Editor’s Fore­word

Con­tem­po­rary dis­cus­sions regard­ing the edu­ca­tion of the archi­tect often morph into debates about the role of prac­tice with­in acad­e­mia and the form that prac­tice assumes in rela­tion to the inde­ter­mi­nant tech­ni­cal, cul­tur­al, and sociopo­lit­i­cal demands con­tin­u­ous­ly chal­leng­ing antecedent ped­a­gog­i­cal con­ven­tions. If Karl Marx’s claim that ​“all social life is essen­tial­ly prac­ti­cal” is extend­ed to acad­e­mia, then those involved in archi­tec­tur­al edu­ca­tion will recall the crit­i­cal ban­ter and ide­o­log­i­cal rifts between prac­tice and ped­a­gogy that have been the focus of count­less jour­nal issues, con­fer­ences, and insti­tu­tion­al debates.

Even though the con­cepts and mechan­ics of practice—or archi­tec­tur­al edu­ca­tion, for that matter—should con­sti­tute obvi­ous top­ics of archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­og­ra­phy, their entry into the dis­course was rel­a­tive­ly slow. Among the books that grad­u­al­ly ele­vat­ed the study of prac­tice into a legit­i­mate form of schol­ar­ly inquiry are, in the Eng­lish-lan­guage world, Spiro Kostof’s The Archi­tect: Chap­ters in the His­to­ry of the Pro­fes­sion (1997) and Dana Cuff’s Archi­tec­ture: The Sto­ry of Prac­tice (1991). Dur­ing the the­o­ret­i­cal wave of the 1990s, sta­ble notions of acad­e­mia, prac­tice, and their inter­re­la­tion­ship were questioned—or even deconstructed—by build­ing on the cri­tique of pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion as a rather lim­it­ed under­stand­ing of prac­tice. Mag­a­li Sar­fat­ti Lar­son, in par­tic­u­lar, con­tributed to the crit­i­cal reassess­ment of prac­tice from the per­spec­tive of social and cul­tur­al stud­ies, most­ly through her books The Rise of Pro­fes­sion­al­ism: A Soci­o­log­i­cal Analy­sis (1977) and Behind the Post­mod­ern Facade: Archi­tec­tur­al Change in Late Twen­ti­eth-Cen­tu­ry America (1993). In 1996, William Saun­ders edit­ed a vol­ume titled Reflec­tion on Archi­tec­tur­al Prac­tices in the Nineties, which tried to desta­bi­lize the notion of prac­tice even fur­ther, includ­ing through an essay by Rem Kool­haas, who makes the case that the inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion of prac­tice is indeed one of the most pre­cious tenets of the pro­fes­sion today—though, for him, the excite­ment is pure­ly oppor­tunis­tic, an effect of the period’s unprece­dent­ed expan­sion of glob­al cap­i­tal­ism and neoliberalism.

By the end of the decade, authors like Francesca Hugh­es had turned to fem­i­nist the­o­ry and iden­ti­ty for­ma­tion as a foun­da­tion for the expand­ed field of prac­tice, includ­ing in her edit­ed book The Archi­tect: Recon­struct­ing Her Practice (1998). By the begin­ning of the 2000s, authors such as Jonathan Hill were draw­ing on the the­o­ries of crit­ics such as Peter Bürg­er, who argued that the insti­tu­tion of art is much wider than its con­stituent parts. Like­wise, archi­tec­ture is much big­ger and more encom­pass­ing than its nar­row­ly defined pro­fes­sion­al insti­tu­tions. In Hill’s case, that meant a direct cri­tique of the Roy­al Insti­tute of British Archi­tects (RIBA) in projects such as The Ille­gal Archi­tect (2000), which ques­tions the nar­row def­i­n­i­tion of the pro­fes­sion as a byprod­uct of nation­al mar­kets, accred­i­ta­tion, and licensure.

While this abbre­vi­at­ed arc is limited—it relies pure­ly on West­ern, Eng­lish-speak­ing scholarship—it starts to paint a pic­ture of the evolv­ing rela­tion­ship between acad­e­mia and prac­tice and how his­to­ri­og­ra­phy might see prac­tice as its object of study. In par­tic­u­lar, it sug­gests that the inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion of the dis­ci­pline has only been accel­er­at­ed by the glob­al crises and chal­lenges of the last few years. Our own moment is fur­ther com­pli­cat­ed by the evolv­ing con­text of ​“social life,” which has been con­tin­u­al­ly expand­ed through new forms of social, envi­ron­men­tal, and cul­tur­al change. Meet­ing this moment will require an even clos­er exam­i­na­tion of the rela­tion­ship between acad­e­mia and practice.

Notwith­stand­ing the impor­tance of build­ing design for the edu­ca­tion of archi­tects, this issue of AR seeks to expand the notion of prac­tice of archi­tec­ture as a whole beyond the sta­t­ic course­work, the leg­isla­tive and cur­ric­u­lar dia­grams, by embrac­ing the diver­si­ty and cre­ative poten­tial of our world—in par­tic­u­lar, that of our stu­dents as they seek to define their vision and place with­in the mul­ti­far­i­ous practice(s) of archi­tec­ture. In the con­text of esca­lat­ing wars, the anthro­pogenic cli­mate cri­sis, and social inequal­i­ties world­wide, we can­not but won­der: What does it mean for acad­e­mia to be prac­ti­cal today? What does it mean to enact—using lan­guages, val­ues, and visions that are not imme­di­ate­ly our own—new forms of design research and prac­tice that orig­i­nate along the edges of dom­i­nant ped­a­gog­i­cal discourses?

AR 5 presents a suite of papers and projects that broad­ly address this debate, aim­ing to engage the ques­tions that are both exis­ten­tial and spec­u­la­tive, lit­er­al and metaphor­i­cal, local and glob­al. Name­ly, what is the role of practice—and what form does it take—within schools of archi­tec­ture? How are man­i­fold forms of knowl­edge sit­u­at­ed with­in con­tem­po­rary cur­ric­u­la, and what are those forms? How does his­to­ry speak to the cur­ric­u­lar changes nec­es­sary for an architect—and architecture—to find rel­e­vance in a seem­ing­ly entrop­ic, anar­chic milieu?

Strad­dling all these ques­tions is a series of essays that pro­vide open­ings into new dis­cours­es from var­i­ous geo­gra­phies and angles, sug­gest­ing that the most cogent dialec­tic between acad­e­mia and prac­tice today is per­haps that of plan­e­tary think­ing and the ensu­ing glob­al sol­i­dar­i­ties it creates.

The work of the Pol­ish-born artist Miron Tee frames these con­ver­sa­tions through lay­ered anno­ta­tions and media interventions—a type of art that seeks to legit­i­mate itself not through a par­tic­u­lar aes­thet­ic but as a form of real-life poet­ry that encom­pass­es notes, pho­tographs, and descrip­tive geom­e­try. This form of self-reflec­tion is some­what familiar—Eastern Euro­pean in its directness—while still seem­ing dif­fer­ent and refresh­ing to the West­ern reader.

I am deeply grate­ful to be a part of the AR com­mu­ni­ty through this issue of the jour­nal. The rel­e­vance of this edition’s sub­ject is beyond ques­tion, and, as I spent my child­hood in Bel­grade when both Ser­bia and Slove­nia were part of the for­mer Yugoslavia, serv­ing as guest edi­tor for this edi­tion has been a sort of home­com­ing — a plat­form for reflec­tion and recon­nec­tion. Thanks to the col­lab­o­ra­tive efforts of AR​’s team of edi­tors, design­ers, and man­agers, we have made this issue a beau­ti­ful reality.

Since I began with Marx, it is prob­a­bly only appro­pri­ate to end with Slavoj Žižek. In a recent ​“Plan­e­tary Con­ver­sa­tion” with Gio­van­bat­tista Tusa, Žižek reflect­ed on the idea of ​“unsus­tain­abil­i­ty,” or the para­dox­i­cal­i­ty of our own world and the demise of its future. In par­tic­u­lar, he dis­tin­guished between two mod­els of the future: one that envi­sions it as a pro­gres­sivist exten­sion of the present—the same things hap­pen­ing over and over again—the oth­er posit­ing that new things are yet to come (avenir in French). ​“All great plans for dif­fer­ent futures nec­es­sar­i­ly turn into their oppo­sites,” Žižek said, sug­gest­ing instead a more open and inno­v­a­tive ver­sion of a glob­al, plan­e­tary futur­ism that ques­tions the very norms and stan­dards of the present.[2] Here, too, in this issue of AR, we seek to explore an open-end­ed dialec­tic that is teth­ered mid­way between acad­e­mia and prac­tice, using the frag­men­tary ped­a­gogy of the present to sug­gest how we might prac­tice in the evolv­ing world of tomorrow.