The Future of Architecture Education: Barriers and Shifts
Hillier College Dean Branko Kolarevic recently participated in several forums with a focus on access and diversity in architecture education and the recent shifts to online learning.
At the August panel hosted by the American Institute of Architecture New Jersey chapter (AIANJ) speakers discussed what it takes to attract students from the local community to accredited programs like the one at Hillier College, and what is required for community college courses to meet the standards of four-year colleges in order to maximize transfer credits and remove financial barriers.
Kolarevic described how Hillier College consolidated existing Newark-based design collaborations with the city in a more visible way by creating the Newark Design Collaborative. The intent is to “move into a space in downtown Newark and bring what we do into the community, to young people who could actually walk in and see students from the community working on design projects.” Another strategy is to interface with community colleges: “We do have a very active transfer program within the state - students who enter a two-year college can transfer to Hillier; with some we have very strong links, with some we ought to develop better links,” said Kolarevic.
In a field that is traditionally taught in groups, in shared studio spaces where building physical models is part of the learning process, the abrupt shift in the spring to online education produced both opportunities and challenges for faculty and students. At the Architectural Record’s “Innovation” Conference in October, Kolarevic reflected on experimental collaborative projects that he and others had done in virtual learning in mid and late 1990s under the moniker of Virtual Design Studios (VDS).
In a quick snapshot of the culture of innovation and experimentation of the time, Kolarevic ran a global VDS with shared authorship of design projects with students from Hong Kong, Zurich and the US working together on a system that kept track of the projects as they worked in sequential shifts. As Kolarevic pointed out, “These technologies have been with us since the 90s. Now that every single school of architecture around the world has adopted these digital online technologies, what are the kinds of insights and innovations that we should be seeing in the coming years? I would like to think of this semester and next semester as opportunities for innovation and experimentation.”
Co-presenter Martha Thorne, Dean of the Instituto de Empresa School of Architecture & Design in Spain (IEU) added, “We called it liquid learning. By embracing this new term, we were able to rally everybody around an idea of going forward, of thinking in a new way.”
“We are no longer bound to the space of the studio or the space of the school and that has huge implications from the perspective of equity because the people who could not afford to be in given space at a given time could still get an architectural education,” said Kolarevic.
At the November 2020 AIANY Deans Roundtable moderator Milton Curry, Dean of University of Southern California School of Architecture and the sixteen deans present talked about the role of educators in raising awareness of the contributions architecture provides to society in the design of the built environment, the possibility of greater access to education with online delivery of architecture education, and the need for diversification of funding for students and programs. Dean Kolarevic agrees with Leslie Lokko, Dean of the Spitzer School of Architecture at CUNY, who said, “We have an opportunity to design architecture education. But we have to speak honestly if we are to build something new.”
No stranger to the need to address inequities, Kolarevic also played an integral role in the recognition of Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, one of the pioneering women of American architecture and the first woman in the role of president of Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). In 2018 when he was president of ACSA, Kolarevic hosted a conference in Quebec City on the theme of “Engaging the World”, where he nominated Ginkel to receive the 2018 ACSA Award for Distinguished Service for the many firsts in her career, in what was at that time a profession only for men. In another tribute at the University of Toronto on November 12th, Kolarevic and others added their testimonials to an archive, ‘For Her Record’, on Ginkel’s many contributions to the field.
Kolarevic is firm in his belief that the sudden shift to online learning will lead to greater diversity of students gaining access to architectural education, broad adoption of emerging technologies for online learning and a redesign of the pedagogy of architecture itself. More difficult is the undoing of systemic injustices, and there architecture educators can support emergent movements like Design Justice, that encompass the myriad of ways social justice can manifest in everything architects design.
