Time for some critical thinking about architecture and design

Austin Williams introduces the Critical Subjects school in London this week, which aims to challenge students’ thinking away from the modern orthodoxies of university.

Browsing through the shelves of a local antiques shop recently, I came across a vintage collection of Odham’s The Modern Home University, published in 1935. Its 12 volumes include ‘Psychology and Philosophy’, ‘The Science of Living Things’, ‘Engineering: Theory and Practice’, and my favourites, ‘The English Language: its Beauty and Use’ and ‘The Arts: Man’s Quest for Beauty”.

The Modern Home University was not a forerunner of students refusing to attend classes, but more about the auto-didactic ambitions of ordinary families to understand the world and to better themselves in the inter-war years. Undoubtedly, many volumes were sold and not read, but even having books at home and on show was a statement of intent when just five per cent of the population went to actual universities.

Today, owning a book that explicitly expresses a love of beauty is enough to raise eyebrows, but not in a good way. Ironically, it is often the practitioners and educators of the so-called aesthetic arts – art and architecture - who are most appalled that anyone would read about, endorse or condone beauty, given that it is regularly portrayed as an elitist concept; one historian has called it ‘a dangerous fantasy’. An academic is contemptuous of ‘Western norms of beauty and white standards’. Reclaiming a common-sense understanding of beauty is one reason that we at the Future Cities Project published Five Critical Essays on Beauty in 2023.

The broad contemporary hostility and philistinism towards contested ideas means that there is very little space for debate on these and other matters. In universities, of all places, architecture students are told what to believe, not how to think. They are fed the line that the future of building, for example, will be bamboo, thatch, rammed earth, timber, hemp, cardboard or some other Dickensian, net-zero, reclaimed source material. Architects themselves are told that they must promote the climate emergency or be struck off. The debate is over. From a very early age, design students are taught to think that ethical concerns relate purely to carbon, or pollution, or sea-levels – very few realise that the Western philosophical tradition started 2,500 years before modern environmentalism - and these contemporary restrictive parameters are constantly reinforced throughout their further and higher education. As such, they have little conception of ‘other views’.

To break this self-reinforcing cycle of conformity, the Future Cities Project has organised the forthcoming Critical Subjects: Architecture & Design School, where we intend to give students a significant university education in just two, action-packed days. We want this to be the physical equivalent of The Modern Home University, where intellectual exploration, questioning, ethical challenges, and general intrigue will be the determining factors of each student’s engagement in this project of mutual improvement.

As part of the Critical Subjects School, 32 students from around the country, including several nationalities, will attend several high-profile architects’ venues to discuss topics from ‘Is Judgement Impartial?’ to ‘AI: Pros & Cons’; from a debate about the housing crisis, to whether we should demolish more and start afresh or preserve what we have. There will be five debates across each day.

In the evening, there will be a one-off debate in central London (where the public is invited alongside the Critical Subjects students), to explore Global Futures, a snapshot of the architectural/infrastructure possibilities across the world and the opportunity to discover, engage and find out more about what is happening in far-flung parts of the world. From the huge investments in railways in Nigeria that have transformed the opportunities for personal mobility, to the rapid urban transformation in China, the reality of Middle Eastern mega-proposals, and the pros and cons of the development trajectory in India, we’ll get first-hand explanations on which to judge.

Here are a couple of examples to consider. NEOM, a futuristic city planned in Saudi Arabia, is promoted as a model for future developments worldwide, but Dezeen, a design magazine, called it a ‘moral atrocity’ and likened it to the advent of the thermonuclear bomb. Further east, Shenzhen in southern China has normalised the use of robotic and drone deliveries with the potential to revolutionise transportation and logistics, but Western commentators say that it feeds ‘an all-seeing digital system of social control’.

India’s air-transport industry is one of the fastest growing in the world, and yet Indians are told to ‘reduce their mobility footprint’. Likewise, many developing African cities have been condemned as ‘eco-disasters’ and instead of lifting people out of poverty, many Western agencies seem oblivious to underdevelopment. Indeed, many observers from the West advocate for degrowth.

Too many of us have not really explored the far reaches of other continents or been aware of the political arguments surrounding them, so this is a starting point to see what is really going on in the rest of the world. What can we learn? Given that a third of the world’s populations live in developing countries, we can begin to understand what form their development takes, and why it is so often frowned upon in the West.

By examining these narratives, we might begin to gain insights into the transformative power of urban innovation and its implications for the region and the world. Of course, we may conclude that urbanism and infrastructure are vanity projects in poverty-stricken regions, and that we should simply address the very challenges in the under-developed world in the here and now. Whatever your conclusions - taking inspiration from the vintage ambitions in Odham’s The Modern Home University - this event should be a real education.

GLOBAL FUTURES
Date: Thursday 8 February 2024
Time: 18:30 – 20:00
Venue: BDP offices, 16 Brewhouse Yard, Clerkenwell London EC1V 4LJ
Registration: sign-up via Eventbrite

Speakers include:

• Jee Liu, director, Wallace Liu (referencing China)

• Jide Ehizele, The Railway Consultancy (referencing Africa).

• Alan Dunlop, founder, Alan Dunlop Architects, artist and writer (referencing UK/Europe).

• Palak Jhunjhunwala, co-founder of Beyond design (referencing, India)

• Christos Passas, Zaha Hadid (referencing the Middle East)

Image: Heavenly Water, Wang Luming, Wang Zhenfei, HHDFUN Architects