Frames of McMahon Hall. A Pedagogical Model for Interdisciplinary Architectural Education using Photogrammetry and AI

Mid-century Brutalist buildings are frequently documented as objects of form, yet their contested reception and lived memory are less often addressed in architectural education. This article analyses the results of an interdisciplinary experiment centred on McMahon Hall during the summer school Rhetorical Machine + the Hyperlocal at the University of Washington. The method pairs UAV and close-range photogrammetry with a retrieval-augmented, persona-based generative AI workflow to produce a polyvocal narrative grounded in curated site-specific sources. The article argues that this combined method offers a transferable pedagogical model through which students can document both the measurable and intangible dimensions of the built environment while developing technical, interpretive, and ethical competencies.