The Journal of Architecture

Lead: Pari Riahi and Doreen Bernath

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This thematic call invites critical reflection on the conditions, commitments, and contradictions of teaching and learning architecture in a time of intersecting crises. Amid disillusionment with entrenched pedagogies and growing pressures to instrumentalise education, we ask how architectural training might sustain a sense of consistency – understood as an enduring orientation toward curiosity, ethical responsibility, and transformative possibility. Contributors are encouraged to interrogate the pedagogical structures, epistemologies, and practices that shape architectural education across diverse contexts, and to explore how modes of teaching and learning might be reconfigured to respond meaningfully to shifting social, environmental, and disciplinary horizons.

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In this time of manifest disenchantment with certain ingrained patterns of work in architecture and the field’s inability or unwillingness to respond to the multiple ruptures and crises, what does it mean to teach and learn architecture today? How can one address the challenges of different geographical and social contexts while considering territorial and global interconnections, upholding a clear sense of knowledge? How does one practice teaching while maintaining a consistency of thought and action? Architectural education is marked by specific components in curricula and settings. The design studio and project-based pedagogy have often been set apart from other essential categories of knowledge to learnings in an environment that call for a mixture of scientific and creative process through drawing and making. 

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Much has been examined and debated by those directly engaged with architectural education. On the one hand, there are opinions and scholarship that champion pedagogical principles based on the particularity of teaching and learning architecture, which they believe can be applied more as principles of good educational practices in general across disciplines. On the other hand, there have also been persistent voices calling for significant reforms, evidencing the so-called ‘cliff-edge’ moments of the incompatibility of the graduates fulfilling professional demands or societal needs. The latter has grown rapidly in recent times with the surge of problems arising from commodification of higher education, value of learning overridden by employability, and the admittance of professional inadequacy in adjusting architectural practice at large to meet the demands of climate change and spatial justice. The perseverance of the creative genius as a type, authoritative canons and the reductive basis of success hinging on the delivery of specific building types and systems have further exacerbated entrenched social segregation, hierarchies, and ecological detriments. Other experiments, in forms of hands-on, in-situ knowledge and collaborative practices emerge as alternatives to the disciplinary challenges mentioned above. Radical experiments and initiatives in reforms in different contexts across the world continue to reconfigure what it means to teach and learn architecture by reconnecting the multifaceted agencies of our built environments with the reciprocity of roles and relations. 

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This thematic call is intended to acknowledge the complexity of current debates and to instigate conversation about how we can maintain a sense of consistency in our educational endeavours. How can we engage and negotiate amidst the imaginative, ethical, environmental, and technological forces in architecture today with consistency in principle and in effect? ‘Consistency’ was the final and unfinished memo in Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium.  Clues in the other five memos suggest that consistency is to be understood as the condition of mutual awareness between makers of possibilities. We see this sense of consistency as a plane of possibilities that learning and teaching open up, where pedagogy is, in the best sense, not the certainty of knowledge or controlled outcome, but the anticipation and sustaining of the state of ‘yet-to-become’. Bernard Stiegler refers to the ‘plane of consistency’ that connects to the ‘plane of the extra-ordinary’ and with what Gilles Deleuze proposes as the ‘belief in the world’, which is sustained by philia, or love, of what does not yet exist, as ‘intrinsically doubtful and improbable’. With this prompt we wish to rethink an architectural education, where the passing on of knowledge is one of thinking of new possibilities, oscillating between teaching and being taught, learning and relearning.

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We believe that the recursive and reciprocal relation between teaching and learning needs to be addressed and reinvented with a sense of audacity and hope towards the future of the field. Disciplines, architecture included, have inner and outer modes of operations. Each discipline’s inner modes keep them consistent in their daily acts and life-long convictions, while their outer modes signal their ability to converse and intersect with others. How does consistency, in the present call's context, express itself in the continuum of teaching and learning architecture? Consistency is a complex word, even possibly a problematic one. It can imply rigidity, an adherence to things known and tested. It can also be misconstrued as resistance to the new and unfamiliar. We envision consistency as nurturing qualities and aptitudes that will keep the next generation of architects curious, invested, and fully present within the discipline. Consistency is the ability to make space for difference, for opposition, for undoing all and everything, only to remake, reconfigure, and reimagine them. Consistency includes edges, peripheries, and intersections of architecture with other fields, capable of enduring contaminations, erosions, and shifting horizons. 

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We seek contributions that explore:

• Debates on disciplinary boundaries as manifested or instrumentalised in architectural education, and how such consistency of conviction can, on the one hand, be challenged and altered, and, on the other hand, be maintained as possibilities and alternatives.

• Diverse qualities and aptitudes that can be consistently nurtured in modes of teaching and learning of architecture to sustain curiosity, hold plurality and make space for difference, either resisting the relentless demands of proficiencies, precisions, and obligations or responding to them in unexpected and innovative ways. 

• An expanded sense of nurturing architectural imagination and future actions, which can be consistently encouraged and constructed in architectural training to enable recognition of (and across communities) inclusive dialogues and modes of working with other fields and disciplines.

• Possibilities of interdisciplinary pedagogy in architectural curriculums and degree pathways to enable consistent means of co-learning and -teaching for students and staff with different knowledge bases and specialties, and between subjects and disciplinary structures in current higher education systems.

• Transmissions of in-situ knowledge and skills from practices that can be mutually and consistently tied in to school- and programme-based learnings, challenging the persistent divide between education and practice.

• Structures of collaboration and active advocacy as crucial values and abilities that are developed in the teaching and learning of architecture, that which to maintain the ethical and imaginative consistency of the field to inevitable paradigm shifts in the discipline and the world at large.