Recent cultural shifts have produced overlaps of practices, methods, and approaches where the discipline of architecture cross-pollinates with other creative arts. Exploring this fertile terrain, students develop creative projects that are physically situated and engage with contemporary social, political, economic, and ecological conditions, addressing key emerging issues in our world and exploring sites where these issues are made manifest. Rather than focus on a predefined discipline or subject, Situated Practice operates through and beyond categories in order to engage with specific situations. Outcomes combine media and include site-specific and performative installations, interventions, designs, and events.

Projects this year are field reports from vanishing points where an uncertain past meets a fragile future. They explore subjects such as participatory city-making, colonial legacies, ethical conservation, property rights, Highland clearances, Aztec herbal manuscripts, China’s one-child policy, the creation of networks of empathy, constant productivity in the contemporary age, failed architectures of elevated pathways, and the material remains of the sites of residence of the last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie I. This diverse range of work demonstrates a commitment to the idea of practice as a political operation within the public realm, where each project aims to reimagine the role of the public practitioner in the 21st Century.