(RE) BUILDING: THE HOUSES OF DAN DUCKHAM EXHIBITION ON DISPLAY IN METROLAB

In 2019, the Florida Atlantic University School of Architecture acquired the archives of Dan Duckham, who practiced locally from 1959 to 2005 and is one of the most prolific mid-century architects in our region. This collection, consisting of thousands of hand-drawn presentations and working drawings, represents the work of his lifetime and offers insights into the architectural, cultural, social, and environmental conditions of that period.

Today, programs in Architecture delve ever deeper into pedagogies related to computational design, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Students are increasingly focused on the engagement of software as design tools and storage of these explorations is relegated to the cloud.  Archival documents of architectural projects from the mid to late 20th century, on the other hand, offer real tangible artifacts that can be used to teach in multiple realms of the discipline including design, representation, history, theory, materiality, or structure.  Within this context, this project sought to examine how the Duckham archival material might be used as a pedagogical tool that can help to balance the curricular scale and provide new opportunities for students to learn about architecture through the engagement of old drawings.

Students in this course, offered by Associate Professor Francis Lyn, were first provided instruction in the handling and documentation of archival material, and then spent a lot of time “reading” the drawings.  Because these were all fairly modest houses, the complete sets were small, mostly consisting of about five sheets. The condensed nature of the drawings allowed the relationships between form, structure, context, design intent, and environmental issues to be understood simultaneously and fairly quickly.

While developing an understanding of drawing conventions and construction methods, skills that many had previously not addressed seriously in any course, they began building the digital models as if they were actually building the houses. The course concluded with this exhibit of the student work, presented alongside original working drawings from the Duckham Archives. The exhibit will be available for viewing until January 10, 2024 in MetroLab, located in the downtown Fort Lauderdale campus.

Students participating in the course included: Arian Acosta, Darryl Edwards, Pablo Franco, Angel Howell, Olga Mikrikov, Ashani Miller, Uriel Morales, Gabriela Osorio Suarez, Eli Steigerwald