Architecture Educators and Practitioners in Collaboration_BLAD

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Copyright © 2026 Kathryn Clarke Albright, John Syvertsen, Chip von Weise, Andrew Balster, Ashraf Salama, Karine Dupre, and ORO Editions.

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Editor Kathryn Clarke Albright

Authors

Kathryn Clarke Albright, Andrew Balster, Chip von Weise, John Syvertsen, Ashraf Salama, Karine Dupre

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Shuang Wu

ORO Managing Editor

Jake Anderson

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Foreword

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Chapter 1

The Formative Years

This opening chapter tracks the formative years of Chicago Studio from fall 2002 through fall 2006. As stated in the introduction, I had initial thoughts that guided me as to how to structure the necessary components of academic-based architecture education combined with professional practices in the city. The course content and methods of teaching intertwined residency between Blacksburg and Chicago, between studio with allied courses and immersion within professional practices that offered a new type of classroom. Over the duration of those early years, the relationship between academic requirements and professional practice engagement progressed to shape Chicago Studio’s current curriculum and pedagogy. I found the extensive collaboration with practitioners fueled the success of the students’ immersive experiential learning, and ultimately the persistence of Chicago Studio. The commitment of the architecture community was, and remains, paramount to this innovative educational model.

While the success of the students’ experience and learning has not been measured in any conventional way—surveys, rubric-based assessment, and so on—the continued interest of prospective students due to word-of-mouth enthusiastic recommendations by past participants signals the worthiness of the collective student experience. Students only made their evaluation of faculty teaching effectiveness at the end of the semester. Stories of Chicago Studio alumni’s individual career paths guided by their experiences validated why students participated year after year. If alumni had stopped touting their experiences in the program or failed to see the benefit to their career, the innovative program would have ceased on its own. I will now unravel those formative years that established the foundation of professional relationships and the offerings of the city that sustained this unique program for over two decades.

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Image 1.10 Collage of students’ sketches, Chicago Avenue Corridor. Chicago Studio archive.

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Not all projects focused on form or typology. Some tackled infrastructure and systems. One of the most ambitious efforts, Living LIFE (Local Integrated Food & Energy), reframed architectural engagement as ecological intervention. Developed in collaboration with John Syvertsen and Peter Ellis of CannonDesign, and sustainability expert Dr. Raj Rajaram, the project asked students to treat waste not as a byproduct, but as a resource. [Image 2.13–2.15]

Set in the Uptown neighborhood, the project began with deep data work—mapping waste flows, energy networks, and food access disparities. Students learned that Chicago generates nearly 4.7 million tons of waste annually, much of it organic and potentially recoverable.

Armed with this insight, they designed a decentralized network of facilities to turn waste into compost and biogas, closing material loops and supporting neighborhood-scale resilience.

The work moved between technical rigor and speculative vision, resulting in proposals that blurred the line between infrastructure and architecture. The message was clear —systems matter. Design has a role in shaping them.

Collectively, the Uptown projects illustrated how architectural education, when embedded in real communities, can catalyze new systems of value across space, culture, and sustainability.

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Student team proposal for

Review of student work created synergy, as a group of us attended and engaged on a consistent basis. The continued interaction of this professional cohort created a model for architectural education that maintained a rigorous intellectual dialogue around architecture within a more practice-based environment. Where design studios and other courses, such as professional practice, teach students the concepts of how architecture as a profession works in a classroom setting, students in Chicago Studio are able to experience practice through making their own projects within the context of the city. And they do this while getting feedback from active practitioners intimately involved in the everyday re-making of the city.

This professional, yet intimate, relationship continued to build as the program evolved. My firm became a host firm in 2007 and continued when it transitioned to a residency program under Andrew Balster. We loved having the students in our office each semester, and this allowed us to share the energy and stimulation of the program with others in our office. As a firm, we enjoyed helping the students wrestle with the urban, social, architectural, and programmatic aspects of their projects. Since we had more time with them, we were able to help them develop and refine the conceptual aspects of their projects.

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The practical aspects of architecture in a professional office often overwhelm the conceptual and social content of the work. It becomes lost in the dialogue of clients, budget, code, and so on. Having the students in our studio helped bring conceptual and social aspects of our work back to the forefront. For students, being embedded within a firm for the semester grounded them within the practice of architecture, both through weekly interaction and critiques from mentors, and through internships at the end of the semester. Students received feedback on their projects while experiencing the balance between conceptual rigor and pragmatic concerns of practice.

The residency structure was a natural progression for the program, as it further embedded students into practice, and leveraged the resources of the architecture community more fully. Reviews became social events for host firms and mentors as well as opportunities for intellectual discourse around issues raised by student work [Image 3.2] We hired students for summer internships as well as permanent employment, as did many of our fellow host firms. In this way, the program engaged with an ever-larger cross section of the Chicago architecture, design, and allied communities while contributing to the richness of discourse and touchpoints for Chicago Studio.

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Image 3.62 Final proposal showing concept to detail. Chicago Studio archive.

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Professional Engagement and Reviews of Student Work

It is worth noting here that the format of Chicago Studio reviews, both midterm and final, is somewhat unique [Image 3.80, 3.81] In order to allow for all firm mentors and other participants to provide their insights and feedback to all of the students, we have a very large jury with as many as twenty professionals. Students pin-up their drawings and models around the walls of our conference room and also prepare eight-to-tenminute slide presentations. Students give their project presentations, which include the initial concept portion referenced above, typically followed by their drawings and models.

After the students’ presentations, reviewers divide into groups of two to three, and move around the room in twelve-to-fifteen-minute intervals of critique. In this manner, each group of practitioners talks to each student team and gives them specific feedback. While it may lack the showmanship and drama of the traditional backand-forth of a formal jury characteristic of architecture schools, it gives students a wide range of perspectives. In addition to firm leaders and mentors, there are Chicago Studio alumni, representatives from neighborhood groups, developers, structural and MEP engineers, Chicago planning department staff, and often staff from the local alderman’s office. The mix of critics maintains a social equity dialogue of the project and provides perspectives unavailable in a purely academic setting. Some participants have been coming to Chicago Studio reviews for over twenty years. These events capture the soul of the program

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Having a diverse, large group of participants at the midterm review generates useful feedback. The challenge for students is to understand what feedback to incorporate into their projects and what feedback to ignore. The week after the midterm is spent digesting this information and exploring it in their projects. Here, again, the concept becomes a tool for editing. If feedback supports and moves the idea of the project forward, then it is worth exploring. If it goes against their concept/goals for the project, then it might not be relevant. In some cases, however, the feedback results in students questioning their concept and moving the project in a different direction. This is often a challenging but rich opportunity for students which takes us back to the Kant dialogue between intuition and reason. While students may have spent the first seven weeks of the semester exploring an idea and designs related to it, they fail to make the connection.

Often, there may be formal aspects of the project that are more interesting/successful than the concepts these forms represent. This may require rethinking the conceptual grounding of the project. Current neuroscience research suggests that areas of the brain processing verbal, visual, and experiential information overlap. Much of what we previously understood as a factual or literal response to visual information is actually referential and metaphoric. A nonlinear design process emphasizes this more complex relationship between the mind, the built environment, and how we experience it.

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21 Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge University Press, 1991); Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Communities of Practice

Experiential learning explains how knowledge is constructed in Chicago Studio. Yet, Etienne Wenger’s theory of communities of practice (CoP) elucidates where and by whom that construction is made and sustained. CoP is defined as a social group that upholds a shared range of resources, stories, tools, and concepts, generated through mutual engagement in a joint enterprise or project.21 In this respect, beginners move from peripheral participation toward fuller membership by contributing to and borrowing from this repertoire.

Seen through this perspective, Chicago Studio does not seem to be a self-contained learning setting but a node in a broader professional community that includes host firms, city planners, community advocates, and specialist consultants. Three CoP dimensions map carefully onto Chicago Studio’s structure:

* Domain: The shared domain is architecture as civic negotiation. Unlike the canonical tradition that treats design as an aesthetic composition exercise, Chicago Studio frames architecture as the coordination of economic, technical, and social agendas in a dense urban context. This domain gives coherence to otherwise diverse actors, including community groups, developers, and students—all care, though differently and for different purposes, about how a new building or urban intervention shapes Chicago’s public life.

* Community: Engagement is not sporadic or periodic, but sustained over the semester. Practitioners rotate through roles: critiquing schemes, co-teaching seminars, offering internships. Students split time between their own design work and host firms’ open offices, absorbing informal practices, including how to structure a client email, how to pitch a façade-system upgrade, as much as formal critiques or project reviews. The city itself acts as a scaling device where manifestations can be observed: An “L” ride to the South Side becomes ethnographic data collection; a lunch-and-learn at a firm introduces emerging heat-recovery technologies. These layered interactions generate what Wenger calls “social capital” that endures any single project.

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* Practice: For over twenty years, Chicago Studio has accumulated a repertoire: zoning-analysis templates, community-survey protocols, internship reflection rubrics, and, more significantly, stories of past cohorts— how the 2010 team brokered a land swap, how the 2021 group negotiated affordable-unit ratios under INVEST South/West. New students enter what had become a tradition and extend it, transitioning from peripheral participants to central contributors by the end of the semester.

To conclude, I argue that Chicago Studio seems to have done a lot more than enhancing the conventional studio that follows the canonical tradition; it has layered critical and transformative pedagogies onto experiential learning where the program sought what Andrew Balster called “immersion without indoctrination.” Wenger’s notion of communities of practice appears to manifest clearly as newcomers advance by legitimate peripheral participation until they share authorship of the CoP’s knowledge. Chicago’s dense ecology of more than twenty host firms and the abundance of civic agencies perfectly created such a community. [Image 4.4]

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Chapter 5

Reflections and Going Forward

Although there is extensive scholarship analyzing the different forms that architectural education can take, it is less common to find literature that will provide a diachronic review of a specific teaching mode in a given architectural curriculum. This is understandable as higher education often fluctuates with societal transformations and their incentives, while architecture, as a discipline, calls for constant updating, not only to keep its relevance with professional practices but also to respond to new uses and needs that may stem from these evolutions. Specifically, regarding design studio, the change in leadership often affects the philosophy of the studio and its expected outcomes. However, recently, discussions have emerged about several design-build studios that have stood the test of time,1 their spearhead being the Rural Studio at Auburn University, Alabama, which celebrated its thirty years in 2023. Not all design-build studios focus on social responsibility and/or cater for the underserved communities, yet all have in common the construction process at their core, which can, in a certain way, more easily sustain people, regulations, and material changes. However, less is written about non-design-build studios.

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