UW students wishing to enroll in the Summer Field Studio and/or the Autumn Quarter UW studio were required to take the Spring Quarter prep seminar and charrette. The course objectives were to build interdisciplinary faculty-student teams and develop collaboration and fieldwork ethics, strategies and protocols; build background knowledge of field studio context; build skills and a research/design toolkit appropriate to the field studio problem; build relations with Seattle professional community and visiting Sichuan experts concerned about sustainable disaster recovery planning and design.
Fifteen students took the seminar, which was led by Dan Abramson, assisted by Built Environments PhD candidate Josh Miller, and included lectures by Jeff Hou (Landscape Architecture), Carrie Dossick and Ken-yu Lin (Construction Management), Rob Peña (Architecture), Ben Spencer (Landscape Architecture), Bob Freitag and Manish Chalana (Urban Design and Planning), Stevan Harrell (Anthropology), and Jeff Berman (Civil Engineering). Built Environments PhD student Jewel Yang, and visiting Chinese professional planners Luo Danheng and Sun Wen from WuHe International also gave lectures. Topics included: seismic hazards mitigation planning and structural design, ethno-cultural landscapes, watershed ecology, low-cost infrastructure, climate-responsive building, fieldwork methods for community-based planning, urban planning in China, Chinese minority ethnicities and governance, local knowledge and sustainable development in mountain valleys, and cultural preservation and tourism in Lijiang. The students ranged in level of education from junior-year undergraduates to first-year doctoral students, concentrating in art, architecture, construction management, civil engineering, landscape architecture, and urban design and planning.
The centerpiece of the course was a special unit devoted to the May 5-9, 2009, China-US Professional Workshop on Regional Sustainable Development. The workshop was a non-profit exchange program that, in addition to being supported by BE Lab students and TAs, received sponsorship from the U.S. Department of Education through the University of Washington Jackson School of International Studies; from King |
PREPARATORY SEMINAR AND CHARRETTE
