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- Convenors:
-
Fadi Shayya
(University of Salford)
Demetra Kourri (Manchester Metropolitan University)
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- Discussant:
-
Albena Yaneva
(University of Manchester)
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
STS sensibilities allow architectures to break away from their modernist dualisms and grand promises to address the complex ethical, ecological, and sociotechnical entanglements of construction and urbanisation. However, the built environment is a native contributor to generating STS sensibilities.
Long Abstract:
The Latour-Yaneva dynamic school of thought offers new worldviews on how to teach architecture with a renewed “sociology of associations” (Latour, 2005; Yaneva, 2010, 2022). Architectural educators engage with methodologies drawing from the sociology of science and ethnography of design, and they expand the subfields of architectural humanities and the social studies of architecture.
An STS sensibility allows architectures to break away from their modernist dualisms, grand promises, master architects, and iconic starchitects. It decentres the pedagogy and practice of architecture from the figure of providence and panopticon vision to the distributed network and oligopticon insights. It endows architecture and the built environment disciplines with realist attitudes to reconnect with their ground as collaborative practices of disturbing, reassembling, and constructing. It is the kind of sensibility central to addressing the complex ethical, ecological, and sociotechnical entanglements of contemporary and legacy construction and urbanisation.
However, the built environment is a native contributor to generating STS sensibilities. It foregrounds the situatedness of scientific knowledge production within excavation, construction, and destruction processes. It platforms site-specific and environment-oriented practices while envisioning future worlds. It endows materialities and agencies to objects actively participating in making spaces of inhabitation and infrastructural landscapes. It situates the study and understanding of innovation within networks of knowledge exchange, laboratories, and circulating references.
We invite academics, researchers, and practitioners who teach future professionals of the built environment (arch, urban, landscape) to theoretically and empirically reflect on how they engage STS sensibilities and integrate STS methodologies in their pedagogies. In the hope of organising a Combined Format Open Panel, we encourage the submission of academic paper presentations and welcome experimental formats of knowledge expression such as written reflections on an STS-inspired studio brief, visual reflections on student design work, and cataloguing STS engagements during professional design practice.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Sabine Hansmann (HafenCity Universität Hamburg) Alisa Uhrig (HafenCity University Hamburg)
Short abstract:
This paper presents the seminar "Material Stories," including its outline, methodologies informed by STS and ANT, and results. It will offer insights into this specific teaching format and discuss how it can contribute to a shift towards more just and sustainable architectural production.
Long abstract:
The history of architecture is marked by heroic figures. Canonized and divided into epochs, they are passed down through generations. In her essay "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" (1989), American author Ursula K. Le Guin advocates for a shift from hero-centered narratives to stories about everyday people and things. Le Guin emphasizes the importance of these often-overlooked stories for community cohesion and the creation of awareness and responsibility.
In the "Material Stories" seminar, we focus on the everyday materials we use for building. Through research and storytelling, we illuminate the diverse social and ecological entanglements of building materials, both locally and globally, within the Earth's system. Based on empirical research, students write short observation reports and tell stories from various life stages of a selected material. These ethnographic reports are then expanded into small, scientifically sound narratives through extensive research. Our focus is on the complex entanglements and dependencies within the "German" construction industry, which relies on many other actors that often remain invisible to us as architects. The best students results are published on the accompanying "Material Networks" web platform: https://blogs.hoou.de/materialnetworks/.
This paper will focus on the seminar`s outline, methodologies, and results, and discuss how STS sensibilities can contribute to a shift towards a more just and sustainable architectural production by following the socio-ecological entanglements from the inside.
Jennifer Raum (Bauhaus-University Weimar)
Short abstract:
Conceptually approaching STS sensitivities, the teaching practice ‘Plural Realities’ is intended as a setting that enables individual, theoretical, or ontological perspectives on the built and unbuilt environment beyond already-exhausted architectural viewpoints.
Long abstract:
“If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities?” (Philip K. Dick)
In this paper I would like to share and discuss my teaching practice at the Faculty of Architecture at Nuremberg Tech, Germany. ‘Plural Realities’ ran over a period of 2 years and fostered non-anthropocentric and more-than-human perspectives on the world. Without following any particular STS methodology, but with the aim - and conceptual agreement - of creating a sense of the complexity of the world, I would certainly understand this teaching practice as very much driven by STS sensibilities. Plural Realities too aims to ‘break away from its modernist dualisms, grand promises, master architects and iconic starchitects’ and - I would add - from the idea that only chosen people are allowed to contribute to (architectural) theory, from solution-oriented thinking and other grand narratives, from fetishizations of the architectural object and objectifications of the unbuilt environment.
In this sense, I see learning, unlearning, and relearning as one of the most incredible capacities we have in relation to the ever-changing conditions of our present. As a teacher, my motivation is to encourage students to develop different approaches to architecture and to provide spaces for collaboration, but also to find new ways together to continually redefine the built and unbuilt environment with plural realities - as an active and sensible response to the ethical contradictions and ecological entanglements of our present.
Davide Landi (Bristol School of Architecture and Environment - UWE-Bristol, Department of Architecture, Iowa State University)
Short abstract:
In bringing together physical and digital architectural model-making techniques, architectural knowledge becomes a method concerned with the notion of scale built around an acknowledgement of a conscious continuity between digital and physical domains whilst rejecting modernist dualisms.
Long abstract:
The term physical model frames an artefact with a broad spectrum of different uses and interpretations throughout the history of architecture. In it, physical models have been, at first instance, an artefact for producing architectural knowledge, so central in architectural education and practice.
Nevertheless, a characteristic of the 21st century for architectural knowledge is the engagement with contemporary challenges, such as the production and availability of new technologies. Over time, for example, the use of computers in architecture has allowed architecture students and architects to develop scripts and generate spectacular geometries and forms to be 3D-printed. Architectural models, as a product of omnipotent computers and 3D-printing machines, have made specific aspects of architectural knowledge inaccessible, such as the notion of scale lost with the ‘zoom in and zoom out’ gesture.
Drawing on the idea of physical models as a possible harbinger of architectural knowledge, this paper empirically explores the notion of scale through the physical and digital architectural model-making of 12 students at the Bristol School of Architecture and Environment. In bringing together physical and digital architectural model-making techniques, architectural knowledge becomes a method concerned with the notion of scale built around an acknowledgement of a conscious continuity between digital and physical domains whilst rejecting modernist dualisms. Thus, the question of architectural education and practice is on the agenda again.
Tommaso Listo (Politecnico di Torino) Camilla Forina (Politecnico di Torino) Valeria Federighi (Politecnico di Torino)
Long abstract:
Architectural design education has a long tradition of taking place in ateliers. In these spaces of practice are embedded epistemologies that express a certain conception of design but also of the world, and how, as a consequence, the former can affect the latter. Students thus learn within conditions that reflect these conceptions, often working, paraphrasing Lefebvre, on parts of spaces cut out of larger ensembles, imitations that claim to objectively grasp the world through a drawing. For the past four years, we have been conducting a didactic experiment called The Great Game, which consists of intervening in such conceptions to modify the traditional atelier model. The theoretical frame of reference from which we have moved can be traced back to STS: distributed agency, the project as a sociotechnical object, controversies as sites of discovery and action. The aim is to not reduce larger ensembles within drawings, but to make drawings act within larger ensembles. We present features and rules of the Great Game through the materials used and produced in these few years, to evaluate the advantages and limitations of the simulation in which we place our students.
Harsh Mittal (BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus)
Long abstract:
STS sensibilities broadly, and particularly, the concept of assemblage from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) philosophy, have been undergirding my teaching practice, over the last two years with learners doing majors in architecture and engineering, on topics of housing, and urban policy and governance. In doing so, I have been devising assignments and assessments that facilitate an exploration of the entanglements of urban built environments with various policies, programs, and planning instruments. Through EAST-4S 2024, I seek to reflect on these efforts and locate the distinctiveness of the pedagogy of screenwriting, that maps out assemblages of built environment. In my experience, the exercises of screenwriting, have enabled drawing simultaneously on STS-inflected ethnographies of built environment, the personal experiences of the learners with similar built environment, and the developments that are unfolding in the context of the classroom and that of learners.
I plan to share the assignment briefs that have helped in developing some of the scripts infused with STS sensibilities and develop arguments around how screenwriting as a pedagogical device infused with STS sensibilities allows for: (1) checking the tendency of classifying and categorising the built environment in positivist terms, and embrace the multiplicity of situations in which such classification and categorisation happens; (2) approaching the built environment as part of an ongoing becoming process, to which classroom participants connect through intermixing of ethnographic vignettes, fiction and prior personal experiences, rather than attempting to represent it exhaustively.
Hannah Varga (NDU)
Long abstract:
In recent times, the Bologna Process has initiated a transformation in European art and design education at universities. This transformation has prompted disciplines like architecture to reevaluate their relationship with traditional sciences. One noteworthy example of this shift occurred between 2013 and 2016 through the research project "Aesthetic Practices after Bologna" at Swiss universities which sought to understand the effects of this transformation on epistemic practices within art, design, and architecture. As part of this project, STS-sociologist Monika Kurath authored the essay "Architecture as a Science: Boundary Work and the Demarcation of Design Knowledge from Research" (Kurath, 2015). The essay delves into how architecture and 'traditional' research disciplines differentiate themselves from one another to legitimize their respective positions.
Building upon these developments in European universities, this paper aims to discuss two key aspects. Firstly, it explores the extent to which boundary work, as a practice of demarcation, defines the relationship between STS and architecture in education. Secondly, it examines how new interstices between architecture and STS in pedagogies could be nurtured for joint conceptual work, rather than reinforcing demarcations. In doing so, the paper raises the question of whether STS can be understood beyond sensibilities for breaking with modern dualism and to embrace the complexities inherent in the build environment in architectural pedagogies.