Designbuild Pedagogies for Social Change Past, Present and Potentials

Foreword: Love Is All You Need   

Coleman Coker

Introduction: Designbuild, Architectural Education and Social Activism

Emilie Taylor Welty

PART 1. PAST

1. A History of Community Design/Build in the United States in Four Moments

Anna Goodman

2. A Little and Incomplete History of Architectural Design-build Practices in Latin America

3. Live Projects Network: Connection and Knowledge from Diverse International Live Project Activity

Jane Anderson

4. Frameworks

Tolya Stonorov

PART 2. PRESENT

5. ColoradoBuildingWorkshop: Articulating Place-Form

Erik “Rick” Sommerfeld

6. Impact of Live Build; Urban Citizen Studio at the University of Pretoria Department of Architecture

Carin Combrinck and Sidney Badenhorst

7. Participatory, Community-Based Social Impact Design

Nils Gore and Shannon Criss

8. Takeaways from Global-Local to Globallocal-Local

Matthias Kestel

9. How Indigenous Knowledges Shape Co-design and Co-build Projects

David O’Brien

10. Building a Body of Knowledge

Mary Hardin

11. Clouds of Wood.Origin, Pedagogy, and Projects of a Design-Build in Colombia

Felipe Mesa

12. Measuring the Multiple Impacts of Designbuild Studios

Emilie Taylor Welty, Ann Yoachim and Byron Mouton

PART 3. POTENTIALS

13. Design/Build for Transformation: Transgressive Roots and Radical Potentials

Zachary Lamb

14. Labor Intensive Architecture: Reimagining Devotional Work in the Context of Design-Build Curricula

Jose Galarza

15. Rural Studio and Front Porch Initiative; Knowledge Loops Between Implementation and Research

Emily McGlohn and Mackenzie Stagg

16. Co-Design: The Environmental Science Lab at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, Ibarra

Lorena Valdivia-Steel, Jorge Andrade Benítez, Gabriela Naranjo-Serrano, Jan Blieske and Sandra Iturriaga-del-Campo

17. Bang Nong Saeng Kindergarten

Pau Sarquella and Carmen Torres

18. Poiesis and Affect. On the Emancipatory Agency of Design-build Studios

Ana Valderrama

Conclusion

Emilie Taylor Welty

Biography

Emilie Taylor Welty is a leader in design-build education whose research and practice are grounded in material explorations and expanding access to design. She is an architect and Associate Professor at the Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment where she serves as the architecture program director. Emilie is also co-founder and principal at Colectivo, an award winning New Orleans based architecture firm.

"Designbuild Pedagogies for Social Change is a powerful reminder that architecture is never just about buildings — it is about making change. This book shows how designbuild collapses the boundaries between thinking and making, classroom and community, transforming education into a practice of justice. It is both a call to action and an invitation to see building as a deeply human endeavor - one that builds capacity, relationships, and hope."

Katie Swenson, Senior Principal, MASS Design Group; author of Design with Love and In Bohemia

 

"Architecture as an applied discipline, must integrate the head and the hand. The world of ideas and the world of things. Architecture as a profession emerged from the building trades in the Middle Ages. Architecture has its roots in building, and this book contains perspectives on people carrying on those traditions."

Brian MacKay-Lyons, Principal, MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects; Founder of Ghost Lab

 

"This book gathers the leading pedagogical innovations in designbuild education—a radical and experimental tradition that first challenged modern architectural teaching. This work returns the relationship between design and construction to the heart of architectural education, exploring hands-on making as a catalyst to reimagine architecture´s social role and transformative potential."

Cristóbal Molina Baeza, Head of Architecture, Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage of Chile, Tulane Visiting Professor

"This book shows us many ways to make the important connections between students and real places and real people. These experiences are powerful and transformative and inform designers about practice in a way that cannot be done in the classroom. I hope it will encourage more schools and programs to pursue this work."

Elizabeth Mossop, Professor of Urban Resilience, University of Technology Sydney, Academic Director Living Lab Northern Rivers