Measure Twice

Measure Twice was an undergraduate design studio taught by Emerging Scholar in Design Andrew Bako in the Fall 2025 semester at the University of Texas at Austin. The studio positioned slowness as both an ethical stance and a design imperative in a resource-depleted world. Rather than rushing toward demolition and new construction, students approached measuring, marking, and cutting as consequential design acts that balance care with control. They began by documenting Austin homes slated for demolition, producing precise as-built drawings, scaled miniatures, and surgical-style “pre-op” plans to guide deconstruction. In the second phase, students designed a civic material repository—part warehouse, part archive, part public interface—that supports reuse. Ultimately, the studio argued that careful documentation and deliberate cuts conserve embodied energy, transform waste into shared resources, and position the archive as an active instrument of repair and future-making. The model shown here is by UTSOA architecture student Anna Rohn.