WSU EUNOIA Volume III

TOWARDS A CURRICULUM OF
EQUITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN SDC
PHIL GRUEN
DISCRIMINATION AND DESIGN | FALL 2020-21
Figure 1: A trip to the SPLATT
Table sparked discussion about
how furniture design affects people
pyschologically.
Is the School of Design and
Construction moving towards a
pedagogical model where equity
and social justice are central to its
teaching mission? Can the SDC
move in this direction? Should the
SDC move in this direction? The
events of 2020—the pandemic, of
course, but especially the murders
of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor,
and George Floyd—marked a
watershed moment in American
history. They also appear to be
marking a turning point in design
education, as several institutions
nationwide are highlighting the
importance of equity and social
justice to their design programs.
Will the SDC be part of this shift, or
even at its vanguard?
At some point in the spring of 2020,
I was asked to teach Arch/I_D
530: “Philosophies and Theories
of the Built Environment” in the fall.
It was a course I had never had the
opportunity to teach in seventeen
years at WSU. But what, exactly,
to teach? The university catalog
description offered little guidance:
“Focus on systematic thought,”
it states, “which may describe
behavior of the built environment.”
Given what was happening in
2020, I wondered whether to
focus, instead, on systemic thought
which may describe behavior of
the built environment.
As the course was listed as
“Philosophies and Theories of the
Built Environment,” however, my
inclination was to turn to the classic,
western model, which is how I was
trained. This would mean a course
examining the foundational texts
that established the architectural
canon. Thus, we needed to start
with Vitruvius’s Ten Books on
Architecture and then move to
Alberti’s The Art of Building in
Ten Books—his reinterpretation of
Vitruvius, updated to cohere with
circumstances of the Renaissance.
These would be followed by the
usual litany of western European
architectural treatises whose
words and drawings painstakingly
offered variations on a theme of
antiquity: Serlio, Filarete, Vignola,
Palladio, Perrault, Blondel, Ledoux,
Viollet-le-Duc, Campbell, Morris,
Schinkel, and Semper—enough
to set the theoretical stage for the
longevity of the “ancients” through
much of the nineteenth century and
the enduring legacy of the École
des Beaux-Arts into the twentieth
century. There might be a slight
detour to the eighteenth-century
“quarrel between the ancients
The tumultuous events of 2020 inspired a reckoning
about equity, social justice, and systemic racism,
particularly in the United States.
and the moderns” to locate the
theoretical roots for the splintering
of architectural discourse during
the modern period. I took an
elective course like this during my
master’s degree in architectural
and art history, but it was required
for students in the professional
architectural degree program. I
assumed that if one was to teach
a course on the philosophies and
theories of the built environment in
a professional program, it must be
modeled in such a way.
The events of 2020 changed
everything. As protests erupted
around the globe against the
systemic racist and colonial
underpinnings to so many policies
and practices in the contemporary
world, I knew that teaching a
design theory course not only
rooted in the western tradition—
but also focused upon the ideas
and individuals who promoted
that very tradition—would merely
perpetuate the school’s complicity
in upholding a dominant narrative
that privileges the hegemony
of colonialism, patriarchy, and
power. Such a course also would
fail to dismantle a top-down,
hierarchical pedagogy that for
too long has dominated design
education and practice: not only
in looking more critically at what
we study and teach, but how we
choose to study and teach it.
In the summer of 2020, I turned
instead to the teaching of
philosophies and theories in a
decolonized fashion, examining
issues of racism, sexism, classism,
and ableism with respect to
design—past and present. I knew
this was going to be something of a
challenge. Was it not enough that
students were trying to complete
their graduate degrees during a
pandemic, necessitating course
delivery regarding difficult and
sensitive topics either on Zoom or
in person, masked or otherwise?
So long as health and safety could
be maintained, I nonetheless felt it
imperative to discuss these issues
and this material, no matter the
logistics. If students had not been
exposed to this material before
they graduated and entered
professional practice, it might be
too late. The concerns were too
important.
So, beginning in the fall of 2020,
I substituted “Philosophies and
Theories in the Built Environment”
with “Discrimination and Design”:
an active-learning, flippedclassroom
graduate seminar
focused on spatial and social
inequities. Each class was
organized around six principal
themes divided into two-week
segments (or “fortnights”). In the
fall of 2020, those themes included
Black Lives Matter, gender and
sexuality, the pandemic, borders,
climate, and monuments (the latter
of which concentrated upon the
removal of monuments celebrating
individuals associated with the
confederacy and colonialism). In
the fall of 2021, topics regarding
gentrification and accessibility for
people with disabilities replaced
borders and the pandemic for
the purposes of introducing new
“
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eunoia