Pedagogical Rebalancing Act

  Reconsider the way we teach architecture, urban design, and built environmental activism. Our graduate Jonny Hanna recently wrote, “The end goal is to make tangible the alternative worlds asked for by my community. . . .what does a completely housed future look like? What does a food secure future look like? What does a climate-resilient future look like? What does a world without work look like?” Such are the questions our students are asking. Can we really find answers by teaching design in the antiquated atelier format that architecture schools still embrace—as if the endless hours spent in studio by instructor and student alike inoculate against climate degradation, social injustice, and automation? In fact, students chained to their studio desks are actually training up for their lives as serfs in the architecture firms of the metropolis—where they are subject to low pay, long hours, and strict hierarchies as they claw their way up to the top. Rethink the relationship between studio and subjects! Spend more time thinking, more time talking, more time reading, less time teaching architecture as a craft-based art practice relayed from master to apprentice through desk crits and pinups, bound by the fiction of avant-garde connoisseurship but actually enforcing a slowly-moving status quo tied to rapidly evolving software packages. Studio has long been a hegemonic force in architectural education, the exceptional force, the sovereign subject to which all other classes provide “support.” At the same time, like the sovereign, it may constitute the biggest impediment to producing transformative architecture through collective intelligence. It’s time for a constitutional revolution. What are some new ways to teach architecture?