Excavating the University Campus: A Pedagogy of Deconstructing Architecture’s Myths

This paper seeks to offer an interdisciplinary and collaborative model for design seminars to examine the very conditions that have guided the practice, pedagogy, and historiography of architecture. Excavating the University Campus is a research-integrative design seminar that positions students to uncover comprehensive, untold histories of destructions in the wake of postwar and ongoing urban university campus expansions across the United States. Through campus case studies spanning chronologies and geographies across the United States, students critically examine official campus histories by deconstructing their design tactics, linguistic nuances, alliances, and the architect/planner’s design tools and methods. The seminar challenges students to source interdisciplinary knowledge and tools in order to map, spatialize, and metricize the extents of erasures through two-dimensional, three-dimensional, image-, audio-, and text-based translations. The research process parallels with—and is theoretically grounded in—a curated selection of interdisciplinary foundational texts by scholars who interrogate the material afterlife of destruction in the built environment. Ultimately, students design multimedia animations and short films that contribute to a counter-historiography on each case study by juxtaposing, superimposing, and clustering layers of retrieved materials and produced visualizations to create new assemblages that subvert official narratives.