Keywords

1 Intro and Warm-Ups

As a place centered at the architectural pedagogy, the studio space generously hosts living and miscellaneous non-living constituents: students/participants, instructors/facilitators and invited individuals; spatial/temporal elements and components, physical/digital agents or representatives, owned/hacked/open-sourced tools, mediums and strategies, and others. Inside the studio, pluralistic and inclusive atmosphere and egalitarian practices hold strong potential to deconstruct the conventional education models and their hierarchy-prone power dynamics established through the giver and receiver of knowledge. The giver, in other words professor are positioned as “the privileged transmitters of knowledge” [1] in the conventional models. Contrary to the conventional models, pedagogies on the studio fosters an environment of mutual communication and exchange that stimulates critical discussions and provokes creative experiments. Contributions of the non-living and hybrid constituents, strengthen the opportunity of experiencing a collective existence and solidarity between the living members of the studio. Within the context of this research text, we will illuminate the non-living and hybrid constituents, their characteristics and contributions to the design studio and its more-than-living ecosystem. For warming up to the context and employing experimental, progressive practices to make critical interrogations and interpretations, we select “Radical Pedagogies” and “Architecture Beyond Capitalism (ABC) School 2022” as the sources of research. While practices in “Radical Pedagogies” give also substantial clues about the political climate arisen on the post-war period of the 20th century, current studio practices from the “ABC School 2022” reveal the alternative, emancipatory approaches on the contemporary politics.

1.1 Warm-Up1: The Selection of Radical Pedagogies, Exhibition and Book

The “Radical Pedagogies” research project, led by Beatriz Colomina, Britt Eversole, Ignacio González Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris, Anna-Maria Meister, and Federica Vannucchi, was exhibited at the 2014 Venice Biennale under the same names as curators and with the subtitle “Action-Reaction-Interaction”. The catalog of pedagogical practices displayed was also shared on the project’s website (www.radical-pedagogies.com) and published as a book in 2022 [2]. The selection compiles pedagogical approaches and experiments considered radical, mainly centered in Europe-America and from various universities around the world, including workshops, conferences, protests, tours, research, exhibitions, or biennials focused on architecture, planning, design, and art education, totaling 89 practices. The reasons for cataloging and examining these practices as radical pedagogical experiments and trials vary from their political underpinnings to the pedagogical atmosphere they create and the methods and tools they utilize. However, they share a common feature: all bear strong traces of the inclusive, emancipatory, interactive, critical-creative, and investigative pedagogical universe of the design studio in various aspects.

The structure of the warm-up exercise can be summarized as exploring the practices that constitute the selection in the “Radical Pedagogies” exhibition and book in terms of their political, spatial, atmospheric contexts, and their atypical, non-orthodox, experimental, emancipatory methods, and critical-creative representational productions; then creating a chart of the selection through specific criteria and generating mappings and graphs; and finally, conducting interrogating, critical comparisons, and speculative, progressive evaluations on them. We are moving to the Warm-up2 exercise to explore studio practices from the current time range and to make comparisons and evaluations on them.

1.2 Warm-Up2: 2022 ABC-Architecture Beyond Capitalism School, Sessions

The Architecture Lobby, a grassroots organization, was established by architecture laborers from various fields such as architects, landscape architects, planners, designers, students, and academics to build a critical-based solidarity and advocate for fair labor practices and inclusive work environments in the USA. Within the organization, the Academy Working Group has been conducting a series of workshops titled “Architecture Beyond Capitalism (ABC) School” since 2021. The school in 2021 advanced through a detailed exposition of concepts such as capitalism, labor, and commons. The series of workshops in 2022 (ten days, thirteen workshops, and opening-closing sessions) was organized with the theme of examining these three concepts directly through educational practices in the studio, discussing and developing alternative, experimental, progressive methods for pedagogical practices in the studio. The 2022 school focused on the studio environment and education, considered the dynamo of architectural culture. Issues such as more-than-living studio constituents and their (equatable) power dynamics, the construction of a more transparent, egalitarian, and participatory studio culture through program and studio curricula, political, economic, and physical/digital factors affecting the operations and outputs of the studio, as well as inter/transdisciplinary practices and impressions from studio practices in other disciplines were opened for discussion.

The 2022 school featured the ability for anyone registered on the web/cloud portal to access workshop recordings at any time; the drafting and openness for editing of a common text on studio culture and alternative, transformative action proposals during the closing plenary of the school, which was held online for all sessions; and the establishment of an active learning, sharing community where individuals we see as facilitators in one workshop could easily be seen as participants in another. These aspects, along with the presentations and discussions in the workshops, are considered experiments and trials for building studio practices.

2 The Pedagogical Universe of the Studio: Contextual and Performative Actions

We will attempt to construct the “Pedagogical Universe of the Studio” as a networked, and nebulous ‘carrier bag’ (referencing Ursula K. Le Guin and Donna Haraway), drawing from the practices we selected and quoted from the “Radical Pedagogies” selections [Warm-up1] and the workshops we decrypted from “Architecture Beyond Capitalism School 2022” [Warm-up2] as well as readings on pedagogy. After explaining the conceptual foundation that will form the carrier bag, we will start to fill its pouch with practices and trials from Warm-up1–2 and insights from readings.

We can evaluate the actions occurring within the “Pedagogical Universe of the Studio” under two main headings: “contextual” and “performative”. Positions in terms of politics (serving as an incubator where collectivity, solidarity, and equality are observed; being a source of activism and resilience/resistance; creating awareness; and more), spatial (disconnected, dissolved, or blurred boundaries of the studio; engagement with or outflow into the urban environment; and more), and networked (inter/transdisciplinary research subjects and exploration methods; non-hierarchical, horizontal power dynamics among all living constituents of the studio including students/participants, facilitators/instructors, invited individuals, etc.; and more) refer to “contextual actions”. Decision mechanisms and practices directed at the functioning of the studio through these contexts are indicators of “performative actions”. Performative actions can be characterized through a broad adjective pool such as provocative, speculative, triggering, radical, alternative, off-line, atypical, non-orthodox, experimental, proactive, progressive, participatory, egalitarian, emancipatory, inclusive, pluralistic, heterogeneous, investigative, and creative.

[Warm-up1]-1.

Cedric Price [London, UK; 1959–65] focused on developing flexible learning modes and methods that would require mobile/transportable infrastructures to process his productions as physical agents in continuous flow. In the Potteries Thinkbelt, Price designed not only as a physical but also as a ‘contextual’ stimulant towards the dream of an educational environment/atmosphere that dissolves into daily life, utilizing the rail system infrastructure connecting abandoned factories/production facilities that once produced pottery. His envisioned educational system’s physical transfer centers and transportation modes (consisting of wagons/cabins on rails) also ‘perform’ as permanent constituents and temporary agents of knowledge transfer. In the plan&section sketches for the Pitts Hill Transfer Area, coded as a permanent constituent of knowledge transfer, there are ‘large’ and variable structural volumes supported temporarily or self-sustaining, formed by the congregation of ‘small’ service provider units within a fixed skeleton with movable platforms, in a multi-stacked manner.

During the same periods of production and through partnerships such as running studio/workshops at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London, the ‘kit-of-parts’ logic frequently encountered in the designs of Archigram and Price can also be seen in Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt proposal. Through a dynamic kit-of-parts that would trigger volumetric configurations of unit mobility, Price proposes a new architectural ‘context’ response to what he considered archaic and static educational environments. The rail system network, reinforced by the support of the existing/added service roads and the nearby airport, connecting the pottery factories, becomes transformative in character with its ‘performance’, transforming pedagogical practices. The time spent on the rails between centers turns into parameters that could redefine the duration of the class/studio, while the wagons, possessing a moving, shaky, narrow but elongated interior space with a continuous flow of exterior space, become parameters that could redefine the class/studio atmosphere. Units and volumes at the transfer center and rails and wagons in the transport network are important non-living constituents of Price’s proposal, included in the more-than-living ecosystem of the pedagogical universe.

[Warm-up1]-2.

The Institute for Lightweight Structures (IL-Institut für Leichtbau Entwerfen und Konstruieren-ILEK) [Stuttgart, Germany; 1964–90], was established under the leadership of Frei Otto and utilized one of Otto’s tent structures for shelter. Positioned in a wooded area within the new campus of the University of Stuttgart, the tent structure that formed the architectural and provocative ‘context’ of IL was described as “an anomaly (deviation, disorder, oddity) next to science-focused neighboring institutions/institutes, a thorn that arouses curiosity among the buildings belonging to the sciences.” Starting with only “six students, IL reached a population of seventy students from various parts of the world, attracted by the open teaching approach and the reputation for experimentalism at the institute, and interested in alternative pedagogical practices and young architects” by 1971 [3].

IL was designed with a focus on total space usage that would not contain “a sharpened division/separation of functions/interior spaces” but would offer spatial flexibilities accommodating different scales of work, activity modes. This arrangement allowed for ‘performative’ variability in the programmatic setup, such as “expansion and contraction of experiment/discovery groups within their research/production processes” using dividing equipment, level differences, mezzanines, and “the possibility of collective events like seminars/meetings to spill outside (frequently) whenever desired.” “The laboratory environment at IL, focusing on physical model/prototype production and their documentation through various methods, was predicated on a direct experience of playful experimentation using unusual materials such as eggs, balloons, shaving foam, and technical equipment like cameras, small gauges, fostering a fun/playful atmosphere observed during tight collaboration” [3].

[Warm-up1]-3.

Architects Alberto Cruz, poet Godofredo Iommi, and sculptor Claudio Girola from the School of Architecture at the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso-PUCV) [Valparaíso, Chile; 1952–72], who wanted to explore the urban environment with creative methods and various dérives through the city, designed a truly interdisciplinary studio/pedagogical practice that would “use language performed in a poetic and collective manner through poetry as a tool,” [4]. In the practices at PUCV, language was used in a way that aligns with Kasia Nawratek’s definition that it “acts as a catalyst for the emergence of images and consequently meanings, inherently containing the power to facilitate the phenomenon of designing” [5]. They explored urban landscapes as a playground without defining any specific strategy or purpose, other than through poetry and the language reconfigured by poetry’s unique methods (re-structuring, distorting, playing with layout). This method of make instrumental poetic language also entailed a complete liberation from historical layers within the ‘context’ of the urban environment, associations related to memory/remembrance, and physical/spatial stimuli and directions.

The dérive practices at PUCV differ in some aspects from those initiated by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn within the Lettrist International during a similar period (between 1952–1956) and later transferred to Situationist International practices in 1957. According to a passage Greil Marcus cites from Lettrist’s publication Potlatch, in their dérives, “they potentially used the existing urban infrastructure, from metro corridors and tunnels to dark parks, gardens, fire escapes, and roofs” [6]. While Debord and Jorn’s psychogeographic explorations in parts of Paris, Copenhagen were conducted with the active, intertwined guidance of memory and senses; PUCV set aside memory and the past, framing city dérives under the guidance of emotions evoked by poetic language. Debord and Jorn transformed their dérives and vague encounters in familiar parts of the city they were deeply connected to into psychogeographic representations (collages, mappings, fanzines, pamphlets) [7]. PUCV that foregrounding the auditory impact of poetic language, experienced proactive and atypical ‘performances’ of close interactions and playful encounters with urban landscapes through 1:1 apparatuses like body extensions, hybrid skeletons, and prostheses which enable to engage without leaving footprints in the sand, walk on the beach without sinking and getting wet, dérive around the city without staying in the sun, being affected by the wind, and play games by gliding without touching the ground.

The pedagogical practices that focus on exploring the city under the control of emotions provoked and triggered by poetic language, including close encounters with the city and the body, and playful encounters (tournaments), allowed the participant/student-facilitator/instructor living constituents at PUCV to be “open to producing new subjectivities.” In their dérives not only within the city and its immediate surroundings but also to various points in South America with an interdisciplinary team, we can observe “a behavior plane where all participants are equalized and hierarchical, atypical power dynamics” are non-existent. Collectively performed, pleasure and enjoyment-focused ‘performative’ actions (papillons-phalènes) deeply shook pedagogical conventions and desired to “blur, dissolve, and even break the boundaries between learning-working-living,” bestowing a “new erotic character” to the pedagogical universe of the studios at PUCV [8].

[Warm-up2]-1.

Will Martin explored the trail of emancipatory agents that could be integrated into the studio as non-living constituents, in his workshop “Ours to Hack and to Own: Open-source Strategies and the Pedagogy of Potential” [9], aiming to trigger pluralistic, inclusive, co-evolving, and autonomous architectural pedagogies. The preconditions for the agent’s ‘context’ within the studio were first defined as “not serving capitalist accumulation and naturally not training worker for it, and then not forming its strategies and production tools over orthodox, patriarchal, and reductionist frameworks” [9]. The proposed non-living constituent to permeate/settle in the studio and ‘perform’ was the GitHub service, a cloud-based and open-source version control system frequently used by software developers.

GitHub’s repository can host content in various formats, including visuals, text, coding, etc. Software developers, defined as ‘contributors’ to the repository, have access rights to view, edit, and develop content. The version control system allows developers to simultaneously follow the entire process of the main project or its branches (semi-autonomous parts that don’t affect the main project but can transfer changes, edits, and improvements back to the main project if necessary) and revert any errors that occur during the process. In summary, GitHub is scrutinized as an open-source, user-friendly, and participatory system/interface that facilitates the project process to progress in a negotiator manner and in collaboration by reducing the fear of making mistakes. The participatory, alternative studio pedagogy development tool or the performance of GitHub as a pluralistic and emancipatory agent within the pedagogical operation is examined, thanks to its open-source nature, which allows it to be owned or hacked by everyone.

[Warm-up2]-2.

In the “Collectivized Pedagogies” workshop [10], constituents of the Dark Matter University (DMU) jointly presented their pedagogical universes with inclusive and progressive studio themes and course contents. Studio facilitators from various universities across the United States, who came together during the COVID-19 process, designed a curriculum for political design studios focused on “Design Justice,” developing a participant and disputative approach through online programs (zoom, mural, miro, etc. for video conferencing over the internet, information sharing, enabling joint discussion and development like) and interfaces. As a positive outcome of the distance education model, which became part of contemporary pedagogical practices due to the compulsory long-term, intense lockdown, and quarantine measures during the pandemic, DMU constituent studio facilitators had the opportunity to apply and observe their curriculum and ‘context’ synchronously in various universities and through differing internal operations and dynamics. This situation provided a foundation for ‘performative’ activities such as an unprecedented permeability between studios (studio collaborations established with facilitators from different states and virtual visits between them), mutual interaction and sharing (discussing ‘contextual’ differences that emerge when the same theme is applied in studios at other universities). The main themes of the studios focused on principles like “working together and exploring the city/state’s infrastructure and current neighborhoods”; “sequential modules aimed at comprehensively researching, exploring, and understanding socio-economic/political topics such as housing, economic developments, and labor” [10] were applied in a collaborative manner across different universities.

Implementing their pedagogical experiments in this ‘context’ and striving to conceptualize a political design studio, Dark Matter University (DMU) aims to define an approach that can critically and inquisitively focus on commonly overlooked, normalized issues avoided in confrontation in the current context, such as xenophobia and “anti-racist pedagogies; commons, collectives, and marginalized communities; fragile identities, decolonization, and care practices; isolation, surveillance spaces, and the dynamics of power and labor” [10]. This approach aims to combat existing inequalities and adopt a progressive stance towards transformation because, as Bhabha puts it, the “condition of being a minority and the culture of the migrant being in-between/in-limbo” [11] creates transitory sensations capable of gathering and integrating all constituents of the studio into acts of resistance and resilience. In later stages, DMU plans to enrich its inclusive and emancipatory pedagogical universe by adding courses/studios related to the personal research and experience areas of its constituents that align with the universe.

3 The Pedagogical Universe of the Studio and More-Than-Living Constituents: Conclusions

From [Warm-up1]-1.

Cedric Price harbored the dream of reaching a pragmatic utopia through a revolutionary set of proposals he designed by himself, without the request of any person/institution. He believed that everyone involved in the education/learning/thinking network, which is “embedded/integrated into human actions, including everyday life,” would also be freed from the shackles of dogmas and “behavioral patterns based on patriarchy” [12]. Price stated that the Potteries Thinkbelt was a proposal that would “facilitate a state of social justification where students and the public, instead of being separated, come together, which architecture education (and universities in general) needed” [13]. Although not a direct counterpart of emancipation and unification in his proposals, he utilized tools in the studios/workshops he conducted within the AA to empower students by authorizing them. “According to Price, being a student also encompassed the responsibility of acting as an independent individual. In this direction, the ‘Taskforce’ program he initiated at the AA aimed for a contract to be signed between the student/participant and the facilitator/instructor, leaving the task of defining what the student wanted to achieve throughout the year to the student” [12]. The contract, as a non-living constituent added to the studio, becomes a catalyst for both making the students a more responsible and at the same time more independent constituent of the studio and transforming the archaic and hierarchy-prone power dynamics in the studio. Our critique that signing a contract does not break the dual structure between student-facilitator sides and that aiming for the student’s independence paradoxically results in a document that might pressure the student is a note on the method applied.

From [Warm-up1]-2.

Like Buckminster Fuller’s domes [14], we can see in IL under Frei Otto’s coordination the use of the total space defined by a shell including alternative structural systems and materials as a non-living constituent to transform the pedagogical atmosphere in a non-orthodox manner. The difference in IL lies in the expectation not for the transformation to be as spatially focused as on the domes but for the space to be positioned as a facilitator and intermediary constituent of this transformation. The space is successful as a facilitator insofar as it can open up room for experimental and participatory pedagogical practices, allow flexibility in operations, and beyond that, transform the hierarchy-prone power dynamics among living constituents towards a progressive and egalitarian direction. Finally, the almost sacral position of space in the domes has given way to a more sarcastic approach in IL, where space is described as strange and even alien-like.

From [Warm-up1]-3.

In previous practices, we observed structural (and non-living) constituents with their own tectonics, such as domes, transfer centers, transportation modes, and tent structures, directly or indirectly transforming the studio atmosphere and operation in a progressive direction. In the practice at PUCV, where the illusion of a binary ecosystem defined by living and non-living constituents is dismantled, we start encountering constituents with intermediate forms and hybrid structures. Language conveyed as poetry gains a hybrid constituent nature because it can be ‘performed’ through living constituents while also preserving its ontological ‘context’. The emphasis and intonations, the words, and lines awaken different meanings, images in the mind of each listener, producing a collective reaction while being listened to and perceived collectively in a form that has turned individual, almost ritualistic. This reaction then aligns with Donna Haraway’s description of an atmosphere “where a critical and joyful uproar is occurred; a trouble is produced through productive joy, terror, and collective thinking” [15], also describing a practice that can become autonomous from the dominant and surrounding system. Besides directing speculative, emancipatory actions of the studio/pedagogical practices, it also encourages the design of complex skeletons, prosthetic-like body extensions as representational productions, and their development using progressive and experimental structures and materials.

From [Warm-up2]-1.

The practices discussed from the Radical Pedagogies selections compiled from the second half of the twentieth century (1940–1990) [Warm-up1], defined non-living and pedagogically transformative constituents of the studio through structural formations and spatial qualities, encounters/explorations/close encounters in urban landscapes, and mediated actions. When the studio gained a more holistic, flexible, and variable ‘context’ through spatial arrangements, and when ‘performative’ actions dissolved its boundaries into daily life and the city, the perceived physical atmosphere within the studio was mentioned. In the workshop by Will Martin at the 2022 ABC-Architecture Beyond Capitalism School, we see that technological equipment, systems, and interfaces, which were previously applied mainly for recording studio productions, documenting parts of the city forming the studio context, or archiving, have now evolved from being supportive constituents to being game-changers, fundamental building blocks. The impact of technological leaps over the long interval, digital interfaces and applications that have become pervasive in our lives, is evident in the change of role distribution within the studio. In here, instead of choosing a digital system for pragmatic reasons to facilitate studio operations, we see it uniquely involved in the preparation phase of the studio’s pedagogical universe through the program, positioned against the capitalist system, breaking down hierarchies prone to formation within the studio, and mediating an active interaction and feedback mechanism as a non-living, moreover virtual constituent.

From [Warm-up2]-2.

in [Warm-up1], we had defined the transformative powers of non-living or hybrid constituents on the physical atmosphere of the studio’s pedagogical universe. In the previous practice of the 2022-ABC Architecture Beyond Capitalism School, we evaluated the non-living (and virtual) constituent for directly focusing on emancipating the studio’s power-relationship dynamics from hierarchization and even preventing the reflections of the neoliberal political and economic system from leak the studio. The difference in the DMU practice similarly aimed at studio operations, beyond focusing on the preparation process through the curriculum for conceptualizing the studio ‘context’, also generates counterparts for ‘performative’ actions actively taking place during the studio’s operation. Topics and issues that studio focuses on, and the key cornerstone of this holistic approach emerge in a hybrid structure with the non-living qualities of the spaces it concentrates on, and the living (and both physically perceptible or mentally apprehensible) qualities (From [Warm-up1], similar to the practice at PUCV) of the communities and commons in DMU. Communities and concepts marginalized in our current context are deeply scrutinized, confronted through interrogating, and addressed for designing proactive and progressive proposals in DMU’s political design studio. As a natural consequence of this approach, the internal power dynamics of the studio and modes of research/discussion/production are redefined specifically for DMU. Consequently, the pedagogical universe of the DMU is planned through a system of in-depth disputative and critical-creative thinking to leave prejudices and dogmatic beliefs outside the studio, embrace and welcome all modes of action, including progressive and speculative, and to not provide an opportunity for “knowledge to be taught implicitly as part of the hidden curriculum,” as Illich puts it [16].

Another significant (and non-living) constituent observed in the DMU practice, online programs, unlike the previous practice, do not undertake any triggering or transformative role in the studio’s pedagogical universe. Rather than, it only function as a technical interface that in facilitating transitions and mobility or mediating gatherings virtually. We would like to conclude the examination of DMU with a somewhat speculative evaluation. In the practices selected from the second half of the twentieth century in [Warm-up1], we generally saw the reflection of universal political fluctuations, such as the events of ‘68, in pedagogy, usually in the form of pressures and rebellions from student groups towards the (undoubtedly positioned more privileged) facilitators. In [Warm-up2], especially in the DMU practice, both studio facilitators and the participant/student composition in the universities where the practices are applied are mostly positioned as constituents that are directly the subjects of the issues and problems addressed by the studio or fit various in-between/marginalized definitions. We see this transformation as important also in terms of evolving relationships that are eager to hierarchize among living constituents (with a bit provocative interpretation, from privileged to needy) towards a more inclusive, egalitarian, and emancipatory ground.

In light of the above conclusions from the section of contextual and performative actions, in this research text, we have focused on the miscellaneous roles and power of the studio’s non-living and hybrid constituents in transforming the pedagogical atmosphere and operations in a participatory, inclusive, and emancipatory manner. We chose to underscore the unique/quirky/eccentric, troublemaking/pesky, fickle/inconsistent, triggering/provocative, playful/pleasure-seeking/erotic qualities of these constituents, which studies on studio pedagogy focusing on the student-facilitator duo (sometimes turning into a trio with the addition of invited individuals) have not examined much, and preferred to explore and interrogate the studio’s pedagogical universe with an unconventional approach guided by these adjectives. We also discovered that the experimental and proactive structures of non-living and hybrid constituents contribute to the transformation from hierarchical power dynamics towards more engaged pedagogical practices among living constituents.