Changing the State of Affairs: Making Architectural Education More Engaged
Whether their concerns center on climate change, racial inequality, or the state of the workplace, architecture students today seem to have an urgency to understand, and contribute to, the world they know, fear, or desire. They perceive existential crises and want to address them—right now. Architectural education, comfortably sitting between theory and innovation, is adapting, but not quickly enough.
In more technical departments, often in schools of engineering, which try to prepare students for practice, the challenge is to quickly introduce cutting-edge methods beyond the one-off, small scale prototyping projects. In this article, I focus more on design schools which emphasize creativity and theory. Here the challenge is more that whether history, theory, technology, or the arts, faculty tend to have singular expertise necessary for research but aren’t always eager to engage with the complex, interdisciplinary, evolving and system-based world we live in. Now there is a welcome crack in the system, where courses and design studios can dedicate themselves to relevant topics—not historic, not utopian, just pure urgent.
When I went to graduate school at Harvard’s GSD twelve years ago, my first professor told me to “un-learn” my two years of professional practice and to let go of my preconceived notions of what architecture should be like. He told me to wait and see where my education took me. Looking back, I wish he told me to develop a strong agenda: for what I wanted out of my education and how I wanted to use it upon graduation.
Since then, such design schools have made an effort to better respond to “real problems,” with an increase in courses that talk about systemic thinking, and link architecture to politics, policy, ecology, economics, and social frameworks. Recent classes at the GSD, for example, have explored architecture and waste, ecological urbanism, and urban design of political activism, while studios have addressed broad aspects of sustainability, from the social to material, including for example the “urban machine” (introduction of local industries in urban centers) and the Green New Deal Superstudio, which is part of an international group of courses that “translate the core goals of the Green New Deal—decarbonization, justice, and jobs—into design and planning projects for their respective regions.”
In London, the AA now offers units on civic agency, rising ocean levels, and reusing existing resources. The last has been so popular that some students have taken it more than once and thus spent their whole time in graduate school in one studio. Three recent graduates from this unit are currently working on projects that grew out of it—a clear success story.
Figure 1. Program diagrams from a student project, 2021, looking at a systematic approach to regenerate the town of Jarrow, England through re-skilling the unemployed population, catalyzing re-industrialization and social change, and channeling local waste and by-products of renewable energy extraction. Courtesy of Katherine Bluff.
Is this shift the beginning of a fundamental change in architectural education? Will it accelerate after the pandemic, as schools fill with students even more eager for engagement? What model would students establish for themselves, and if we consider education to be a market, could students influence what they are investing in?
Let’s examine what is bringing on these changes. The most obvious cause is that conditions are changing and no one can escape climate change, pandemics, and social protest. Design schools react by hiring practitioners with expertise in these areas, whose work resonates with students. New research interests, in turn, influence the overall agenda of the schools. We already see this reflected in the kinds of work being published by the GSD and Columbia University’s GSAPP, including Ecological Urbanism, Ethics of the Urban, Architecture and Waste: A (Re)planned Obsolescence, and Water Infrastructure: Equitable Development of Resilient Systems.
Figure 2. Phasing drawings from a student project, 2018, that aims to break down barriers between different communities in Vienna by developing a large scale communal landscape and culture park in place of a hereditary enclosed allotment system. Courtesy of Reshma Upadhyaya.
This educational shift is also related to the emergence of new ways of designing. Termed the “Socio-Technical System innovation level” by Fabrizio Ceschin and Idil Gaziulusoy, these approaches focus on “promoting radical changes on how societal needs, such as nutrition and transport/mobility, are fulfilled.” As Professor Chris Lash of the Taliesin School of Architecture so aptly puts it, “Ideas don’t keep you warm.” In a recent workshop organized by Tristan Boniver of Rotor between our graduate studios at Newcastle University and the AA, students were asked to come up with a glossary on “the building stock and us.” It was inspiring to see them not only defining existing terms for how they see the built environment they inherited, but coming up with new ones, such as “Generational Discrepancy,” “Inherited Overproduction,” and “Reuse Extremist.”
The other major reason for the shift in architectural education is that, as Corey Seemiller and Meghan Grace suggest, students have changed. Generation Z students are not only more aware of the urgency of climate change and attuned to questions of social justice and equality, but more insistent that their work address such concerns, leading them to prefer action over theory. Interests have shifted from form- and space-making to agency-making.
The last time this happened at a large scale, in the 1960s and early 70s, the heightened social activism led to the establishment of some of the first architecture-school–community initiatives. These included the Yale Building Project, a mandatory year when students “commit to positive social action” through a design-build project for a community in need, and U.C. Berkeley’s project with Asian Neighborhood Design to improve living conditions in low-income Asian neighborhoods in the Bay Area. More than a hundred such programs emerged at U.S. schools alone, including the Farallon Institute, the Rural Studio, and Studio 804.
“Students are not only more aware of the urgency of climate change and attuned to questions of social justice and equality, but more insistent that their work address such concerns.”
Students today are also aware of the changing role of the architect as the profession’s relationship to the built environment gets more complex. The central question for them has shifted from, what are we able to do as architects to what should we do? Moreover, they are wary of individual stars and more interested in teams. They understand that behind each project there is a wide range of disciplines, which gets even wider when one starts considering all consequences of our built environment, from energy to waste, from emerging technologies to social behaviors. With more re-use and recycling, we need less ego.
Technology, possibly unwittingly, may also play a role in the shift. With digital fabrication tools more widely available, students can experience more real-world construction processes, whether they are full-scale buildings or large-scale installations.
Ultimately, as Ceschin and Gaziulusoy write, today’s students have realized that in order to “remain socially relevant in a post-industrial era, a fundamental characteristic of which is intensifying social and environmental crises,” their education needs to change. As Alicia Wodika and Wendi Middleton argue, there is a “need to assist students in making the connections of what they are learning in the classroom and how that equates to their functioning as engaged citizens in their communities.” More and more, indeed, they tell me that they won’t be looking for jobs in a conventional office settings but are instead interested in developing emerging materials, starting their community-led practices, or working in the public sector.
Figure 3: Master plan from a student project, 2021, creating a network of renewable energy, green industries, large-scale planted areas for farming and urban forests, transportation links, and cultural / community infrastructure. Courtesy of Xueqing Zhang.
One way to encourage connections between academia and practice is to offer more design-build and other hybrid studios. These studios usually involve a real client, with a real community, and forge real social connections. Design-build fosters the idea of co-design and participatory design, concepts students enjoy as they simultaneously gain and lose some control of their design process. Applying new skills to a project with an actual physical manifestation appeals to a generation of students used to the idea of maker-spaces, where they can work together to create unique and authentic products, often for open-source distribution.
I recently taught a design-build studio in Israel. Students there live not only with economic inequality but as witnesses to, or victims of, racial prejudice. By having a multi-racial studio group engage with community groups—acting, designing, building, eating together—tiny invisible boundaries were broken every day. When building a facility for a bicycle club in an Arab community, for instance, many locals could not imagine Arab female students in traditional outfits welding, hammering, and pouring concrete. Yet here they were, challenging notions of gender and racial inequality within the profession and community alike.
Figure 4: Construction photo of students assembling a micro-apartment to test viability of reuse of existing structures through, open-source, digitally fabricated methods to assist with the housing crisis in Israel, 2020. Courtesy of Studio 1:1, the Technion University, Haifa.
By choosing courses that have more direct impact on society and the environment, students are reshaping design education. Through formal demands, like Architecture Education Declare in 2019, students are making clear “that at present our education does not give sufficient weight to the inherently ecological and political basis of architecture.” The question now is, what comes next? What educational model would they establish for themselves if they had the agency? Will they be able to expand upon the design-build pedagogy with new educational models like “Engage-Design” and “Respond-Design?” Let’s hope so.
