Design Build

The School of Architecture at the University of Utah has hosted a design-build program in Bluff, Utah for ten years. The emergence of the program at the same time as the consolidation of digital technologies in architectural schools is no coincidence. Favoring the conceptual rather than the practical, modeling software and digital fabrication have introduced notions of space, materiality, and locality that take little notice of the capacity of the building industry to realize them. They have drawn a wedge between the high and low design opportunities available in the marketplace, and have created graduates alienated from the dominant conditions of the material production of the built environment.

Design Build Bluff, in contrast, is conceptualized around the desire to immerse students into the realities and exigencies of the construction industry. It encourages a more lateral relationship between ideas on paper and “nuts and bolts” on site. Every spring a number of graduate students move more than 300 miles away from the school of architecture and form a tightknit commune to build a small single family home for a beneficiary on the Navajo reservation near Bluff.

This paper presents the successes and failures of the pedagogy of learning-by-doing as practiced at Bluff by taking a closer look at the three most interesting houses built by the students of Utah in the past ten years. It thinks through Rosie Joe (2004), the house that put the program on the map, Sweet Caroline (2006) a playful exploration of the geometry of a Hogan, and Rabbit Ear (2013), the last completed expression of its teaching philosophy. Taking the pulse of the school’s decade-long involvement with the reservation, the paper argues that moving into its second decade, the critically acclaimed program needs to transcend the object-centric architectural education, for it leads to an impossibly narrow, technocratic, and ironically, marketdriven pedagogy and understanding of the role of the future architect.