Round up SEIAA 2023
The Social and Environmental Impact Academy for Architects (SEIAA) is an Erasmus+ project that was centered around innovative teaching formats to educate responsible architects that have the skills and knowledge to support a transformation towards a sustainable society. From 2020 until 2023 4 universities shared their transformative teaching formats, based on which, each of them organized a five-day workshop focusing on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Four Universities – One Common Goal
The Social and Environmental Impact Academy for Architects (SEIAA) is an Erasmus+ project that was centered around innovative teaching formats to educate responsible architects that have the skills and knowledge to support a transformation towards a sustainable society. From 2020 until 2023 the University of Liechtenstein (LI), the Hasselt University (BE), the Bergen School of Architecture (NO) and the Royal Danish Academy (DK) shared their transformative teaching formats, based on which, each of them organized a five-day workshop focusing on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In the workshops twenty students worked in five mixed groups, each consisting of one student from every university. The workshop programs depended on the teaching format of the university as well as the needs of its context. All workshops included a collaboration with actors outside the university campus and took place in real life locations.
Goals
- to explore and test more effective formats and settings to “teach” sustainability in architecture schools,
- to create a dialogue among architecture faculties and cross-sector stakeholders from different fields,
- to strengthen the responsibility and agency of the participants regarding the creation of resilient communities through architectural investigations,
- to scale the result of the developed project through cooperations with NGOs and local actors.
Challenges
- How can we as architects and architecture students tackle global challenges?
- How do we get from an output-oriented to an impact-oriented design?
- How do we foster social engagement in architecture studies?
- How do we build an ecosystem of changemakers to support each other?
Impact Manifesto
- Provide more real-life settings where students get in contact with important stakeholders and where designs and planning processes can be implemented and scaled.
- Widen the traditional knowledge transfer on an emotional, motivational and actional level so that students also gain responsibility and motivation, awareness and agency to act.
- Articulate the roles and train the capabilities of teachers to initiate and deal with co-creative and transformative settings.
- Complement system- and target-knowledge with transformative knowledge to empower students to initiate and implement changes themselves.
- Introduce a code of conduct that ensures consistency between taught and lived sustainability in the context of the architecture university and beyond.
01. University of Liechtenstein / May 2022
In the first workshop of the Erasmus+ project “Social and environmental impact academy for architects (SEIAA)”, nineteen architecture students and five teachers dealt with the topic of sufficiency in relation to the use and design of the built environment.
In a five days workshop in the context of the University of Liechtenstein the participants have explored ways to (re)design the built environment so that a sufficient use of it becomes a key to a good life. The findings were brought together and translated into “sufficiency-lessons” that the participants implemented at the high school in Vaduz and the Formatio school in Triesen.
02. University of Hasselt / July 2022
In the second workshop of the Erasmus+ project “Social and Environmental Impact Academy for Architects (SEIAA)”, twenty architecture students and six teachers came together in Genk (BE) to adress the issue of Re-Wilding in relation to the social and ecological dynamics of the Winterslag-neigbourhood, which was originally designed as a garden city in the first half of the 20th century.
The workshop was organised as a short Live Project which is a collaboration between an educational institution and an external client characterised by design negotiations in a short time period with limited resources or budget. In this case the client was the local social housing organisation ‘Nieuw Dak’.
03. Bergen School of Architecture / August 2022
In the third workshop of the Erasmus+ project “Social and Environmental Impact Academy for Architects (SEIAA)” 19 architecture students and 11 teachers came together in Bergen. The workshop participants were invited to a five-day empathic exercise to dwell with all the living species that one can find in the shared habitat at the seaside outside the school.
The workshop was a search for ways to reorient design impulses towards gestures for enhancing the habitats of the living species as alternatives to the proposed municipal seaside-pathway.
04. Royal Danish Academy / June 2023
The workshop at the Royal Danish Academy has been the 4th workshop and culmination of Erasmus+ project “Social and environmental impact academy for architects (SEIAA)”. The research center CINARK – Center for Industrialised Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy (DK) facilitated in June 2023 a five-day workshop in Copenhagen.
The academic framework of the workshop has been linked to the topic “ecology of tectonics” that is funda mental to work executed at CINARK. As in the previous workshops, students worked in groups mixed across the four universities. Together they have explored and defined circular design strategies through hands-on 1:1 experiments, combining functionality, aesthetics and circularity and exploring questions, such as: What does it mean to build circularly? What characterizes the beauty of circular and tectonic solutions?
