Design Discovery Young Adult

The Design Discovery Young Adult program is an intensive summer studio course that aims to initiate high-school students into the world of architecture while showing them that they have agency over their environments and communities through design. As one of the two instructors of the program for 2018, I was responsible for conceiving, planning, and teaching the studio course –from formulating the design exercises and learning objectives to orchestrating a series of lectures and reviews and providing guidance to students with their design projects. Together with Bryan Ortega-Welch, we structured the studio around a series of design and making exercises, which were building on each other to conclude in a synthetic final project. We asked students to explore the potential of paper folding and cutting to create spatial enclosures, to imagine scenarios of inhabiting these enclosures, and subsequently, to challenge the ways of seeing and imagining space by projecting grids and lines on the models. As formal possibilities emerged from the paper filding, students were asked to visually and spatially interpret them and propose narratives of inhabitation. Reversing the flow from drawing to modelling, the starting point for the exercises was the act of making, challenging common perceptions of design as a linear process from conceptualization to realization.