Archeworks is an alternative design school with a difference. In place of a traditional curriculum, students work in multidisciplinary teams with nonprofit partners to create design solutions for social and environmental concerns.
Archeworks is dedicated to envisioning and advancing a better quality of life for communities through socially responsible and environmentally conscious design solutions that address the greatest urban challenges of the 21st Century.
Archeworks envisions future communities, driving dialogue, policy and city design, whilst inspiring a collaborative process. The outputs include innovative prototypes that shape healthy, beautiful and sustainable cities and places.
During the conversation with Archeworks Executive Director, Susanne Schnell we discussed the importance of developing community based live projects that are multi-disciplinary and involve students from a wide range of back grounds.
One of the characteristics of Archeworks is that it is entirely independent of any architecture school, and in essence is about to set the programs in response to the community needs any expectations regarding outputs or assessment criteria – imposed by the school pedagogy or the professional validation requirements of the US equivalent of the RIBA.
We also reflected upon how this ‘freedom’ allows the project pedagogy to in essence be co-designed within the live project process – as students and community participants establish their aims and aspirations collaboratively.
Finally, the discussions also reflected upon how many of the US Live Project/Community Design Centers are defined by strong leaders – Dan Pitera from the Detroit Collaborative Design Center and Terry Schwartz from Cleveland Urban Design Center came to mind – who are clearly producing pedagogic frameworks within which their centers sit, yet there remains a need to map and critique these frameworks in order to establish what the defining characteristics of live projects actually are.
Live projects 
Discussion
No comments yet.