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Transdisciplinary Design
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DeanCarlton Condominiums, Brooklyn, 2007
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Once an academic outlier, transdisciplinary design went mainstream this fall. Parsons The New School for Design, in New York City, launched the first American degree program of the type, and curators Michael Rooks and Jonathan D. Solomon surveyed transdisciplinary design for the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which closes November 11.
The substance of transdisciplinary design is still up for grabs. Does it weave various masteries, remarkably tightly, into a design solution? Or does it “transgress disciplinary boundaries, with new knowledge not contained within any one of those disciplines,” as Parsons dean Joel Towers puts it? The approach is largely agreed upon. Summed up by Biennale title Workshopping, transdisciplinary design is highly inclusive and participatory, embracing fields as disparate as economics and public policy.
Mason White and Lola Sheppard hadn’t settled on a definition of transdisciplinary design in London in 2003 when they cofounded Lateral Office, which is now based in Toronto. White recalls, “I think it was partly a realization that architecture has an opportunity to perform in a more integrated way — and a criticism of the fascination with signature practices.” More recently, the pair has focused on the economic and ecological causes and consequences of architectural intervention, although they prefer broad research to partnerships. Lateral’s short-listed project in last year’s cityLAB WPA 2.0 competition, for example, proposed transforming the Salton Sea in southwest California — terminating its use as an agricultural reservoir; redeveloping its coastline into industrial, recreational, and ecological zones; and floating various pools within the water body to harvest the sea, regulate its salinity, or attract tourism. “What two issues could be said to dramatically affect building more than capital and operational costs, and, increasingly, its role in an urban ecology?” White asks.
Towers — who, predating transdisciplinary design’s emergence even in academia, established SR+T Architects with Karla Rothstein in 1992 as a loose network of collaborators (“We thought that a diversity of opinions would help get at the most compelling and enduring idea”) — concurs that this burgeoning approach is well suited to the notion of urban ecology. “In the broadest sense, ecology is transdisciplinary activity,” he says. “It is heterogeneous, spatially complex, and involves social and natural systems and their relationships within some given boundary.”
Yet such breadth of vision can be applied to small-scale work, too. SR+T designed the three-family condominium DeanCarlton “in between” financing, building regulations, construction technology, and other topics. Towers says that that allowed superinsulating the building and outfitting it with a green roof, which otherwise would not have been possible with a speculative developer’s budget. “Design thinkers are particularly well positioned to address the most complex problems facing society. The sooner we recognize that and shun a nostalgic view of architectural practice, we’ll be able to regain relevance.”
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