Aleksandra Jaeschke Explores Pre-Design in Inaugural Rudy Bruner Lecture

This lecture was sponsored by The Rudy Bruner Center for Urban Excellence, which fosters innovative thinking and dialogue about the role of design in the complex process of placemaking. The Rudy Bruner Lecture will be offered annually as part of the School’s public program series, engaging scholars and practitioners who are critically interrogating the theories and practices of design and development.

Jaeschke is an architect and associate professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. Originally from Poland, she co-directed a small architectural practice in Sicily before pursuing a doctor of design degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her research there focused on the frameworks that shape architectural production. “Looking back, I realize that much of my work has been an attempt to question the frameworks we rely on in architecture to examine the assumptions we tend to take for granted,” she reflected. “I’ve tried to expand system boundaries, draw from other domains of knowledge, and question the assumptions we tend to naturalize within architecture.”

Her early professional experience had also revealed a gap within mainstream sustainability conversations; efforts to reduce environmental impact often focus on material choices while overlooking the regulatory frameworks and market dynamics that guide those choices in the first place. Her doctoral research traced how cultural, political, and economic forces shaped early building codes and financial instruments—and how those legacies continue to influence construction today.  

“As my understanding of our place within the biosphere became more holistic, I began to see that it’s not enough to just adjust those techniques,” she explained. “We need to question the mindsets from which they emerge.”

These insights led to her 2022 book, “The Greening of America’s Building Codes: Promises and Paradoxes.” In that work, she explored the origins of the frameworks and mindsets that gave rise to concepts such as sustainability and green building standards and examined how these ultimately become woven into regulatory policies.

“By endorsing certain construction materials, and by embedding particular testing protocols, performance standards, and liability thresholds, building codes shape the fate of materials,” she noted. “They determine which become normalized, which remain marginal, and which never enter practice at all. In this sense, material selection, often framed as a design decision, is already structured at the level of regulation. I consider that a form of pre-design.” Jaeschke describes pre-design as engagement with the forces that structure what becomes possible before design begins, which may include developing design tools, technological devices, supply chains, standards, regulatory language, or financial instruments. 

Jaeschke turned to the example of straw-bale construction to illustrate how building materials become recognized, authorized, and normalized. Straw-bale construction was originally developed in Nebraska in the late 19^th century prior to modern code and regulatory practices. It had fallen out of practice due to the rise of industrialized materials but saw a resurgence in the 1980s, when it then had to be standardized, tested, documented, and written into model codes.

Shifting her focus to the sourcing of straw, Jaeschke pushed this example further. When straw-bale construction first emerged, straw was plentiful in that region and its utilization in construction was a good use of available resources. Though it’s framed as a low-impact, sustainable solution today, that’s not as true as it once was.

On the surface, straw-bale construction looks compelling because straw is viewed as an abundant and naturally occurring byproduct. But what happens when the forces of capitalism demand an increase in the production of straw to feed this system? The result is an agricultural and industrial monoculture, designed for maximum yield and efficiency while simultaneously causing soil degradation, biodiversity loss, groundwater depletion, and increasing vulnerability to climate instability. This system also leaves little room for the important practice of leaving a portion of straw in the field to restore the soil’s nutrients, thus trading long-term agricultural health for immediate profit.

“Scaling would not simply increase volume,” Jaeschke warned. “It would change the conditions under which straw is produced and distributed, and therefore change how we evaluate its environmental impact.”

She emphasized that this dynamic extends far beyond straw. Similar patterns appear in forestry, where single-species plantations are often labeled as “forests” to support the growth of the mass-timber industry. The language of sustainability, she argued, can sometimes obscure the extractive systems that make certain materials possible. “And agricultural regimes do not only organize land,” she pointed out. They also control monoculture, privileges, standardization, and managerial control, while diverse systems depend on situated intergenerational ecological knowledge.”

In a lively discussion with the audience, Jaeschke answered a series of questions and provided thoughtful advice:

• Offering practical insights for emerging professionals and practitioners, she encouraged them to explore whichever aspect of predesign most interests them, noting that this can open up a whole new world of professional possibilities.
• It’s important to recognize the limits of scaling up material use and to avoid overreliance on any single “miracle” material. More nuanced, regionally grounded approaches—aligned with ecological cycles—offer more sustainable pathways, though they require the slowing of processes within the construction industry, which is not popular.
• Incremental changes, such as replacing toxic foam with hemp fiber panels, can also make meaningful progress.
• There’s value in exploring policies that would limit the production of certain materials based on region. This could help support strategic diversification based on local resources and ecological conditions.

“Pre-design, as I understand it, requires engaging regulatory, agricultural, energetic, and economic conditions,” Jaeschke concluded. “Straw is neither inherently virtuous nor inherently problematic. Its significance depends on the systems that sustain it, and on whether we are willing to examine those systems before design begins.”