In both my undergraduate and graduate courses, I give discussion-leading responsibilities over to the students, and I encourage their creativity in developing ice-breaker activities for their classmates. Today’s leaders in The Architect and the City (my 20th-century urban design history course) had the class break into groups of 4-5 to build a house, in which our six theorist/architect/planner protagonists (Engels, Sitte, Stübben, Howard, Unwin, and Wagner) would be “materials/components/rooms.” It was a VERY WEIRD charge (I had tried to convince the discussion-leaders to make the task more traditional—they wisely ignored me), and wildly successful. The resulting diagrams are funny, astute, and the exercise caused the student groups to think analytically about what each protagonist had to offer to the problem of the Industrial City. I asked their permission to post them, so here they are.
