This wave model is not Utopian fantasy. We have seen that when communities of people are given genuine agency, the architecture that results resonates with a depth that cannot be replicated by any mass-produced product.
Francis Kéré’s schools in Burkina Faso offer a clear example. By developing a unique mix for stabilized earth bricks, the community learned to use locally abundant resources already on hand to build beautiful and functional spaces that support resilience and growth.

Likewise, Christoph Schlingensief’s Opera Village Africa, guided by Kéré, reframed the notion of “opera”, through architecture, as “social sculpture”. The resultant village became a space where art, education, and daily life intermingled. While the project was controversial and imperfect, it held significance in its provision of space for the ongoing development of cultural and civic expression in a community that critics had previously dismissed as unworthy.
To be sure, encountering examples of architecture like these can be uncomfortable, even disorienting, for those unaware that they view the world through polarized lenses.

The Sydney Autonomous House offers an instructive example: this collective student project envisioned a completely autonomous dwelling, a stand-alone, replicable product that would embody independence from society and ecology.
When judged through the product model lens, this project was an abject failure. In one glance the architecture tells its own story — chaotic, incoherent, dysfunctional, and unfit for replication.

But from the process perspective, this project is a clear success. It is easy to see even decades later that this project’s significance came in the conversations it provoked. The Autonomous House became the physical manifestation of a community’s direct confrontation with the trade-offs and realities of autonomy taken to its extreme.

Through this lens, the failures of the Autonomous House became productive discomfort, a physical reminder of a conversation still unfolding. Architecture is the medium through which this conversation carries on into the future.
Together these examples reveal both the strengths and the limits of architecture’s dual approaches, and suggest that the process model’s contributions are easily overlooked when judged through the product model’s lens.

The product and process models of architecture offer us access to two alternative avenues for understanding ourselves and our world. Each model is valid but incomplete.

The product model excels at generating the material [physical shelter, capital assets]. The process model is critical to generating the evanescent [connection, emergent intelligence, shared meaning, anti-fragility].

Architecture’s contribution to society is revealed only when we recognize the value and limitations of each model.

The constraints and benefits of any theoretical model become clearer when tested in practice. In my own unbuilt work, I have been drawn to explore the process model. In lived projects, I have observed the powerful and multifaceted impedances we face in executing it.

The projects I present here were developed in an academic studio setting and therefore produced as an individual design response, and in the case of the Los Angeles based projects, remotely. I am in agreement with Clouse: “Without firsthand knowledge of and lived experience near a project site, many visiting designers fail to comprehend the unique climactic, social, and cultural context that would necessarily ground a successful design intervention.”

Physical limitations notwithstanding, my intent on each was to develop a nuanced understanding of the community it would serve and to imagine these not as isolated products but as prototypes of what co-created responses might look like if shaped by their real communities. Each one explores how architecture can shift from the particle logic of products to the wave logic of process, enabling communities of users to author their own ongoing forms of meaning.

See Appendix B: Studio Reflections for accompanying figures relating to each project.

A multi-family housing system cited in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, this project sought to create a domestic infrastructure of mutual support. Informed by Dolores Hayden’s Non-Sexist City, these pods became heterotopias of care — spaces where residents could co-design the terms of their own living arrangements and care-giving economies.
Located adjacent to the new 6th Street Viaduct Park, the 85,000 GSF mixed-use residential project addressed not only housing shortages but also the deeper societal need for living arrangements that enable nuanced modes of communal care.
The building’s identity revolves around its unique organizational format, which took a ‘pod’ approach. Comprised of nine pods in total, each pod incorporated a mix of scaled-down private spaces of varying sizes, connected to a shared kitchen, outdoor area, and live/work spaces. Residents of this development would thus be able to develop their own micro living systems according to their individual and group needs.
The purpose of this design was two-fold. First, this enabled non-nuclear living arrangements that provide economic efficiencies for individuals and groups who might otherwise be disadvantaged by a housing system structured around the dual-earner nuclear household. Second, it created efficiency not only in initial building costs (savings passed on to the developer), but also in ongoing living costs for residents. Ideally this would be reinforced through a Community Land Trust model or collective pod ownership, ensuring that the client was also the future resident. In this way, the project sought to expand access to generational wealth-building for lower-income households while cultivating long-term collective resilience.
Inspired by the neighborhood’s existing street art, this project also created space for community expression through art. This site shared a zero lot line with its neighbor to the South, an existing double height industrial building. Instead of treating this as an eyesore or imposition, this existing surface became a locus of participation, hosting an expansive mural of community-created street art.
At its core, the PODject was created as a form of architectural truth-telling: making visible the non-nuclear forms of kinship and community that hold society together, even when they are excluded from formal recognition or value.

ISIAC (The Institute for the Systemic Integration of Academic Creativity is located in the heart of downtown Leimert Park, a historically Black neighborhood in LA. Shaped by systemic racism and economic exclusion, their collective response to challenging circumstances has resulted in the creation of a unique and enduring cultural heritage. From the Watts Rebellion to the establishment of the Brockman Gallery and later Art + Practice, this community has long cultivated adaptive intelligence to resist the dominant product model through art and community.

ISIAC was conceived as an architectural response to this context: not to “fix” an educational achievement gap, as the product model might dictate, but to reveal and support the forms of intelligence already present.
Named after the Egyptian goddess Isis, who reassembled and reanimated her husband, Osiris, from his scattered parts, ISIAC sought to integrate individuals in this community into a living system of creative exploration and exchange. This metaphor was expressed through its form, which was comprised of three distinct volumes, each with their own unique identity, integrated into one continuous form.

ISIAC proposed a pedagogical model at the intersection of art, science, and technology that built on the Montessori principle of ‘learning by doing.’ The facility was conceived as a flexible collective environment designed to encourage the cross-pollination of ideas across disciplines, incubating makers and form-givers of all ages.

And similar to The PODject, ISIAC also made room for co-created art generated by the community. The entry sequence was designed around a mosaic surface intended for collaboration with local artists. For presentation, this surface was represented with imagery inspired by influential Leimert Park artist Mark Bradford, known for his large-scale abstract paintings made from everyday materials as comment on complex social issues. Bradford once recalled his grandmother reminding him: “Baby, you don’t bullshit your way into first class, you think your way out of economy.” ISIAC sought to legitimize the ‘first class’ creative intelligence already present in Leimert Park, reframing what the product lens might otherwise mistake for ‘economy’.

This project drew on another local precedent that resonates with the process model: Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, started in 1912. What began as an individual act of expression in Rodia’s front yard during a time of economic and social precarity grew into a towering assemblage of found materials. Don DeLillo described the work as “a kind of swirling free souled noise, a jazz cathedral...”. Rodia called it nuestro pueblo (our town), reflecting the diversity of the neighborhood at the time.

Even after Rodia’s death, the Towers endure as a landmark, sustained by the very community networks they celebrated. Former LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa reflected on their meaning: “When I see those towers soaring over Watts, my thoughts always return to the pieces that make up that beautiful whole. The the value in those things that people, in their haste, are so apt to cast away.”

Like the Watts Towers, ISIAC sought to create a space where the pieces of this community could come together to form a more beautiful whole. In so doing, it framed architecture as an educational heterotopia: a site where the fractures between institutional narratives of knowledge and the lived truths of community intelligence could be made visible.

A disaster-responsive community hub exposed to the extreme heat of low-desert Arizona, The Divide considered the many ways that interconnected systems outside our control threaten daily life. It asked: how do we plan for continuity when we live within brittle systems that demand more input to maintain stability than we can guarantee in a crisis?
While mainstream narratives often treat climate change, extreme heat, drought, and proximity to the Palo Verde Nuclear Station as separate risks, The Divide insisted on addressing them as intersecting vulnerabilities.

This design responded physically through a whole-site shade canopy and deeply sunken structures, restoring the riparian micro climate once fed by the historic canal running through the site. Thick earthen walls, made from local clay soils, wrapped the south and west perimeters, offering fortress-like protection against radiation, both thermal and nuclear.

But beyond the material, The Divide also sought to cultivate the evanescent assets of this community. Drawing on neurobiology’s concept of the ‘salience network’ — the brain system that determines what matters most and shifts attention between reflection and action — the project imagined how architecture could support a similar process at the community scale. Just as the salience network must be strengthened before a crisis occurs to function effectively during one, so too must communities develop habits of shared attention, emotion, and meaning-making, if they are to successfully adapt in times of stress.

To accomplish this the design incorporated an open-air circulation structure linking all program spaces and offering places for reflective observation. It also preserved historic structures to anchor collective memory and included ample flexible indoor and outdoor spaces that could be used for education, health, governance, and community life. By minimizing the built footprint while maximizing adaptability, the project created a framework for resilience, even in dynamic and uncertain futures.

The Divide did not promise absolute safety or control. Instead it offered a space where the community could gather in both the best and worst of times, a place for respite, continuity, and the cultivation of social assets necessary for adaptation under crisis.

The case studies presented here suggest that architecture’s most robust contribution emerges when it mediates the paradox presented by the product-process dyad. Each project demonstrates how design can meet programmatic constraints and market demands while still holding space for emergent, collective meaning. To consider this further, we will turn now to analyzing these projects from the perspective of the theoretical models presented in this course.

The PODject - a critique of domestic space
The PODject aligns closely with the concerns articulated by the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA) as discussed in Türeli’s essay, Housing for Spatial Justice: Building Alliances Between Women Architects and Users. The WSPA sought to expose how the nuclear-family household, buttressed by zoning and economic structures, created a built environment that disproportionately burdened women with care giving responsibilities. Their workshops and proposals experimented with spatial arrangements that might distribute care more equitably and re-imagine domesticity as an engagement of restoration rather than isolation. The PODject, with its pod-based format, echoes this agenda by deliberately enabling non-nuclear living arrangements, shared childcare, and economies of mutual support.

The design also embodies the four themes that emerged in the Women’s Development Corporation‘s (WDC’s) community design workshops: safety, control, flexibility, and nature. Safety is addressed not only in the physical structure of multi-family living but also in the emotional security of care giving networks. Control is extended in the flexibility given to residents to define their own pod arrangements according to group needs. Flexibility itself is central: smaller private units connect to shared kitchens, gardens, and workspaces that can shift to accommodate evolving households. Finally, the project’s adjacency to the new 6th Street Viaduct Park and integration of outdoor spaces in each pod aligns with WSPA’s insistence on the healing and empowering role of access to nature in domestic environments.

In these ways, the PODject functions as both a critique of the suburban nuclear home and as endorsement of public-private partnerships that Türeli associates with feminist critique. Yet the critique intended by The PODject extends beyond a narrowly feminist framing. While the design certainly responds to feminist concerns about unequal care burdens, its deeper aim was to support healthy childhoods and caregiving structures broadly. In this sense, it offers what Türeli calls for at the close of her essay: a reclamation of feminist critique as a tool for interrogating contemporary capitalism. The PODject challenges housing’s role in reproducing economic vulnerability by experimenting with alternative ownership models such as a Community Land Trust, situating residents as both clients and stakeholders.
Finally, the participatory art dimension of the PODject — its mural wall created by residents — can be analyzed through Susanne Bauer’s essay on Opera Village. Bauer shows how participatory cultural production becomes a mode of community authorship, reshaping architecture into a shared cultural resource rather than a fixed commodity. In this light, the PODject’s mural wall is not decoration but a democratic surface where residents continually re-inscribe their presence. This design move also mirrors Greg Castillo’s framing of countercultural reuse as a practice that generates social value from what dominant systems might dismiss — here, transforming an otherwise blank party wall into a living testament to community expression.

ISIAC - a countercultural and postcolonial critique
ISIAC also resonates strongly with themes in Türeli’s discussion of the WSPA. Tureli notes that the WSPA’s founding aim was “to foster collective learning in a non-hierarchical environment”. ISIAC, likewise, was designed as a platform where people of all walks could converge in a flexible environment. By drawing on Montessori’s ‘learn by doing,’ the project translated WSPA’s pedagogical ambitions into a built framework that highlighted experimentation and community creativity over institutional hierarchy. Rather than attempting to ‘fix’ educational deficits through a product-oriented intervention, it sought to reveal and amplify the creative intelligence already present in Leimert Park.
The project also engaged the countercultural ethos that Greg Castillo describes in his essay “Salvage Salvation.” Castillo highlights how the practice of scrounging for materials during the counterculture movement was not only pragmatic but also “proved transformative”, turning discarded fragments into a source of cultural meaning. This logic directly informed ISIAC’s precedents and material strategies. Rodia’s Watts Towers epitomized the capacity of found materials and improvisation to create enduring collective value. ISIAC echoed this principle through its proposed entry mosaic and metaphorical form. Rather than imposing a singular aesthetic, the building became a framework where disparate “pieces” — artistic, cultural, and personal — could come together to create one unique and cohesive whole.
Susanne Bauer’s account of Christoph Schlingensief’s Opera Village offers another lens. Schlingensief insisted that if visitors expected a traditional opera house but instead saw only goats, a school, and a sports field, “it just shows he hasn’t understood what opera is about”. ISIAC propagated this same message — the architecture of learning and cultural production is not appropriately judged through the discrete product lens.

Stickells’ reflections on the Sydney Autonomous House contend that the value of experimental architecture lies not in ‘success’ as a product, but in the conversations it provokes and sustains. ISIAC can be understood through this lens as well. Its significance is less about delivering a ‘finished’ educational object and more about creating an iterative participatory framework where new forms of knowledge and identity can be tested, reshaped, and revalued.
Finally, the postcolonial critiques of Bauer, Clouse and Low underscore how architectural legitimacy is historically tethered to Eurocentric product model narratives, often dismissing other forms of intelligence as peripheral. As Low observes in recalling Foucault’s heterotopias, “Othering has become an unconscious design action...”, a tendency ISIAC resisted entirely. Rather than imposing outside definitions of knowledge or culture, the project embedded itself in the existing creative intelligence of Leimert Park.

The Divide - reclamation of the public good
The Divide engages directly with Tom Spector’s observation that the erosion of the public sphere has diminished architecture’s ability to serve the ‘public good’. He draws on Habermas to make a convincing argument that the bourgeois public sphere once functioned as a critical space where citizens opposed entrenched power, but today attention for this role has been undermined by consumerism, bureaucracy, and neoliberal privatization. He quotes Habermas, saying, “Tendencies pointing to the collapse of the public sphere are unmistakable… its scope is expanding impressively, [but] its function has become progressively insignificant”.
The Divide sought to resist this erosion by cultivating a space where communities can develop shared meaning and adaptive capacity before crisis strikes. By framing architecture as a collective salience network — continuously directing attention between reflection and action — the project positioned itself not as a defensive bunker, but as a civic organism. Its shade canopy, earthen walls, and sunken courtyards protected against heat and radiation, but just as crucially, its open-air circulation system and flexible program spaces were designed to host governance, education, and collective rituals. In Spector’s terms, this allows architecture to become a vessel for public critique and renewal, not merely a consumer amenity.
Bauer’s discussion of Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture, as interpreted by Christoph Schlingensief, further illuminates the project’s intent. Bauer writes: “The cultural interactions…envisioned for this project become social change, initiated by the individual and carried forward by the community itself”. The Divide embodied this ethos: its framework was designed not to promise safety but to catalyze social plasticity. Like Beuys’s social sculpture, it recognizes that resilience emerges not from imposed systems but from the ongoing creative labor of the people themselves.

The product model has given us material security: reproducible housing, predictable deliverables, a shared baseline of comfort — conditions unimaginable to the average citizen a century ago. Yet as countless examples of our modern built environment attest, when this model dominates unchecked, it breeds perfectionism, trend-driven hollowness, and monuments to ego that mask systemic insecurity and fragility.

The process model, by contrast, invites the public into a messy, layered process of meaning-making. It produces complex relational structures and shared ownership. It allows us to cultivate and access those evanescent social assets that are just as critical to our enduring security and comfort as our material ones. This is what WSPA sought in its collective experiments with non-hierarchical learning, what Castillo observed in countercultural practices of salvage, and what Bauer described through Schlingensief’s vision of cultural interaction begetting social change. Yet because the process model resists commodification, it struggles to find validation in systems driven only by efficiency and profit.
Thus it has been demonstrated that both models, product and process, clearly offer value in different ways.

The question then becomes: are we capable of situating ourselves dynamically between these two models, positioning ourselves to capture the benefits of both while avoiding the pitfalls of either?

Just as light requires physicists to accept it as both wave and particle, architects must be capable of understanding architecture as both product and process simultaneously if we are to fully realize its potential for society. Taken separately, these models appear paradoxical, suggesting that we must choose one over the other. But when viewed as two parts of one whole, we find that our understanding of architecture is clarified.

No longer is it necessary to reinforce one binary constraint at the expense of the other. Our task instead is to dwell within the paradox of duality, integrating lessons from the product model when advantageous, while always remembering the process model’s unique power in cultivating attention, memory, and meaning across space and time.

Joseph Beuys’ philosophy reminds us that society is always entangled in sculpture, like a school of fish shifting and flowing together as one. Architecture, then, brings us into awareness of the form our sculpture takes, that we might consciously influence its contours. And while the architect cannot promise a perfect Utopia, it is possible to guide the co-creation of an Intertopia — a place where the ongoing negotiation of duality creates a dynamic equilibrium that leads to stability and growth.