Drifting Intersections: A Campus for Inciting Collaboration

Abstract

Collaboration among design professionals is a crucial component of a comprehensive design solution. The proximity of minds, each providing expertise and experiences unlike the others, produces an environment ripe for ideation. In traditional university settings intradisciplinary education has become more common. This educational method develops praiseworthy but brief projects. However, it lacks the built environment to sustain long term collaborative design relationships between students, graduates, and practitioners. Frequently, the design and other allied disciplines reside in separate buildings on campus. Leading to the question, do the proximity of these buildings between synergistic design fields improve collaboration levels? Qualitative research methods will be utilized to survey undergraduate landscape architecture degrees across the United States on their collaboration levels with architecture students and civil engineering students at their respective university. Coupled with their physical distance to the aforementioned degrees, an investigation into if there exists, and to what degree there is a correlation with proximity and collaboration amongst design fields will be studied. The results of this “proximity and collaboration analysis” will then be applied to the urban redevelopment of a multi-block Design District in Downtown, Fargo, ND.