From an Architecture School to a School of the Built Environment

The Tulane School of Architecture is in the midst of a transformation from an architecture school to a school of the built environment. In terms of the compositional identity of this school, this transformation is a reflection of the diversity of faculty within the school including social scientists, geographers, graphic designers, preservationists, historians, lawyers, economists, civil engineers, landscape architects, urban planners, and real estate developers. These faculty represent new perspectives about the form and process of the built environment. These ideas are drawn from novel areas of academic inquiry, as well as from students, communities, practitioners, and stakeholders — who see the design and management of the built environment as a penultimate exercise on the frontier of addressing some of the world’s most pressing challenges and opportunities.

On this frontier, professional and economic allegiances that have reinforced structural inequalities and environmental degradations challenge the conventions of practice and of the utility within the strictures of professional qualification and development. Yet, the light is not dimming for architecture, rather it is casting its own pedagogical reflection on these allied programs of the built environment. Research studios at the school are pushing the limits of cross-scalar representation and thematic exploration unknown to prior generations of architects. While mastery is paramount to the refinement of professional excellence, so too is the expanded horizons from which design methods are applied across the disciplines. Here, design is at the heart of the problem-solution nexus that stimulates our global anxieties for the fragility of the built environment.

Some people may be rightly nostalgic for the primacy of architecture. There is a cultural dimension to architectural education that created social and intellectual bonds that have endured for generations. The legacy position of architectural disciplinarity is not diluted by the multiple disciplines of the built environment. To the contrary, architecture has long relied on and has contributed to the foundation of everything from estate management (later real estate development) to landscape architecture, and from construction management to urban design. The faculty of early American architecture schools were populated by a broad array of technicians, trades, and applied scientists. It was not uncommon at the turn of the 20th century to see economists and engineers serving on design juries at America’s leading architecture schools. The design and construction of buildings and cities was viewed as multidisciplinary — not transdisciplinary. It was not until the mid-20th century that academic disciplinary specialization, professional licensure, and risk management forced architects, urban designers, civil engineers, and planners to go their separate ways. A final hold-out of this long-forgotten era is bridge design, which still persists in many architecture schools.

Today, there is an intellectual shift across America’s architecture and design schools. Students and faculty are exhausted by the endless modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern tropes that were once profound critiques of material solutions to problems that are now superseded by the rapidity of global change. Performance, impact, exposure, inclusion and experience — which also