AHRA workshop at the Pratt Institute

As part of the AHRA 2022 Conference “Climate Collectivism”, MOULD organised a digital workshop aimed to challenge and question the architectural curriculum in relation to the ongoing climate crisis. Architectural education often fails to align with the real-world challenges practitioners face, treating ecological and political issues as mere add-ons to the core architectural curriculum. In response, MOULD argues that architectural education should shift its focus, treating architecture as a tool rather than just an object and adopting a more holistic, systems-thinking approach that goes beyond reductive discourses around sustainability.

The digital workshop started with the question: What does climate breakdown do to architectural education? In order to address this paradigm shift, MOULD invited conference participants to engage and interact in real time using a pre-designed, shared Miro template. A series of questions were provided as a foundation for initiating discussions and shaping potential learning scenarios for the future of architectural education. Responses to these questions were guided by the understanding that architecture and architectural education are inherently intertwined with the climate. Given the imperative for systemic change across all aspects of society in response to the climate breakdown, the participants questioned the role of architectural education, seeking to move beyond a solutionist mindset.

We would like to thank the workshop participants for their insights and fruitful conversation:

Prem Chandavarkar
Marianna Charitonidou
Sonja Drajovic 
Zach Fischer 
Ariane Harrison
Holly 
Mia Roth
James Soane
Zoe Tank

More information on the conference can be found here.