a doubt the Indigo Pine project. Here, I have no beautiful renderings to call my own. I do not have much to offer in terms of what was produced at the end (I have a lot of spreadsheets...if that counts - Fig 2). 

What emerged with from each project, however, is strikingly different. While I may have less to show in terms of personal production or process for Indigo Pine, the project for me was much stronger in large due to its highly collaborative and comprehensive nature. I think that architectural educators would be wise to steer the studio model toward a more holistic process - from encouraging experimentation up front to engaging the larger body of the university and even to steering critiques toward the larger goal of continued learning over the course of an academic career. Perhaps beginning to identify interest areas early in the process would help to focus education toward a continual learning process (whether that be business, fabrication, digital methods, sustainability, etc). 

Figure 1: senior project | "best project" in terms of end product

Figure 2: Indigo Pine project | "best project" in terms of learned content