Prospects: Towards an Enhanced Practice of International Design Studio Collaborations

Scholars of architecture use the epistemological practices of science and art to imagine alternative futures and identify their spatial prerequisites. Despite, or perhaps because of, the protected laboratory setting of academia, design studios have the potential to demonstrate and illustrate the possibilities of foregrounding different politics. Beirut is a city in perpetual social, economic and political crisis. Tackling case studies during times of crisis, such as Beirut, introduces a particularity to academic studios owing to the pressing urgency to identify levers of change. The academic design studio exercise as an epistemological exercise can generate knowledge which can spill outside the academic setting to affect prevailing public discourse. However, this can lead to a tension in education between a) training students how to solve real world problems versus b) having students produce knowledge that can help solve real world problems.