Notes on Acting Up: Collage and Quilting as Pedagogy

Part open letter, part personal narrative, this essay argues for two mediums that have-in the experience of the author-been derided as less-than-scholarly in architecture education: quilting and collage. By inviting us to embrace messiness, nostalgia, and radical juxtaposition, quilting and collage offer timely alternatives to 90-degree corners and orthogonal projection. Rather, they invite us to embrace new forms and spaces of knowledge production and collaboration, with real liberatory potential for design education. Lastly, I outline the nuanced complications of teaching at a Historically Black institution (as an alum of one), and what is lost when we prioritize traditional forms of architectural representation.