Nancy Levinson: In his 2014 essay “Rethinking Repair,” media scholar Steven J. Jackson explores the idea of “broken-world thinking.” He starts with a provocative question:
What world does contemporary information technology inhabit? Is it the imaginary 19th-century world of progress and advance, novelty and invention, open frontiers and endless development? Or the 21st-century world of risk and uncertainty, growth and decay, and fragmentation, dissolution, and breakdown? 1
What relevance might Jackson’s formulation have for architecture? To what extent do the design disciplines inhabit (still) a world that assumes “open frontiers and endless development” — a world of new buildings, new landscapes, new cities? To what extent are those assumptions, that world, increasingly problematic?
Jorge Otero-Pailos: We are in a new era in which everyone, not just architects, is more conscious that the earth has limited resources, and a limited carrying capacity. But our education system has not caught up with this realization. Architecture is still being taught in much the same way as in the 19th century. We teach students to solve problems that arose during the industrial revolution, when factory production started spewing building products in all shapes and sizes. Architecture emerged as a profession to oversee putting all these parts together as cheaply, quickly, and safely as possible. Today, students are still learning this métier. We have become very good at putting factory products together. But we are not as good at figuring out whether this is the problem we should be working on.
Everyone, not just architects, is conscious that the earth has a limited carrying capacity. But our education system has not caught up with this realization.
It is clear in my mind that the urgent problem for architects is how to care for the existing built environment. We need a new architectural imagination, and new pedagogical agendas to go with it. Imagine if every architecture school were to re-orient towards solving the massive problem of how to care for the built environment we already have, along with its many ramifications — social, economic, environmental, aesthetic, cultural, political, artistic, and so on? Such an imagination — such a pedagogy — would generate exciting new conceptions of architecture, new experimental practices that would help us to envision a better future, one that not only accounts for what is already here, but repairs it, improves it.
Wherever you are, look out the window, walk around your neighborhood, and much of what you see is less than 100 years old. To build all this, we burned enough fossil fuels to send the earth’s climate into a tailspin. Look closer, and you will see that many buildings are deteriorating or outright falling apart. They were designed for 30- to 50-year lifecycles, and the expectation was that, instead of being renovated, these buildings would be torn down and replaced. But we simply cannot afford to burn the fossil fuels necessary to replace every building with new ones over the next 50 years.
Given this obvious fact, it is perverse to continue with architectural curricula structured around designing for new construction. This is not to say that we should not teach such things at all. There will always be need for new construction. It is a matter of rebalancing. Schools need to put most of their pedagogical efforts into educating architects capable of repairing and re-imagining the existing built environment.
We don’t take care of the buildings we have. Most graduates have little knowledge about the life of existing buildings.
The issue is that we don’t know how to take care of the buildings we already have. Buildings that have minor problems, that could continue to be used with small tweaks and repairs, are left to decay and are then demolished. We are not teaching architects how to recognize the intersecting root causes leading to a building’s demise, which are not always about water infiltration and material degradation. They might also include ideological, social, financial, political, or environmental toxicity, among other systemic factors. Can you imagine educating doctors without teaching the causes of diseases, or how to recognize individual pathologies, or the social dynamics of infectious diseases? Yet most graduates of architecture schools have very little knowledge about the life of existing buildings, the causes of their obsolescence, and why some endure against all odds. This is an issue that Kiel Moe and Daniel Friedman confront in their essay in this series, in which they propose the practice of tending.
Looming over this discussion is, of course, climate change. Last July was the world’s hottest month ever, and we know that this is a trend. 2 Meanwhile, the latest report from the U.N. Environment Programme notes that “in 2021, construction activities rebounded back to pre-pandemic levels in most major economies,” and “CO2 emissions from building operations have reached an all-time high …. The building and construction sector is not on track to achieve decarbonization by 2050.” 3 So, yes, it’s time for schools of architecture to show an alternative to the profession, and to reorient our teaching, research, and creative imaginations.
This is not easy, however, because there’s a lot of inertia in the academic system, and a lot of money in the construction industry, keeping architects hypnotized by the mistaken idea that architecture equals new construction.
NL: It’s telling that my question about the historical paradigm of progress and novelty has led so directly to climate change. Unsurprisingly, the word “inertia” comes up a lot in climate literature. Bill McKibben has described “inertia and vested interest” as “the main reasons our energy systems have been slow to change.” In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh puzzles over what he calls “the peculiar resistance” that has, in his view, prevented writers of serious fiction from grappling with global warming and its impacts. “Contrary to what I might like to think,” he writes, “my life is not guided by reason; it is ruled, rather, by the inertia of perpetual motion.” 4
What do you see as causing the inertia — the resistance — in the design disciplines? Is it largely a question of “vested interest”? Of the professional acclaim and financial rewards that (still) follow from designing new buildings?
JO-P: There are many intersecting institutional, economic, and political forces that create resistance to change in architecture schools. Rather than trying to enumerate them all, let me focus on the force that I think is least examined and most recalcitrant: the force of ideals. We need to take a hard look at the ideals that architects aspire to, because these ideals have a powerful effect on designers’ willingness or unwillingness to change.
Ideals are the currency of schools. They are what attract young people to pursuing an architectural education and living as architects. But if you look at architecture schools worldwide, the overwhelming majority uphold what is in my view the mistaken ideal that to be an architect is “to build.”
Ideals are at the core of architectural education, and they are different than goals. The horrible corporate-speak phrase “learning objectives” conceives of education in terms of goals, and frames education in purely utilitarian terms, as a product. Ideals are not utilitarian. They are what we aspire to. They constitute the grammar through which we make sense of ourselves and our lives. Architecture schools jealously protect the ideals that give meaning to the life of the architect. But the ideal that is currently being protected is out of sync with the real needs of our times.
Ideals are not utilitarian. They are what we aspire to. They constitute the grammar through which we make sense of ourselves and our lives.
It is incredibly difficult, but not impossible, to challenge the ideal that architecture schools currently enshrine: the firm belief that the highest service an architect can render society is to design for new construction. When architects are presented with the unwelcome facts that this tireless work is in fact enabling an extractive industry that is causing great harm to societies and environments the world over, architects’ ideals and sense of self are challenged. These unwelcome facts, which are elaborated in scientific journals every day, create a psychological tension. It is interesting to observe how the architects in charge of running schools are responding to this tension: they are promoting research into using “greener” materials, and introducing courses and curricula to teach students to build “sustainably.” All these initiatives are ways of rationalizing the existing ideal that architects must continue to design for new construction, only with “better” materials and processes.
In other words, architecture schools are unwilling to absorb the new facts of our human condition.
Such schools are suffering from cognitive dissonance. The psychological theory of cognitive dissonance predicts that, when ideals and sense of self are challenged by external facts, an individual or a group will make up rationalizations (e.g., research into new green materials, sustainable new construction) that allow them to believe they were right all along. Paradoxically, schools can present themselves as “designing the future” or “addressing climate change and social justice,” while resisting the pedagogical changes required to prepare students to really address those problems.
Yet there’s an intensifying desire for systemic change. Consider the powerful statement made by architects Mauro Baracco and Louise Wright in collaboration with artist Linda Tegg when (as curators of the Australian Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale) they called for “architecture actively engaging with the repair of the places it is part of.” 5 Students can see the dissonance between what they’re taught and what society needs. More and more, you see projects denouncing the extractivism of architecture, and questioning the profession’s complicity with the construction industry. A good example is the anthology Non-Extractive Architecture: On Designing without Depletion, which was published by the research-and-design collective Space Caviar. The authors get right to the point in the introduction: “As the true urgency of the environmental crises we face becomes clear, architecture requires fundamental reinvention …. Could architecture be understood as the practice of guardianship of the environment, both physical and social, rather than an agent of depletion?” 6
Frances Richard: “Guardianship of the environment” — that’s a compelling vision of practice.
NL: It’s very much in sync with our Repair Manual series, which started with the proposition that a profound sociotechnical transformation was imminent: a paradigm shift from building the world to repairing the world. In his essay, Daniel Barber is equally clear about the failures of sustainability. “To put it plainly, sustainability hasn’t worked,” he writes. “Or rather, what’s really being sustained are longstanding professional methods and practices.” 7
And so, the inertia. Is this also due to the sheer magnitude of the challenge? The profound difficulty of changing not only systems but also longstanding ideals?
JO-P: Yes, it is. It would mean a veritable pedagogical and professional revolution. The last time this was even attempted within academia was in the late 1960s and early ’70s — a tumultuous time around the world. In America, intersecting sociopolitical forces, including the civil rights movement, led to important reforms in architectural pedagogy. Significantly, the new consciousness of the detrimental effects of top-down new-build architecture on communities led many architects to join the preservation movement. Jane Jacobs was emerging as a defender of neighborhoods threatened with demolition and redevelopment. One chapter in The Death and Life of Great American Cities opens with this salvo: “Cities need old buildings so badly.” 8
To change these ideals would mean a veritable pedagogical and professional revolution. The last time this was attempted was in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Also, in those years, the architect James Marston Fitch — a close ally of Jacobs — was beginning to teach courses in preservation, and in 1964, he started Columbia’s program in historic preservation.9 It was the first such program in America, and his goal was nothing less than to revolutionize architectural education. Fitch was a polymath. He had worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority; he had command of populations statistics, having worked as a statistician during the Great Migration, trying to figure out where housing would to be needed. He also understood meteorological data, having served in the Military Weather Service during World War II. He saw the connections among these disciplines. He practiced what we now call interdisciplinarity. This led him to develop a keen interest in the relationships among architecture, local weather, and planetary climate. His 1978 essay “Architecture and Energy” is remarkably prescient. Fitch argued that much of American architecture is based on an “authentically hallucinatory” assumption that fossil fuel energy is inexhaustible, and old buildings are expendable. He issued this challenge:
Before we decide to construct a single new building, we must re-evaluate all existing building stock around us. Before we destroy old buildings in favor of new structures we must understand that this not only involves the expenditure of a great deal of energy, but might well be less efficient. 10
Clearly, Fitch was ahead of his time. He’s still ahead of our time! Because, as it turned out, preservation was sidelined in architectural education. By the early 1980s, it had been sectioned off into a separate division, and its revolutionary potential was not realized — at least, not yet.
NL: Why was Fitch sidelined? Did this reflect the longstanding tensions between those architects who espouse formalist agendas, and those who champion social and environmental concerns? Did it also reflect larger sociopolitical changes, as the collectivist ideals of the ’60s gave way to the market-centric and individualistic culture of the Reagan era?
JO-P: I think the fact that he didn’t have an architecture degree was part of the reason his colleagues at Columbia could easily discredit his ideas. His family was not wealthy enough to finish paying for architecture school, so he had to drop out and work as a draftsman. I also suspect that his colleagues recognized that his vision of the future was a direct challenge to the ideal of the architect as designer of new buildings.
Fitch’s notion of architecture as a “curatorial” practice was a first attempt to put care at the center of architectural pedagogy. Both words come from the Latin curare. His interest in care was his response to evidence, already well established in the 1960s, that new buildings were creating more social and environmental problems than they were solving.
Experimental preservation is a way of developing methods of caring for the built environment, imagining new ideals that might revitalize a world that is already built up.
I think that, as a dropout, he had not been fully socialized into the ideals of architecture schools — and so he could see the logical consequences of the facts, and was able to challenge existing models of practice without feeling that he was challenging his own sense of self. He started to think about existing buildings, especially pre-industrial and pre-air-conditioned buildings, as particularly responsive to local weather conditions, and became interested in what we now call passive design. He was also a great writer, and could communicate very effectively. There was great promise in Fitch’s understanding of preservation as a new way of practicing architecture centered on care.
FR: Is that what you want to return to now, at Columbia?
JO-P: We are certainly interested in recovering Fitch’s capacity to understand architecture, the weather, and society as related along a continuum of care. Through the Preservation Technology Lab, we’re also including artists and artistic methods, informed by science and technology, in how we creatively reimagine the existing built environment. 11 There is a powerful movement in the art world towards cultivating forms of care and repair in existing places. Artists are not invested in architecture’s ideal of new construction, so they have an easier time assimilating the facts and developing new practices in response. My colleague Erica Avrami is broadening the preservation program to include community-engaged research methods, providing new evidence on links among the existing built environment, climate change, and social justice, and pushing for change in regulatory policy. Andrew Dolkart is contributing novel documentation methods that are helping to recognize the role of LGBTQ communities in shaping New York, showing students how to repair such silences.
We are in dialogue with colleagues engaged in advancing experimental preservation elsewhere: Erik Langdalen and Mari Lending in Oslo, Thordis Arrhenius, Jonas Dahlberg, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti in Stockholm, Adam Lowe and Carlos Bayod in Madrid, Cecilia Puga and Emilio de la Cerda in Santiago de Chile, Paulo Tavares in Brasilia, Ines Weitzman, Rodney Harrison, and Cecilia Bembibre in London, David Gissen in New York, Azra Aksamija in Boston, Paul Rucker in Richmond, Anya Sirota in Ann Arbor, Elizabeth Blassius, Jonathan Solomon and Mechtild Widrich in Chicago, Bie Plevoets in Hasselt, Mo Krag in Aarhus, Nikolaus Hirsch in Brussels, Luise Rellensmann in Cottbus, Pavla Melková in Prague, Daniela Zyman in Vienna, Filwa Nazer, Dania Alsaleh and the Gazzaz brothers in Jeddah, Sara Alissa, Nojoud Alsudairi, Alaa Tarabzouni, Fahad bin Naif, Nawaf bin Ayyaf and Ahmed Matter in Riyadh, Raqs Media Collective in Delhi, Alex Hok-nang in Hong Kong, Jennifer Ferng in Sydney, Rory Hyde and Hannah Lewi in Melbourne, among many others.
We are interested in the cultural meanings that existing places carry, as much as in the CO2 they embody. We therefore work at the intersection of art and technology, meaning-making and the production of scientific knowledge. Experimental preservation is a way of developing and testing methods of caring for the built environment, as well as of imagining, through those very practices, new ideals that aspire to revitalize a world that is already built up. This practice responds to the human and environmental conditions that Bryony Roberts has termed tabula plena — as opposed to tabula rasa. 12
NL: So we need to move from a paradigm of growth to a paradigm of repair. In short, to change the value proposition of architecture. What will that involve, specifically?
JO-P: Whether we call it repair, or care, or experimental preservation, we are referring to the pursuit of a new ideal or paradigm — a word that comes from ancient Greek, and means “to show side by side.” The new paradigm is revealing itself side by side with the old, and it must be compelling enough for architects to aspire to it, to find enough richness in it to make sense of their purpose in the world. Only a more compelling ideal can overcome the current one. This is not something that can be imposed from above by a dean or a chair. It has to emerge organically, from below, from the students and faculty. And when it does, it needs to be protected and nourished. That’s the role of good leadership in schools: to cultivate.
Whether we call it repair, or care, or experimental preservation, we are in pursuit of a new paradigm. This is not something that can be imposed from above.
One has to keep one’s ear close to ground and listen for the sound that seeds of ideals make when germinating below the surface. For example, one has to pay attention to what advanced students choose to work on when doing a capstone project or writing a thesis. Over the last three years, sitting on final reviews at a number of schools, including my own, I have noticed a sea change. In 2023, with one exception, every capstone project at the Oslo School of Architecture focused on redesigning or repairing existing buildings or cities. At Columbia, more than three quarters of all studios in the last three years have involved existing buildings. The architecture school at Hasselt University in Belgium has refocused around reuse of the built environment, and they have mounted an important international exhibition with the Flanders Architecture Institute, As Found: Experiments in Preservation, that takes the pulse of experimental preservation. 13
In Turkey, Sevince Bayrak and Oral Göktaş, partners in the firm SO? Architecture and Ideas, and professors at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at MEF University in Istanbul, transformed a pool building destined for demolition into an auditorium and cultural hub. “If we define the building as a container,” they wrote, “then the building becomes the site itself and architecture no longer needs empty plots to flourish, but existing structures to begin the transformation.” 14 As curators of the Turkish Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, they surveyed experimental preservation practices in Turkey, and printed quotes by leading international architects. I remember this from Marina Tabassum in Bangladesh: “We need a generation of architects who do not indulge in the madness of building but take part in repair.” 15 The exhibition included a “repair shop” with materials ranging from the prosaic to the conceptual, aimed at inspiring and educating the public.
It would be interesting to do a transverse study to ascertain the extent to which a turn towards experimental preservation is manifesting in the international ecosystem of architecture schools. Such a study should also include architectural institutions with a pedagogical mission such as foundations, museums, and galleries.
NL: To continue this point: What you are describing does seem to be a new ideal, or paradigm, that is emerging organically. Where do you see this trend leading within academia? Is it being “cultivated, protected, and nourished”?
JO-P: To venture an informed guess, we should attend to the common language that is gaining currency in academia. These shared words form a deep discursive current that is slowly but relentlessly tugging us in a new direction. Some words I hear repeated are: care, repair, preserve, reuse, sustain, reciprocate, degrow, decarbonize, decolonize, anti-extractivism, antiracism, spatial justice, and sustainability. While each means different things, if we take a step back, we notice their relatedness, and start to see the contours of the ideal that is taking shape. My interpretation is that, at the heart of this burgeoning new ideal is the aspiration that architecture will evolve into a creative practice capable of repairing damaged realities, nourishing and being nourished by a deeper engagement with existing built environments, in order to sustain the people and the nonhuman species who live in those environments.
Architecture can evolve into a creative practice capable of repairing damaged realities.
For this very reason, I think it is an exciting time to be an architect. The discipline is being rethought. Architecture is what architecture does. Today architecture is defined by what it does to the existing built environment and the people and animals and plants in it. Architecture is no longer defined by style, by what it looks like, as in modernism and postmodernism, or by its size, as during the starchitect moment — remember S,M,L,XL? All that ended with the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. Today, architects cannot simply choose to operate at one scale and ignore the others. We are compelled to work at all scales simultaneously, because we recognize that architecture is a form of articulating relationships across these scales, from dust particles to continents.
This is what Andrés Jaque calls trans-scalarity. It is not about picking a particular scale, whether global, territorial, urban; or about choosing to work at the scale of the neighborhood, the building, the interior, or the molecule. It is about engaging simultaneously across all these scales and their associated publics. Andrés’s installation, XHOLOBENI YARDS. Titanium and the Planetary Making of SHININESS / DUSTINESS, enacts this idea, demonstrating the interconnectedness of New York’s Hudson Yards and the South African village of Xholobeni, through close documentation of the production of the shiny glass facades that define Hudson Yards: their dependence on titanium from Xholobeni; the financing that structures this extraction; the neocolonial supply chains; the dispossessing of the most vulnerable citizens, both in New York and in Xholobeni, by their own governments. This is a radical critique, a new expansion of formalist approaches to “site analysis” which once only looked at relationships between architectural shapes, and reduced analysis of ecosystems to the directions of the sun and prevailing winds.
To cultivate this yet-unnamed ideal of architecture requires nourishing the ground with supportive pedagogies. This means educating students to document, assess, and care for ecosocial interconnectedness in the existing built environment. It also means loosening the grip of the ideal that the core deliverables of design studios should be design for new construction.
NL: What roles might preservation play in this new direction, this new ideal?
JO-P: Preservation has a rich reserve of concepts and methods. For example, the understanding of heritage as at once tangible and intangible offers great lessons as we reimagine architectural design to encompass both material flows and new cultural practices made possible by existing built environments. But we will need to overcome the historical demotion of preservation within architectural pedagogy.
This bias against preservation goes back to the origins of the profession. During the last two centuries, as the ideal of architecture as an extractive practice developed, preservation was excluded from architecture schools, and its forms of creativity were largely ignored. Nevertheless, and against all odds, preservation survived inside the schools, keeping alive the possibility that the practice of architecture could be something entirely different. In the margins, preservation developed methods of care that can be drawn upon by anyone interested in these questions today. Preservation has always posed fundamental challenges to the conception of architecture as extractive new construction, and in this sense, the current turn towards preservation is hastening the recalibration of schools towards the ideal of care and repair.
The understanding of heritage as at once tangible and intangible can help us reimagine architectural design to encompass both material flows and new cultural practices.
We mentioned climate change, and I’d like to return to this important factor in the turn towards preservation. This turn does not come naturally, because older architects — the ones teaching today — went into the profession attracted by the old ideal, the promise of contributing new designs for new construction. Understandably, they feel that a turn towards preservation is, in a sense, a betrayal of their professional identity. I speak from experience here. As an architecture student at Cornell in the early 1990s, I was never exposed to preservation. It is therefore incumbent on us to facilitate faculty exchanges between architecture and preservation. But we should not stop there. Every faculty member needs to get outside their comfort zone and, with some humility, see what they can learn from colleagues in other disciplines about how they approach care of the existing environment. Preservationists have a lot to learn from architects as well, and we will have to overcome the resentment that comes from being treated as an inferior discipline. Everyone has to bury the hatchet.
NL: In what ways, exactly, do you see this as having an impact in the profession?
JO-P: One of the particularities of professional schools is that many faculty members are also practicing professionals. So the impact is real and immediate. I mentioned Andrés Jaque, and I would be remiss not to mention other colleagues, such as Mario Gooden, and Scott Marble and Karen Fairbanks, whose recent expansion of the building that houses the Africana Studies department at Brown University manifests a thoughtful engagement with that scholarly community. The project aims to repair both the building and the social relations of belonging to a place. Wonne Ickx and his firm Productora have intelligently transformed Santiago de Chile’s former postal-sorting facilities, designed in the 1970s by Chilean brutalist Boris Guiñeman, into a new headquarters for a rail company, that also allows for public access. Kate Orff, through SCAPE, has been advancing radical repair of existing built landscapes. For her, architecture extends underwater and into more-than-human ecosystems.
Or take what is happening at Yale, where the dean, Deborah Berke, published a recent manifesto titled Transform, co-authored with Thomas de Monchaux, that takes inspiration from experimental preservation theories and methods, and rightly pushes against some of preservation’s more normative practices and problematic policies, such as those that prevent aesthetic changes at all cost. She argues that such inflexibility is intentionally blind to its negative ecosocial consequences, and she calls out preservationists who refuse to take a hard look at these impacts.2 This thinking is informed by her practice at TenBerke, and in turn, her academic work has helped to clarify her intentions going forward. In New Haven, she carefully combined two existing buildings, an ice cream factory and a glass blowing supply store, into a studio space and community center run by artist Titus Kaphar. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, architecturally and socially.
Another dean, Hashim Sarkis at MIT, has decided to move the architecture school into an historic building, rather than build a new one. Sarkis argues that this move is necessary to “incubate innovations for the built environments.” The best environment for students and faculty who are working to imagine the future, he claims, is a building built in 1895! This is truly a shift in the architectural imagination.
And Meejin Yoon, Cornell’s dean, and her firm Höweler and Yoon, have developed an approach that is deeply responsive to the eco-social layers in existing structures and communities, as demonstrated by their Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at UVA, designed in collaboration with GSAPP’s Mabel Wilson — which is very much a work of repairing social injustices inscribed in the built environment.
It is important to note that these are not examples of one-way movement from academia to the profession. There is a parallel trend within the profession that is exercising pressure on academia to change its ideals. If you track the AIA billing index, you can see that, two decades ago, work on existing buildings constituted about 30 percent of total revenues for U.S. firms. Recently, the figure has increased to 44 percent. 16 If these trends continue, as it seems they will, they will contribute to the development of new ideals, or what you are calling a new paradigm.
FR: So we have the firm and the school, producing interesting reparative projects, courses, and studios. Does this add up to teaching care for the planetary commons? Can the training of practitioners in care at the level of world climate actually be sponsored by extant institutions, given that even adventurous administrators must contend with institutional histories and habits and investments, both social and financial? Or can such pedagogies become truly new — at least for now, for a while — only at the margins, where one discipline touches another? And, if it is the case that radically transdisciplinary repair of the climate commons can only be fostered at the edges of established institutions, would we need to create something like an architectural hedge school or an insurgent, non-accredited, para-institutional preservation school? An ad hoc work-study zone on the fringes, outside the university or professional office?
Every faculty member needs to get outside their comfort zone and learn from colleagues in other fields about care of the existing environment.
JO-P: To teach care for the planetary commons does indeed require a new pedagogy. To state the obvious, architects are taught to care for what their clients pay for, as well as what they themselves are legally responsible for — which are the materials to be assembled into a building on a discrete plot of land. Architects are not paid to care, or insured to take responsibility for, anything outside the property line. Teaching care for the planetary commons means radically expanding the scale of what architects are taught to care about. What institutional framework would support teaching students to think in this expanded way? It seems to me possible to cultivate this new pedagogy within existing educational institutions.
Take, for example, Theaster Gates at the University of Chicago, where in 2011 he founded the Arts and Public Life initiative, a pedagogical platform that advances experimental preservation methods in ways that can ethically sustain communities of color. As a trained urban planner, he contrasts these principles against traditional models, which often put profit above community. The success of such practice-based pedagogies lies in the ability of researchers to generate methods and principles that others can apply in their own work. Gates translated the methodologies he derived within academia to the real world of community redevelopment. In 2013, only two years after founding the APL, he created the Rebuild Foundation, purchasing the Stony Island State Savings Bank from the City of Chicago for one dollar, and reimagining it as the Stony Island Arts Bank, a space where the community could invest its cultural energy and draw communal benefits, starting a virtuous cycle.
Sadly, urban planning programs don’t teach his methods. School leaders need to work in a multipronged way to update national accreditation criteria through institutions like National Architectural Accrediting Board, which is U.S.-based, but also accredits schools in Europe, the Middle East, and South America. I believe an important component of cultivating this new pedagogy is to introduce a requirement within the NAAB and similar accrediting institutions for hands-on experimental preservation work. Hands-on work is necessary to cultivate the awareness that architecture cannot be contained within the plot of land.
The way I came to this awareness was cleaning the facades of buildings with my own two hands. This work constitutes the ongoing series The Ethics of Dust, which I began in 2008. These artworks emerged from the intersection of architecture and experimental preservation. I wanted to preserve the dust that would normally be thrown out, because it seemed to me, intuitively at first, that this dust contained important information about architecture’s environmental footprint. This dust, which you can see deposited as dark stains on facades, comes in large measure from the boilers of buildings, as well as electric power plants and traffic. The smoke produced as a byproduct when we heat, cool, and electrify buildings is as much a condition of possibility for architecture as concrete or steel. The airborne particles we call smoke or dust are therefore an architectural material. Yet smoke cannot be contained inside the plot of land. To manipulate this material requires new ways of caring for architecture that encompass this larger territory. It invites us to imagine how to care for the atmosphere as an airborne built environment. This is a method of care that engages with the planetary commons.
Hands-on exercises must present opportunities for discovering and coming to terms with challenging material in this way. It is not easy for students, accustomed to thinking about architecture as a tectonic assembly of static materials on a single plot of land, to assimilate the fact that architecture has a-tectonic dimensions. By focusing on how to repair what architecture damages, students are freed up to creatively engage with the a-tectonic dimensions of buildings, which are planetary.
Teaching care for the planetary commons means radically expanding the scale of what architects are taught to care about.
It is very important for these exercises to be centered on how to do the repair, with material methods. The importance of attending to how we repair is related to what Cesare Brandi called the “methodological moment,” the moment when a caregiver recognizes that their work is not simply technical, but also a way of thinking, raising critical questions about the thing being repaired; about their own reasons for repairing it; and about others who are invested in its repair, e.g., clients or affiliated communities. For example, how would you repair a broken vase? Would you use cheap, quick-drying superglue to hide your work? Or would you use gold to fill the cracks, to show your reparative effort? Your choice is telling. As you work, you will have to face questions about the vase itself; how you value the act of repair; your willingness and capacity to invest in this act; your appreciation of the vase once it has been altered; your concern for others, including those who came before you and made the vase, and those who will come after you and use the repaired vase; and much more. These are ethical questions.
It is also important that exercises afford students moments to reflect — preferably in group discussions — on their hands-on methods, so that they can make corrections and adjustments to align their methods with their unfolding ethical frameworks. Otherwise, if there is no opportunity for process-based discussions, and their work is displayed only in a final review, then repair becomes simply a way of “showing” an a priori ethical position. The work of repair will then degenerate into pedagogical moralism, and eventually, worse, into pedagogical dogma. Repair would thus become blind to its own orthodoxies.
Your question of how we begin to teach architecture as care for the planetary commons is provocative. The examples of methods that I just offered are only one little piece of the puzzle. If we move in this pedagogical direction, I think we will reveal other dimensions of the discipline that will be crucial for architecture schools.
NL: What do you mean by “other dimensions”?
JO-P: I mean the word quite literally, as other ways to measure architecture. The prefix “di-” comes from Latin and, earlier, Greek; it means two, twice, or doubling, as in “carbon dioxide,” which has two oxygen atoms. Through my work in the preservation of dust, I have come into material contact with a dimension of architecture which is a-tectonic, in motion, planetary, yet longer lasting than its tectonic double. It is difficult to see with one’s eyes, to apprehend with one’s hands, and therefore to measure with the conventional tools of architectural documentation, like a tape measure. But it is crucial to measure this other dimension in order to produce evidence that we can then synthesize into knowledge, and eventually act upon it creatively. To measure is to disclose, to bring evidence into view.
There is a moment when a caregiver recognizes their work as not simply technical, but a way of thinking about the thing being repaired.
The Ethics of Dust is one way in which I have attempted to measure a-tectonic architecture. It is a method that results in a series of documents of dust from around the world. Inspired by the artist Eva Hesse, I experimented with latex as a way of casting, removing, and collecting dust. I don’t much like the word “cleaning,” because it does not account for what happens to the dust after it is removed. I have found the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s reframing of cleaning as an act of care (through her idea of “Maintenance Art”) more precise and generative.
The technique involves applying liquid conservation latex to walls, which polymerizes as its water content evaporates, absorbing surface dust. Once dry, the latex with the dust can be peeled off as a cast. These casts are made at architectural scale, in order to record the patterns in which dust was deposited, and allow the viewer to read these patterns in relation to the original wall. This is important environmental data, because wind direction, driving rain, humidity, and sun exposure are factors in dust deposition rates, and the projections and recesses of a wall create microclimates.
This, in other words, is a model of practice that understands “architecture” not only as materials that sit on the ground, but also as a system of materials that circulate in the sky.
FR: I want to ask again about intransigent institutional facts. Even a professor or administrator or practitioner — not to mention a client — who cares passionately about climate catastrophe might justifiably say, “it’s all fine and well to take care of the sky. But we can’t pay for that.”
JO-P: Pragmatically, schools have to perform a balancing act between short term and long term. But we know that today’s “marginal” concerns are going to determine the next 40 or 50 years — that is, the length of time our students will be in practice. Schools need to balance their responsibility towards students who need to get a job tomorrow, and their responsibility towards those same students who will need to remain employed for decades.
It would be irresponsible for architecture schools not to reorganize pedagogy with the long view in mind — to center some of what is marginal today.
It would be irresponsible for architecture schools not to reorganize their pedagogies with the long view in mind. This means bringing to the center of pedagogy some of what is marginal today, but which we know will be central in the future. The information that is calling into question existing models of pedagogy is there for everyone to see. But acting on it is hard, because no school wants to be the first to make major changes. Schools are constantly benchmarking themselves against their peers. What this means is that, as in a flock of starlings, once one takes flight, others will eventually join the murmuration. That’s how pedagogical culture will eventually change.
NL: What are some examples of narratives that, historically, have exerted transformative cultural power? And can you say more about the cultural narratives that architects might craft for this century? Or perhaps there are narratives from other fields that they might adapt to their own purposes, their new ideals?
JO-P: A major narrative of care in architecture was written in the mid-19th century, by John Ruskin. With all his faults, Ruskin was a critical thinker and a visionary. He wasn’t an architect, but he rewrote the narrative of architecture as care at the very moment, during the industrial revolution, when architects were gripped by the ideal of working in the service of private interests, of design as cost-effective planning for the assembly of industrial materials, of polluting as if the earth was an “ultimate sink” that would magically make our toxic materials disappear. 17 He articulated an ideal of architecture as being in service not of professional self-interest, nor of the client, but rather of the common good for every living creature. “There is no wealth but life,” he wrote defiantly. 18 Ruskin criticized architects who blindly did whatever they were told; who designed whatever they were asked to design. In doing so, he argued, they were participating in the transfer of wealth from the public to the private, a process he termed the production of “illth.” One vital way to counteract the illth of architecture, he believed, was to reorient towards the care of existing buildings.
When do we start to talk about what we refuse to design?
Of course, Ruskin was ridiculed within architecture schools for much of the 20th century as a fuddy-duddy. But outside the schools, he has been credited as a pioneer of preservation and of environmentalism. He was an influential teacher. One of his students, the artist Sir William Blake Richmond, started the Coal Smoke Abatement Society in England in 1898. Richmond designed stained glass windows, and he asked himself if he should keep making stained glass when nobody could see the light come through them, because industrial smoke blocked the sun. He learned from Ruskin to be a political activist, and he decided to solve the artistic problem at a political level. He started the first environmental society in the U.K., and 60 years later, in 1956, it led to passage of the Clean Air Act in England. Richmond didn’t see the adoption of that law. But, if it wasn’t for his Coal Smoke Abatement Society, there might be no clean air in London or in the United States, because our Clean Air Acts of 1963 and 1970 followed the British legislation of 1956. So the design ambitions and creativity of the architect need not stop at the lot line.
NL: When do we start to talk about what we refuse to design? When do leading architects say, “no, we won’t build a new building. We want to work with you, the client, to redevelop existing buildings”? Famously, Lacaton & Vassal were asked years ago to redesign a park in Bordeaux, and they ended up saying, “we think this park is good as is. Just keep maintaining it.” Their metaphor, in explaining the idea, relates explicitly to care. Here they are in The Guardian:
“When you go to the doctor,” said Jean-Philippe Vassal, “they might tell you that you’re fine, that you don’t need any medicine. Architecture should be the same. If you take time to observe, and look very precisely, sometimes the answer is to do nothing.” 19
Certainly Lacaton & Vassal have earned widespread recognition for their approach. When they were awarded the Pritzker Prize, the jury citation noted their “commitment to a restorative architecture that is at once technological, innovative, and ecologically responsive.” 20 On the other hand, they have yet to exert much influence — to change the cultural narrative. Perhaps their approach is still too radical?
Let’s return to the idea of resuscitating the unrealized ambitions of historic preservation as a discipline. Call it radical repair. Channeling Ruskin, channeling Fitch, where would you like to see the profession go?
JO-P: Lacaton & Vassal seem to me to offer a great direction for the profession. It is important, also, to listen and learn from communities who inhabit the buildings and environments that need repair, because they know best what is broken. The recent uprising of communities against confederate and colonial monuments makes this patently clear. To move towards a paradigm of repair, we need to teach students to understand that built environments are shared resources, and that these resources have meaningful histories. We need to think of climate culturally and collaboratively.
Architects cannot “solve” the problem of climate change. No one discipline can do that. But we are not even teaching architects to collaborate, not really. Studio pedagogy is still overwhelmingly structured around the assessment of individual design skills, not collaborative skills. This could be easily changed, yet we haven’t really done it.
NL: A few years ago, in these pages, landscape architect Billy Fleming argued that if designers want to have real impact — in Ruskin’s terms, to serve not the private client but the public good — we need to start by “remaking the discipline.” 21 To what degree do you see students pushing for such change? In the climate community, there’s a popular narrative that “young people will lead the way.” Yet others rightly argue that this is feckless and irresponsible — that it’s the older generations that have the power, the money, the institutional positions. 22
JO-P: I think that academia has an important role to play in showing possible alternatives that are compelling enough for the profession to follow. Students do have power to influence schools’ direction, and their greatest contributions to academia are the ideals they bring with them.
FR: But this remains — doesn’t it? — an example of tweaking existing disciplinary and institutional patterns, rather than revolutionizing them.
NL: I agree. To state the challenge another way: How do you educate students for a profession that shouldn’t keep existing in the way it now exists? For a future that will not — or should not — resemble the past? How can schools train students to practice in a profession still rooted in that 19th-century value proposition, while educating them to revolutionize or reform that same profession — to create a new value proposition, a new cultural narrative?
JO-P: Schools have the responsibility to go beyond protecting the ideals of the current profession. They need to become laboratories for cultivating new ideals centered around care and repair, a new grammar through which students can make sense of themselves, their work, and its purpose in the world. Schools should develop the student’s capacity not only to question things as they are, but to propose and test alternatives. It is important that these experiments are not foreclosed too early with the reasoning that they have no immediate pragmatic consequence in the current profession. They need time to gestate. Ultimately, these small experiments can grow to be compelling enough to become models that the profession emulates and scales up further.
How do you educate students for a profession that shouldn’t keep existing in the way it now exists? For a future that will not, or should not, resemble the past?
This does not happen overnight. To implement a new university course takes at least a year, and a new curriculum requires a five-year horizon. Implicit in your questions is an impatience with the rate of change. So, a question in turn: what exactly is driving that impatience, that urgency?
FR: I can speak to that, Jorge. I’m not an architect; I’m a writer, and my urgency comes from fear. From naked fear of what is visible out my window, in my own backyard, every day. If I have to wait for the progression from a Coal Smoke Abatement Act to a British Clean Air Act to an American Clean Air Act to the rolling back of that Clean Air Act, to the avoidance of the reelection of somebody who will roll that act back farther, and then the recovery from that rollback — if I have to wait for all that, I am afraid. That’s the source of my urgency.
JO-P: And what’s the threat?
FR: I live in California. We’ve had years where, during the so-called rainy season, it hasn’t rained for weeks. We’ve had weeks where we avoid going outside because the sky is orange with smoke from wildfires; because particulates and aerosols from burned cars and refrigerators, incinerated artifacts of the carbon economy, are being delivered through the commons of the air.
I’m pretty good at making narratives. I’m a good teacher. I value pedagogical and creative ideals very, very highly. But neither gives me a tool, right now, to stop that smoke from settling down on my head, and above my head on the birds and squirrels and trees in my yard, let alone on my neighbors — including those living in tents.
JO-P: The way to address the urgent questions you raise is to decide to change the way we live. That’s as much a pragmatic change — stopping doing certain things and doing others instead — as it is a change of mindset, a change of ideals. It means rethinking what we live for, the individual pursuits we ascribe value to and reward. For instance, magazines would have to stop rewarding new construction projects, and instead decide to make the majority of coverage about care and experimental preservation. If all architecture journals in the world committed to rebalancing their content in this way, the impact would be profound. Professors, who need to get published in order to “show impact” and get tenure, would focus their attention on repair. Practicing architects would start focusing on projects they could publish. I therefore call upon all editors of architectural magazines to unite in this effort.
Editors and publishers can lead in the realm of architectural politics. I don’t mean party politics with a capital P. I mean politics with a small p: how we make decisions together. In order to make a collective decision to change our pursuits, we need to first envision alternatives that are more appealing than the status quo. Architectural journals, in tandem with architecture schools, can become great laboratories for such envisioning exercises.
But, again, architecture cannot operate in isolation. We must recognize that we are talking about this in architecture because there is a broad cultural groundswell of interest in care and repair — because compelling new ideals, while yet inchoate, are taking shape. A number of recent publications provide evidence of this turn in various disciplines. For instance, in feminist political science: Joan C. Tronto’s, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care; The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, by Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Litter, Catherine Rottenberg; and Lynne Segal’s Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy. In philosophy, María Puig de la Bellacasa’s, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds; in art, iLiana Fokianaki, “The Bureau of Care: Introductory Notes on the Care-less and Care-full,” to name a few among numerous examples. 23
There is a cultural groundswell of interest in care and repair. Compelling new ideals, still inchoate, are taking shape.
Architecture will not be what we thought it was. There is a shift — especially in larger cities. In the 1960s, all the empty buildings that we have in New York now, after the pandemic, would have been torn down and parking lots put up, to augment the tax rolls. The fact that we’re not tearing them down is a sign of change. We’re talking about adaptive reuse. This is where schools fulfill an important role. One of my students recently wrote a thesis that looked at turning those empty office buildings into cooperative housing, and what it means when you have a floor plate that can’t be subdivided. What about co-living? Students are willing to reinvent things that seem sacrosanct — for instance, the assumption that everybody needs their own bathroom and bedroom. They are willing to make such changes because the ideal of care is so compelling to them.
Interestingly, politics (this time with a capital P) is following suit. Last October, the Biden administration directed the U.S. Department of Transportation to allocate $35 billion to finance the transformation of existing office towers near transit hubs into residential uses. Developers and politicians are pursuing these new projects, although they are criticizing the administration for too much red tape in making the financing available. 24
NL: Yet these too are relatively small-scale changes: discrete efforts, not structural reforms. To this point, I can say more about what you described as impatience, as urgency. The discipline seems stuck, does it not? On the one hand, there is widespread agreement that architectural education and practice need some degree of fundamental reform; on the other, there is widespread business as usual. Professional offices are still competing for shiny new projects. The design press, as you remark, is filled with well-illustrated stories about new projects and even new cities. At the schools, many studios still focus on the design of new buildings. The old value proposition is tenacious. New cultural narratives are struggling against the cultural weight of history — and more, against the financial weight of business as usual.
Clearly fundamental change is hard, and slow; it will be a generational project. But we seem reluctant to make a real start. Or maybe we’re fearful about the implications for design practice: fearful about a future focused less on the new. Again, I’m thinking of that quote from James Marston Fitch: “Before we decide to construct a single new building, we must re-evaluate all existing building stock around us.” Imagine if that proposition was taken seriously, and was used to shape policies and practices. Now that would be a fundamental change!
But we don’t seem willing to go there. And so the horizon of change becomes the future — some future date that’s just past the point of obligating us to make changes today. In another installment of this series, Daniel Barber describes “the overshoot.” This is the period when the plan is to maintain business as usual — to keep burning fossil fuels while we await new technologies that will be able to draw back the carbon we’ve allowed to accumulate in the atmosphere. Conveniently, that moment of technological advancement is decades away.
FR: Do you not feel the urgency that we are describing, Jorge? Is it your sense as a preservationist — as a student of history — that these trends and emerging understandings about legislation and adaptive reuse can scale to culture-wide change in the carbon economy?
Let’s be honest: the environmental damage of new-build architecture was well understood by the 1970s.
JO-P: I do feel the urgency. But there is no silver bullet. Change only comes when enough people want it enough to make it happen. This, again, is where ideals need to be compelling and collectively formulated in schools, in journals, in professional associations. They also need to be based on the truth of scientific evidence. Let’s be honest about it: the environmental damage of new-build architecture was well understood by the 1970s, and discussed by people like Fitch. And the discipline willfully ignored the evidence — or worse yet intentionally buried it, in order to continue to uphold a 19th-century model of architectural practice that, at least in academic circles, was known to be obsolete 50 years ago. Academics have continued to teach architecture, and to write architecture histories, as if it none of that information mattered. Fitch and so many others were marginalized. Architectural historians, journalists, critics, and publishing houses have continued to lionize the single designer of new buildings: the Wrights, Gropiuses, Mieses, Corbusiers, and Niemeyers of the world, who aligned themselves with urban renewal, with the demolition of existing cities, with the destruction of ecosystems to make way for their designs.
NL: Gropius, Mies, and Corbusier created powerful cultural narratives; narratives about modernity and architecture, about “open frontiers and endless development,” to use Steven Jackson’s terms. And today we can see that these narratives belong to an era that’s past. But if I’m understanding you correctly, part of the dilemma, for architecture, is that we remain fascinated by these stories. We haven’t created new narratives — say, a narrative in which existing things are more valuable than new things — that have the power to displace the old ones.
JO-P: Correct.
FR: Have you found that a project like the Climate School at Columbia helps to lessen the business-as-usual inertia? That this collaborative transdisciplinary project helps to cut through the weeds, to streamline the sharing of knowledge across disciplinary and administrative boundaries?
JO-P: There’s great promise in Columbia’s Climate School. It is encouraging the sort of humility that I mentioned, allowing us to learn from each other, to build bridges between architects and preservationists, scientists and designers. It is encouraging an effort to move beyond our disciplinary biases as teachers and researchers. We all realize that to address a challenge like climate change, we need to learn from each other, and not be invested in the old ideals of our disciplines.
The reality is that we have no choice but to care for the massive built environment we have created in the last two centuries.
Columbia’s Climate School has identified the built environment — along with water, food, energy, and disasters — as areas for “high-level ambitions for impact” that cannot be achieved by any one discipline. They are creating “Action Collaboratives” to foster knowledge exchanges among faculty. Erica Avrami, my colleague in the preservation program, codirects (with Feniosky Peña-Mora, in engineering), a cross-disciplinary research initiative on “Adapting the Existing Built Environment.” 25
The reality is that we have no choice but to care for the massive built environment we have created in the last two centuries. It is falling apart, and consuming more energy than it should. We cannot act as if the only way to solve what is broken in it is to build it again. That’s just not possible within the limits of the earth’s carrying capacity. The writing is on the walls. There is growing market demand for architects who can re-imagine what exists already. It is incumbent upon us to allow students to play and experiment with creative and ethical ways to do the work of repair. We have to let them demonstrate that it is possible to reimagine all the disciplines of the built environment around an ethos of repair. Experimental preservation has an important role to play in this collective effort to spark a new architectural imagination centered on care.
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