Architecture and Progress (AaP)

Progress is both innate and inevitable. To progress is to exist, but life can unfold progressively. Progress is ever-present. In any given scenario, circumstances can become progressively worse or better. While it is inherently human to strive for progress, within that pursuit lie obstacles, foreign territory and the unexpected.

Our world consists of obstacles in progress, which become progressively problematic as we advance, overcoming challenges only to uncover others lying beneath. Culture tends to dismantle progress even as it is being made, and this dismantling is often by design. Given the profound impact of design on the world, it is pressing and relevant to critically examine its role in human progress by asking: How do we define the progressively problematic within the discipline of design? After the task of definition, how are progressively problematic scenarios, solutions, and consequences applied in design processes with direct impact on the built environment and humanity?

Professor Matt Hall and I are co-editors of Architecture and Progress: Exploring a Progressively Problematic Built Environment - a work that starts with obstacles as productive instruments for design inquiry and critical investigation. We propose that progress and obstacles are interdependent, challenging the conventionally positive notion of progress through diverse positions in the history, theory, practice and representation of architecture and the built environment. For shapers of the world, finding the solution is often seen as a mark of progress, but perhaps historical case studies in the past, provocative visions of the future, and assessments of our complex present context may have utility for thoroughly understanding, if not breaking, the problematic cycle of our designs. To do so requires intellectual and practical approaches to reveal that the byproducts of design often produce more unknowns than knowns, most of which are discovered when it is too late. Although progress is commonly understood as linear, positive and durable, a more precise inventory of its consequences suggests otherwise. This positions architecture as an adaptive, ethical, and speculative practice capable of addressing complex urban and societal conditions. 

Within the next 2-3 years, we are looking towards publication of a second volume of AaP with Routledge. This volume we plan to co-author, rather than a co-edit. We feel that the exploration completed in the first volume has provided us with critical insight in the concept of challenging the notion of progress as inherently beneficial. Professor Hall and I hope to take these insights as a departure point for a more precise investigation. In the event a second volume’s success, an additional extension of AaP will be a grant-funded, limited volume journal that opens this examination to broader sources of inquiry. This journal could be funded by various foundations focused on topics that align with AaP as well as publishers with an option for journals. 

A pedagogically applicable extension trajectory is a strategic next step for further developing AaP. Within the boundaries of the AaP research completed thus far, I plan to inject these concepts into studio projects and/or develop a seminar built around AaP. As a departure point, I plan to experiment with concepts introduced in my chapter, “Unresolution: Fiction in the Space Between Inquiry and Invention”. For example, a design studio incorporating this subject may include as part of the design brief incorporating consideration of potential future scenarios that challenge current architectural solutions that in turn become obstacles to progress within themselves. Alternatively, a seminar in this subject will incorporate research of historic obstacles that have been architecturally “solved” that result in the development of new obstacles, a study of these types of conditions found in literature, and projections of real-word possibilities for future obstacles and their obstructive solutions. 

AaP + Community Engagement and Participatory Design:

One role of architecture, in collaboration with a large variety of complimentary disciplines, is to produce solutions to obstacles that society faces. At times components of architecture itself produce the solutions, e.g. envelope assemblies, structural materiality, and use of recylable and renewable resources. In other circumstances broader societal issues require that architects themselves become educated of a community’s needs through direct engagement. How can the role of the architect be optimally effective in addressing broader societal ills through direct, grass-roots level community engagement through methods of participatory design? How progressively beneficial is this sort of intervention, and, conversely, what is the possibility that this sort of engagement is progressively problematic?

I have incorporated community engagement and participatory design in two of my urban-focused design studios. This research trajectory is in its beginning stages but is prime for expansion from experimental pedagogy to presentation and publication at conferences and in disciplinary journals, respectfully. Additionally, to build further upon the foundations of AaP, I plan to engage this expansion by investigating participatory tools, and the methods used to create them.

My experience in teaching predominantly first-year through fourth-year studios, as well as seminars, lends itself to merging this research and its provocations into a pedagogical framework. This framework will operate towards establishing a foundational structure upon which AaP’s theoretical potential is explored. This will also reinforce in students that within architectural solutions lay consequences that purveyors of the built environment must consistently, and perhaps primarily, acknowledge.