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In 2020, Montana State University initiated a five-year NSF-funded Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) project with the vision of transforming the traditional topic-focused course structure in environmental engineering into an integrated project-based curriculum (IPBC) that supports a climate of collaborative and continuous learning among faculty and students. The curriculum redesign process engaged faculty in an extensive consensus-building process to define desired student learning outcomes for the program. In the transformed curriculum, faculty collectively agreed to integrate systems thinking, sustainability, and professionalism competencies and to cultivate students’ identity as environmental engineers throughout the degree. To achieve these goals, there must be a level of shared meaning around the four constructs of interest—systems thinking, sustainability, professionalism, environmental engineering—to guide pedagogical decision making among faculty. A qualitative cultural assessment was conducted to investigate, analyze, and describe the shared meanings faculty hold around the four constructs. The goal of the assessment was to uncover areas of shared meaning with the strongest consensus within and across constructs. By eliciting and describing “definitions by consensus,” faculty will be able to generate consistency in teaching and assessment practices throughout the curriculum. The culture assessment process undertaken by the department and its outcomes will be of interest to other programs seeking to foster collaborative teaching and to enhance collective ownership of degree program learning outcomes.
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The Site of Ornament
Historically, ornament has provided a tether to cultural meaning in the built world. Ornament is tied to specific cultural attributes. As an integral part of the construction, ornament negotiates with the culture from which it emerges. It is a built grammar, but it is also expressive of its own making as well as the society that shaped it. Modernity has largely reversed this connection with some important exceptions. There is a strong history of architects developing space through the design of the construction that provides what Louis Sullivan would call an “organic” link to the ornament that emerges, and this nexus of structure and form becomes the “site” of the ornament. Luigi Nervi’s ferro-cement shells and Frank Lloyd Wright’s textile blocks are two salient examples that have, through necessity or interest, developed details that generate entire projects, which then generate new projects as that construction/detail is refined and builds on the culture that inspired it. Ornament is thus a negotiation between the built artifact and the meaning of its “ornamented” expression. As architects, we now operate in a world of off-the-shelf selected components. This attitude, combined with the integration of building components into BIM programs, has made the architect a selector/consumer rather than a designer of the construction, making ornament a part of this selection process – i.e., decoration. The research project Woven Blocks is an attempt to reexamine the way in which architects can shape space through the design of the construction itself. Pulling from Frank Lloyd Wright’s textile block system, Woven Blocks imagines a 3D-printed block capable of taking advantage of a self-supporting system of enclosure that can be “programmed” with function, take on aspects of the context it resides in, and reflect the nature of its making. The project is the design of the manufacturing process as well as its end-product. This enables the building material to respond directly to its program, shaping space/meaning in potentially a more “plastic” way. This paper is first a consideration of architects thinking through construction, then a reflection on the cultural implication of their production. The site of ornament also implies a shift in perception from the textile patterns of specific cultures found in ceramics, clothing, wall mats, or flooring onto the building surface and into its lashing to the frame and the integration of its various services/systems. This lens will serve to frame the research around the project Woven Blocks, examining the efforts of the authors to shape the process of construction as a place from which ornament can emerge and meaning can be rediscovered.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2229267
- PAR ID:
- 10469182
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the 2023 Building Technology Educators’ Society Conference: Beyond the Artifact
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 317-324
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- 3D Printing Additive Manufacturing Frank Lloyd Wright Ornament Construction
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Scottsdale/Arcosanti, Arizona, USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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