For Thursday 02/06/25, the campus will be closed until 12 noon today due to the severe weather. All classes scheduled after 12 noon will take place as scheduled. Students should check Canvas for details on classes.
Scott Gerald Shall, RA, is a Professor of Architecture in the College of Architecture and Design at Lawrence Technological University (LTU) and the founding principal of the architectural practice houm (ourhoum.com). Prior to joining LTU, Shall was an Assistant Professor of Architecture in the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and the School of Art and Design at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Shall is also the founding director of the International Design Clinic (IDC, www.internationaldesignclinic.org), a registered non-profit that realizes crowd-sourced architecture and virally-propagated creative action with communities in need around the world. Since founding the IDC in 2006, Shall has worked through this organization to complete over two dozen projects on five continents, including an urban tent for the homeless made of reclaimed water bottles, a vision for education based upon borrowed resources for the migrant communities of India, educational devices based upon the vending architectures of Bolivia for kids working the streets of La Paz, and a two-dollar water filtration system.
Sponsoring Organization: International Design Clinic
Architecture was, and is, a patronage-based practice, as is reflected in the patterns of engagement preferred by the architect: linear and hierarchical processes, carefully curated clientele, and methods of valuation that prioritize exclusivity and the production of symbolic capital (Crawford, 1991). Although not without merit, these patterns become problematic when attempting to forge robust, community-based design efforts.
To be effective in this milieu, the professional critically examine their field’s historic prejudice and trade the largely colonial practices of the field for more inclusive patterns of engagement (Freire, 2010). Only then will the architect become able to avoid imposing their approach upon constituencies historically disadvantaged by them and inadvertently generating the “malevolent urbanism” such processes naturally create (Theime and Kovaks, 2015).
The IDC takes a different approach.
Using the tactics and thinking embedded in fields ranging from counter-culture art movements, theories of development communication, viral-propagation networks, and guerrilla organizations, the IDC develops radically collaborative work with communities in need around the world. Built of mostly scavenged means in only a few days with budgets of less than $2000, each of these modest projects is realized dialogically, using the best practices of crowd sourcing and a range of construction technologies, including globalized crowdsourcing, hyper-local peer-to-peer production, bricolage, and design-build. The resulting work empowers the community to possess and evolve the offered work. It also points to new forms of community-based practice, and, perhaps, incites a radical re-imagination of each.
Use Your Cell Phone as a Document Camera in Zoom
From Computer
Log in and start your Zoom session with participants
From Phone
To use your cell phone as a makeshift document camera