SPATIAL EDUCATION

Levana Rashba ’23 constructing a full-scale body prosthetic to interrogate ways in which architecture can be more empathetic to nonhuman beings for Assistant Professor of Architecture Thena Tak’s class Tender Thresholds: An Architecture of Animal Belonging.

In 2021, Bard College launched its Architecture Program. Ross Exo Adams and Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco, assistant professors of architecture and codirectors of the program, were given the latitude to reimagine and challenge the scope of architectural education in a liberal arts undergraduate context. Freed from National Architectural Accrediting Board requirements, they were able to craft a curriculum in keeping with Bard’s pedagogical principles; the result is not a preprofessional program any more than Bard’s Biology Program is premed. But in the same way that medical schools recognize the value of the critical thinking and communication skills that are hallmarks of Bard graduates (roughly 90 percent of Bard alumni/ae who apply to medical school are accepted), graduate programs in architecture value the breadth of experience Bardians bring to their postgraduate studies. The following article—adapted from “Unsettling Architecture’s Commonsense” in Journal of Architectural Education by Adams, Santoyo-Orozco, and Olga Touloumi, assistant professor of architectural history at Bard—provides a window into the questions the program is addressing, and starting points for exploring possible answers. How, they ask, can the status quo—which “asks its constituents to serve as witnesses as opposed to protagonists; its students to regurgitate the canon as opposed to critically estranging it; its projects to exploit sites as opposed to attending to a plurality of ways of living and being in the world; its briefs to promise quick, profitable futures as opposed to opening space for longterm socioecological engagements; its educators to demarcate their disciplinary boundaries instead of actively seeking out transdisciplinary alliances and exchanges”—be unsettled?

Below: Sam McVicker ’23, Sage Arnold ’24, and Emily LeCompte ’25 studied Blithewood Gardens in 2021, reimagined the site as it will be in 2100, and proposed adjustments in response to our changing climate for Visiting Lecturer in Architecture Montserrat Bonvehi-Rosich’s class Landscape Devices for a Changing Climate.

What responsibilities should architecture curricula carry, and what is at stake in architectural education more broadly as we enter irreversibly into a time of great uncertainty but also of transformation?

We understand the classroom as a site of social reproduction that actively produces and reproduces cultures of labor and the architectural worker per se. For us, this site of social reproduction feeds into labor modalities and value systems that organize the architectural office, the construction site, and the systems of extraction, planning, and circulation underpinning them. The classroom is where students learn how to work, which attitudes matter, which behaviors are rewarded, which are penalized, and which are ignored altogether. Never a neutral space, the classroom is a site of privilege with the potential to promote toxic, competitive behaviors that at times aim to annihilate the very bodies and psyches that architectural workers need to tend to. For this reason, we seek to unsettle the common expectations of the traditional classroom. We aspire to a classroom that disrupts the current economies of labor exploitation and their social terrain of hierarchies. We support pedagogical practices that invite students to participate in the sharing and making of architectural knowledge.

How can architectural education engage the worlds beyond the dominant professional paths? How can the curriculum speak not only to students wishing to enter the professional field but also to those with no intention of studying architecture? How can the immersive context of a small college allow for an architectural education that confronts the structural injustices of an asymmetrical and broken world?

Free from the constraints of professional schools, liberal arts colleges such as Bard can create a model of architectural education that is not limited to preparing future architects but is also interested in developing a broader spatial literacy. We do this, first and foremost, by proposing a curriculum that presents architecture as a lens through which to see the world and as a propositional set of tools by which to intervene in it. For us, engaging with architecture in this way means that we must center our curriculum around historical and political thought that can open space for new approaches to design to emerge that don’t solely rely on the process of production typically demanded from a studio-centered program.

In decentering the studio, our curriculum explores architecture across four families of courses. With Critical Cultures of Architecture we are interested in encouraging an approach to the field as one of situated, sociopolitical agency; a field articulated by spatial histories, visual cultures, and critical research methods. Courses under Electives on Space invite students to approach spatial questions through the lenses of anthropology, human rights, and curatorial studies, among others. These courses allow us to explore disciplinary conjunctions and ask what an architecture student can learn from an anthropologist, an economic historian, or an activist, and what responsibilities such exchanges carry. Led by invited guests, Open Practices Workshops offer the most flexible space in the curriculum, dedicated to exposing students to extrainstitutional contemporary practices and modes of thinking. Finally, with Design Studio Seminars we propose a pedagogical triangulation articulated across the following themes: planetary practice, constituencies, and collective futures. Rather than suggesting methods of design or a linear acquisition of knowledge, this agenda offers a nondisciplinary common ground from which architecture can directly engage with present conditions, narrowing the gap between the life in the classroom and that outside of it.

The program culminates with a yearlong project, where the curriculum retreats and students command their studies, launching a research agenda around an issue of sociospatial consequence. Together, the four families of courses ask students to engage not only with the tools, histories, and methods specific to architecture but also to encounter spatial thinking from the critical perspectives of other fields. This allows for a multilevel engagement with architecture that speaks equally to both aspiring architects and to those curious students with space-adjacent fields of inquiry (e.g., environmental studies, anthropology, human rights).

As a whole, the goal is to constantly reappraise what architecture is and what architecture can do, unsettling a linear pedagogical framework as students are invited to enter the curriculum at several points. In doing so, we seek not only to train architects per se but to open architecture as an analytical tool for other disciplines, pronouncing the importance of spatial literacy in the humanities and beyond. All of this in an effort to cultivate architecture as a world-making practice.

How does architecture’s affinities with neocolonial structures and racist practices contradict the language with which architecture speaks about itself? How does it conceal, participate in, or operate beyond predatory practices of real estate development, unjust economies, and practices of displacement?

We seek to question the inherited tools of architectural evaluation and the pathologies of racism, classism, and sexism they often reify. We strive for a compassionate pedagogy, following bell hooks, wherein the classroom constitutes a shared responsibility among teachers and professors. Following hooks as well, we invite students to become stewards of a new architectural culture with an agenda of social and political liberation—of world making. And, with a commitment to an accessible education, we seek to offer all students, regardless of class or income, the tools, resources, and materials they will need to successfully, and with dignity, complete their course in architecture.