Bridging the Gap Studio is an award-winning urban design studio taught collaboratively by a US and an Iraqi professor of architecture. Sponsored by Gensler in 2016, the studio collaboration is in its ninth year, reaching over 200 students of architecture in the US and Iraq. In 2019, Bridging the Gap Studio was recognized with the Architect Magazine Studio Prize. The faculty collaboration has been supported by two IREX (International Research and Exchanges Board) grants and funding from the University of Maryland's Global Classrooms initiative.
The studio is a project-based learning environment in which US and Iraqi students collaborate together to create design proposals for similar programs in each other's cities. We typically begin with a research module, in which students investigate, document, analyze, and present a district in their own city to their counterparts abroad. Based upon information exchanged, students embark upon urban design explorations in their counterparts' cities. The course culminates in a pair of design proposals in the two cultures. Students collaborate as a virtual team to foster the success of both projects, serving as information sources for one and information processors for the other. Projects serve as vehicles for cultural exploration, as students propose settings for each other's daily lives. This experience mirrors work that students will encounter in globalized architectural practice, where projects are often executed in collaboration between US and local offices, with success dependent upon intercultural communication skills. This particular international collaboration, coming at a time of tremendous strain between US-Iraqi relations, has great potential to instill global understanding through person-to-person diplomacy.