<table> </table> Architecture School,&#8221; a new documentary series about college kids designing and building state-of-the-art low-income housing in post-Katrina New Orleans, belies its bland title.</p><p>This is an unexpectedly engaging, fast-paced show with an edge. It&#8217;s got form and function. And it premieres at 8 p.m. Wednesday on the Sundance Channel.</p><p>While in Los Angeles, I interviewed four of the principals involved in the show. As we began, I took out my audio recorder &#8212; and four sets of eyes landed on it.</p><p>&#8220;I didn&#8217;t know you could do that!&#8221; says Michael Selditch, the show&#8217;s co-creator.</p><p>&#8220;I didn&#8217;t either,&#8221; says Reed Kroloff, the former dean of Tulane University&#8217;s architecture school.</p><p>They didn&#8217;t know you could record with an iPod. Just by snapping on an elegant mic attachment, my output device becomes an input device. As we praised this gizmo, it occurred to me that here was an example of design and the impact it has on our everyday lives.</p><p>And that is the subtext of &#8220;Architecture School,&#8221; which uses the extreme case of New Orleans to illustrate how important it is to prebuild correctly, whether designing a music player that fits in your shirt pocket or a home that can survive a hurricane.</p><p>The show&#8217;s producers are both architects, although Selditch now works in film and TV. Stan Bertheaud, his producing partner, still teaches at Woodbury University in California. They said they always knew there was something inherently interesting about this line of work. The trick was finding a way to make it interesting enough for TV.</p><p>They found what they were looking for at Tulane University&#8217;s prestigious School of Architecture. In 2005, shortly after Katrina, the school set up Urbanbuild, a program to design new housing in neighborhoods ravaged by the storm&#8217;s aftermath.</p><p>Fourth-year architecture students would have a competition, judged by their teachers, to design the most innovative and appealing model home ... and then they and their classmates would leave the campus, go into the inner city and help build it.</p><p>Inserting architects into the building process sounds obvious, because it was the way things got built for centuries. But only in the past 15 years or so has the idea come back into vogue.</p><p>&#8220;Architecture over the past 100 years has divorced itself quite significantly from the building process,&#8221; Kroloff said. &#8220;That&#8217;s allowed architects to do many more things than they&#8217;ve done before&#8221; &#8212; design iPods, for instance &#8212; &#8220;but it&#8217;s limited their ability to be part of the build process.&#8221;</p><p>One corrective has come in the form of a movement, called simply &#8220;design-build,&#8221; which seeks to integrate the two processes. It&#8217;s practiced in a growing number of architecture firms and taught on more than two dozen college campuses. At Tulane it&#8217;s supervised by Byron Mouton, an avuncular but tough-minded professor who&#8217;s seen often in &#8220;Architecture School,&#8221; usually chiding or encouraging one of his charges.</p><p>Design-build, Mouton said, &#8220;takes the student out of the familiar, safe zone&#8221; of sketching plans on a computer. For many Tulane students, it&#8217;s their first experience working with a contractor.</p><p>&#8220;So much about architecture is just about gravity,&#8221; Selditch said. &#8220;And they forget about gravity when they&#8217;re in school. They just draw these crazy things ...&#8221; and as he said this, the other three teachers in the room laughed knowingly.