Design Build Initiative (DBI)

About

Located on the Arabian Peninsula the on-going Design Build Initiative (DBI) at the American University of Sharjah presents an alternative model of full-scale pedagogy that privileges a collective approach to hands-on education woven into all levels of the curriculum.  Beyond individual projects or partnership, the initiative foregrounds collaboration enabled by a diverse, evolving faculty team of 6 to 8 members who work together within a resilient infrastructural framework designed to overcome the excessive stress borne by individuals working in isolation.  

In the most common North American design-build pedagogical model, a single faculty member leads 12 to 15 students while managing responsibility for all aspects related to client engagement, logistics, liability, accounting, construction supervision, and turn-key delivery.  These responsibilities are extraordinary as well as physically and mentally exhausting.  Ultimately the disjunction between teaching load and project responsibility subverts long-term program sustainability as burn-out undermines curricular continuity.  Even the most experienced DB teachers suffer. Dan Rockhill notes that, “When I stagger away from these projects, I think ‘There has got to be an easier way’.” (Kraus, 2017)

The Design Build Initiative exists in a region unaccustomed to hands-on education and divorced from its own material culture. Following the discovery of oil in the 1950s vernacular craft traditions native to the Arabian Peninsula have been in decline.  Exacerbating this situation, the normative approach to education and professional practice in the region segregates design from construction while treating architecture as a form of surface decoration geared toward women.  While our university rejects these local conventions and operates as a fully co-ed institution the Architecture program remains 85% female and Interior Design is 98% female.  In this context, DBI seeks to empower all students, regardless of gender, through direct engagement with instruments of making and by extension provide graduates with agency in the civic, social, and environmental evolution of the region.  

The extensive ecosystem of non-profit partners common to collaborative design-build in North America does not exist in the Middle East where charity and fund-raising operate differently.  In response DBI works to engage four different types of community. At the most immediate level the College community serves as the primary user group, provides feedback on past projects, and informs programming. The focus on the immediate context transforms completed projects into a didactic learning environment.  Students who have lived in and with previous projects bring those lessons to their work while also fielding input and commentary from the broader student body before and during design development. 

At the campus level the Dean serves as the institutional client while also providing advocacy with the upper administration.  Campus planning and the facilities department provide mentorship and serve as an analog to municipal zoning and building departments.  Beyond campus, industry partners have collaborated to provide material donations and most importantly, mentorship. To date over thirty people representing over fifteen companies have contributed time, training, and expertise.

Completed in 2011 a host of new fabrication labs provide the foundation necessary to support the new DBI program.  Without access to grants and non-profit partners the department applied for and received $80,000 in annual support from the provost’s “Special Initiative Funding.”  

At this young school the faculty were free to imagine Rockhill’s ‘easier way’ without the burden of institutional tradition.  The new institutional framework foregrounds a team-based approach, shared responsibility, curricular integration, and fluid teaching assignments that eschew individual entitlement or course ownership. Individual faculty members do not teach the same fabrication courses or design-build studios repeatedly. The relatively large pool of engaged faculty allows for a platoon system that keeps everyone fresh while also ensuring that participants teach non-DBI courses thereby defusing internal politics.

Over the first ten years twelve DBI faculty have led hands-on studios and elective seminars. Completed projects have been recognized with three ACSA Design-Build awards, three JAE publications, and eight regional AIA design awards. Notably, each of the three ACSA award-winning projects was led by a different faculty member.