Service Learning

The following list describes service learning and other field-based courses I have led, as well as a few others I have co-led or facilitated.

1. SERVICE LEARNING

Service learning is a pedagogical approach in which students, under the specialized guidance of their instructor, engage in social service work. During this process, the students learn specific skills that they can later employ in their own professional careers.

In the case of my architecture-related service learning courses, students learn skills related to architectural design and urban planning, construction techniques, team work in construction projects, and the ethics of working with people in a condition of subalternity.

I normally run these courses in partnership with local nonprofits and universities, or teach courses based on the social design projects with which I have been professionally involved.

The outcome of these courses seeks to benefit local stakeholders to ensure a fair partnership: the students obtain knowledge and experience, while the course yields a product that serves a goal previously agreed upon by the parties.

For the creation of these products, I and the educational institution I represent make all the required economic investment. This includes not only our professional services and labor but also, when necessary, the purchase of construction materials, the payment of local laborers who assist in the process and/or the training of students, the contracting of meals and transportation expenses of local participants, and any other required expenses.

Earthquake Reconstruction with Bamboo: El Matal, Ecuador

In 2016, a devastating earthquake hit the coast of Ecuador, killing more than 600 people and injuring more than 16,000. With a group of students from the Five Colleges in western Massachusetts, I joined a group of volunteers building emergency houses using bamboo in the Manabí province.

The houses were designed and provided by CAEMBA, an Ecuadorian nonprofit, who shipped “kits” to the village with all the necessary materials to build the houses, from bamboo poles to bolts. However, the kits came with no instructions, so some expertise was required to quickly understand the contents of each kit package and how to build the structures.

One of the reasons we joined this effort was that, as the faculty member, I would be able to contribute my previous experience with bamboo construction. I have mentioned my final decision of dispensing with bamboo as a solution for low-income housing in my professional work. However, due to its structural advantages, I still believe that bamboo is quite effective as a temporary material for emergency reconstruction. The structural strength of bamboo—particularly its resistance to compression efforts—was apparent during the aftermath of the Ecuadorian earthquake, as people were able to keep some of the near-collapsing concrete structures standing with the temporary addition of bamboo poles.

The service learning component of this effort consisted of my offering the necessary expertise for the construction of a house, while the students contributed with labor. In that process, the students learned about bamboo construction as well as the complexities (technological, organizational, social, and political) of aid delivery in emergencies.

The logistical coordination of this service learning activity was done in collaboration with Maquipucuna, an Ecuadorian environmental nonprofit. The course was taught in Summer 2016 with Hampshire and Smith College students.

Educational Infrastructure with Bamboo: Escuela para la Vida (School for Life) – Cali, Colombia

While the course above focused on bamboo construction in the context of a humanitarian emergency, this course explored the use of this material in a general context of poverty and marginality. The course took place in Montebello, a low-income informal ladera barrio located in the western hill slope bordering the city of Cali, Colombia.

For this course, I partnered with Escuela para la Vida (School for Life). This local nonprofit runs a K-12 school in Montebello, offering free education and meals to the barrio’s children. The nonprofit uses the school facilities’ bamboo construction as a catalyzing element for social improvement, utilizing the structures on the school campus as teaching tools for training unemployed young people from the barrio in bamboo construction techniques.

As a nonprofit, School for Life is generally underfunded, so a service learning rationale for this collaboration worked well for their case, and the funding that our college group contributed helped to finish the roof of one of the school’s buildings (a project that had been stalled partly due to funding limitations). We assumed the cost of materials, paid for specialized labor and the labor of some of the young bamboo builders to teach the students and assist with the work, and donated our own design and labor costs.

Throughout this project, students learned about bamboo design and construction techniques. Throughout the design process, they learned how to draw bamboo construction documents. On a more interpretive scale, they learned about the complexities of negotiating between beauty and functionality in social design practice, as well as about the challenges and possibilities of collaborative design. We also discussed as a group issues pertaining to the right to design (i.e., who designs, and for whom?).

During the construction phase, the students learned how to compensate between drawing and building discrepancies and how to frame bamboo structures, as well as a few specific techniques for joining bamboo poles (those artistic techniques I had dispensed with in the design of the San Martín structures). They also learned how to use power tools in bamboo construction and, importantly, developed skills to work with construction workers in an environment of mutual respect.

The course lasted two weeks, with the first week devoted to field trips throughout Colombia’s mountainous Central Cordillera region. The field trips were essential for the course because, in this area of Colombia, a great body of knowledge on bamboo architecture has been developed on the basis of a vernacular tradition dating back to at least the late 1800s.

The field trips were facilitated by Ximena Londoño, a prominent Colombian botanist who has identified more than 50 species of bamboo not previously documented in scientific literature. Londoño offered the students instruction on the biology and taxonomy of bamboo as a plant.

During the field visits, students also became acquainted with traditional bamboo building techniques and building types, as well as the work of contemporary masters in bamboo design, including Simón Vélez and Marcelo Villegas. We also visited the latter’s fabrication shop and discussed with him his approach to bamboo construction.

The focus of these field visits was partly technological. Given that the task at hand was to finish the roof of one of the school’s buildings, we wanted to study in the field how the masters of bamboo design created their roofing structures. From my own work in the San Martín barrio, and also my field research on ethnoengineering, I knew that, if used in roofs, bamboo could eventually weaken over time due to the high temperature of metal roofing and the water leaks from nail perforations. Using nails on bamboo poles also tends to split the poles, compromising their structural capacity and durability.

Surprisingly, our group discovered that, while these architects used bamboo for the framing of columns and beams, many did not actually use much bamboo for their roof structures, opting instead to construct the roofs with metal.

Learning from this experience, we decided to also use metal for the School for Life’s roof structure and limited the use of bamboo to a few pieces of a non-structural bamboo that grows in the school fields for a design effect. For the roofing itself, we used corrugated transparent sheets to allow light into the building.

By ultimately deciding to minimize the use of bamboo despite this being a bamboo-related course, we prioritized the durability of our intervention. For students, the greatest lesson from this decision was that, in social design, flexibility is central to ensure a positive impact of the intervention. If we had fixated on the desire to work primarily with bamboo because this was a bamboo course, we could have achieved our goals as architectural designers. However, our partner organization might not have been able to achieve its goal of ensuring that the building intervention was durable and efficient for the school to continue to fulfill its social mission.

This course was taught in Summer 2015 with Amherst, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, and Smith College students.

Social Outreach Infrastructure with Bamboo: Javeriana University – Cali, Colombia

This was the first bamboo-related service learning course I taught, before the two previously described. The local partner for this course was Universidad Javeriana, one of the oldest (est. 1623) and most renowned universities in Colombia. This course was organized similarly to the one described above, with the main differences being the type of project we built and how the project determined the focus of our field research work. In this case, the focus was less technological and more cultural; thus, in our field research we concentrated more on traditional bamboo construction than on contemporary high architectural projects.

The project we tackled in this course was the construction of a bamboo shed on the Cali campus of Javeriana University. The students designed the bamboo truss system that supported the shed and then built the trusses. Their training in bamboo construction was provided by personnel from School for Life, led by architect Greta Tresserra, with the assistance of some of the Montebello Barrio youth apprentices.

The shed was intended to be a gathering place for members of local community groups that participated in the University’s social outreach projects. Unfortunately, the University later dropped this construction project.

This course was taught in Summer 2014 with Hampshire and Mt. Holyoke College students.

Social Housing Apprenticeships: Guyana

During the process of carrying out the evaluation of the Guyana housing project’s first phase, I worked with two students as apprentices. The students, from Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, joined the local team carrying out post-occupancy interviews for this evaluation.

A typical research day for the students involved visiting distant rural settlements, where they interviewed beneficiaries of the housing program. The goal of these interviews was to document, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the beneficiaries’ experiences with the housing program and the program’s impact on their well-being.

Most of the interviewed beneficiaries were indigenous Arawak and Macushi women. Given that these women lived in extreme poverty and followed a set of cultural communication codes different from the culturally predominant ones, prior to the students’ work I offered them training on how to conduct the interviews in a culturally sensitive manner. As part of this training, the students learned that how a relatively privileged interviewer interacts with a less-privileged interviewee, including the interviewer’s demeanor and body language, can have a critical impact on the quality of the latter’s responses.

In addition to conducting interviews, the students also organized and codified the information that they gathered. They sorted large amounts of data and entered them into a complex set of spreadsheets that provided key information for the project evaluation. In general, the students learned about the particulars of planning, designing, executing, and evaluating a low-income housing project, especially one catering to underprivileged and underrepresented populations.

These apprenticeships helped the students to cement their interests in participatory design and housing practice, which they later pursued in graduate school and by interning and working with high-profile institutions including the United Nations and the World Bank.

The apprenticeships took place in 2014.

Assessment Research and Development Planning: El Salvador

Like the apprenticeship described above, this field course involved students doing research work among beneficiaries of a housing project—in this case, the Istepeque housing project in El Salvador. The course revisited the participatory planning and urban design project that I co-facilitated and whose outcome was the construction, by formerly homeless families, of the neighborhood they had designed.

The course took place five years after the families had moved into their new homes. Just as we had carried out the participatory design work as part of a team, Reinhart Goethert and I reconvened for this course. At that time, I had finished my Ph.D. program and was teaching at Berkeley. We formed a group of both Berkeley and MIT students, including undergraduate and graduate students in architecture and planning. Like the original design workshop, the group also included Salvadorian students, in this case architecture students from the Dr. José Matías Delgado University. Finally, the course included the members of REDES, the local engineering nonprofit that had overseen the neighborhood’s construction.

In this follow-up course, we sought to explore two main questions. The first question was “How did it work?” That is, how did families adapt to their new settlement, and how did they adapt their new settlement to their changing conditions (e.g., by transforming the original housing units)? The second question was simply “Now what?” That is, now that they owned a home, what should be the next steps for the families to continue improving their living conditions?

We set out to answer these questions through surveys and interviews carried out by the students, as well as a group of exercises led by me and Goethert. After analyzing the data that emerged from these research activities, we shared our findings with the residents and, working as a whole group with them, we identified the next steps toward updating the community development plan. These steps included both immediate and longer-term action goals. We also reported to REDES on our assessment of the physical outcome of the structures (which were of excellent built quality) and provided suggestions on good practices for the organization to incorporate to make even better use of their resources in their future community infrastructural work.

Regarding learning outcomes from this experience, first, students learned fundamental notions regarding participatory design and incremental housing. Second, they learned interviewing, surveying, data collection, and data analysis techniques. Third, they learned the basics of the microplanning participatory method, as well as the outcomes of this method in a real world scenario. Lastly, they learned about critical issues pertaining to informal and formal housing tenure in developing countries.

This course was taught in 2011.

Sanitation Activism: Orange, Massachusetts

Dwelling upon my own professional exploration of sanitation alternatives, in Spring 2013 I taught a course called “Reinventing the Toilet,” which involved a design-build component. This component ran the gamut from theoretical design formulations to ultimately building a prototype.

As part of this course, students collaboratively developed the design parameters for a composting toilet adapted to the western Massachusetts environment and regulations. They did this work with input from me and a group of well-respected local sanitation activists, including Ben Goldberg, Bruce Scherer from Heritage Fields Farm, and Deborah Habib and Ricky Baruch from the Seeds of Solidarity nonprofit.

The following summer, Theo Brossman, the course TA, built a usable composting toilet prototype on the basis of the course-produced designs. Brossman built the structure as part of his bachelor’s thesis in the Seeds of Solidarity Farm in Orange, MA, using salvaged construction materials.

For this course, in addition to Seeds of Solidarity and Heritage Fields (with the latter offering its facilities for the toilet construction), we partnered with members of the Orange Planning Department and the Board of Health, as well as with the organizers of the North Quabbin Garlic and Arts Festival. The toilet prototype was exhibited at the festival’s 15th edition, where it became a meeting point for sanitation activists and curious people alike.

This course had a significant local impact beyond the classroom, becoming a catalyst for local discussions on sanitation, environmental preservation, and social issues in general. Throughout the semester, I was in constant communication with local sanitation activists, homeowners, journalists, and colleagues who were curious about alternative sanitation.

The course was taught at Hampshire College.

Construction: Barrio San Martín – San Lorenzo, Ecuador

This was the first service learning initiative I ran, and it was the only one described here that happened before I moved to the United States. Students from the United States and France, who were in San Lorenzo (Ecuador) as volunteers for the Madreselva farm, became interested in what my then work partner Toria and I were doing in the San Martín barrio, and offered to work with us.

In this service learning initiative, we shared with the students our perspectives on sanitation access vis-à-vis social inequality, as well as our technical knowledge on composting toilets. As they learned, the students helped to build the concrete foundations for the Nueva Esperanza women group’s toilet.

2. FIELD-BASED COURSES, AND OTHER COURSES WITH A FIELD COMPONENT

In addition to service learning courses like those described above, I also teach field- based courses in which no material outcomes are pursued onsite. The goal of the fieldwork in these cases is to provide students with specific skills that they can later use to carry out community-based work on their own if they so choose.

City Planning Studio: Bangkok, Thailand

This field course included students from MIT and Berkeley, as well as local students from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. The course was team-taught, with Reinhardt Goethert and Zachary Lamb as the main instructors, while I and Non Arkaraprasertkul played a supporting role. The course also included presentations by local infrastructure construction professionals, architects, planners, and members of the government.

The course explored the expansive growth of the urban population worldwide. According to United Nations estimates, by 2030 two-thirds of the world population will live in cities. Considering that scenario, the course explored this basic question: How can we best plan for this rapid urban population increase?

The course examined this question with the case of Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, which has a population of 14 million people. The main task at hand was to foresee scenarios for an effective and manageable model of urban expansion.

To do so, students formed groups and selected a specific area of the city in which to work. Over two weeks, they carried out onsite documentation and analysis of this area. This task included interviews, surveys, mapping, and a review of existing planning material. The main methods used during the field research were surveys and interviews with residents. From the resulting material, students identified what “pulled” or “pushed” residents to live in each given area, as well as the residents’ views on the main challenges and advantages of living in that area.

The primary goal of this field research was to build a historical narrative of the area so as to understand its formation and logic of growth. The expectation behind this task was that, by understanding the site’s growth pattern up to that point in its history, students should be able to accurately predict how this area might continue to expand if no other factors were to alter the current pattern.

The second goal was to identify the area’s main advantages from physical factors (e.g., location and distance from the city’s central and peripheral business districts) as well as infrastructural factors (e.g., drinking water quality and transportation infrastructure).

By connecting the acquired information related to both goals—the prospective assessment of future growth and the physical and infrastructural factors—students identified a series of criteria to consider in the development of an effective growth plan for the city. After that, they developed and defended five different morphological possibilities for such a plan: star-like spread, mesh mini-centers, river spine, compact, and super sub-centers.

This course was taught in 2009.

Earth Construction: Cotopaxi Province, Ecuador

In this field course, students explored the topic of earth construction. Through that exploration, they engaged in a multi-dimensional analysis of the notion of cultural appropriateness in sustainable design.

Sustainability advocates usually consider earth to be one of the materials with the greatest potential for global sustainability, as it is (at least in theory) a low-cost material that is readily available and has excellent climate-conditioning performance.

The reason for teaching this course in Ecuador was this country’s centuries-old tradition of earth construction, dating back to pre-Columbian times. We studied earth construction in some of the indigenous Kichwa communities where it was historically mastered. We also worked with architects and builders who, learning from the indigenous traditions, have proposed technological and design improvements to earth construction and have applied these to low-income housing and other social infrastructure projects.

The course included site visits, presentations by ethnic rights leaders, and talks by architects and other earth building practitioners. It also included a hands-on learning component, during which students learned three earth construction techniques: rammed earth, pressed earth, and earth masonry.

Through learning by doing, the students became conversant with the basic technological and design principles of earth construction. At the same time, they learned about the possibilities and challenges of adopting earth as a material for sustainable development practice.

The course activities were revisited through daily group discussions that evolved around the central question of the possibilities and challenges of the practice of so-called culturally appropriate design and of sustainability in general.

For this course, I partnered with Funhabit, a reputable Ecuadorian building nonprofit that has worked with Kichwa families of the Cotopaxi province since the 1980s. The architects and builders from Funhabit, including Luis Gallegos (director of the nonprofit) and Vinicio Gallardo (the projects coordinator), led the students’ technical training and facilitated the field visits to the rural communities.

The course was taught in 2016 with Hampshire and Smith College students.

Sketching as a Tool for Community and Architectural Research Work

Sketching abilities and knowledge of representation techniques are valuable skills in community work, as this type of work is often affected by communication gaps that occur due to cultural, language, or educational differences between the professional practitioner and the community member. Because of that, in community-development work ideas are often more effectively conveyed when explained in a visual form.

This is one of my reasons for exploring sketching in a course I teach called The Language of Architecture. In addition to teaching students different sketching techniques, in this course I also teach them to use sketching as an analytical tool.

The process of sketching a building involves translating a three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional representation. Throughout the process of making that translation, students in the Language of Architecture course consider the decisions that architects make when, for example, placing a given column in one spot and not another. When such decisions are not forced by functional considerations, they can be influenced by other factors, and this course encourages students to consider what those factors could have been through the act of sketching. This type of analysis ends with a series of questions and hypotheses about the studied building, which serve as a starting point for students to carry out library research on architectural historical literature.

Thus, in this course students use sketching as tool for inquiry in the same way I do in the traditional architectural method of analysis explained under my professional portfolio.

The buildings students sketch include significant pieces in the history of architecture. The course includes a field tour where we follow a roughly chronological sequence in visiting a dozen buildings that reflect stylistic architectural change, from neo-Gothic structures of the late 1800s to recent works of sustainable design. Students select one of these buildings to sketch and another to research further. Later in the course, students select buildings in their own home locations and produce historical narratives, using sketching as a tool for their process of historical analysis.

I am currently (in 2024) teaching the Language of Architecture course at Amherst College.

Global Urbanization Patterns

In the last course to be described on this page, the field is the students’ own, as students carry out a spatial analysis of a city where they either live or have lived. I assign this exercise as part of a low-income housing course called Housing, Urbanization, and Development.

In this exercise, students analyze their selected city, with a focus on testing the present- day applicability of a classic theory of urban settlement proposed by sociologist Ernest Burgess in the 1920s. The theory, popularly known as “Concentric Circles,” explains that when people in poverty immigrate to cities, the first place they settle in tends to be the city center. From there, and as they start to improve their economic conditions, they begin to progressively out-migrate to peripheral areas.

This theory has limitations, but it is useful for students to spatially understand a city by contrasting it to Burgess’ model. The essential question that students explore through this exercise is the extent to which Burgess’ settlement theory applies to the case of their studied city.

Students engage with this question through the process of drawing sketch maps of their cities, either based on a concentric circles template I distribute or by drawing the map from scratch.

A finding that usually emerges from this exercise is that, while Burgess’ theory might have fittingly described the United States’ industrial cities of the era in which the theory was formulated (e.g., Chicago or New York), the fast pace of gentrification has since completely subverted the theory, even in those cities.

As for so-called Third World cities, students often find that the theory is hard to apply, as these cities’ often organic patterns of growth tend to result in urban forms that are far more complex than a centralized, radially expanding one. As one student found for the case of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the people in greater poverty actually tend to settle in the outermost ring, in complete opposition to Burgess’ model.

Attesting to the spatial complexity of those cities, another student decided to represent the case of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, by using watercolors. In doing so, she intended to signify that patterns of change in a Third World city are not as clear-cut as proposed by Burgess’ concentric circles model. There are areas of overlap that can only be represented by the organic gradation that watercolor permits—for instance, a wide range of purple tones between a red-coded zone and a blue-coded one could represent a mixture of income levels, land uses, or economic activities.

In general, I have found this exercise to be a useful pedagogical tool since, while learning to think spatially about their cities, students also come to understand different urbanization patterns globally. Moreover, students become more sensitive to manifestations, in their own city’s spatial configuration, of issues such as social class segregation, marginalization, and homelessness.

I am currently (in 2024) teaching this course at Amherst College.