SOCIOARC Exercises

The examples we presented earlier in the chapter, from a design studio and a social inequality course, point to the possibilities in SOCIOARC. While both efforts are good, they are incomplete. Both would have been better if we had been working together the whole time, showcasing why a joint program and curriculum, where architects and sociologists would always be working, teaching, and learning together in partnership would be so powerful and transformative. From “experiments” such as these in our classrooms, alongside our dialogic investigation of the SOCIOARC Convergence, we have derived a series of exercises that can be used to work in the space between architecture and sociology. We present here a different proposition for what is enough for each field to know, for what is required to build an essential understanding of this convergence. The exercises presented in this chapter bring together architectural and sociological methods to allow for more comprehensive investigation of the world. This provides a method for making the social a part of the design problem from the beginning, and for carrying it through to the final design product by altering the initial conception of the site and the design problem.