There is something contradictory about training future spatial practitioners in spaces that were never designed with them in mind. In my previous posts, I described teaching architecture in a context where studio culture is increasingly driven by digital production and compressed timelines that alienates students from their bodies and from each other. The studio, once a space of collective making and dialogue, has emptied out. Students work from home, or in the library because the space itself offers them little reason to stay. As Könings et al. (2023) have shown that learning spaces are rarely designed with the learners in mind, contributing to disengagement, anonymity and the slow erosion of studio culture.
My intervention departs from the need to rethink the classroom with students, shaping with them a space for communal learning and knowledge production that is grounded in their lived experience. Drawing on Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), I want this intervention to nurture critical consciousness, empowerment and liberation/transformation in my students. Moving away from the idea of the tutor as the authority figure and toward a facilitator of dialogue, a co-learner encouraging reflection, questioning and participation. In his 1960–61 essay “Form and Design” the architect Luis Kahn wrote that “Schools began with a man under a tree who did not know he was a teacher discussing his realization with a few who did not know they were students.” (Kahn, 1961). Inspired by this, this intervention invites students to move from passivity to agency, from being objects of their education to subjects who can shape their own learning and environments.
Redesigning the classroom unfolds in a sequence of interconnected moments that can be tested with a small group of 6-8 students: reflection, research, mapping and design, collective sharing and co-design, embodied action.
Reflection
Students are invited to reflect on their experience of the classroom, using their preferred media: What works? What doesn’t? What do they need more of, or less of? In Sister Outsider (1984), Lorde urges us to integrate the material of our lives, to trust the knowledge that comes from lived experience rather than dismiss it as subjective or peripheral. Redesigning the Classroom gives students a platform to speak about their bodies, their needs, their realities and to act on what they know.
Research
Students look outward: researching at least three precedents of learning spaces drawing from history and global examples: from DAAR’s Tree Schools to Balkrishna Doshi’s design of CEPT Univresity, to more recent experiments like Lemonot’s multiform table Moeca where conviviality becomes a tool for imagining and experimenting with new pedagogical mechanisms. This research will offer a lens through which thinking critically about the classroom, a reminder that the classroom as we know it is not inevitable.
Figure 1: Hilal, S., Petti, A. and Grupo Contrafilé (2014–ongoing) Mujawara/The Tree School [Mixed-media installation: tree, 12 chairs, 12 books]. DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research). Available at: https://www.decolonizing.ps/site/the-tree-school/ (Accessed: 22 May 2026).
Figure 2: Doshi, B.V. (c.1970s) Balkrishna V. Doshi with students at School of Architecture, CEPT, Ahmedabad [Photograph]. In: Scriver, P. and Srivastava, A. India: Modern Architectures in History. Cited in: ArchDaily (2023) Architecture as Celebration: The Philosophies of B.V. Doshi. Available at: https://www.archdaily.com/995606/architecture-as-celebration-the-philosophies-of-bv-doshi (Accessed: 22 May 2026).
Figure 3: Gennari Feslikenian, J. (n.d.) CEPT University, Ahmedabad — Balkrishna Doshi [Photograph]. Divisare. Available at: https://divisare.com/projects/381279-balkrishna-doshi-jacopo-gennari-feslikenian-cept(Accessed: 12 March 2026).
Figure 4: Lemonot (Morreale, S. and Perri, L.) (2024) Moéca [Mixed-media installation]. BASE Milano, Milan, 3 October 2024. Available at: https://base.milano.it/eventi/moeca/ (Accessed: 22 May 2026).
Mapping and Design
From thinking to moving, students map and measure the existing classroom with their bodies, creating a drawing and model of the existing classroom layout. Departing from the mapping, their research and their reflection on their lived experience, students envision their own ideal classroom using two-dimensional and three-dimensional media. Design here begins by thinking through the hand (Pallasmaa, 2009), a form of embodied knowledge where the entire personality and body of the student becomes the site of the design task: the task is lived, linking experience to space making.
From Collective Sharing to Co-Design
Students’ designs can be pinned up in the room, becoming a showcase of different learning spaces that respond to different needs. All students share their visions in relation to their experiences and needs, making visible what is usually invisible to the group. The students are now asked to negotiate their designs, learn from each other’s visions and experiences and co-design a new collective classroom that responds to the differences and opportunities emerged.
Manipulating the existing through embodied action
This collective vision can now influence the manipulation of the classroom’s physical space. Working within real constraints presented by the space (existing furniture, access requirements, spatial limits), they physically redesign the room together. They move things. They test and negotiate options to create a new classroom layout that starts to address their vision in the best of ways. As Könings et al. (2023) argue, involving students directly in redesigning their learning environment fosters agency and ownership, helping them in understanding space not as a fixed product but as an active, ongoing process shaped by those who inhabit it. Through this process, every student’s body – with its needs, differences and intersecting identities – becomes the starting point, connecting the affective and cognitive dimensions of learning (Hill and Singh, 2018). Here the student is situated within the production and assimilation of knowledge, and their needs and realities are not a problem to accommodate, but a generator of space representative of the people who inhabit it (Boys, 2019).
References
Boys, J. (2019) Doing Disability Differently: An Alternative Handbook on Architecture, Dis/ability and Designing for Everyday Life. London: Routledge.
Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Hill, V. and Singh, G. (2018) Critical Pedagogy #4: What does it look like in practice? [Online video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6ghTlyBDNk (Accessed: 15 May 2026).
Kahn, L.I. (1961) ‘Form and Design’, Architectural Design, 31(4), pp. 145–154.
Könings, K.D., Bovill, C. and Woolner, P. (2023) ‘Towards an interdisciplinary model of practice for participatory building design in education’, European Journal of Education, 56(1), pp. 44–59.
Lorde, A. (1984) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg: Crossing Press.
Pallasmaa, J. (2009) The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. Chichester: Wiley.
Image References:
Figure 1: Hilal, S., Petti, A. and Grupo Contrafilé (2014–ongoing) Mujawara/The Tree School [Mixed-media installation: tree, 12 chairs, 12 books]. DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research). Available at: https://www.decolonizing.ps/site/the-tree-school/ (Accessed: 22 May 2026).
Figure 2: Doshi, B.V. (c.1970s) Balkrishna V. Doshi with students at School of Architecture, CEPT, Ahmedabad [Photograph]. In: Scriver, P. and Srivastava, A. India: Modern Architectures in History. Cited in: ArchDaily (2023) Architecture as Celebration: The Philosophies of B.V. Doshi. Available at: https://www.archdaily.com/995606/architecture-as-celebration-the-philosophies-of-bv-doshi (Accessed: 22 May 2026).
Figure 3: Gennari Feslikenian, J. (n.d.) CEPT University, Ahmedabad — Balkrishna Doshi [Photograph]. Divisare. Available at: https://divisare.com/projects/381279-balkrishna-doshi-jacopo-gennari-feslikenian-cept (Accessed: 12 March 2026).
Figure 4: Lemonot (Morreale, S. and Perri, L.) (2024) Moéca [Mixed-media installation]. BASE Milano, Milan, 3 October 2024. Available at: https://base.milano.it/eventi/moeca/ (Accessed: 22 May 2026).