Teaching Architecture in the Age of Fragility

The origin of academic architectural education can be found in the inauguration of the Académie d'Architecture in 1671 in France based on the idea of knowledge as the transmission of a ‘style’. This idea continues to characterize contemporary architectural education but in a different way, through the pursuit of a personal aesthetic expression or in the satisfaction of real estate and construction market requirements as a cynic acceptance of reality. To conceive architectural education only as serving the market is to lose the meaning of architecture itself as a way to design, and improve, humanity. The contemporary age is characterized by the notion of fragility that represents the many uncertainties of our time related to different issues involved in politics, economy, energy, ecology, and demography. In the field of architecture and urban design, the main causes of fragility come from the phenomena of planetary urbanization and climate change that are visible in disaster, migration, periphery, inequality, diversity, and planetary crisis. While the ‘Academié’ model of education is founded on the knowledge of historical buildings in their aesthetical prerogatives, an architectural education focused on the contemporary issues of fragility needs to be based on the knowledge of projects that faced these challenges, to define a conceptual framework of a new agenda with new theories, technics, and references. Teaching architecture in the age of fragility means promoting the critical role of architects inside, and for, human society through projects of adaptation, hospitality, community, process, coexistence, and imaginary.