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This paper describes a set of pedagogical experiments in architectural design studios that cultivate what I call a Research of the Now—methods for grappling with the cultural, technological, and ecological conditions that increasingly shape contemporary urban life. Against a backdrop of pandemic disruption, accelerating computation, and emergent economies of attention and logistics, I have developed studio frameworks that ask students not only to design architectural projects, but also to assemble research documents—field guides to the present that make observations, claims, and arguments about the systems in which architecture is entangled. The process begins with random assignments of characters or subjectivities—gig worker, YouTube unboxer, meme-stock trader, Airbnb mogul—that inflect student investigations and dislodge them from familiar habits of analysis. Students then build layered research documents, sometimes collectively and sometimes individually, to observe, narrate, and theorize the complexities of contemporary digital culture and urban economies. These methods are further channeled into the development of “urban episodes,” speculative scenarios loosely situated in metropolitan contexts, which become the testing ground for design proposals. Through this approach, students’ design projects attend to contemporary culture in more sophisticated ways. While these are sometimes provocative architectural designs, they also produce conceptual products—frames of thought, critical positions, and imaginative logics through which students learn to read and re-write the conditions of the present. By reporting on recent iterations of these studios, the paper argues for the value of exploratory design-research pedagogies that foreground observation, speculation, and critical assembly as essential forms of architectural education.

Volume Editors
Reed Kroloff & Francisco J. Rodríguez-Suárez

ISBN
978-1-944214-52-4