Journal of Emerging Scholarship

Entrepreneurship and Architecture are two academic disciplines focused on solving problems. Entrepreneurship, specifically, utilizes idea generation, creative thinking, and opportunity recognition to evaluate ideas. In the Anne Arundel Community College, fall 2024 semester students in two classes within these disciplines collaborated to develop ‘architectural’ ideas that can contribute to ‘solving’ (or at least contributing to solutions to) the problem of affordable housing in Anne Arundel County. Students in ESI 103 Introduction to Entrepreneurship and ACH-211 Architectural Studio1: Form, Space, Order applied entrepreneurial concepts and processes, as well as analytical skills and architectural design principles to present a design solution for affordable housing on a specific site. The timing of this collaborative assignment coincided with the passing of Bill No. 72-24, the Housing Attainability Act of 2024. The updated zoning regulation expands the opportunity for faith-based communities like the Joy Reigns Lutheran Church congregation in Edgewater, Maryland to imagine innovative ways to provide affordable housing on their property. It also provided architecture students an opportunity to embrace The American Institute of Architect’s (AIA) challenge set forth in their 2021–2025 Strategic Plan to engage as “change agents in developing and delivering solutions to society’s most pressing needs” (AIA,2025). Through this project students intended to determine how interdisciplinary collaboration between entrepreneurship and architecture students generate innovative solutions for affordable housing in Anne Arundel County. This project investigates fusing two high-impact learning practices by creating a learning community of architecture and entrepreneurial students to address, through the lenses of different disciplines, a complex community problem that intentionally provided students a service learning/community-based learning opportunity to “apply what they are learning in real-world settings and reflect in a classroom setting.” (Kun, 2008). Through this collaboration architecture students were able to test the effectiveness of new zoning and housing development policies aimed at generating more housing in Anne Arundel County while entrepreneurial students employed resourcefulness concepts to addressed affordability restraints to substantiate architectural design solutions and provide more specificity to help encourage and guide entrepreneurial behavior when designing housing solutions.