ABSTRACT
The Outdoor Classroom project serves to illustrate some of the potential lessons typically hidden from the students' view and/or participation in design-build pedagogy. In contrast to the Outdoor Classroom, the PORCH_house prefab project in Little Rock, Arkansas was designed to push the design-build model into the realm of contingent pedagogy. Most of the projects completed through the ongoing Tectonic Landscapes Initiative, such as TrailerWrap and the Outdoor Classroom, have followed the design-build model of careful orchestration. Traditional architectural skills such as spatial cognition and formal composition are well honed in the normative academic design studio. However, the professional skills associated with negotiating the stress-filled reality of complex, collaborative projects defined by teams of consultants and multiple, often mutually exclusive, variables are difficult to model in an academic setting. As student interest and capacity has increased a nascent tradition of making is beginning to emerge within the school.
