Scott Shall
Scott Gerald Shall, RA, is an Associate Professor Architecture in the College of Architecture and Design at Lawrence Technological University (LTU) and the founding principal of the architectural practice houm (ourhoum.com). Prior to joining LTU, Shall was an Assistant Professor of Architecture in the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and the School of Art and Design at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Shall is also the founding director of the International Design Clinic (IDC, www.internationaldesignclinic.org), a registered non-profit that realizes crowd-sourced architecture and virally-propagated creative action with communities in need around the world. Since founding the IDC in 2006, Shall has worked through this organization to complete over two dozen projects on five continents, including an urban tent for the homeless made of reclaimed water bottles, a vision for education based upon borrowed resources for the migrant communities of India, educational devices based upon the vending architectures of Bolivia for kids working the streets of La Paz, and a two-dollar water filtration system.
Shall’s research and creative work in this arena has been disseminated widely, including presentation at the World Congress of Architects (2023), the Third, Fifth, Seventh and Eighth International Symposia On Service Learning In Higher Education (2013, 2017, 2022), the 2nd Valencia Biennial of Research in Architecture (2020), and Structures for Inclusion (2007) as well as invited lectures hosted by the AIA (2017), Polis University (2016), the University of Maryland (2009), the New School for Design at Parsons (2008), and the Pratt Institute (2008). Shall’s writing on socially-responsive design has been featured in a range of publications, including works by Springer (2023), Palgrave-MacMillan (2018), the University of Indianapolis Press (2015) and the AIA Press (2010). In 2008 Interior Design magazine published the work of the IDC along with projects by Kengo Kuma & Associates, OMA, and Buckminister Fuller in an article highlighting practitioners who are challenging the edge of design practice. Shall has exhibited his creative work in venues around the world, including solo shows at the Zeitz Museum for Contemporary African Art (2022), the San Francisco Museum of Art in La Paz, Bolivia (2015), and the AIA Center for Architecture in Philadelphia (2009) as well as inclusion within group shows at the Sheldon Swope Museum of Art (2010), the Goldstein Museum of Design (2010), the Venice Architecture Biennale (2013) and MoMA (2015).
Shall’s research and creative work in this arena has been disseminated widely, including presentation at the World Congress of Architects (2023), the Third, Fifth, Seventh and Eighth International Symposia On Service Learning In Higher Education (2013, 2017, 2022), the 2nd Valencia Biennial of Research in Architecture (2020), and Structures for Inclusion (2007) as well as invited lectures hosted by the AIA (2017), Polis University (2016), the University of Maryland (2009), the New School for Design at Parsons (2008), and the Pratt Institute (2008). Shall’s writing on socially-responsive design has been featured in a range of publications, including works by Springer (2023), Palgrave-MacMillan (2018), the University of Indianapolis Press (2015) and the AIA Press (2010). In 2008 Interior Design magazine published the work of the IDC along with projects by Kengo Kuma & Associates, OMA, and Buckminister Fuller in an article highlighting practitioners who are challenging the edge of design practice. Shall has exhibited his creative work in venues around the world, including solo shows at the Zeitz Museum for Contemporary African Art (2022), the San Francisco Museum of Art in La Paz, Bolivia (2015), and the AIA Center for Architecture in Philadelphia (2009) as well as inclusion within group shows at the Sheldon Swope Museum of Art (2010), the Goldstein Museum of Design (2010), the Venice Architecture Biennale (2013) and MoMA (2015).
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Papers by Scott Shall
To realize more profoundly sustainable work demands a shift in practice. Specifically, architects must replace top-down patterns of engagement for those that incorporate local wisdom. They must question their allegiance to specifiable material palettes and embrace the potential held by reclaimed or idiosyncratic means. And they must challenge the notion that the needs associated with the construction of the project at-hand are inherently more important than those associated with its inevitable de-construction.
In short, they must begin to think less like engineers, and more like bricoleurs.
To investigate this premise, this writing will study three community-based projects, each of which was recently realized using a distinct, bricoleur-inspired approach. From globalized crowdsourcing to hyper-local, peer-to-peer production, ad-hoc construction to digital simulation, design-build to viral propagation, each of the offered studies will lend readers a unique perspective into new, more sustainable, forms of practice. And, hopefully, incite a radical re-imagination of each.
To upset this cycle of dependent rentership requires new, more sustainable approaches to financing, designing and constructing homes. Fortunately, emerging technologies offer intriguing promise to this end. This paper will assess this potential through a comparative analysis of three soon-to-be-completed homes, each of which was realized through the deployment of one or more emerging technologies. From generative design to industrial production, 3d-printing to panelization, the proposed study will offer readers a grounded, evidence-based comparison using metrics relevant to the building trades. The resulting conclusions will offer those involved in the housing industry insight into these technologies, so that they might help to create more affordable and sustainable housing for a nation in desperate need of it.
It is important to note that this professional marginalization is not due to a lack of relevant expertise or desire to help. Rather, it is because the frameworks supporting most of these professionals are misaligned from the practices used in these extra-legal communities. Whereas architects and engineers, in training and practice, embrace a patronage-driven, linear, and relatively segmented approach to projects, extra-legal communities are realized much more fluidly, allowing them to be built at a rate far outpacing the supportive capacity of the governing authorities.
To impact this reality, those who are responsible for the design and construction of our built environments must recalibrate their approach to more closely align with this reality. This paper will delineate four strategies to this end.
This is not to state that these settlements – which, by definition, lack safe shelter and adequate resources – could not benefit from greater financial, legal, and professional support. They undoubtedly would. However, to be effective, this help must be offered in a manner that is attuned to the unique nature of these shadow cities and not through the importation of practices used to realize their legal counterparts (Theime and Kovaks, 2015). For doing so will generate ineffective, malevolent urbanism, instead of the truly dialogical work, effectively compromising the ability of the designer to leverage the inherent resiliency of these settings in order to offer a more sustainable urban address (Friere, 2010).
The paper proposed by this abstract will explore a more dialogical approach by studying the resiliency and health of several design actions that have been executed within extra-legal communities using a more collaborative professional framework. Constructed of mostly scavenged means in only a few days with budgets of less than $2000, these modest architectures will be studied to understand their efficacy as not only a project, but as a generator of new projects, executed virally and without professional support.
It is important to note that this professional marginalization is not due to a lack of expertise, nor is it due to a lack of desire. It is because the academic and professional structure supporting these professions are fundamentally counter to those used to build these shadow-cities – a reality that has helped to support the growth of extra-legal settlements at a scale that far exceeds the capacity of the governing authorities to support them. The result is the production of extra-legal settlements at a scale far beyond what can be accommodated using current means of engagement.
To meet the challenges and opportunities presented by these shadow-cities, requires an evolution of practice – one that trades the rigid hierarchies and linear approaches currently deployed for more inclusive and heterarchical terminologies and practices.
To impact this world, the architect and engineer must shift from author to instigator.
Their office must move from a place of design, to a place of design, making, use, assessment and remaking.
Their work must focus less upon the production of constructs, to which others must respond, and more on the production of smaller constructs that inspire various publics to iteratively realize a sustained address.
The presentation proposed by this abstract will describe the process used to create the foundational maker-space, highlight the lessons learned through its execution and offer insight into how this process, and the resulting work, might be refined in the future.
This professional marginalization is not due to a lack of expertise, nor is it due to a lack of desire. It is because the frameworks that support these professions are structured in a manner that privileges a pace and structure of interaction that is fundamentally counter with that used to build these future-cities.
This chapter proposes an alternative manner of practice, one that is more aligned with the nature of these extra-legal settlements.
In order to investigate this concern further, several groups of students pursuing advanced degrees in architecture have, over the last two years, collaborated with experts in the fields of development, fabrication, design, construction and urban planning to, incrementally, revise the building delivery system used for affordable housing and making it more efficient, sustainable and affordable. Through this prolonged address, these students were able to bring together the efficiencies and supports of traditional construction with those offered by emerging materials and processes, including digital fabrication and parametric data analysis. The first home, HOUSE01, will be completed in the spring of 2017. Although not yet complete, early evidences are promising: the current bid for the construction cost of the kitchen and 1.5 baths for HOUSE01 is $10,000, roughly $17,000 less than the average cost of similarly scaled homes; the current schedule of production indicates a savings of over 21 days.
Based upon the insight earned through this effort, faculty and students are currently working with community partners to design and build HOUSE02. The intent in so doing is to further refine the building delivery process, more rigorously incorporating all techniques used in HOUSE01 and providing a proof of concept for the approach – all while providing students the support needed to demonstrate attainment of the learning objectives associated with the courses involved.
This paper will describe the pedagogical approach that results from this effort, documenting how students and faculty simultaneously satisfied the oft-conflicted demands posed by the long-term address required by the centralizing muse and the carefully regulated academic frame. It will outline how this precedent, in terms of both the structure of the learning environment and the insight generated through it, might indicate a direction by which we might not only reconsider the manner in which we teach, but the manner in which we educate engineers, architects and other creative professionals. Bearing this in mind, the writing is divided into three parts: part one outlines the growing financial and environmental cost of housing, which served as a centralizing muse for the course sequence; part two will describe the housing delivery process that supported these trends and served as the primary grounds for investigation within the courses; and part three will describe the approaches of learning and teaching that emerged from this investigation.
These paired conditions – the exponential growth in informal settlement and our almost complete inability to understand them - will only grow in importance over time. Unfortunately, to address the former is impossible unless we first address the latter and to address the latter requires that we adjust our techniques in light of the still-unknown realities of the former. This paradox forces our hand as researchers into and designers of said environments, compelling us to adopt techniques of research, design and construction that permit a more gradual and systematic interrogation of current mechanisms based upon heretofore unknown conditions. That is, instead of entering into informal settlements as an engineer, with a preconstructed survey or premeditated mission (i.e. to tabulate numbers, design sustainable homes, or build a community center) we must enter into these situations as a bricolleur, using small acts of observation, data-collection, and construction in order to gain the knowledge necessary to craft more profound methods of working. In this way, the tools and measuring devices of the bricolleur-researcher function less like objects, designed to a fixed and singular purpose, and more like Claude-Levi-Strauss’ objects of knowledge: artifacts designed provisionally, through which we might instigate the creation of new tools and objects.
To illustrate these concepts, this paper will turn to a series of $5 architectures created in this spirit within the informal settlements of India, Bolivia and the US. The measurements, insights, and methods unearthed through these small architectures will be presented, analyzed and discussed, in the hopes of, eventually, developing a more iterative research paradigm
Although designers are quite divided as to the reasons for this checkered history, recent work within the field of development communication might suggest a cause. Historically, the practices of development communication, like those of humanitarian design, have been based upon a diffusion model of practice. In this model, the chief purpose of a development campaign is to provide information that will persuade individuals to change their behavior for the good of many. For myriad reasons, this model failed to work. In response, communication experts developed the participatory model, a practice that trades the top-down processes of information transfer for techniques that promote a continual exchange of information between the players in the project. In the participatory model, the practitioner works with community members to continually reassess their needs and collaboratively design methods to address them.
This paper will use the participatory models of development communication to evaluate current practices of the humanitarian designer. As a framework, this writing will accept two methods of assessment: the work of Dr. Jacobson, who has adapted the principles of Jurgen Habermas to offer a new model of evaluation for participatory projects and the post-occupancy evaluation model commonly deployed by architects. From this evaluation, this writing will propose several techniques of pre- and post-occupancy research and evaluation for the humanitarian architect.
To realize more profoundly sustainable work demands a shift in practice. Specifically, architects must replace top-down patterns of engagement for those that incorporate local wisdom. They must question their allegiance to specifiable material palettes and embrace the potential held by reclaimed or idiosyncratic means. And they must challenge the notion that the needs associated with the construction of the project at-hand are inherently more important than those associated with its inevitable de-construction.
In short, they must begin to think less like engineers, and more like bricoleurs.
To investigate this premise, this writing will study three community-based projects, each of which was recently realized using a distinct, bricoleur-inspired approach. From globalized crowdsourcing to hyper-local, peer-to-peer production, ad-hoc construction to digital simulation, design-build to viral propagation, each of the offered studies will lend readers a unique perspective into new, more sustainable, forms of practice. And, hopefully, incite a radical re-imagination of each.
To upset this cycle of dependent rentership requires new, more sustainable approaches to financing, designing and constructing homes. Fortunately, emerging technologies offer intriguing promise to this end. This paper will assess this potential through a comparative analysis of three soon-to-be-completed homes, each of which was realized through the deployment of one or more emerging technologies. From generative design to industrial production, 3d-printing to panelization, the proposed study will offer readers a grounded, evidence-based comparison using metrics relevant to the building trades. The resulting conclusions will offer those involved in the housing industry insight into these technologies, so that they might help to create more affordable and sustainable housing for a nation in desperate need of it.
It is important to note that this professional marginalization is not due to a lack of relevant expertise or desire to help. Rather, it is because the frameworks supporting most of these professionals are misaligned from the practices used in these extra-legal communities. Whereas architects and engineers, in training and practice, embrace a patronage-driven, linear, and relatively segmented approach to projects, extra-legal communities are realized much more fluidly, allowing them to be built at a rate far outpacing the supportive capacity of the governing authorities.
To impact this reality, those who are responsible for the design and construction of our built environments must recalibrate their approach to more closely align with this reality. This paper will delineate four strategies to this end.
This is not to state that these settlements – which, by definition, lack safe shelter and adequate resources – could not benefit from greater financial, legal, and professional support. They undoubtedly would. However, to be effective, this help must be offered in a manner that is attuned to the unique nature of these shadow cities and not through the importation of practices used to realize their legal counterparts (Theime and Kovaks, 2015). For doing so will generate ineffective, malevolent urbanism, instead of the truly dialogical work, effectively compromising the ability of the designer to leverage the inherent resiliency of these settings in order to offer a more sustainable urban address (Friere, 2010).
The paper proposed by this abstract will explore a more dialogical approach by studying the resiliency and health of several design actions that have been executed within extra-legal communities using a more collaborative professional framework. Constructed of mostly scavenged means in only a few days with budgets of less than $2000, these modest architectures will be studied to understand their efficacy as not only a project, but as a generator of new projects, executed virally and without professional support.
It is important to note that this professional marginalization is not due to a lack of expertise, nor is it due to a lack of desire. It is because the academic and professional structure supporting these professions are fundamentally counter to those used to build these shadow-cities – a reality that has helped to support the growth of extra-legal settlements at a scale that far exceeds the capacity of the governing authorities to support them. The result is the production of extra-legal settlements at a scale far beyond what can be accommodated using current means of engagement.
To meet the challenges and opportunities presented by these shadow-cities, requires an evolution of practice – one that trades the rigid hierarchies and linear approaches currently deployed for more inclusive and heterarchical terminologies and practices.
To impact this world, the architect and engineer must shift from author to instigator.
Their office must move from a place of design, to a place of design, making, use, assessment and remaking.
Their work must focus less upon the production of constructs, to which others must respond, and more on the production of smaller constructs that inspire various publics to iteratively realize a sustained address.
The presentation proposed by this abstract will describe the process used to create the foundational maker-space, highlight the lessons learned through its execution and offer insight into how this process, and the resulting work, might be refined in the future.
This professional marginalization is not due to a lack of expertise, nor is it due to a lack of desire. It is because the frameworks that support these professions are structured in a manner that privileges a pace and structure of interaction that is fundamentally counter with that used to build these future-cities.
This chapter proposes an alternative manner of practice, one that is more aligned with the nature of these extra-legal settlements.
In order to investigate this concern further, several groups of students pursuing advanced degrees in architecture have, over the last two years, collaborated with experts in the fields of development, fabrication, design, construction and urban planning to, incrementally, revise the building delivery system used for affordable housing and making it more efficient, sustainable and affordable. Through this prolonged address, these students were able to bring together the efficiencies and supports of traditional construction with those offered by emerging materials and processes, including digital fabrication and parametric data analysis. The first home, HOUSE01, will be completed in the spring of 2017. Although not yet complete, early evidences are promising: the current bid for the construction cost of the kitchen and 1.5 baths for HOUSE01 is $10,000, roughly $17,000 less than the average cost of similarly scaled homes; the current schedule of production indicates a savings of over 21 days.
Based upon the insight earned through this effort, faculty and students are currently working with community partners to design and build HOUSE02. The intent in so doing is to further refine the building delivery process, more rigorously incorporating all techniques used in HOUSE01 and providing a proof of concept for the approach – all while providing students the support needed to demonstrate attainment of the learning objectives associated with the courses involved.
This paper will describe the pedagogical approach that results from this effort, documenting how students and faculty simultaneously satisfied the oft-conflicted demands posed by the long-term address required by the centralizing muse and the carefully regulated academic frame. It will outline how this precedent, in terms of both the structure of the learning environment and the insight generated through it, might indicate a direction by which we might not only reconsider the manner in which we teach, but the manner in which we educate engineers, architects and other creative professionals. Bearing this in mind, the writing is divided into three parts: part one outlines the growing financial and environmental cost of housing, which served as a centralizing muse for the course sequence; part two will describe the housing delivery process that supported these trends and served as the primary grounds for investigation within the courses; and part three will describe the approaches of learning and teaching that emerged from this investigation.
These paired conditions – the exponential growth in informal settlement and our almost complete inability to understand them - will only grow in importance over time. Unfortunately, to address the former is impossible unless we first address the latter and to address the latter requires that we adjust our techniques in light of the still-unknown realities of the former. This paradox forces our hand as researchers into and designers of said environments, compelling us to adopt techniques of research, design and construction that permit a more gradual and systematic interrogation of current mechanisms based upon heretofore unknown conditions. That is, instead of entering into informal settlements as an engineer, with a preconstructed survey or premeditated mission (i.e. to tabulate numbers, design sustainable homes, or build a community center) we must enter into these situations as a bricolleur, using small acts of observation, data-collection, and construction in order to gain the knowledge necessary to craft more profound methods of working. In this way, the tools and measuring devices of the bricolleur-researcher function less like objects, designed to a fixed and singular purpose, and more like Claude-Levi-Strauss’ objects of knowledge: artifacts designed provisionally, through which we might instigate the creation of new tools and objects.
To illustrate these concepts, this paper will turn to a series of $5 architectures created in this spirit within the informal settlements of India, Bolivia and the US. The measurements, insights, and methods unearthed through these small architectures will be presented, analyzed and discussed, in the hopes of, eventually, developing a more iterative research paradigm
Although designers are quite divided as to the reasons for this checkered history, recent work within the field of development communication might suggest a cause. Historically, the practices of development communication, like those of humanitarian design, have been based upon a diffusion model of practice. In this model, the chief purpose of a development campaign is to provide information that will persuade individuals to change their behavior for the good of many. For myriad reasons, this model failed to work. In response, communication experts developed the participatory model, a practice that trades the top-down processes of information transfer for techniques that promote a continual exchange of information between the players in the project. In the participatory model, the practitioner works with community members to continually reassess their needs and collaboratively design methods to address them.
This paper will use the participatory models of development communication to evaluate current practices of the humanitarian designer. As a framework, this writing will accept two methods of assessment: the work of Dr. Jacobson, who has adapted the principles of Jurgen Habermas to offer a new model of evaluation for participatory projects and the post-occupancy evaluation model commonly deployed by architects. From this evaluation, this writing will propose several techniques of pre- and post-occupancy research and evaluation for the humanitarian architect.