ABSTRACT

The urgency of addressing climate change challenges architectural educators to employ methods for cultivating stewardship in emerging designers by integrating a broad array of performance domains into the curriculum. Voices from the Field is an experiential applied professional practice course that employs cases pursuing high performance building certifications to demonstrate the interrelationship of technical, organizational, behavioral, and operational domains during the process of taking buildings from concept to realization. This study contributes to the literature on teaching with case-based pedagogical methods by employing qualitative data analysis of four sets of course deliverables produced by students who studied two Living Building Challenge (LBC) projects. The findings indicate that students gained an understanding of the integrated nature of design, and an awareness of the necessity of “Backwards Design” and “Tactical Materiality” to meet contemporary climate challenges. Additionally, students increased their understanding of the strategies, attitudes, and behaviors necessary to apply their sustainable ideals to real-world dilemmas in order to build a more just and sustainable society.