Madelaine Coline
The design-build pedagogy: building together to innovate? French teaching, at the crossroads of a vast international heritage and its own identity.
ABSTRACT
Design-build education refers to a specific way of teaching architecture, in which students design and build a project themselves. Architecture schools at university are left behind in favor of actual construction sites, which become the new sites of learning where students face actual issues : as a team, they work for clients with real needs, manage a budget and a schedule, have to adapt to the existing site and to the risks of the project, organize the site supply and carry out the construction.
Nowadays, design-build is widespread throughout the world, especially in the United States, where we find its strongest roots and where it is now well-established. In recent years, design-build has begun to appear in French architecture schools. The creation of the design/buildLAB at the ENSA Grenoble in 2016, founded by two French-American teachers is the most representative example of this recent establishment. “Learning by doing” is developing in French education and many programs have started to appear: experiments at the Grands Ateliers de l’Isle d’Abeau and at the future Parisian CAAPP1, Solar Decathlon, studios within the “Architecture, Environment and Constructive Cultures” Masters at the ENSA Grenoble or “Looking for Virtuous Architecture” at the ENSA Lyon, etc.
Through these French examples, coming from a larger and more established international movement, two characteristics of design-build education will be studied here: the “doing together”, for the realization of a collective and interdisciplinary project, and the evolution of the design process, nourished by constant back-and-forth between drawings and concrete experimentation. How does this approach by doing enrich and transform the design process? Does practical and collective experimentation foster innovation?
A typological survey of French education (from experimentation at scale 1 to the actual construction of buildings), the analysis of several case studies and interviews with teachers allow us to conduct this research.
1 Centre Art Architecture Paysage Patrimoine à Évry, France
BIOGRAPHY
I discovered design-build studios, a particular way of teaching architectural projects based on learning by doing, at the Technical University of Berlin in 2012. As an Erasmus student, I participated in the organization of an international conference dedicated to this pedagogy (Design-Build Studios, New ways in architectural education) and in two design-build projects (Tanzania and Haiti). Back in France, I wrote my master thesis on the subject. Today, I am a DE HMONP architect (ENSAPB, 2015), and since January 2020, I am doing a thesis on design-build education at the IPRAUS laboratory. I teach at ENSAPB, in Licence and Master, as a project assistant and intensives.