How will we learn spatial practice in 2050?

Given that the architecture and construction industries are responsible for 40% of global carbon emissions and territory-altering material extraction, there is a growing urgency to radically rethink how and why we build and therefore how we teach architecture. If spatial practice were to orient more towards repair and reuse, what are the skills, knowledges, subjects, and values that future architects would need to learn? Where and how would they learn - what might be the future modes of learning and teaching for non-extractive regenerative architecture and planetary wellbeing?

Repair the school. What do we question? What needs repair? What should be maintained? Can we interrogate ideas around productivity and production; relationships to capitalist accumulation and corporate power; disciplinary boundaries/centers/margins; myths of individual creative genius; assumptions about expertise and professionalization; hierarchies of class, race, gender, and more; insularity and immersion; types of spatial knowledges that get lifted up; binaries and separations of body and mind, of self and community; commensurability to the impacts and root causes of climate change? 

School of repair. What/how do we need to learn and teach in the climate-changed future? How to create spaces of collective learning about repair, care, co-learning, unbuilding, speculation, solidarity, and other futuring practices for planetary wellbeing? What other pedagogies, methods, and formats arise? What if schools prioritize building from what already exists and creatively rescripting the things around us? Can schools work with an open definition of architecture that goes beyond the imaginary “finished” building at the end of some closed linear narrative, to instead a dynamic assemblage of materials and networks and processes and shifting relationships? 

Re-pairing the school with ____. Who/what do we sister with to co-speculate schools of repair? How do we learn from other spatial knowledges oriented towards futures of repair and wellbeing? How do we learn from and with local practices and organizations, and in the process build power and build possible worlds? To do that, how and what do we unlearn?

In this studio, we operate from Querétaro as a local testing ground and site of learning, recognizing the city as impacted by and inextricably implicated in planetary crises. The city is home to 18 architecture schools yet these schools and its emerging professionals are implicated in local urban conflicts from rampant real estate speculation and resource-intensive sprawl, to struggles for access and mobility in a car-centric culture, to landscape-altering sites of extraction, to displacement of pueblos originarios. We will learn from different neighborhoods of the city as palimpsest of histories and cultural legacies and everyday appropriations and ongoing political contestations – which we will actively engage alongside local community organizations.

This semester is broken into three modules: Re-/Co-/Un-Learning (where we situate ourselves, engage in a collective build in order to world-build, and fill our toolbox with methods, histories, skills, and frameworks); School of _____ (where we develop our speculative projects), and Future Now (where we bring pieces of the future world to our classroom, and translate the project across media).  

To design a school of architecture while in a school of architecture is a project of critical reflection and projection of one’s values into a desired future; it is a call to assert agency over one’s education; it is to question how and why and where one should learn while actively formally engaged in (and paying for and spending time on) learning; it is a process of meta critique of one’s institution; it is to turn one’s gaze upon one’s own position and purpose in the architecture field.

Pedagogically, we will question the modes of studio learning centered around continuous production, competition among peers, and dissemination of images – and instead work towards meaning-making for meaningful making, collaborative production, and creation of processes and infrastructures. Through critiquing how we learn while we learn, we hope this studio will be a space to interrogate the nature of architectural education and our profession in a climate-changed world. What new building protocols we need, whether we need more buildings at all, how to maintain existing building stock and critically engage with the contexts it carries, how to design maintenance and re-use strategies, how to rearticulate access to ownership and ideas of property, how to equitably redistribute materials and resources… This is all on the table for speculation and intervention in this studio.

Coordinated by Cynthia Deng. Co-taught with Nadyeli Quiroz, Angela Fellowes, Ana Isabel Olvera Alacio, Lucas Hoops, Mariana Covarrubias, Daniel Camiro, Yetzi Tafoya, Daniela Cruz Naranjo, Luisa Medina, Israel Viadest, Joaquín Barriendos, and visiting instructors Celia Chaussabel and Katie Rotman.