Emerging Pedagogies

This was the central question at the ‘Nature of Knowledge’ symposium at the Nieuwe Instituut. Held in support of the ‘Nature of Hope’ exhibition, the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) invited academics, students and practitioners to discuss architecture’s future. More precisely, the future of architecture education. The discussion was divided into three blocks – Knowledge in a Post-Growth World, Nature of Knowledge and Practice in Transition — exploring how education might adapt to address a future full of uncertainty.

Most academics approach big questions by refining a problem statement. One of them is Tatjana Schneider, professor at TU Braunschweig and researcher on the ‘Architecture is Climate’ project. She opened the late afternoon session by providing a refreshing and energetic overview of architecture’s relationship to climate breakdown. She explained that relationship with a chronogram – a drawing, similar to a geological map, serving as both visual guide and critique – depicting layers not of Earth, but of crises, labelled Violating, Band-Aiding, Exploiting, Accumulating, Separating and Ignoring. This layered map reveals how architecture is embedded within and shaped by these interwoven social, economic, cultural, and spatial forces, contributing to rather than resolving today’s crises. In the midst of this lies architectural practice, which she depicts as inherently fused with these processes. Schneider calls them out: buildings acting as fossil fuel apparatuses that feed extractivist exploitation, speculation objects in a growth economy, greenwashing tools, and gentrifiers. She then formulates a problem statement where architecture is deeply entangled with a hegemonic order that fails to ‘envision better futures’ and, instead, perpetuates and reproduces a violent status quo. A conventional architecture practice that has failed to critically reflect on its position in the current crisis and, with that, might have made itself obsolete.

Yet the chronogram also highlights unexpected and encouraging areas of resistance forming in the crevices of this order: space-making practices that challenge the entangled mess through protest movements, community projects and research collectives that fundamentally reimagine what architecture could look like. The assembly of individuals gathered to speak at the symposium represented these forms of resistance. Individuals who try to critically position themselves, actors emerging from the fissures. As architect Janna Bystrykh, who organized the event, noted, they were ‘toiling alone in their institutions’, each working in different ways to make a difference.

Professor Phoebe Lickwar, for example, presented her research on ‘expanding the canon of landscape architecture’ by exploring the poetic and ancient practice of agro-ecology. In central Italy, she drew attention to a method that has resisted the colonization of land by mono-crop farming. Planting crops in relation to local ecology connects agriculture to flora, fauna and soil. Collective caretaking of these crops provides communities with engagement and meaning. In this context, her students from the University of Texas at Austin, are encouraged to engage in land-based learning, exploring the land, observing the relationships that produce these landscape architectures, and learning from sustainable remnants of agro-ecology, which have become very up-to-date for our future survival.

The forgotten practice of agro-ecology aligns with a form of knowledge production that Kasia Nawratek brings to the conversation. The teacher at Manchester University encourages her students to adopt a post-humanist perspective, drawing on thinkers like Anna Tsing and Rosi Braidotti. Central to her teaching is the concept of polyphony, a term borrowed from music, which refers to the presence of many voices — human, animal, fungal and plant life — all voicing simultaneously. In her courses, Nawratek helps students to become aware of this polyphony, emphasizing the diversity of species that inhabit spaces. She aims to foster a sense of connection between students and the networks of life around them, encouraging them to listen to and become part of the complexity that exists beyond an anthropocentric view of the world.

The symposium continued to explore other ways of telling histories to students, such as the approach provided by Professor Daniel Barber from TU Eindhoven. Barber focuses on ‘de-carbonization’. In his pitch, he examined architecture and urban planning through the lens of energy use — particularly in relation to fossil fuels. By doing so, he illuminates the known architectural canon in a different light, challenging the legacy of modernism once energy use is taken into consideration. Parallel to the re-evaluation of a canon, he also highlights underrepresented histories, like those of solar architecture pioneers in the 1950s.

These are only a few examples of the non-violent ways of thinking, acting and narrating histories presented at the event. They were beautiful to listen to. They claim a critical space in the discourse, exploring affirmative approaches that tries to understand education in the complicatedly interwoven crises. In their exploration of a response to ‘the problem’, they provide not only other ways of thinking but also fundamentally different ways of ‘being in the world’, as Nawratek put it. While these critical approaches are still incomplete — missing discussions on topics like de-growth and spatial politics — they allow students and emerging practitioners to tackle the anxieties that the fragility of our current reality produces. Value compasses, new ways of thinking, which could give direction and turn hope into action, turn ‘hope into a verb’, as IABR director Saskia Stein put it to tie the symposium back to the main topic of the IABR.

However, as architect Sascha Glasl noted, the actors taking this critically ‘in-between’ approach seem dreamy when facing ‘the real world’. In the encounter with the co-founder of Space&Matter, the gap between these critical approaches and the reality of architecture practice became clear. In this space, terms like Interdisciplinarity, De-Colonization, Polyphony and De-Carbonization clash with Venture, Innovation, Investment and Development. Although Space&Matter shares the goal of addressing the poly-crisis through projects like De Ceuvel and new ownership models, their approach seems misaligned with academia’s emerging critiques. If the divide between ‘sustainable’ practice and academia can already be felt, the discourse with a conventional architecture office appears almost impossible.

The effect of this on students was described by Emma Diehl, a student at the Academy in Amsterdam, where students work part-time in an office and attend classes in a study programme. She described how peers hesitate to bring their newly learned values and attitudes into their work environments. This resonates with my own experience, and many ‘critically’ trained graduates leave conventional practices, disheartened, or re-enter academia, seeking alignment with their ideals.
Here, the role of academic institutions became a subject of discussion at the event. How should they position themselves in this multifaceted crisis? What is the relationship between new approaches amidst a poly-crisis and ‘normal’ architectural practice? Should they continue to prepare students to meet current industry demands or reimagine architecture through its potential for fundamental, transformative change? At present, institutions seem to lean towards the former, largely conforming to an existing professional landscape. Many academics at the symposium described themselves as small factions within a larger university system. Critical academics on ‘rowing boats’ that try to push an ‘oil tanker’ off course is the metaphor that architect Lara Schrijver, professor at University Antwerp, used to describe the situation.

The symposium therefore left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, one senses the emergence of a new attitude in architecture education. Educators provide refreshingly sharp analyses of the status quo, offer engaging visions of what architecture could become, and utilize alternative tools and methods to gather knowledge and histories. Listening to them, I felt the presence of a radically different pedagogy, one that transcends the complexities of the poly-crisis and offers empowering avenues for students. An education that provides a set of values that give future architects handles for action. But it seems that the new approaches presented are trapped in the very poly-crisis they seek to address: squeezed between slow-moving education institutions and the demands and language of a ‘real world’ office architecture.
The IABR symposium offered a vital space for these actors in the crevices. A platform for discussing and exchanging ideas, a place to widen an influence and strengthen a critical position. But if a re-imagined design practice is to challenge the dominant architecture entangled with the status quo, many more of such events will be necessary. I agree with Tatjana Schneider when she urged that education needs to ‘shift gears’. It needs to find ways of expanding these other ways of teaching a fundamentally different architecture practice. Academics and students need to start organizing themselves, exerting collective and energetic efforts to overcome institutional inertia and take the lead in transforming the field. When this happens and the crevices widen, perhaps we’ll finally be able to answer the big question of what envisioning better futures means for aspiring architects in this poly-crisis.