Interstitial Installation

The Interstitial Installation project was a challenge, undertaken by a fourth year studio in the School of Architecture at the University of Arizona, to design and build an installation for the interstitial spaces located on the second and third floor stair landings between the two buildings that comprise the college facilities. The studio, comprised of 11 students and one assistant professor, was given $6000, seven weeks and the use of the school’s material laboratory facilities.

The pedagogy employed in this project empowers students to negotiate project-based experiences that are analogous to professional practice, challenging students to engage in anthropological and evidenced-based pre-design research, and work collaboratively to develop designs in response to real world conditions and constraints. Students subsequently develop budgets, schedules, construction and shop drawings, proceeding with fabrication and construction. The project is not merely the opportunity for students to build, but to assume ownership and transform the ideal into reality, where the only acceptable outcome is for the poetic and the pragmatic to become one.

The studio participants’ learning and benefits can be categorized into four areas:  1. The importance of actual conditions and constraints in clarifying objectives and boundaries, within which creativity can be concentrated.  2: The importance of anthropology, surveys and the value of having an actual user group for which to design.  3. The importance of collaboration; the students each served as leader and follower on various components of the project.  4. The consequence and risk of design; because the studio was undertaking a project to be used by their peers and faculty, the students would therefore be held accountable, subject to praise or shame, based upon their performance.