Abstract

The requirements of contemporary architectural and urban design practice places a growing importance on the ability to generate new solutions to complex design challenges. Such an approach is particularly relevant in the context of contemporary urban projects in need of urban innovation and socially engaged practice, i.e. urban regeneration or street quality improvement projects. Meaningful involvement in such topics requires a high degree of interoperability between the designers and other experts, community collaboration as well as internal team work. Such collective work methodologies are also employed by companies working on creative projects, such as engineering consultancies1 . In the paper we summarise the Authors’ experience of developing, testing and running ‘collaborative urban studio’– courses for the first year Master level architecture students at Gdansk University of Technology, which aim to train future architects in working within the collective creative framework. The course is based on three underpinning principles: (1) there is no obvious solution to a given task, as the topic is usually a complex, nonstandard project and its scale is comparable with the professional commissions; (2) the course topic is based on a real-life case with a real client; (3) students are organised to work towards a jointly developed proposal. In order to meet this objective, the student teams need to organise their work through establishing their own management system, which must allow for continuous collaboration and mutual support. The success of ‘collaborative urban studio’ is based on setting up the components of a creative environment – room for asking and receiving help from colleagues, as well as pooling and exchanging own knowledge through team-based ‘reflective reframing’2 . Developing a real project helps to motivate students to collaborate closely, owing to the perception of agency. In the text, we detail the rationale for establishing a studio as well we share the observations of our work. The Gdansk project is currently one of the first, sustained efforts in Poland to run ‘live studio’ continuously at the faculty of architecture. Despite the organisational challenges, the selected formula helps to promote the achievements of collective architectural work in engaging with complex, urban projects.

Authors (2)