Gabriel Arboleda SMArchS '05 has been awarded the 2021 ACSA JAE Scholarship of Design Award, which recognizes the best paper published in the previous year by JAE, the Journal of Architectural Education. JAE is the journal of ACSA, the organization that oversees all of the accredited professional degree programs in architecture in the US and Canada.
The annual ACSA awards are a recognition given to architectural educators who “inspire and challenge students, contribute to the profession’s knowledge base, and extend their work beyond the borders of academia into practice and the public sector,” as described in ACSA’s official announcement.
As described by Arboleda:
The paper, titled “Beyond Participation: Rethinking Social Design,” deals with the topic of social design in traditional rural communities in poverty. The paper studies issues of water and housing access among indigenous communities in Guyana, including the Arawak, Macushi, Wapishana, and others. I have carried out participatory design work in these communities for over a decade, and this paper reports on the results of that work. In particular, the paper offers the rationale for a bottom-up participatory design approach in which people design by and for themselves. Thus, this approach relies upon human agency as the keystone of an architectural design process. I call the approach ethno-architecture, using the prefix ethno- in the anthropological sense of “the perspective from the other side.” That is, the people’s own perspective on their problems and design solutions.
The ACSA awards will be presented at the ACSA 109 Annual Meeting in March 2021.
More information about the author can be found here.