1. Introduction
Pavilion architecture is an emerging paradigm in architecture education that offers a wide range of opportunities for experimentation, from digital architecture to traditional craftsmanship. The design-build teaching method has been often linked with the Bauhaus educational approach because of its workshop-based learning activities that integrated design and craftsmanship [
1]. The origins of design-build teaching activities can be traced back to John Ruskin, who worked on a road construction with his students at Ferry Hinskey near Oxford as a community project [
2], or the student construction projects at Tuskegee University in Alabama, which were initiated by Booker T. Washington in exchange of students paying fees to complete their studies [
3]. After the first student-led design-build projects, a new form of design pedagogy emerged in the 1950s in the United States, which challenged the design education norms of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The group was led by Colin Rowe, John Hejduk, Bernard Hoesly and Robert Slutzky, who introduced a critical and formal approach to architecture education. These new ideas inspired a novel concept for design studio, which initiated several design-build projects [
4]. Design-build learning was also promoted later in ‘A Study of Education for Environmental Design’, also known as Princeton Report, which presented a change in pedagogical thinking in design studio and “highlighted the need to broaden the scope of architectural education to the design of the entire built environment and to engage students in solving community related problems” [
5] (p. 282). In the past seven decades of history following their emergence, design-build projects shared typical features such as: separated design and construction phases, collaboration between university and external stakeholders (community, non-profit organisation) and combined effort of local volunteers, students and academics. The integration of design-build studio in the teaching curriculum, however, shows great variety [
6].
Pavilions became a vehicle for design-build projects in design studios, in the last two decades, to experiment with parametric design and digital fabrication—for example, the pavilion construction project as part of design studio at Architectural Association [
7,
8]. Other examples are the pavilion projects by Institute of Computational Design in Stuttgart led by Achim Menges, which are mostly known as result of advanced structural research while some of them are student projects like the Aggregate Pavilion [
9]. A similar approach is implemented at The University of Tokyo where emergent structural investigations by Jun Sato [
10] are undertaken in design projects focusing on Japanese tradition and which include contemporary tea houses built by students of Kengo Kuma Lab [
11,
12]; or the pavilions of Yusuke Obuchi Lab’s students [
13,
14], which intertwine tools, craftsmanship and digital fabrication in design-led research and construction projects. Furthermore, pavilion projects take up the challenge to link different fields of science with architecture design, i.e., the Studio One at UC Berkeley, which combines biomimetic research with design and construction [
15]. With the advancement of computational design and the penetration of digital fabrication tools and technology in university labs, the number and complexity of student-built projects is increasing. The number of student-led design-build projects at universities globally was estimated to be about 60 in 2005 [
16] and over 100 in 2010 [
17]. Based on the number of project submissions for the student Design-Build Pavilion Competition organised by popular architecture website ArchDaily, design-build projects by students have at least doubled by 2017 and are increasing, showing “almost 100” submissions in 2015 and several “hundreds of projects” in 2017. (Popular architecture website, ArchDaily opened call for pavilion projects in 2015, 2016 and 2017. The number of submissions showed a significant (at least 200%) increase each year. The Best Student Work Worldwide: ArchDaily Readers Show Us their Studio Projects Available online:
https://www.archdaily.com/771146/the-best-student-work-worldwide-archdaily-readers-show-us-their-studio-projects (accessed on 1 July 2021). The Best Student Design-Build Projects Worldwide 2017 Available online:
https://www.archdaily.com/875689/the-best-student-design-build-projects-worldwide-2017 (accessed on 20 July 2021)).
This development is also pointed out by Jori Erdman and Robert Weddle in their discussion on emerging full-scale student-led design-build exercises in architecture schools across the United States [
18]. Their article, which concluded the findings of a conference they organised on that topic in 2001, aims to reflect on the fact that “design-build activities continue to resist theorizing and critical discourse,” [
18] (p. 175). From a pedagogical perspective, this leads to two important disadvantages: the benefits of the exercise are often viewed as self-evident and the focus shifts from the process to the product itself, which hinders efforts to “integrate pedagogy with process” (ibid).
Corser and Gore present that design-build projects follow two possible methods: (i) constructing larger houses (with investigation of construction, i.e., modular systems), or (ii) exploration of new materials and processes. Although they acknowledge the significance and novelty of these two approaches compared to a traditional design studio teaching, Corser and Gore question the approaches’ potential of offering a new alternative in practice-especially in terms of open-ended speculation for the first and being too reliant on individual student talents for the second. They propose an alternative and third approach, which they coin as “‘guerrilla architecture,’ defined as ‘small-scale interventions in in the social and urban landscape’” and present a case study for New Orleans [
19] (p. 32).
With student-led design-build projects gaining popularity [
20], it is becoming important to develop a way for evaluation of their pedagogical impact, especially considering that these projects are becoming part of standard architecture teaching curriculum. Pedagogical evaluation can address several critical aspects which currently lack attention. Firstly, the intended learning outcomes (ILOs) and their efficiency for a pavilion project is becoming an important factor: building a pavilion is clearly a bigger challenge for students than preparing design drawings for a project but it also requires significantly more resources from the school as well. The increased load on staff and resources should be justified with the higher impact of the project.
Secondly, student-led design-build projects include multiple stages, i.e., design, fabrication and construction, which have different learning outcomes for students. A typical project has all these stages and students are involved in each step of the process. While the advantage of student involvement is clear in the fact that students take ownership of the design, it is not established whether all these stages have equal importance in learning experience-especially, if the design process is managed by a smaller group rather than the total number of students involved in the construction. Speculation about the comparative contribution of the various phases of design-build projects raises a question on whether the exercise would have been equally or more effective if the students were to only construct a built structure that has already been designed-namely, having students focusing only on the build experience.
Finally, student-led design-build projects have not yet been compared with traditional teaching methods in the classroom to understand the difference in impact or the potential novel aspects in learning. A construction project is indeed an important challenge and requires an extended consideration of design-related aspects. However, it can be argued that making of physical models or large-scale detail models can have similar impact with less demanding learning environment for student, teacher, and the school. Therefore, the differential impacts of design-build projects need to be assessed to justify the higher demand in resource.
In light of their increasing popularity as a pedagogical vehicle, this paper evaluates the learning impact of student-led design-build pavilion projects by using psychometric assessment and quantitative analysis. The study involves an online questionnaire distributed to undergraduate architecture students at Loughborough University who were involved in student-built pavilion projects which took place in the first year of architecture undergraduate study. The aim of the research is to address current gaps in evidence-based assessment of the pedagogical benefits and shortcomings of design-build pavilion projects in architecture education. The paper examines the following research questions:
What are students’ perceived learning outcomes from design-build pavilion projects?
Do aspects such as students’ level of involvement and the project outcome have an impact on students’ views?
What are the theoretical and practical implications about pavilion project pedagogy that can be identified by the input from students’ views?
In what follows, ‘Materials and Methods’ presents the research design and reasoning behind the selected types of analyses, including their description and limitations. ‘Results’ presents the findings from the analysis of the questionnaire data and ‘Discussion of Findings’ offers a reflection on the learnings and implications of the study findings considered against the wider pedagogical context in architecture education. Overall, the paper presents an evaluation of pedagogical impact of student-led design-build pavilion projects, which to our knowledge has not been attempted before on such scale. From this evaluation, a theoretical model for pavilion project pedagogy is proposed as a basis for future research.
4. Discussion
The research presents a psychometric assessment of a student-led design-build pavilion project and translates the results into a hypothetical Pavilion Project pedagogy model, which can be used as a tool to develop and assess similar educational projects.
Beyond its novelty, the research is important because of multiple factors. Firstly, as Erdman has argued, with the increasing possibilities in student ‘hands-on’ constructions, it is important to get a better understanding of the learning impact of student-led design-build project [
3], especially considering the different activities and stages involved in the project. Assessment of learning impact can highlight unique aspects that other learning exercises cannot offer or other strengths that the pedagogical approach should focus on to maximise impact. The psychometric assessment contributes to existing reflections on ‘hands-on’ pedagogy offering a more nuanced understanding of the student perspective and the value and challenges which students experience in these projects, mapped against learning criteria and intended learning outcomes. Furthermore, the HPPP model offers an evidence-based entry point for the development of design-build focused pedagogical theorisation which is an observed gap in architecture education discourse [
17,
18].
Secondly, an effective evaluation of student-led design-build projects can improve the efficiency of design-build projects not only in terms of learning outcomes but also their planning and implementation. In general, an effective evaluation can support comparative understanding of the benefits and challenges associated with including such projects in standard architectural teaching curriculum, which would eventually improve student experience and learning environment while minimising negative impacts on school and staff. Assessment and improvement of the pedagogical performance and delivery of design-build learning could help to mitigate what Canizaro identifies as ‘collegial resistance’ and ‘administrative and institutional’ resistance [
17] (pp. 31–32). In response, the aim of the authors is not to discourage student-led construction projects in education, but rather the opposite: presenting an evaluation framework that offers an objective assessment on the impact of such projects, which would support student-led projects to take their place as part of standard architecture education and enable more students to access hands-on experience in design and construction.
With regards to the results and benefits of HPPP, the model suggests a few speculative ways to use it in architecture education, especially if the design-build exercise is embedded in standard design studio class where time and resources are limited. Firstly, students’ perception suggests a justified emphasis on construction and the significance of the ‘building’ process in design-build educational projects. This outcome begs further discussion about the meaning and value of ‘build’ in an architectural curriculum, which is particularly timely considering the current context of online learning [
29,
30]. The significance of the construction phase could be reflected upon when the design-build exercise is planned overall: sufficient time and resources allocated for the construction stage is essential, especially if intended learning outcomes for design can be covered by other projects within the module. The impact of the construction factor explains that construction success emerges as a critical element of the learning experience, which is also evidenced in both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ keywords used by the students (success and failure). This means that the positive learning outcomes of the project should be clearly communicated to the participants especially regarding lessons learned that are independent from construction because students appear to perceive success as equal to learning outcome. It also aligns with research in design-build education which suggests the central role of the educator in managing confusion and facilitating the learnings of uncertainty and its resolution to come through [
31]. A caveat to be noted is that the questionnaire distinguished between the design and construction questionnaire items and included no questions regarding design in the construction phase, whereas it can be argued that design decisions continued to take place during construction.
The second observation is that the engagement and participation factor and teamwork factor are confirmed as critical elements for students’ perception, therefore, the management of students’ teams and tasks should focus on achieving collaboration: the tasks should be designed in a manner to offer diverse participation for the students instead of making them responsible for a specific task of the project (as it would happen in a typical professional construction project). In general, higher involvement leads to more positive acknowledgement of learning outcomes, which means that the exercise should be designed with monitoring on attendance and participation. Overall, the results show positive outcomes with high satisfaction for teamworking, which makes student-led design-build exercises a strong option for collaboration projects in architecture education.
Considerations for Future Research
The questionnaire items should be seen as a basic assessment framework which needs to be further validated by applying it to similar student pavilion projects. Validation via new projects and datasets will reveal whether the model can explain student perceptions for other cases of pavilion projects, which could result in additional refinements of the model before its theoretical confirmation.
The resulting HPPP model suggests that the construction stage reflects most of the learning impact perceived by students, which could indicate that pre-designed projects may have similar impact to student-led design-build pavilion projects. This aspect needs further exploration and may have significant implications in terms of future directions of design-build projects—on the one hand, emphasising the learning value of the construction experience and, on the other hand, promoting less emphasis on the design phase; and with resulting implications on resources required from schools and the debate on hands-on versus online design education. Overall, a closer consideration of the multifarious impacts of design-build pedagogy measured against its challenges is an area that requires further research to uncover whether the multifarious benefits outweigh the costs in labour and resource. Future research could also focus on different typologies of design-build projects—e.g., in terms of scale, year of study, educational scope and project timeline and their respective and comparative learning impact.
Finally, the model and the questionnaire in its current state does not reflect on differentiation between design-build projects and other activities in terms design experience. Since design studio projects are time constrained, the time allocated for design stage is often shorter and much of the efforts are reserved from resolving construction-based problems and project delivery. While design elements scored high in the current assessment, it should be acknowledged that design here can be understood in a broader aspect as simply designing a building. Establishing such distinction may present further understanding in learning outcome of design-build projects, especially in relation to other design works in studio.
5. Conclusions
The research presented an overall assessment of students’ perception on student-led design-build projects, focusing specifically on pavilion projects. The significance of the study was to offer a comprehensive evaluation on the intended learning outcomes of the exercise in design studio pedagogy. Such assessment has not been presented to date and is relevant to architecture education because design-build projects require much higher resource and effort investment from both students and school, whilst they are increasingly becoming part of standard architecture education-which is also the case for our study project (Element Pavilion at Loughborough University). An additional consideration was the timing of the project in education since Element Pavilion is for Year One BArch students and having a student-led design-build project at this early stage is very rare.
The results show that the pavilion exercise was seen by the students as a positive experience overall. The benefits in learning have been acknowledged by the participants both in terms of ARB/RIBA learning criteria and overall assessment of educational framework used by universities in the UK (knowledge and understanding, intellectual abilities, practical skills, general transferable skills, personal development and overall experience). The comparison of the pavilion project with other exercises has been perceived positively as well, following digital and physical modelmaking. However, it needs to be mentioned that further consideration is needed to understand how the scale and complexity of design-build exercises compares to standard design studio learning activities.
The statistical analysis of the data showed further advantages of student-led design-build projects, especially considering construction and teamwork. The analysis translated the results into four critical domains: construction, design process, engagement and participation, and teamworking. These four domains served as a framework for a hypothetical pavilion project pedagogy model, which can be used for theorisation, design and analysis of further student-led design-build projects in the future. However, the results show that the impact and eigenvalues of the construction factor (13.228) is much higher than the design process (2.703), engagement and participation (1.801) and team working (1.346) factors. This result would suggest that a construction-only project could also be viable exercise because it appears more influential compared to the remaining three domains that together present considerable part of the pavilion project. This is relevant especially for courses where the ILOs of design process are covered elsewhere in the design studio curriculum. This assumption, however, needs further study and sufficient comparative analysis.
Finally, it should be noted that this study was limited only to analysing the perception of students. While students’ perception is an important part of the learning process and should be always acknowledged, it is important to point out that students’ views should also be critically reflected upon and both the limitations of student evaluations of teaching (SET) should be acknowledged alongside the contributions [
32]. For example, students failed to acknowledge the pedagogical value of failure itself and perceived success as being equal to learning. This is of course not the case, since there is inherent value in trials and attempts, especially when considering materiality and construction. Indeed, in their study of design-build education, Nicholas and Oak argue that the resolution of ‘frictions’ is “in fact central to the pedagogical model of design-build education” [
31] (p. 50).