Pedagogies for an Anti-Disciplinary Design Education assembles methods from 15 contributors – across 12 universities in 10 countries – who are attempting to encompass the trans-scalar conflicts that design must take responsibility for. This book argues that a radical rethink is needed.
Architectural education today is stretched between institutional inertia, market orientation, and planetary polycrisis. Contemporary urgencies – climate, nature, inequality, food systems– are typically treated superficially, when they demand a reordering of the terms of pedagogy itself. Pedagogies for an Anti-Disciplinary Design Education assembles methods from 15 contributors – across 12 universities in 10 countries – who are attempting to encompass the trans-scalar conflicts that design must take responsibility for.
Why anti-disciplinarity? Architecture is undoubtedly permissive in its range of interests and roles. Still, in design schools today, even subjects that share teaching spaces – architecture, urbanism, landscape, preservation, (nature) conservation, interior design, industrial design, etc. – are structurally prevented from interacting. And architecture education is so demanding and so market-oriented that engaging disciplines beyond design schools – geography, sociology, history, politics, theory – is even harder.
This book argues that a radical rethink is needed. An anti-disciplinary approach can engage the entangled supply chains, energy regimes, debt structures, border policies, histories of dispossession, and more-than-human ecologies in which design operates. Another design education is not only imaginable but already emerging in the experiments documented here, and it can be pursued without denying the constraints within which most of us work.
1. Everything is in Everything: Border Pedagogy, Panecastic Method, and
Postdisciplinarity in the Architectures
2. Starting Over: Integrating
Ecological Feminist Materialist Approaches in Architectural Conservation and
Landscape Pedagogy
3. Yes, and: Interstices as a Living Laboratory for
Anti-Disciplinary Design
4. Designing the Encounter with the Other: Toward an
Affective Pedagogy of Creativity and Collective Imagination Roundtable 1:
Beginnings of an Alternative Pedagogical Project: Conversations on situated
methods and institutional critique to rethink design education
5. Design
Before Discipline: Scrappy Methods for a Contemporary Landscape Architecture
Education
6. Anti-Disciplinary Interdisciplinarity: Uselessness in a
Polytechnic Architecture School
7. Memoir Carnivals: Anarchitecture and
Collective Pedagogies from Disciplinary Borders
8. Re-Creating the Past:
Imagination, Heritage, and Anti-Disciplinary Pedagogies in Architecture
Roundtable 2: Advancing Anti-Disciplinary Pedagogies: Refining and Building
the Book
9. Immersive Horizons: Virtual Reality-Mediated Pedagogical
Explorations for Multidisciplinary Architectural Design at Tsinghua
University
10. Architecture After Discipline: Learning from Productive
Failures and Situated Pedagogies
11. Heavy, Weight: Tapestries as Pedagogical
Practices
Mitesh Dixit is an architect, geographer, and founder of DOMAIN Office. His work connects architectural practice with critical research, focusing on territorial changes, extractive industries, and the geopolitics of the built environment. He teaches at several universities in the U.S., the U.K., and Europe, and publishes on architecture, geopolitics, and extractive landscapes, integrating design with critical cartographical analysis.
Fedah Taqi is a junior designer at BIG in New York. Her prior work as a Project Designer at DOMAIN Office included projects in the U.S., teaching in Serbia and Austria, and curatorial research in Italy; her recent work studied socio-spatial conditions along MENA borders.
James Westcott is an editor and writer. He taught a studio on material reuse with Rotor at the Architectural Association in London and continues to teach a seminar on (nature) conservation. He is currently editing Rem Koolhaass upcoming autobiography (Taschen, 2026) and edited Ad Hoc Baroque (Rotor, 2023), Back to the Office (Nai010, 2022), Countryside (Taschen, 2020), Elements of Architecture (Taschen, 2018), and Project Japan (Taschen, 2011). He is the author of When Marina Abramovi Dies (MIT Press, 2010).
