Engaged Practices: A Meditation on Design-Build Pedagogy and Public Health

This paper presents an experiment in design-build pedagogy performed in a Directed Research course that examines the relationship between architecture, public health, and upward mobility. It argues for the grounding of design-build work in this milieu of public health research and community impact, the prioritizing social impact over technical learning objectives, and that developing projects through multidisciplinary teams that bring together infrastructure, professionals, academics, and civic or community partners creates viable, fundable, realizable projects that can help reduce barriers to opportunity in low-budget contexts.