The project was to develop spaces,
both physical and virtual, that would allow students
and faculty from across the university to engage
in thinking through making.
We got into it, I think, through our collaborative teaching
in the Harvard architecture studies
undergraduate track, which is in its fifth year now at Harvard.
So new, but there is an increasing interest
from students at the college to study through physical making
and visual output.
So we are interested in finding ways to support that
but also to link that work to things going on more broadly
across Harvard University's campus.
So that was our real agenda, is to be
able to bolster and support and connect this already
ongoing project to other initiatives that are
similar across the university.
And we had noticed that students and faculty were
engaged in making projects.
They were actually physically producing things
for their other courses.
And we were interested in trying to figure out
how to foster real conversation about the objects
that they were making.
So not just thinking about the technical skills
but actually the discourse that surrounds
producing objects as a mode of research
and of knowledge production.
This space is among the first to address
student academic pursuits in terms
of thinking through making.
And our grant helps support the outfitting of that space
through technical means for these students.
We also, through the support of the grant,
created a website to be able to disseminate
and create a kind of visual means of analysis of what
the students are making.
So the website really features student work
made through processes of physical modeling or drawing
that is iterative and also evolutionary.
It changes as you study different versions
and permutations of an idea.
And the website really enables both students and faculty
across the university to look at what this process produced
and hopefully, affects how we start thinking
about adjustments to the pedagogy of the two
studios related to all of that feedback and reception.
Yeah.
And I think that's really important.
Because we don't think of this just as the physical making
space.
But, really, that virtual discursive space
is really a part of the project.
And that's really important for us.
And for us, that was a big part of what we
are interested in developing.
So not just a maker space where students could come and do
independent projects but, really,
a space that was both physical and intellectual
for them to be able to talk through architectural
discourse, what objects they were producing
meant, in a sense.
Architects.
They were already embedded in architectural culture.
They have technical skills that allow
them to produce objects that are recognizable as architecture.
The students that come into architecture studies,
and the students that are interested in our making space,
by contrast, are coming from a really wide range
of disciplinary backgrounds.
So we have people from cellular biology,
from classics, from engineering, from applied math.
And they don't really have preconceptions
of what architecture or what architectural objects are,
which is really exciting.
Because they have this whole new lens
with which to look at the work.
It's definitely challenging, because it
means that we have to bring everyone up
to speed in terms of some technical skills
and in terms of the language that we
use to talk about architecture and the way
that we talk about architectural objects.
But for us, it's been really exciting to see
the multiplicity of ideas and opinions
that comes out of this interdisciplinary
collaborative space.
And that's where the interdisciplinary part of our
project--
even though it's definitely in architecture,
we think about it as architecture
with broad interdisciplinary reach.
Yeah.
It's been interesting to craft a website that also starts
to select and bring together examples of student
work produced in the two studios, representative
of students interested in this track of coursework,
coming from very different disciplines.
So it's also a way of making visual and legible,
through means of website representation,
a digital means of communication to the university what
these different disciplines threaded through architecture
as a combination end up producing.
In addition, it's been wonderful working with Lisa
on this grant, because even though we
come at this topic from two different studios,
addressing it together, how interdisciplinary
critical thinking can work through making spaces
has, I think, refined even exactly how each of the two
studios address this topic--
Yeah, definitely.
--and then complement each other.
So it's been super helpful, also,
in terms of shaping and refining the focus
of our respective classes.
And I think that has a much further reach going forward
than just the duration of this grant, which is really
lovely to have as the outcome.
I think, perhaps, what's come out
of this, though maybe not matching one-to-one what
we had anticipated to be the outcomes,
is probably more productive and actually
more focused in many ways to feed
the college and the development of this course of study moving
forward.
So I think to be flexible is an important piece of advice
that I don't know that we maybe had foreshadowed or anticipated
quite as much.
I think having a visible platform
for the work that we're doing is for me,
an immediate mark of success.
We're attracting more students to the studios
and generating more interest in architecture studies.
But I think just having that visibility
for me is one marker, and an important one,
of the success of the project.
I agree.
I think the visibility with the website,
I would imagine, will have a lasting and longer duration
effect and be a mode of measuring success
that we don't really have all the data on yet.
Part of the idea of this project is that it doesn't end now
but that we've set up a framework
to be able to continue to showcase work,
to continue this conversation.
And that was part of what we had imagined all along,
was that this was the kindling for an ongoing, longer-term
conversation and that we now have a pretty robust framework
for making sure that people can become
engaged when they want to.
And also, that that framework can evolve.
So if initiatives in other departments
appeared or found resonance with things going on in the studios,
or the studios started to partner with other faculty,
that this website would enable us a way
to describe the evolution of this series of studios
available to the students over the life of the program.
This is the kind of thing that I feel like maybe, in the past,
we'd have to do secretly, like, what
are some innovative ways of teaching?
That now, it feels exciting that it actually is fully
acknowledged as being valuable in terms of creative thinking
in the classroom that has real intellectual weight
and that that doesn't have to be something that
flies below the radar anymore.