John Wagner & Nadyeli Quiroz
It Takes a Village
The essay explores the work of Digital Ready, a nascent career pathway non-profit based in Boston Massachusetts serving black and latinx students who are acutely under-represented among the ranks of American design professionals. This essay posits the possibility of a design education as a collective improvisation of how we might negotiate and design space together and learn to understand the means, politics, and actual methods of spatial production.
The pedagogical framework of the Digital Ready architecture studio is a departure from –an intended redaction of—traditional architectural design education that posits architecture training as an individualistic and aspirational ascent toward the apogee of past masters. Rather, the program introduces the process of design as a collective action, made by the intuition, talents, skills, and negotiations of inhabitants in the production of a shared domestic space.
Looking at the topic of Affordable Housing, the studio forefronts collective building, evoking commons that have been central to alternative solutions for affordable housing that do not depend on large financial markets, but promote the autonomy of marginalized groups through collectivization. This exploration is accompanied by an overview of the historic and present ways in which spatial production in the United States is strongly coded along racial and economic lines, and how the politics of spatial inclusion and exclusion continues as a growing crisis of affordability and access.
In the studio exploration, the site of this learning is a shared, co-created model negotiating spatial relationships collectively designed by teenage-young adult students. The material language are scale forms of furniture, acoutremon and the signified elements of domestic and neighborly dwelling, hand made, digitally designed, or additively manufactured.
Written by the studio co-directors, this essay will describe the month-long intensive design workshop, its organization, theoretic framework, methods of instruction, and outcomes of a situational learning and collective designing process.
BIOGRAPHIES
JOHN DAVID WAGNER
Is an architect and educator working at the convergence of architecture, urban space and human rights. John has taught at Wentworth, Boston Architectural College, Harvard College, and has co-led youth design studios at the Boston Society for Architecture. John received a Masters in Architecture, with Distinction, from Harvard Graduate School of Design, and was a 2020 Irving Innovation Fellow, and 2021 post-graduate fellow at Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute where his research focused on refugee housing and social infrastructure.
NADYELI QUIROZ
Is an architect from UNAM, with two master’s degrees from Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) on Landscape Architecture and Design Studies. Nadyeli was awarded as the Landscape Architecture Foundation Olmstead Scholar by the GSD, and appointed as a Research Fellow at the South Asia Institute at Harvard University, to work on her research in landscapes of displacement and forced migrations. Nadyeli has taught architecture studios at Wentworth Institute of Technology, where she also coordinated the Architecture Community Outreach program. This past summer, she designed and managed the architecture Summer program at the Boston Society for Architects. Nadyeli currently works at Ecosistema Urbano.