Pedagogies for Anti-Disciplinary Design Education by Dixit, Mitesh; Taqi, Fedah; Westcott, James;

Short description:

Pedagogies for an Anti-Disciplinary Design Education assembles methods from 15 contributors – across 12 universities in 10 countries – who are attempting to encompass the trans-scalar conflicts that design must take responsibility for. This book argues that a radical rethink is needed. 

Long description:

Architectural education today is stretched between institutional inertia, market orientation, and planetary polycrisis. Contemporary urgencies – climate, nature, inequality, food systems– are typically treated superficially, when they demand a reordering of the terms of pedagogy itself. Pedagogies for an Anti-Disciplinary Design Education assembles methods from 15 contributors – across 12 universities in 10 countries – who are attempting to encompass the trans-scalar conflicts that design must take responsibility for.

Why anti-disciplinarity? Architecture is undoubtedly permissive in its range of interests and roles. Still, in design schools today, even subjects that share teaching spaces – architecture, urbanism, landscape, preservation, (nature) conservation, interior design, industrial design, etc. – are structurally prevented from interacting. And architecture education is so demanding and so market-oriented that engaging disciplines beyond design schools – geography, sociology, history, politics, theory – is even harder.

This book argues that a radical rethink is needed. An anti-disciplinary approach can engage the entangled supply chains, energy regimes, debt structures, border policies, histories of dispossession, and more-than-human ecologies in which design operates. Another design education is not only imaginable but already emerging in the experiments documented here, and it can be pursued without denying the constraints within which most of us work.

Table of Contents:

1. Everything is in Everything: Border Pedagogy, Panecastic Method, and Postdisciplinarity in the Architectures  2. Starting Over: Integrating Ecological Feminist Materialist Approaches in Architectural Conservation and Landscape Pedagogy  3. Yes, and: Interstices as a Living Laboratory for Anti-Disciplinary Design  4. Designing the Encounter with the Other: Toward an Affective Pedagogy of Creativity and Collective Imagination  Roundtable 1: Beginnings of an Alternative Pedagogical Project: Conversations on situated methods and institutional critique to rethink design education  5. Design Before Discipline: Scrappy Methods for a Contemporary Landscape Architecture Education  6. Anti-Disciplinary Interdisciplinarity: Uselessness in a Polytechnic Architecture School  7. Memoir Carnivals: Anarchitecture and Collective Pedagogies from Disciplinary Borders  8. Re-Creating the Past: Imagination, Heritage, and Anti-Disciplinary Pedagogies in Architecture  Roundtable 2: Advancing Anti-Disciplinary Pedagogies: Refining and Building the Book  9. Immersive Horizons: Virtual Reality-Mediated Pedagogical Explorations for Multidisciplinary Architectural Design at Tsinghua University  10. Architecture After Discipline: Learning from Productive Failures and Situated Pedagogies  11. Heavy, Weight: Tapestries as Pedagogical Practices