THE CHARRETTE

The midreview used the format of a charrette instead of a crit as a way to create a more collaborative and generative learning space. Landscape architecture student Nicole Cheng used adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy as a guide for how the midterm charrette could be structured. This book, along with Patrick Flynn’s Rethinking The Crit, were introduced by professor Rebecca Popowsky as key to her thinking when putting the syllabus for the studio together.

Two readings proposed were to the voluntary reading group by Ben Regozin and Nicole spoke to performance and were important to feeding thought on the charrette. We created this reading group in an attempt to study. The group discussion that week included Ben and Nicole, as well as Zoe Kerrich, Alex Cartwright, Julius Venuti and Simps Bhebhe.

Readings/Media for that week: adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico: AK Press, 2017), 141.

A podcast episode of Millennials Are Killing Capitalism where Hanif Abdurraqib & Fred Moten discuss “Building a Stairway to Get Us Closer to Something Beyond this Place”.

A chapter from Collective Actions: Audience recollections from the first five years, 1976 - 1981 on “Audience Recollections”. Translated & edited by Yelena Kalinsky.

Patrick Flynn, “Rethinking the Crit,” in Rethinking the Crit: New Pedagogies in Design Education (London: Routledge, 2022), 1–24.

How can the charrette be an alternative to the crit?

With a majority of the students in the studio without experience with crits and the conventional set up of an architecture studio, could this be an opportunity to unlearn faster?

It is difficult to know what is important to learn in professional education without having much or any professional experience in the field prior to entering graduate school. This seems to favor a tutor-led model... and yet this has not demonstrated to work well for students across the board...

How can the studio be set up to encourage collaboration? Is this possible within the university?

Land Acknowledgment

The University of Pennsylvania is located on land that is part of the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people, in the Lenapehoking, the ancestral and spiritual homeland of the Indigenous Lenape diaspora. We acknowledge the Lenni-Lenape as the original people of this land and their continuing relationship with this territory, despite the history of Indigenous removal, dispersal, and erasure. We are also cognizant of the Indigenous history in our studio sites, and the displacement, dispossession, and expulsion that have taken place there.

Our studio study area covers parts of the ancestral territories of the following tribes:

Accomack

Anacostan

Cayuga

Chesapeake

Chicoteague

Choptank

Choptico

Cuttatawomen

Doeg

Haudenosauneega

Confederacy

Lenni-Lenape

Lumbee

Manahoac

Massawomeck

Matapeake

Mohawk

Mohican

Moneton

Monocan

Monongahela Culture

Moraughtacund

Munsee Lenape

Nanticoke

Occaneechi

Occohannock

Onawmanient

Oneida

Onondaga

Osage

Ozinie

Patawomeck

Patuxent

Piscataway

Pissaseck

Pocomoke

Rappahannock

Sekakakwon

Seneca

Shawnee

Susquehannock

Tockwogh

Transquaking

Tuscarora

Wicocomico

We will take seriously the tasks of learning this history of settlercolonialism on our sites of design, and striving to understand the impact of land dispossession and federal policies such as Termination on the lives and experiences of these Indigenous communities, and on their relationship to this land.

We also recognize and support the ongoing struggle for sovereignty and self-determination faced by indigenous groups both here and across the world. Through our research and design work, we will strive to act in a reparative way for these historic harms, with humility but compassion, and to seek avenues for decolonizing the power relations that have been perpetuated over the last two centuries.

Students Simps and Nicole discuss their projects under the theme of ‘Culture’ with guests Thabo Lenneiye and Julie Donofrio.

Students Zoe, Riddhi, Yining and Jules discuss their projects under the theme ‘Infrastructure’ with guest Bob Yaro and Professor Steiner.

Students Cece, Alex and Ben discuss their projects under the theme ‘Nature’ with guests Laurel McSherry and with modifications made on site of the charrette exploratory discussion table nature infrastructure initial artifacts culture specific discussion table

+ executive summary + land acknowledgment + overview maps satellite map [specific] projector