ARCH 672/692 + MUD 732 S/F 2025
ARCH 692 - PROPOSITIONS
SUMMER 2025Living Scaffolding
This studio investigates craft not simply as material or technique but as a model for worldmaking. Structured around an immersive research trip to India, the studio moves from cultural observation to site engagement, asking how acts of making, cooperation, and ecological wisdom can inform new spatial futures. The work unfolds across four phases: cultural and infrastructural observations in Delhi; intensive site fieldwork in Meghalaya; the development of a speculative design proposal; and a final exhibition in the TV Lab.
The studio begins by observing how craft operates in contemporary life. Rather than tracing a linear history, students examine the entanglements of craft with cultural memory, aesthetic labor, economic exchange, and political survival. Craft is understood as an evolving system of knowledge passed through bodies, objects, kinship networks, marketplaces, and migration. Through images, videos, sounds, textures, gestures, objects, structures, and environmental recordings, students assemble a personal index of materials that capture acts of making, improvisation, and material exchange in everyday environments.
The core research site of the studio is the living root bridge at Pynursla in Meghalaya. Grown over generations through acts of cooperation and ecological adaptation, the bridge functions as both infrastructure and living monument. Students operate as embedded observers and spatial researchers, documenting the bridge and its surrounding environment through scans, drawings, drone footage, and environmental recordings to construct a shared archive of spatial, tectonic, and ecological systems.