There’s a style of teaching architecture in which ambiguity is inherent to the questions being proposed. Typically, the brief will be composed of unabashedly vague and evocative terms that confuse the students but ultimately allow for many potential interpretations. One of my favorite second-year projects at Clemson University, my undergrad school, described the invented clients’ wishes as, “They have particular interest in the intellectual and tactile manipulation of conceptual and concrete constructs …” (A statement I am no clearer on today than I was then.) We were then asked to design four rooms, one each for “cleansing,” “conversation,” “nourishment,” and “repose.” I had no idea where to begin to translate these client interests, but this vagueness removed us from the realities of the world, from creating imitations of every house we’d ever seen or imagined. 

As a student, both at Clemson and at the University of Minnesota, where I earned my master’s, I loved the poetry of these immersive design briefs that allowed me to explore and follow my curiosities. Traditional education teaches us to respond with correct answers, and my conventional upbringing in a conservative house reinforced this rigid idea. But design teaches a process, often without a right or wrong response, and this training transformed my education from a linear path into one of exploration. It taught me to question preconceived ideas, to gather information, generate, develop and analyze ideas, and understand that “failure” was a part of the process. 

Students at work in the studio.

Architecture focuses on physical changes to the world: building, adapting, carving spaces. Yet I’d always been drawn to the users of structures and wanted to interact with actual people, not just the built environment. As a student, I gravitated toward humanitarian projects, like Sam Mockbee’s Rural Studio, but found those roles were rarely available in the real world, so I accepted positions in traditional architectural offices. Even in my short career as an architect, I’d started questioning who could actually afford good design, as it is rarely accessible in a meaningful way to those most in need. I was working in Brooklyn in 2009 when an opportunity to teach architecture for three years at the University of Technology in Papua New Guinea arrived. 

I could see two paths, one in which I continued on my current trajectory to a successful career as a lead architect and designer, or one in which I could take a risk to follow a dream. Ever since childhood I’d imagined working in worlds completely foreign from my own suburban upbringing. I’d dreamed of a job with a positive impact that was built on relationships. I took the risk.

Although I knew little about Papua New Guinea (PNG), my design education had unknowingly prepared me, from modeling my favorite teachers to working with the local context; but perhaps the most important skill I learned during my time as an architecture student was to embrace ambiguity—and a little chaos. From power and water outages to personal security, nothing was guaranteed in PNG. With only a rudimentary understanding of Papua New Guinean culture and the effects of colonialism on it, I was working in a vacuum of knowledge. 

A family sits on their stoop in the seaside village of Laukanu, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea.

My students came from the many provinces of PNG, often from villages where they’d never had access to computers, electricity, or libraries. There wasn’t a single class in our department with an assigned textbook. Some students were the first in their family to attend school; their parents skipped meals to pay for school fees. In Lae, the city of my university, materials for drawing and modeling supplies were limited, as was the money to buy these supplies. Students shared what they had, from splitting a meal to sharing a single laptop with a dozen classmates. We often had no electricity or running water for days. PNG is also known for its high crime rate. While I’d made school a priority, my students made community, health, and safety equal priorities. A difference I’d learn to admire. All the accessories I’d thought were necessary to be a good architecture student were just things. 

PNG is an isolated land whose historical introduction to outsiders came via missionaries, gold explorers, and human traffickers, which worked against a general trust of outsiders. It is also a patriarchal society—and I was the only female lecturer in my department. I was received politely, but I can’t say that my colleagues and students initially received me with overwhelming enthusiasm. I often felt unsure of my role, but I had an Obama-era optimism of the world and was passionate about what I was teaching. 

Joel presents his design for a “sacred space.”

Even though I didn’t always get to choose what I taught, I could choose how I taught. Part of my course load was western architecture history. PNG, a former Australian colony, is a part of the British commonwealth, and the department was attempting to maintain its international accreditation—which, like so many (post)colonial adaptations, ignores the local context. I could relate to my students’ disinterest in history. It had been low on my priority list as an undergraduate: the buildings we studied are no longer built, the materials aren’t the same, and memorizing facts was not my strength. It wasn’t until I began experiencing these structures in person that my awe for their role in my field grew. Through buildings we see humanity’s design process; we see how each generation expressed themselves in reaction to their politics, culture, economy, resources, materials, skills, and beliefs. I focused on connecting the lessons history has taught us, like the Roman system of government and how this led to the republic’s form of city planning and building. And yet these western buildings I was teaching in Papua New Guinea were those of the colonizers’ cultures. I was both unlearning the history I’d been taught and hoping to make the class relevant. I wanted them to be able to take away something useful. 

One day, my first-year students had finished pinning up their drawings of famous European buildings, which I had hoped would lead to a discussion. Drawing connects the body to the brain in a way that isn’t possible from looking at a photograph, but the students just stood there quietly, waiting for me to talk. This wasn’t surprising. PNG students rarely ask questions; theirs is a culture of learning through listening to elders and observing. While I stood waiting for questions that weren’t going to be asked, the power went out, and my planned lesson, which relied on a slide projector, became impossible. In this uncomfortable silence, I wished they could see these buildings in full-scale—and then a thought popped into my head. I grabbed string, chalk, and measuring tape and told the students to meet me outside, on the sports fields.

Standing on the school’s tennis courts, the students marked out in chalk, at a one-to-one scale, the walls of the Pantheon, the columns of the Parthenon, and the form of St. John’s baptistery. Out here, the students weren’t quiet—they were talking to each other and laughing. On the rugby field, they paced out the length of St. Peter’s Basilica. (Who says Rome wasn’t built in a day?)

When they were finished, I grabbed an umbrella from my car and handed it to Jackson, one of the group leaders. “In Europe, when you go on a tour, the guide carries an umbrella so everyone can keep track of him through the tangled streets,” I explained.

Jackson took the umbrella and proudly held it up as he guided us through the Pantheon, where we all stood under the imaginary center oculus to observe the light representing Jupiter. The Pantheon’s most striking feature, when drawn in chalk, is the thickness of its walls. A student could, and did, lie head to toe and had plenty of room to spare, which was the point. (That, and to keep the dome up.) “Aye, yo! Please use the entrance,” Jackson requested as some of the students exited through the walls. 

Students guiding each other through their 1:1 “built” drawings.

Students joined hands around a chalked column of St. Peter’s, the same thing I had done on basilica visits with my classmates, to see how many people it took to encircle one column—in this instance, eight. When students began asking questions like “How did they build this?” I saw connections forming. 

I was constantly adapting my lessons to make them relevant to my students, experimenting with assignments in the same way I was teaching my students to experiment with their designs. In one project I asked students to pick something from nature to inspire a connective detail. They would then design the building around that detail. A few students chose ephemeral phenomenons. I resisted my impulse to say, “Don’t choose a rainbow (or sunset).” While I suggested selecting more tangible routes, like a skeleton, ultimately I had to let them try, to let them be uncomfortable, and then to let them figure out how to make their rainbow work. I, too, was learning that it was OK to sit in discomfort as my previously held beliefs of the world no longer fit what I was experiencing. 

                           Livia and the author discuss her project.

The articulation that teaching requires forced me to rethink what I thought I knew. In a place where traditions and community are fundamental, commodity capitalism doesn’t motivate; instead, Papua New Guineans are admirally adept at collaboration. I couldn’t teach western, eastern, and modern architecture history without understanding the context of my students, how they would hear the words I chose to explain colonialism. Nor had I previously understood what “post-colonialism” actually meant for those living in its shadows. But in PNG it was present every day, from the bureaucracy and the limited power of individuals to make decisions to the corruption and crime. So much of my education in PNG was realizing there was another way to understand the world. Sometimes, it was simply unlearning, allowing space for another interpretation.

An elder talks to the students about his village during a village studies trip to Busamang, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea.

Fortunately, my students were patient and taught me how to listen to the silences. Those who have never been given a voice often won’t speak up. We were on a research trip to a village, and the elder had gathered a group for my students to interview before dinner. Even when a question was asked of female villagers, the males would answer. This still bothered me after three years in PNG. So when Pheona, one of the few female students in the program, whispered to me, “I’m going to go help prepare the food,” I responded, “You don’t have to. We are paying the women to cook so you girls can take full part in the study.”

She smiled and pointed out, “It’s a good time to ask the women questions.” She was right, and she was teaching me how to navigate in her world. 

Penua, on a design-build trip, sketches the traditional architecture of the village while residents watch.

Design is a conversation, one in which you are always receiving more than you’re giving. We were learning from the villagers, and the villagers were learning from our students. When we collaborate with each other, our designs become richer.

When I was a student, I saw the role of our ambiguous project briefs and the design methodologies as a way to guide us through a process that would result in a conceptually cohesive design. By teaching and articulating these ideas, I began to see it as more than a way of practicing good architecture or designing for context, as a method and set of tools for changing minds—at the very least, my own—and fostering creative thinking. 

The traditional homes of PNG are as varied as the environments, resources, and the inhabitants who build them.

The reality is that the big questions, the big issues we face, rarely have clear solutions. Design thinking is not problem solving per se; so much of what we face today and what students will face in the future won’t have linear solutions. When I asked 23 students to design an amphitheater, I got 23 takes, and not one of them was wrong. When a student sees their ability to transform an idea into a physical object, they absorb the belief that they have power to make a difference.

All photos courtesy of the author.