The struggle against destructive modes of existence in a world off balance remains the most critical and vexing concern of our time. Today’s dominating political and economic order appears too preoccupied with preserving itself to take on political projects in favor of real changes towards a less lethal more livable earth committed to securing multi-species livelihoods. In the face of growing frustrations and bitter divides, future architects must work all the more inquisitively and creatively to develop site-sensitive architectural breakthroughs for palpable change.
Political architecture relates critically to sustainability goals, certificates, and green talk. It looks beyond mainstreamed solutions for grounded commitment. We can do better. Future architects can become more politically active through their profession and through the very spaces of architecture. The profession must realize its political responsibility much more than it does today and act accordingly.
What can architecture do? It is a grand question. We do not expect grand answers. We encourage students to engage with the world outside the Academy, attempting small real-world transformations. Collaboration, dialogue, activism, exhibiting, and petitioning is part of the PA:CS everyday. But there is equally room for pursuing more introvert and idiosyncratic paths of study.
As we pry open various ecologies, we tend to discover uniquely complex practices, rules and regulations, manners and habits that unfold conjointly, even symbiotically, with the built environment. Such places tend to be sensitive to spatial reconstruction. Students engage with building practices in many ways, through spatial transformation, material engineering, ‘alegal’ building codes, twisted typologies and often through the resetting and recombining of scales: new scales of economy, organization, and labor, meeting unconventional scales of tectonics, function, visibility or habitation. Building on the legacy of the Academy as an art academy, MA students are expected to engage in their work with a high degree of independence – to be self-driven in terms of pursuing core interests and developing an independent engagement with architecture. This transitional process into mastery will be guided and supported not least through longer weekly individual conversations/tutorials with a personal tutor. A consequence of this pedagogical model is that studies are tutorial-based more than curriculum-based.
A defining feature of the Political Architecture program is the annual fieldwork campaign. This mandatory excursion provides us with architectural complexity, urgency, and a political context. The fundamental purpose of fieldwork is: 1) to select and explore a concrete political situation of complexity and urgency; 2) to discover and construct individual project contexts, rich enough to feed co-evolutionary project work throughout the academic year.
The general method we adopt at 'Political Architecture: Critical Sustainability' is twofold: on the one hand, a practical, material, and constructive approach; on the other an analytical, conceptual and academic mode of inquiry. Though the approaches are intertwined, their dual capacities are kept separate, feeding off each other in a co-evolutionary process.
This co-evolutionary approach centers on a process of parallel interaction through two-fold paths of investigation, one pursuing academic ‘thinking through scholarly method’, the other developing architectural proposition from ‘heuristic thinking through material production’. Students will begin to probe for creative potentials in connections and distinctions between academic work and architectural design processes.
A polyrhythmic structure characterizes the programme: lectures, individual tutorials, workshops, roundtables, fieldwork, collaborations, and seminars interweave to establish a type of project and research development practice that support the Co-evolutionary Project Work.