Because of our curriculum transition the Program of Architecture currently has a double handful of students participating in a wide variety of our off-campus “field Studies” programs. We have 15 students at the Urban Studio in Birmingham, 25 students out at the Rural Studio in West Alabama, 17 students in Rome, 15 students in Istanbul, and 16 students in Florence. Later this semester we will have another contingent of 18 more students depart for Rome, and later still 8 or 10 students make an extended two week visit with Professor Sheri Schumacher to Quito, Ecuador. Today I had the opportunity to meet Professor Helena Garino, who is visiting from Quito. Professor Garino is the coordinator of the Interior Design Program at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. She is here this week working with our students and getting them up to speed on the project, site and context in which they will be working this semester. Back in Quito, she has 15 students who are also working on the same project, and later our students will join hers there to work collaboratively on their joint proposals. The project at first seems fairly straightforward from a purely architectural point of view; it involves the renovation of a 16th century jail into a sort of mixed-use building. Where the project gets really interesting is in the fact that the site sits at the foot of a small volcanic mountain (relative to those that surround Quito, anyway) known as El Panecillo, or “small piece of bread.” It is at this point in the urban fabric where the 16th century grid of the Spanish city first collides with the rugged mountains that ring the city, disrupting the orthogonal order of the the vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Roads become sidewalks, and sidewalks become stairs all within a half city block. Historically and culturally significant, it is also where the pre-modern city rubs up against the contemporary expansion. From Professor Garino’s initial presentation to the class it also seems that this joint in the city fabric is a place that marks a boundary between communities: those that are old and historically established, and that of the more recent immigrant making do as they can. It will be with a great deal of interest that I  follow the students along as they grapple with the complexities of such a rich site: history, topography, and culture collisions -my initial sense of Quito is that it is a city of edges both figuratively and architectonically.

What more could an Architecture Program ask for in an advanced architectural problem? The hopeful part in all of our field studies programs is that by having students spend real, directed time in a culturally and architecturally robust place (if only for a few weeks as in the case of Quito), is that they may develop some sort of awareness that they have a significant role to play as designers in the larger world, even if the problems that they encounter are well beyond the power of bricks and mortar to solve. To rub up against the boundaries and edges of the discipline – or any other aspect of life that otherwise defines oneself, and still be able to contribute in some other way – that perhaps is the most important lesson of all.