Live projects : innovating in the present

Setting boundaries is a creative act. Harnessing the idea of student involvement and engagement in live projects to their architectural education is difficult. Attempting to define what a live project actually is in this situation has required a lot of self-searching by architectural educators. Whilst it is an accepted condition of mainstream practice that timescale, budget and brief are matched with intention and design before works starts on site, it is not at all clear that such a definitive bounding of the project is in the students’ best interest in a learning environment. This paper looks at the work of the Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources (ARCSR) research cluster, and assesses the relationship between boundary setting and changing intentions; speculating on the effect of changing intentions on the education of the student. The value of live projects for students involves to a large extent the value of the present moment of active engagement with concrete reality. With the rising cost of university education and a parallel increase in the adoption of live projects at architecture schools, new approaches to learning are required that operate on a different set of principles to those geared towards training architects for large scale, office based practice. Students should be encouraged to experiment and innovate using incremental, iterative and reflective processes embedded in a real setting and tested in the present