CCA News
Architecture Students' Open-Source Approach to Pac Rim Studio an Ecological and Humanitarian Tour de Force
Posted on Wednesday, June 30, 2010, by Jim Norrena
Can a single academic course change the world? Perhaps it can. California College of the Arts offers a seminar course as part of its Master of Architecture curriculum—Creative Integrated Project Management—that proves it is, indeed, possible.
In spring 2010, the graduate seminar, taught by Architecture faculty member Peter Anderson, involved CCA students in a creative project management collaboration with Architecture for Humanity, which enlisted participation from six additional academic institutions to join in the community partnership learning project Pac Rim Studio: the 2010 Architecture for Humanity Education Outreach Program, for which Anderson also served as a studio lead.
The project was spearheaded by Architecture for Humanity’s Nathaniel Corum, head of education outreach and codirector of the Pac Rim Studio (with cofounder, executive director, and board member Cameron Sinclair). Corum collaborated with professors and at least one student group at each of the seven participating academic institutions to develop region-specific ocean-related projects, then cross-pollinated the ideas among the student groups.
The goal behind the logistical aspects of the Pac Rim Studio was to build a more sustainable future using the power of design. Tactics included offering a global network of professionals who offer construction and other development services.
The studio allowed students to engage in collaborative, project-based learning that targeted communities in need from countries and cities located around the edge of the Pacific Ocean (aka the Pacific Rim), namely Pacific Islanders, migrant workers, tropical agricultural workers, and university students.
The Pac Rim Studio also honors the Plastiki Pacific voyage, an ongoing experiment in ocean travel based on the question: "Can a fully recyclable performing vessel be engineered almost entirely out of reclaimed plastic bottles, cross the Pacific whilst demonstrating real-world solutions?”
Inspired by the Plastiki, the Pac Rim Studio is a multicountry, trans-Pacific studio that challenges architecture students from California to Asia to design and plan various open-source prototypes to provide essential needs infrastructure, including post-disaster recovery operations, for developing countries in the Pacific Rim.
Participation in Pac Rim Studio afforded a collaborative component that significantly influenced how architecture students think about environmental issues and fostered community engagement throughout far-reaching locations. Through seminar readings, presentations, and field trips, CCA students became familiar with the structures and vocabularies of integrated project delivery and building information modeling, which resulted in a valuable project management and a significant contribution to global humanitarian relief actions.
The CCA student seminar was responsible for creative project management, which involved coordination with Architecture for Humanity program and web staff to facilitate running the multicountry studio and suggesting and implementing new functionality for the Open Architecture Network (OAN), the shared platform used to host the Pac Rim Studio briefs—project overviews that addressed reef bleaching to plastics in the oceans to low-lying coral reef–constructed nations to tropical agriculture.
The Pac Rim Studio offered six courses from which architecture students from partnering schools must challenge themselves to devise a project that addresses a real-world community issue, as reported by Pacific Rim denizens. (Watch videos of the following projects.)
- Design an Island
- Design/Build a School
- Design Weaving Centers
- Design a Farm Community
- Design Coastal Access
- Design Like You Give a Damn 2
Pac Rim Studio partners include California College of the Arts (Master of Architecture Program), Adventure Ecology—Plastiki Expedition, University of Auckland—School of Architecture and Planning, Unitec—Centre for Maori Architecture—New Zealand, University of California at Berkeley—Department of Architecture, University of Sydney—faculty of Architecture, Design, and Planning, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa—School of Architecture. The project is sponsored by Ocean Voyages Institute, Project Kaisei, and Floating Island International.
According to the OAN: “The studio will share the insight and knowledge of a diverse and committed team of socially responsible designers and supporting organizations (see below). Students will work toward design solutions for several major Pacific Ocean crises, which will then become ‘open-sourced’ for anyone to replicate through the Creative Commons licensing on the Open Architecture Network.”
“Several of the college’s students designed awareness campaigns and information-distribution models to call attention to the challenges faced by ocean systems,” Corum stated. “From quantifying waste in the oceans to 'Sponsor an Island,' the student projects showed an intense level of concern for the aquatic environment. . . . Students learned that organization and orchestration are key elements to design practice—especially when the projects are concurrent or international or both.”
CCA Architecture student Rachael Yu chose to address ocean waste: “The Pac Rim project underscores CCA's mission to reach out to other institutions and connect students with professionals. The project is timely in its address of methods of collaboration and environmental concerns. The gyer that is polluting the ocean is a result of generations of not being aware, and it is our generation's task to take notice and do something. I think CCA and most of the student population is ever-increasingly aware of the waste we produce.”
Yu added, “Integrated project delivery highlights the sometimes invisible or forgotten structure in place that helps everyone communicate and understand their role and responsibility to the project and team. IPD is kind of like a return to civility and honor, but with tech frosting and a new brand.”
Rodrigo Lima, also a student in CCA’s Master of Architecture Program, created an active Google Earth layer that works in conjunction with Google Maps to allow users to easily locate and identify Architecture for Humanity projects around the globe.
“I hope to start my own firm one-day,” Lima shared. “And I definitely foresee some of the lessons I have learned about how one can manage a project playing a large role in how I start and run my own practice in the future. I find this project really important to me because it is architecture without being just architecture. There are so many more logistical, political, social, and ecological issues that go into making our built environment what it is today, and this project not only talks about those realms, but also actually provides us the opportunity to influence and rethink some of these influencers.”
Architecture alumni Lauren Tichy and Andrew Stolz collaborated on a virtual gyre they coined Pac-Rim Press, whose goal is "to provide a base to be able to publicize and fundraise for any project through the design and sale of varying collateral media."
They also presented the "Sponsor a Project!" campaign that creates opportunities for soliciting financial support and engagement within the OAN interface. Within the theme is the "Sponsor an Island" project, whose case study was modeled on California's popular Adopt-a-Highway Program.
"The purchase of a metal water bottle or reusable shopping bag with Pac-Rim Studio imagery on it not only promotes responsible world citizenry through the use of reusable material, but also puts your ideas into the world for varied degrees of exposure," advises Tichy. Download an overview (PDF)
Other students included Riessa Burgess, Monica Cook, Anthony Diaz, Sasha Heuer, Channelle Hurst, Brandon Jenkins, Adam Katz, Jinney Kho, Mike Medeiros, and Ginny Uyesugi.
When asked how the Pac Rim Studio fit into the CCA curriculum, Lima didn’t skip a beat: “The nature of the dynamic rethinking and multidisciplinary working process of Pac Rim Studio (e.g., architects doing data managements, communications, interface design, computer programming) is quintessentially CCA. I think it would be difficult to imagine a course like this one being held at another institution. It is mindful of the environment; it approaches problems in a questioning, intelligent, and alternative way than the norm; and very much in the making culture of this school. We are realizing these ideas and implementing them in the real world.”
While one course may not literally change the world, global-scale change is clearly possible by altering a single way of thinking.
About Architecture for Humanity
Architecture for Humanity is a nonprofit design service firm founded in 1999. By tapping a network of more than 40,000 professionals who lend time and expertise, we help those who could not otherwise be able to afford design, construction and development services, in the communities where they are most critically needed.
Today, we are proud to say we have become a resource for community groups and aid agencies in search of professional design services, local architects—and the most critical element, construction funding. The network that began with a simple competition now includes thousands of architects, designers and others. We remain a pro bono organization of design and construction professionals based on grassroots funding. For more information, please visit the Architecture for Humanity website.
Related
Pac-Rim Press
Plastiki images on Flickr
Plastiki videos on Flickr
The Trash Vortex