Earlier this year, we spent a week on the rugged western edges of the island of Ireland, teaching Interface Architectures – as-method – to master’s stage architecture students at the School of Architecture, University of Limerick.
Broadly, the elective engaged students in the practice of social//spatial justice in contested and bordered environments. Central to our teaching was to place these contexts transversally, specifically the enmeshment of the urban and rural within three centuries of British colonial violence, ensuing unstable land tenure and related ongoing ecological dilapidation. We sought to develop new models of engagement through a constellation of multidisciplinary research: walking, emergent writing practice, documenting, and collective production.
We located our teaching at the site where the River Shannon meanders through the university’s campus, before it pours its water into the Atlantic Ocean. The site presented students with intersections of varying borders – across the ecological, the oppressed and the architectural – and contains histories of colonial violence, famine, climate dilapidation and specific social relations. Students used critical spatial practice to produce a piece of multidisciplinary research that rendered the river as a fertile environment containing bordered//interface histories.
Our teaching was composed of lectures, workshops with practitioners, walks and co-design interventions. The River Shannon was the architectural object through which multidisciplinary research could be enacted. Students worked collectively and individually, demonstrating the conviviality embedded in nonhierarchical pedagogical environments.
Together, they produced a brilliant research platform – River Borders – archiving their individual interventions as well as a collective response to Interface Architectures as-method. Their thoughtful and critical thinking was articulated through findings presented across audio, visual and textual formats. We will shortly share excerpts from the students’ projects, celebrating their important contributions to evolving this critical spatial method.