Empathy As A Rubric For Architecture

Research - “De-Centering the Canon: Architecture and Urbanism” course, Harvard GSD

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Introduction

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom is a collection of essays on pedagogy written by bell hooks. These essays offer insight into hooks’ personal life, ranging from her time as a student to her eventual position as a university educator. Through these personal endeavors, hooks defines the ultimate indicator of a good educator as one who embodies the “engaged voice”. Reading this collection in the context of a design school and the course Decentering the Canon: Architecture and Urbanism, one can begin to highlight moments of engaged learning that ultimately help students develop an awareness of alternative design methods that exist outside the Western architecture canon. Eventually, these considerations develop into different types of empathy and create new rubrics for teaching, creating, and accessing Architecture. Empathy in this context is defined as a sensitivity that enables designers to perceive the consequences of the one-size-fits-all approach to problem-solving in the built environment, explore new possibilities, and use these alternative rubrics to drive positive change. Architecture education then does not need to be a linear focus on canonical practitioners; the profession can expand into the humanities, psychology, and other disciplines to develop new metrics for success.

bell hooks, in her book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, argues for a concept she calls Engaged Pedagogy. Through this collection of essays, she recalls various moments during her early, undergraduate, and graduate education when she was deeply transformed by the all-encompassing teaching style of her educators. She writes, “the engaged voice must never be fixed and absolute but always changing, always evolving in dialogue with a world beyond itself” (hooks, 1994, p. 21). This voice she speaks about is the voice her teachers developed when their educational practice became so infused with their own self-actualization process that they could take their students on a similar journey. hooks states, “engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students…that empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks” (hooks, 1994, p. 21). In the case of Architecture and design, having a direction for the risk-taking hooks alludes to in her essays can take the form of developing a rubric for empathy that one can refer to at various points in their career.

Although one can argue for countless types of empathy, for the purposes of this essay, Ethical, Cultural, and Environmental empathy are highlighted and defined as a starting point to examine their place in Architecture pedagogy and practice. This essay draws on concepts and projects highlighted in the Harvard Graduate School of Design course taught by Rahul Mehrotra and argues that this type of work infects architecture pedagogy in distinctive ways. Using topics outside the traditional Western canon and projects in the Global South, this essay seeks to establish a rubric to make a claim for the role of empathy in design. Introducing empathy as a design strategy helps shape students’ core values, which then influences the kinds of client relationships they form, the firms they build, and the innovative metrics they use to measure success. While the traditional canon is fundamental to architectural education and will always be present in the curriculum, exploring architecture that expands the canon is of equal importance. The writers of Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture echo this sentiment when they state that, “new forms of education explicitly lead to alternative forms of practice” (Awan et al., 2013, p.61). This assertion reinforces hooks’ belief that teaching should guide both educators and students toward deep personal transformation. In this way, integrating empathy-based rubrics into architectural pedagogy not only broadens the discipline’s intellectual framework but also cultivates practitioners who can imagine more inclusive, responsive, and transformative building design methods.

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Ethical empathy

Ethical empathy involves making design choices rooted in disrupting class and power structures, building in dignity, and avoiding inflicting further social harm. Examining multidisciplinary firm structures reveals how power dynamics in architecture firms, where there is a starchitect and everyone works under them, can be disrupted to create a scenario in which everyone involved in the process is a co-creator. This same shifting of power dynamics and class boundaries within the firm structure can then inform the actual design of a project to create buildings where all user experience is considered equally. KMC Corporate Office, designed by RMA Architects, serves as a case study to understand how design can intentionally or unintentionally elevate all employees to the same status and, for a few hours during the workday, bridge the class divides that exist in office spaces. Ethical empathy provides a baseline to consider how all facets of architecture, from the initial design process to the construction and the occupation phase, can be a dignified process that accounts for everyone’s needs.

The traditional architecture firm structure involves a main architect, colloquially known as the starchitect, and a few subordinates who work to execute the starchitect’s vision by producing drawings and conducting coordination meetings. This model offers little opportunity for cross-pollination of ideas between team members and senior project leaders, but it does allow room for the formation of alternative firm structures. The writers of Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture suggest Tom Wooley’s principles for other models of practice as a starting point. Wooley suggests that “a change in the relationship between all architectural workers; the establishment of new sectors of work with a broader social remit; the use of new participatory techniques not only to demystify expertise but also to help everyone understand processes more fully and, finally, a commitment to greater accountability of the entirety of the profession” (Awan et al., 2013, p.61) as methods to disrupt current firm structures. By adopting this approach to architecture firm structures, a wider range of perspectives can be reflected in the process, a system of checks and balances can be established, and richer design solutions that draw on diverse forms of intelligence can be developed. Anthony Giddens, whose teachings form the foundation of the principles explored in Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture, describes this phenomenon as mutual knowledge. According to the book, “mutual knowledge is not determined by professional norms and expectations, but rather is founded in exchange, in negotiation, out of hunch, out of intuition…abandoning the hierarchies embedded in most professional relationships” (Awan et al., 2013, p.32). As a result, architecture becomes a more inclusive process that considers a multitude of stakeholders from the outset, thus creating a process that serves to uplift everyone involved.

KMC Corporate Office designed by RMA Architects serves as a case study for ethical empathy because the building’s design integrates elements that challenge the rigid social binaries often found in corporate offices. Rahul Mehrotra writes, “The building employs a double-skin façade as a strategy of heat mitigation and a space for social connection.” Both the inner and the outer skin are equally as important in the design, with the space between them presenting an opportunity to incorporate a new social dynamic. The inner skin is a concrete structure with aluminum windows, and the outer screen “is comprised of a custom-cast aluminum trellis
with hydroponic trays and integrated drip irrigation for growing a variety of plant species. It humidifies the air entering the building, conditioning the interiors through sun-shading and evaporative cooling [strategies]” (Mehrotra, 2024, p. 95). The space between both screens then creates a series of catwalks in which gardeners can walk through and tend to the plants on the façade (RMA Architects, n.d.). This catwalk system creates unique moments where the gardeners may be tending to plants as important client meetings or corporate lunches are taking place, thereby making the gardeners feel included and connected to the other corporate employees. The visual transparency of the inner screen and the movement of the gardens behind begin to blur the economic disparities that exist between the gardeners and other employees. The transparency creates a system where “spatial resolution allows the least powerful workers to operate alongside the most powerful economic players in this corporate structure” (Mehrotra, 2024, p. 96).

Ethical empathy involves restructuring the power imbalances created by the current system and replacing them with a model that elevates the perspectives of a wider range of people. This approach raises important considerations about how the office design process might be transformed if data and firsthand experiences from construction workers were integrated from the outset, allowing the specific challenges they face to be directly addressed. Interrogating these systems also demands consideration of how janitors, cleaning staff, security guards, drivers, and custodians’ daily experiences can be made as enjoyable and dignified as those of individuals occupying the lobby or executive floors. Eventually, this model will develop language to persuade clients that this more inclusive and empathetic model benefits both their organizations and the field of architecture, even when it deviates from conventional expectations and budget priorities.

https://rmaarchitects.com/architecture/kmc-corporate-office/

https://rmaarchitects.com/architecture/kmc-corporate-office/

Cultural empathy

Cultivating cultural empathy requires a deeper understanding of the ways tradition, religion, and economic practices shape daily life. This essay explores the effects of unstable economic conditions on the future of housing design. For the City Yet To Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities by Simone AbdouMaliq elaborates on economic and societal structures that may drive demand for nontraditional design models. AbdouMaliq states that “religious and fraternal networks, public officials operating in private capacities, clientelist networks mobilizing very cheap labor, foreign political parties, and transnational corporations operating outside of conventional procedures [demand the creation of] more flexible configurations of associational life (AbdouMaliq, 2005, p. 1). Reflecting on AbdouMaliq’s insights, one begins to recognize the need to develop architecture that anticipates change and accounts for a potentially unpredictable future driven by tougher economic conditions. The Aranya Housing Project in Indore, India, serves as a case study to examine how one of the principles of cultural empathy in design can manifest in the creation of base housing that can be expanded over time to accommodate a wide range of economic realities and family structures (Turlapati, 2014). As economic conditions grow more dire and more people choose to live with friends or coworkers to save money, this precedent of incrementalism drawn from the Global South can offer valuable strategies for rethinking how housing design might evolve beyond the traditional nuclear-family model.

The statistics presented by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies provide evidence of a shifting housing model in the United States, driven by rising unemployment and widening income disparities. Data taken from the JCHS tabulations of the U.S. Census Bureau 2023 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates show that “of the 30.5 million young adults aged 18–24 in 2023, just 5.2 million headed their own household; another 1.9 million were the partner of the householder....14.8 million lived with their parents...2.6 million lived with
some other relative....3.3 million lived in group quarters, mostly college dormitories, and about
2.6 million lived with an unrelated householder” (Airgood-Obrycki et al., 2025). The study goes on to state that “more than half (54 percent) of all young adult households had cost burdens, spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing” (Airgood-Obrycki et al., 2025). These statistics highlight a growing problem where income inequality and rapid urbanization are driving demand for multigenerational, mixed-income, and mixed social-class housing models. For this reason, AbdouMaliq affirms that the Global South holds a wealth of knowledge to offer the Global North in addressing this housing crisis and other challenges of urbanization. He affirms that cities, particularly in African countries that have urbanized with limited resources and under strenuous economic conditions, can offer lessons for countries that may be slowly approaching similar circumstances (AbdouMaliq, 2005).

The Aranya Housing Project serves as a model for incremental housing strategies that could potentially be implemented elsewhere. This case study project employs a unique approach to addressing the severe housing shortage India was facing in the 1980s, and the design resulted in the creation of affordable units for residents in predominantly lower-income brackets. It differed from other low-income housing projects in India because of its sites-and-services approach, in which the architect’s role was to provide a range of structures that were not fully built but still livable, allowing them to be adaptable to residents’ needs over time (Turlapati, 2014). These structures took on the form of a “site and plinth, [or] a service core and one room, depending on how much [residents] could afford. Owners were [then] free to use any material for the construction and decoration of the house. Brick, stone, and cement were locally available” (Turlapati, 2014). The article goes on to describe that “each user has an array of options available from one-room shelters to more spacious houses, and emphasis is made on a sense of family and neighborhood while striving to encourage adaptation and personalization according to an individual’s needs and resources” (Turlapati, 2014). A critical aspect of this project is its emphasis on crafting close-knit communities, adaptability of form, and acceptance of the living practices of people from multiple income brackets. Although in the Western context this type of housing model would likely require homeownership, a path that is becoming increasingly unattainable, emerging co-ownership and cooperative housing frameworks could make this an attainable goal for some.

Cultural empathy provides a method to expand an understanding of how communities adapt to economic and social pressures. This reframing urges architects to design housing solutions that account for flexibility and potential long-term adjustments. As the Global North shifts toward shared living and multigenerational households, lessons from the Global South become increasingly relevant. These precedents challenge long-standing assumptions about the configurations of a standard household by highlighting the importance of designing for flexibility rather than rigid and predetermined outcomes. They also underscore the value of prioritizing user agency by allowing residents to shape, extend, or modify their homes as their financial circumstances evolve. Embracing new design models can lay the foundation for more resilient, adaptable, and inclusive housing in the future.

https://architectureindevelopment.org/project/401

Environmental Empathy

Environmental empathy in the architectural context is a conscious effort to understand a region’s climatic and ecological patterns and use these insights to develop region-specific building strategies. Understanding these patterns involves an openness to leveraging Indigenous knowledge of the land, thereby helping designers correctly prioritize designing with cyclical patterns rather than against them. Examining Hathigaon Elephant Village by RMA Architects as a case study, one can trace the positive ripple effects for both human and non-human stakeholders when architects and planners consider nature and ecology as the primary client. An understanding of environmental empathy provides a set of tools for seeing the environment as a stakeholder with its own wants and needs, rather than a neutral participant on whom building practices from other regions can be imposed. This approach ensures that architects can minimize the negative long-term ecological impacts of their interventions and develop a deeper understanding of the specific requirements of the land they are building on.

Leveraging indigenous knowledge refers to the process of grounding modern architectural strategies in the long-standing practices between the local communities and the environments they inhabit. History and literary scholar Lisa Brooks describes indigenous knowledge when she writes, “the land was our archive, holding not only mnemonic devices that enabled the recall
of shared, intergenerational memories and collective oral traditions but also substantiation of subsistence usage, ecological relationships, historical sites, and cultural practices” (Brooks, 2018, p. 276). The knowledge systems, Brooks infers, have developed over generations and are passed down through collective memory, attunement to seasonal changes, and various land-based practices. When translated into region-specific building practices, this knowledge could take the form of water management techniques that respond to cyclical climate patterns, the use of locally sourced building materials, or the adoption of climate-specific heating and cooling strategies. In a manner similar to how Brooks personifies the land as an archive, the land can also be personified as a stakeholder that proposes its own design solutions and encourages a more thoughtful and thorough examination of its needs.

Hathigaon Elephant Village by RMA Architects serves as a case study project in which human, animal, and plant needs are accounted for in the design solution. The project is unique in its approach because, although the site serves as a home for elephants, their caretakers, and the caretakers’ families, one could argue that the primary stakeholder in the design process was the environment itself. In “Architecture in a Time of Flux” Rahul Mehrotra writes that RMA Architects’ design began by “structuring the landscape that had been devastated by its use as a sand quarry by local sand suppliers, to create a series of water bodies to harvest the rain runoff, which is the most crucial resource in the desert climate of Rajistan” (Mehrotra, 2024, p. 97). This desert climate benefits greatly from rainwater harvesting, which increases soil moisture, paving the way for the implementation of a robust tree-planting program. In addition to this ecological rejuvenation, the containment of water facilitates bonding moments between the caretakers and their elephants through elephant bathing practices. The bodies of water also organize the land to incorporate housing for the caretakers(Mehrotra, 2024). For this reason, the design process required an understanding of the monsoon seasons, the elephants’ need for water, and the critical role water plays in this desert landscape (Chin, 2020).

In addition to providing landscape restoration, the design extensively accounts for the needs of the caretakers and their families who live in this community as well. Housing for the caretakers is organized to create shaded courtyards, employ natural ventilation strategies, and provide access to bodies of water for daily use. In her article about the Elephant Village, Andrea Chin explains that “the individual housing units are arranged in a number of groups integrated into the redesigned natural areas and are additionally organized around central courtyards, which act as extensions of essential living spaces and an important place for socializing” (Chin, 2020). The ways in which this project responds to the region’s harsh climate and the cultural rhythms of elephant care demonstrate how environmental empathy can shape design strategies that carry lasting positive change across varying scales (Chin, 2020).

Environmental empathy offers a model for centering the land as a stakeholder in architectural decision-making. Hathigaon Elephant Village demonstrates how starting with the landscape can restore ecological systems while simultaneously supporting complex human–animal relationships. By prioritizing the cycles, limits, and opportunities present in the environment, designers can create more resilient and sustainable building practices. As climate challenges intensify globally, this approach becomes not only beneficial but necessary for imagining environmental sustainability. Thus, environmental empathy pushes the discipline toward a more reciprocal relationship with nature.

https://rmaarchitects.com/architecture/hathigaon/

https://rmaarchitects.com/architecture/hathigaon/

https://rmaarchitects.com/architecture/hathigaon/

Conclusion

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom presents bell hooks’ claim that the engaged educator should serve as a model practitioner in higher education. She argues that the “engaged voice” belongs to an educator who, through self-actualization, has been deeply transformed by their work and, in turn, can cultivate a learning environment where students are able to experience their own transformation. Examined through the lens of spatial design, hooks’ ideas reveal the potential for a more personally transformative approach to architectural education. Her concept of the engaged voice as ever-evolving provides a framework for rethinking how architecture is taught, produced, and practiced. It suggests that empathy should be considered a key rubric for the profession, because it expands the discipline’s morals, values, and culture. This expansion enables design solutions that account for a broader range of human experiences.

As Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture notes, “social space [is] inherently political, [and] is charged with the dynamics of power/empowerment, interaction/isolation, [and] control/freedom” (Awan et al., 2013, p. 30). These conditions demand heightened awareness of the experiences of diverse people, places, and power structures. This essay explores that need through a rubric for empathy grounded in environmental, ethical, and cultural understanding. Environmental empathy demonstrates that treating the land as the primary stakeholder allows ecological systems to recover, which in turn supports the needs of all species that inhabit it. Ethical empathy involves rethinking architectural authorship by challenging hierarchical firm structures and embedding dignity and agency for all users into the spatial outcomes of a building. Cultural empathy offers lessons for addressing contemporary housing crises by interrogating cultural shifts in household structures resulting from economic instability.

Together, these forms of empathy outline a nontraditional design pedagogy that aligns with hooks’ insistence that teaching and design must be rooted in personal growth, mutual transformation, and an openness to change. By allowing the Global South to act as both a technical and cultural teacher, students learn to question assumptions embedded in the Western architectural canon. The implications of this rubric extend far beyond the classroom, shaping the principles students carry into professional practice. These values encourage the creation of meaningful metrics for success grounded in social impact, ecological advocacy, collaborative authorship, and cultural responsiveness. Reading hooks alongside these architectural case studies demonstrates that transgressive pedagogy cultivates designers capable of imagining beyond conventional limits. In doing so, architecture becomes a more inclusive field, better equipped to respond to the complexities of a rapidly changing world.

Sources

AbdouMaliq, S. (2005). For the city yet to come: Changing African life in four cities. Duke University Press.

Airgood-Obrycki, W., Alexander, H., & Whitney, P. (2025, November). Rising unemployment could worsen young adults’ housing challenges | Joint Center for Housing Studies. The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rising-unemploy-ment-could-worsen-young-adults-housing-challenges

Awan, N., Awan, N., Tatjan, & Till, J. (2013). Spatial agency: Other ways of doing architecture.

Brooks, L. (2018). Awikhigawôgan ta Pildowi Ôjmowôgan: Mapping a New History. The William and Mary Quarterly 75(2), 259-294. https://dx.doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.75.2.0259.
Chin, A. (2020, September 24). Rahul Mehrotra of RMA designs Hathigaon Elephant Village. designboom.

https://www.designboom.com/architecture/rahul-mehrotra-of-rma-designs-hathiga-on-elephant-village/

Hathigaon. RMA Architects. (n.d.). https://rmaarchitects.com/architecture/hathigaon/
hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

KMC Corporate Office. RMA Architects. (n.d.-b). https://rmaarchitects.com/architecture/kmc-corporate-office/

Mehrotra, R. (2024). Architecture in a Time of Flux. In Multiplicity: On constraint and agency in Contemporary Architecture (pp. 1–287). essay, University of Massachusetts Press.

Turlapati, L. (2014). Aranya Housing Project. A-D. https://architectureindevelopment.org/proj-ect/401