Date of Award
Spring 5-31-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Architecture (MArch)
Department
Architecture
First Advisor
Lafayette Cruise
Second Advisor
Stephanie Rae Lloyd
Abstract
I welcome you to a pedagogy of collapsing bodies: the teaching and learning practice between surviving occupants of Institutions.
From the villainizing of trans- bodies in K-14 public schools to the bodily removal of Palestinian discourse from universities, the 2025 presidential takeover of the Department of Education unearths systemic urgencies over the fragility, complicity, and agency of academic institutions—survivors of wars, recessions, shootings, climate disasters—that have always been collapsing. As long as educational campuses stage political and industrial performances, Institutional marriage to capitalism collapses the future of the university. Our architectural pedagogy shoulders this weight of confrontation: design education as the additive collaboration with the built environment, the critique and fueling of living systems, and the patronage of the world it seeks to change.
The craft of design education is the simultaneous admission of vulnerability, interrogation of existing systems, and development of futurist legibility. The creative and critical encouragement in design education is and has always been, the foundation for impressionable labor between students and faculty— existing as the university, invisible to the Institution.
We are collapsing bodies occupying collapsing Institutions; we must search for the absences of our architecture. As learning and teaching bodies, we occupy design studios and leave our dearly-departed dust: the signs of life settling between the cracks of floorboards. Our bits of skin, eraser shavings, and breadcrumbs alchemize through sighs, laughs, and rants, nourishing studios as the togethering of collapsing bodies.
In honor of the caring hands of my teachers, I embrace your collapse.
Recommended Citation
Wang, Catherine J., "bodies collapsing together... together as dust." (2025). Masters Theses. 1421.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1421
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