ABSTRACT
The increasing uptake of Live Projects in architectural curricula has repercussions for the way non-studio courses are taught. Teaching in a Live Projects context draws upon a different set of skills and capacities than the simulation-based paradigms typical in architecture school. Its demand for common sense is a good antidote to the mystification of architecture as specialist knowledge. The experiences of teamwork and physical labor, and of quickly resolving complex, multivariable problems in a spatial context so that work can proceed, reinforce different ways of understanding architecture. In order to differentiate standard construction practice from ingenuity, virtuosity, or simple variation, the students, in a study, were asked to study historical documents culled from online sources, such as the US Historical Building Survey and period construction handbooks in the library. They also mapped the sources of the materials used and tracked the off-site and on-site processes that had allowed these materials to be used in the final construction.
