IA&B Campaign May 2014

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THE CREATION OF AN ARCHITECT: CRISIS AND CHALLENGE

In this concluding essay of IA&B's campaign on architectural education, veteran architect and educator Prof Christopher Charles Benninger dissects the challenges of practice in context of pedagogy to outline key ideas within the framework of contemporary architectural education as he proposes some paradigm shifts that will make learning architecture more relevant in modern times.

By Christopher Benninger

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profession is distinguished by the quality of its practitioners, even those who never completed their degrees. It is their record of contribution to the society that makes our profession of architecture profoundly important.

As far as centres of education are concerned, India is a young centre, considering that the University of Paris is over nine hundred years old, and even in a new culture, Harvard is closing in on its four hundredth anniversary. So while one could define India, having created ancient universities like Nalanda, as one of the oldest societies in the world; it is amongst the youngest nations on earth, in every way one can imagine, including the age of its citizens. Unfortunately, none of our ancient centres of education have survived, and we inherited an alien western education.

Hence, I am tempted to look at the future of architectural education rather than its past. I am tempted to place the mantle of the present crisis I see in the architectural profession and the challenges this crisis offers on the shoulders of a few great institutions and on some of the dynamic emerging new schools and their leadership.

Architects are called professionals, because in thinking and in doing, they profess a system of values that motivates them to change the world.

Indian Architect & Builder - May 2014

At independence, there were only two schools of architecture – Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Architecture and a night course at the Delhi Polytechnic. Two decades later, when I arrived in India as a Fulbright Scholar, there were only nine schools of architecture. Come this June, there will be more than four hundred; the number is growing at the rate of more than one new school each week. There

is amazing energy in action here, like a nuclear ball of fire growing larger and larger, as it expands outwards, ever further.

We now have 18,000 members in our Indian Institute of Architects, and about 65,000 registered architects, but we will have 32,000 new students of architecture joining our fellowship as first year students in the coming academic year. This raises a question whether this explosive energy has not grown out of control? Can we manage and direct this energy towards mankind’s good?

Is this crisis so large that we need to invent a new definition of an architect?

Where do we go from here? How do we create the teachers to teach architects?

These are questions in the minds of all thought leaders who are concerned about the future of the profession and the nation.

What we are talking of is a question of the life or death for our profession.

If we sleep on this, within five years we will all belong to a small minority of professionals in a sea of screaming and yelling, uneducated and illiterate, yet officially qualified architects. They will simply use their democratic majority to push all that we believe in aside and throw it out of the window.

Ancient philosophers have said, “If you are depressed, you are living in the past; if you are anxious, you are living in the future; and if you are peaceful, you are living in the present”. But I say we must learn from the past to formulate actions in the

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architectural education This article is drawn from the Centenary Lecture delivered on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Architecture in Mumbai on 13 th December 2013.

Subsequent lectures at the National IIA Convention at Chennai and the Education Summit at Gandhinagar expanded on the Centenary Lecture.

present, changing the future. That is what architects are actually educated to do. That is what architects must do.

Architects are the 'thinker-doers' who are thrust with reconfiguring the environments within which they live. Architects are called professionals, because in thinking and in doing, they profess a system of values that motivates them to change the world.

No other profession is thrust with this mandate or has this unique mindset making them always think of alternative futures for humanity. I repeat, no other.

Let us also be clear, that we are ’technologists’. What we do in our studios is laboratory work: analysing rational functions and logical interconnections, studying measurable site and climatic conditions, stating problems clearly and making hypothesis of possible options to resolve those problems, defining performance criterion and evaluating which design option best provides the answers to questions posed by the context. We study engineered materials and structural systems that support and span a variety of spaces. We give patterns to networks of water supply and drainage, electrical and IT cables, and we decide on air quality and management. We analyse enclosing envelopes, applying systems analysis, to select the ’best fit’ simulating hundreds of components, elements and parts.

Does our education prepare us for this kind of scientific analysis? Should we not be approaching design and fabrication

like aeronautical engineers and marine architects who create great aircrafts or sea ships? Can our teachers and our professors think like this, as simulation analysts resolving complex puzzles? I fear not. This speaks of a crisis.

It is important that we critically analyse our past in order to chart an appropriate course of action for the future.

Hence, let us take a quick look at the past and some of the critical assumptions that we need to revisit. It is important that we understand those key areas of change in order to comprehend the challenges that face our profession and our role in society.

Let me briefly expand on some areas where centres of excellence can take the lead: One: We must move from Dramatic Individualism to Thoughtful Technologists We have projected architecture as an act of idiosyncratic creation rather than an act of promoting the useful arts through rational procedures and logical methods.

In moulding schools of architecture, we have looked at education in terms of individuals and ’star performers’ rather than as creating programmes, procedures and systems. We have neglected the team nature of our empirical processes and the importance of managing complex processes. Our failure in this area has opened the doors for large contractors and project management consultants to jump into our professional work, who have applied cost cutting, schedule shrinking Indian Architect & Builder - May 2014

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Prof Christopher Benninger has studied urban planning at MIT, architecture at the University of Florida and at Harvard, where he later taught.

He has worked under the Spanish architect Jose Lluis Sert and has studied planning under Kevin Lynch, Herbert Gans, John F C Turner and Constantinos Doxiadis. Professor Benninger has been a consultant to many well-known organisations including the UNCHS [Habitat] where he wrote the Theme Paper on education for the Seventh United Nations Commission Meeting on Human Settlements. He is also an avid writer, who authored the book titled ‘Letters to a Young Architect’. He is a Distinguished Professor at CEPT University, the President of the CDSA Trust, Honorary Trustee of the Pune International Centre, and has served on the boards of the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi and the Fulbright Foundation in India. and ’pleasing the client’ as their values.

We must be leaders in making architecture a profession which is holistic, scientific and humane.

Two: We must move from the Great Man Theory to moulding Capable Professionals

We have projected the architect as a persona – a great man; a singular individual who would become an immortal genius; we followed the western Renaissance model of putting an individual man in the centre of the universe, instead of our own great tradition of 'gharanas'.

Rather than passing a body of knowledge down from 'guru' to student, improving and contextualising it incrementally, we thought each generation produces its unique, contemporary wisdom, embodied in a few select geniuses.

We thought that buildings must yell and scream like anal-retentive babies grabbing for attention and claiming to be new revelations.

In fact we are all just doing our jobs, and we try to do our jobs well. We can lead the way in bringing the image of ’the architect’ down to earth. While doing this we can also inculcate poetry, hope and art into the fabric of our environment.

Three: We must move from Romanticism to Objective Reality We have neglected objective reality in favour of romanticism. We never saw Indian Architect & Builder - May 2014

the slums mushrooming up all around us, and we rarely saw the villages that are the very fabric of this great nation.

We imagined the architect sitting in a colourful, air-conditioned studio, designing beach houses, mountain retreats, iconic museums and monuments, instead of analysing society’s problems and solving them through relevant built fabric. We architects have the collective capacity to design systems of access to shelter; create educational facilities and health services for all; make offices, workplaces and industries that drive the economy; detail out streets, footpaths and transport nodes; and plan our townships and cities.

For example, instead of Special Economic Zones [SEZs], where the government acquires vast tracts of land for industry, we can invent Special Habitat Zones [SHZs], where the government [which claims there is no land for mass shelter schemes] can facilitate making farmers as shareholders in large, integrated housing amenity and industrial training and working places, holistically creating humane habitats and boosting the nation’s development, all in one concept.

Thought leaders amongst us can take the lead from here, catalysing our present centres of excellence to analyse and act on the possibilities.

Our thought leaders can buck the trend of making pretty little artefacts and focus design on the creation of humane habitats reclaiming our place in the society.

Four: We must move from Fuzzy Logic to Systems Thinking While it is meaningful that we start off teaching sketching and sculpting in the first year, we never impart youngsters with an understanding of the ’anatomy of a building’. We never put forth a consistent, holistic and systematic image of what a building is.

In medical studies, during the very first year students devour Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body. If a beginning medical student does not grasp this systematic view of the skeleton, the muscles, the nervous system, blood circulation and the organs, they cannot go further. They stay back; they are failed; and they must try once again.

In the same spirit, if you do not know all of the basic systems of a building: structural, electrical, plumbing, air-conditioning, IT networking, kitchens and solid waste, fire escapes and fire fighting, basic concepts of sustainability and building management systems; one should not be allowed to go forward into their second year of studies. However, our colleges lack the courage to guide students by using honest marking and grades.

I fear our colleges of architecture are too addicted to the fees their students pay, so they fear to fail anyone who is really a failure. They need the money, not the student. Let us turn that ugly paradigm upside-down.

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Here is where we can immediately lead the way: I challenge all thought leaders, be it in the great cities or in small towns, to give themselves one year to produce the Anatomy of an Indian Building.

Rope in your professors of technology and your design teachers to work together vigorously toward this target. Start off with notes on each topic and mature it into a textbook. Get it out. Subsequent editions can improve the content and style.

This should form the basis of a first year, 'make-it-or-break-it' course. After a few years of testing and revising it in classes, other schools can take it up. All first year students, in all schools of architecture, must pass this course. A test may even be conducted by the Council of Architecture to weed out mere ’fee paying’ students who will never be architects. We owe it to these students to ‘show them the exit door’ and let them find their true occupation and passion in life. They can move on to more useful lives and our profession can be a stronger fellowship of capable leaders.

Five: We must move from Random Acts of Creativity to Systematic Innovative Thinking We put in a huge effort in studios teaching what cannot be taught – creativity; completely neglecting what can be taught to everyone: technology and logical thinking.

We cannot make a person creative, we can only recognise creative traits and encourage them. However, we can teach

building systems, building materials and building methods. We can teach evaluation techniques, design criteria and deductive logic. I am yet to find a school that teaches students how to put a building together. I am yet to find a master’s degree programme that focuses on what we actually do in professional studios.

’finishing schools’ have been promoted for the professionally disabled and for the psychologically challenged. It is true that we are producing graduates who graduate from colleges crippled and incomplete.

Centres of excellence can ameliorate this tragedy by filling the gaps in our system of education.

In our professional studios, we manipulate technologies of construction materials and processes to solve architectural problems.

It is the poetry with which we do this that makes architecture a great art. Poetry can only rule over science, if poets know the science of their art.

We must design a master’s degree programme around the creation of construction documents, building technologies, mechanical equipment systems, construction details and their standardisation, and around construction management and making buildings.

I personally believe that most of the master’s degree programmes are a huge step backwards in a youngster’s career.

Postgraduates from abroad return crippled, losing two critical years of real building construction experience, while becoming financially indebted. They have been diverted sideways into a no-man’s land of problems they can never solve. And, they expect to be paid higher salaries for their newfound confusion!

In postgraduate learning laboratories students must integrate complex functional, contextual, structural, mechanical, and spatial systems that fulfil stated performance criterion. If any school of architecture does this now, it will be the leader tomorrow.

Bachelor’s degree programmes must produce complete professionals. Master’s degree programmes are to focus on areas that require more specialised knowledge, skills and sensitivities. However, no architect needs a master’s degree to be a good professional. He needs a good bachelor’s degree and a lot of experience.

However, the reality is that we do not have good bachelor’s degree programmes. Thus,

Six: We must move from Text Messaging on Mobiles to Writing and Drawing Serious Texts on Paper Our schools of architecture create an illiterate lot of good talkers. Our graduates cannot write intelligent professional letters, minutes of meetings, site-visit reports, contracts and project proposals.

They cannot express their poetic intentions in words as a mirror against which to assess their creative intentions in built form. They are denied the use of an introspective tool allowing them to have Indian Architect & Builder - May 2014

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critical dialogues with themselves, and maybe even with others.

Writing can be taught in ’writing studios’ where a writing professor guides students through in-class writing exercises, improving their skills by correcting errors on-the-spot, during writing sessions focused on creating essays on architectural theory, history, technology and the social issues being confronted in other classes.

Let me be clear. Though I have not put emphasis on it, our students must learn how to draw by hand too. Drawing diagrams and images of our intentions is yet another essential means of having introspective dialogues with oneself, and we cannot deny students the ownership of this great tool also.

Seven: We must Increase Mind-Body Skills Drawing is a skill and it can be taught.

Drawing is not there to make beautiful pictures or photographic images, it is to build the link between the imaginative mind and the body, so that the sketching hand becomes an extension of the mind.

The mind cannot imagine without the hand moving with a device to make real-world images with pencil, pen or other instruments. Neither can the hand move intelligently, unless the mind is thinking of ideas and concepts and moulding the two with facts. Architectural sketching should usually be of spaces from the ’eye level’, and not birds’ eye views. Practice is a very important aspect of this skill development.

Sketching is less the ability to draw human faces, landscapes and flower pots and more the ability to ’diagram’ spaces, to analyse the interrelationships between spaces, to study interior spaces and exterior connectivity of spaces, to Indian Architect & Builder - May 2014

understand the kinetic visual movement that is structured in a framework of axes, enclosures, focal points, scale and proportions. Sketching is not reproducing reality like a photograph, it is creating new realities of three-dimensional spatial arrangements through architectural diagrams.

Eight: The Architect Works with His Own Hands Equally important to sketching and ’diagramming’ is working with one’s hands in a workshop. Building models from paper, cardboard, wood and wires bring the mind into contact with materials, their connections, their natural capabilities and how different materials want to be different things. When the architect works with his own hands, he begins to love the truth of real materials and to scoff at artificial laminates, fake marble or Plaster of Paris imitations. When the architect works with his own hands, he understands what is ’measure’, and what is ’craftsmanship’. He knows that the joints only work in certain ways, and that shear, bending moment and compression are real aspects of materials and the structures that materials can make. Every school of architecture must have a well-equipped workshop.

Nine: We must Rediscover the Imagination Digital technology has robbed our youth of the need to yearn and wander in their minds. It has robbed our youngsters of the need to constantly create imagined realities within their minds. When one reads a book in black and white, one must imagine the character’s faces, the rooms in which stories happen, and what the protagonists see out of their windows.

This imagination too must be in colour.

One must continuously be challenged to create, in one’s own mind one’s own intimate, personal ’picture of the world’. If a two-year-old child is given a motorised electric wheel chair, he will never learn to walk. By giving our youth the crutch of digital and internet images to ’see’ and to ’imagine’ for them, we have made them poetic cripples. Through endless clicking, they can scout the world without discovering anything.

Each era of history has its own spirit.

Some eras are periods of change and hope, others are cynical ages of repeating things, making the biggest things and feeling, “I will never change the world”. Perhaps the history of the imagination puts individual thinkers into little cubby holes of thinking, either narrowly or vastly, either creatively or through repetitive cut and paste. As I began this treatise, I noted that we cannot teach ’creativity’, but I do think we can expose our youth to creative thinking.

We can expose them to beautiful music, paintings, urban spaces, true architecture and transcendental moments of ecstasy that they alone can hold and cherish.

Maybe from this they can evolve images of hope out of images of despair.

Ten: We must move away from the Blind Leading the Blind We are inducting an army of very young, ill-equipped teachers. New teachers are barely out of college, with little knowledge of what ’a practice’ is, with no site experience, and no clue of various contractual, technical, legal and ethical issues that professionals handle. The vast majority of our teachers can neither draw an architectural concept nor write a descriptive sentence about a piece of art they intend to create. They lack even basic

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I challenge all thought leaders, be it in the great cities or in small towns, to give themselves one year to produce the Anatomy of An Indian Building!

knowledge of building technology and construction methods.

Would we have such people teach medicine or trust them as our doctors? We seem to think that by requiring teachers to complete a PhD they will become knowledgeable or wise intellectuals. We think that they can learn building systems by osmosis, while studying abstract theories in weak doctoral programmes, having no intellectual content. With a few notable exceptions, PhD guides have never had an original idea or penned a useful teaching text. There are few great teachers of architecture who ever had PhDs, and even fewer PhD guides who are respected in society as thought leaders in the field of architecture. How many great architects are there who have PhDs? We are making a mockery out of the doctorate of philosophy and idiots out of our teachers. It is painful for me to say this, but even more pitiful to watch this happen.

All architects must first work in a professional office for some years, know the practice of architecture, and then be in a position to share their knowledge as professionals through teaching.

Passing statutory professional exams, qualifying graduates to practice as architects, will certify their knowledge, and their right to be called an architect.

This must also be the first qualifying hurdle to become an assistant professor of architecture.

Eleven: We must Rediscover our History In my discussions with students and recent graduates, I find an amazing gap in their interest, knowledge and understanding

of history. Architectural history must be embedded in the study of technology, its evolution and progress, and the major innovations that tempered with what we have built and what we will build. Students must know when geopolitical, economic and technological ’turning points’, either in the form of inventions or disruptions, took place and how these led to almost inevitable innovations, parallel to scientific evolution and the global power matrix.

A student should know why there is nothing outstanding about a copy of the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas, while the original tower in Paris was iconic because of its exploitation of new understandings of steel and its fabrication. They should know that new quantitative techniques allowed more reliable simulation of the forces flowing in structures than had previously existed. Similar knowledge of the great ‘Chola’ temple complexes and the Gothic cathedrals would create an ’architect’s mindset’.

The students should have a broad historical framework of the technological, political and economic systems that generated building typologies, historical periods and related architectural and urban planning responses in India’s geo-climatic regions over time.

Twelve: We must move from Sick Buildings and Cities to Healthy Buildings and Sustainable Cities The subject of sustainable cities and buildings needs to be integrated into our teaching of mechanical equipment, materials science, landscape design and into the way we think about buildings. We must see ’living buildings’ operating, not just still, static and iconic sculpturesque objects on a computer screen. Healthy

buildings have fresh air, good sunlight, views to the outside of buildings, recycled water systems, energy saving mechanisms, low carbon consumption, maximum natural lighting and ventilation, and minimal solid waste outlets. The TERI team and many GRIHA experts are working on this and we need to respond with a valid curriculum.

Moreover, our ideas about sustainability need to include the life cycle costs of built fabric and the extent to which costs make habitat inaccessible or accessible to people. A sustainable building is also poetic, uplifting and is a statement of ’hope’. There is an indelible link between our concepts of sustainability and the vibrancy of humane habitats.

Thirteen: We must bring the Focus of Education Back to Practice We seem to have forgotten that architecture is a ’practice’. Let me repeat, ’Architecture is a practice’. It is not theory, it is not talking and it is not meetings.

Managers constitute a kind of ‘talking class’ and we are a ’working-class’. We need to teach people how to work, how to do a professional job, not how to be phantasmagorical creators or famous pretentious little Michelangelos.

We need to teach construction techniques, design, detailing and documentation, not just how to do Sketch Up renderings of upside-down buildings.

In our practices, we follow a clear process of work from a client’s brief, on textual analysis, an inception report, concept and final schematic designs, design basis reports by all the technical team members, statutory clearances, detailed designs, tender documents, construction documents, and closing-out procedures. All of these phases and steps are based on contractual Indian Architect & Builder - May 2014

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documents between the architect and his consultants and clients; and the client and his contractor and vendors. It is important that we create new leaders in teaching ’the business of architecture’, including accounting, legal liabilities, insurance, contracting, taxes, HR and the essential ethical concepts that spin out of these.

All architects must work in the studio of a registered architect for a minimum of two years prior to participating in professional certification examinations. That goes for teachers too. Teaching is not a profession isolated from architectural practice. It is a part and a parcel of professional practice.

Teachers must pass the professional exams before beginning any teaching appointment. I prefer this professional approach to the PhD ’theoretical approach;. the PhD should be reserved for exceptional intellectuals who have invented a new theory, explored a new building system, or created a new material and who have something very original to say about architecture or its practice. At this point, we need great textbooks and these could be the subjects of PhD theses. However, very few of our young teachers can write even a magazine article, much less an important thesis or text!

Fourteen: Centres of Excellence India has at least twenty-five centres of excellence in architectural education. Our centres of excellence can be laboratories for new ideas, putting them to practice, and models for a plethora of evolving, lesser-prepared colleges to follow.

I could foresee a system of Mentoring Schools of Architecture, each having about fifteen to twenty Protégé Schools whom they are guiding. These Mentors and Protégés will be Excellence Clusters.

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An Excellence Cluster need not be a micro-geographic region, but there should be a reasonable travel distance from the Protégés to the Mentor Institution.

Rather than regional clusters, they should be intellectual networks of committed teachers who are jointly developing ideas, concepts, didactic methods and materials.

Any new promoter who wants to start a new school of architecture must first find a willing Mentor Institution. The Mentor Institution will request all of its Protégées to comment whether they would accept this new Novice Institution amongst their intellectual circle, as a participant in their Excellence Cluster. Then only the Mentor Institution will join the commercial promoter of the new college in applying jointly to the Council of Architecture for permission to begin a new school.

Established schools should cast their nets and form groups of colleges that symbiotically strengthen and support one another.

Fifteen: Urban Crisis Now I would like to call attention to the present socio-economic scenario in which schools of architecture function and to the objective reality of the urban crisis in which we find ourselves. Our profession must operate in the real world of people's problems to have something important to contribute. Here, we can engage our new army of young architects in useful work.

As ’thought leaders’ I am sure that all serious architects have at one time or another realised that architects design a good deal of what we see from roads, but very little of what is actually built and lived in by the vast majority of Indians.

We have written books about Colonial Bombay, British Madras, and their interesting styles of buildings, mostly

imported by culturally disruptive rulers.

Did we write books on all of the shelter types, neighbourhood patterns, urban layers within layers of where everyone else in India lives? How much analysis has been done of sub-divided old houses, ‘chawls’, slums, huts and urban villages?

Do we know where the people of India live and work?

Did we make the people of India the centre of our thoughts, our dreams and our plans?

Now all of our cities are going through a process of profound transformation, unpredictable change and disruption. It is not just that some of our metropolitan populations almost doubled over the past two decades, but our country’s demography also has radically changed.

About a quarter of our population subsists below the poverty line and a third of the country’s poor households live in our cities.

That means proportionately there is more abject poverty in cities than in rural areas.

Cities have a greater ability to absorb different levels of human existence in ’their economic food chains’ than villages do. Desperation and the need to survive are sucking people into our cities, just as technology and media are pulling people in for a better life too.

As our youth, and our poor, are drawn into this great, churning dreamland of hopes, desires and aspirations, the reality is that about 75 per cent of the population of our metropolitan urban regions cannot afford the equated monthly instalments for any commercially viable housing scheme on the market. They will never become homeowners, stakeholders or true citizens.

Moreover, half of our people are less than 25 years of age. They are starry-eyed, ambitious and full of aspirations. Therefore, our community of a lac or more students

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of architecture, that will soon number twice those of us who are registered with the Council of Architecture, are part of this Generation X who are media driven, attracted to cities and are avid consumers, yet have very superficial and unrealistic visions of the world around them. Upon maturing they will not be able to afford the simplest of shelters.

It is not the size of the learning community in architecture that is threatening; it is my doubt that we can teach them to confront the new challenges that face them.

Sixteen: We must move from Pretty Architecture to Serious Urbanism While we need to focus on construction technology, we also need to enhance our understanding of urban patterns and infrastructure networks. We need to weave the social sciences of urban demography, economics and social structure into our curriculum. A strong stream of courses on social change, technological innovation, and transformations in modes of production are required. Graduates should have a basic idea of how geopolitics nexus between vested interests and urbanisation including migration patterns and the economic structure of urban populations, mould what we design and build. Herein lays my last hope for architectural education.

Let us break down the walls we have created between the teaching of architecture, urban planning and urban design. Cities are too important to be left in the hands of urban planners alone. Cities are the macro-structure and micro-fabric within which every building finds its appropriate place and its nature.

We must integrate an understanding of urban structure and patterns into our

teaching of architecture: students must know about urban infrastructure networks and land utilisation patterns.

The crossing paths of these two truths are a toxic mix that must be confronted. This indeed is the crisis and the challenge.

India has some of the world’s true urban schools of architecture and who must take the lead in inventing a truly urban architectural curriculum. Urbanism must be woven into the curriculum of architecture and be made a thread in the studios and subject matter in academic courses. I am not suggesting that we neglect rural areas and small towns.

I am suggesting that we understand the integrated network of all human settlements and realise that they all fall into a framework of interrelated habitat systems all linked together through urban economic systems.

For those educationalists that are wise, for schools of architecture that are well meaning, well organised and carefully directed, this is a golden moment to become a leader, a model and a centre of excellence. Tomorrow’s leaders, centres of excellence, and trendsetters will not be in Delhi, Ahmedabad, Pune, Bengaluru, Chennai and Mumbai; they will be in Gorakhpur, Jamshedpur, Imphal and other emerging nodes of creativity where people face ’the conundrum of India’ harshly and head on.

Seventeen: For Great Teachers this is the Crisis and the Challenge Great teachers inspire students to know themselves and to become themselves, growing into being that important self that every architect has to be. These new ’selves’; these new kinds of architects, these new kinds of citizens must be masters of the emerging urban networks and systems around them that will either be moulded by them OR WILL MOULD THEM. Today we stand at a critical point in the evolution of architectural education in India. It is critical because a weak system of teaching is exploding into a gargantuan incompetent, commercial production system that will produce an army of unemployable misfits, along with some excellent professionals. Today is critical because the challenge of urbanisation is the duty of our profession to resolve; yet beyond the reach of the skills, knowledge and sensitivities of what we presently teach.

Christopher Benninger, May 2014

This column invites eminent academicians, ethical teachers, teaching architects, institution builders and design educationists to comment on architectural education (and design education as an extension) in the context of India.

Concerned architects / academicians / educationists / teachers and students are invited to write to us / call us / email us for further discussion. Your deliberations / observations / critique / counter-arguments and agreements will be deeply valued. We must create a meaningful community of like-minded people to negotiate our future as professionals and responsible citizens of a globalising India. We must hold ourselves responsible for the quality of architectural and design thought in the coming decades.

Please send your feedback / comments to iabedt@jasubhai.com. IA&B believes that this issue is of prime (and unprecedented) importance at the moment for the future of architecture in India.

Indian Architect & Builder - May 2014