So here’s what I heard: “It’s so hard for white men to get positions in academia.”

It was after a faculty meeting.

I think it’s important to understand that privilege also demonstrates an extreme lack of experience. If you’re not used to thinking with diverse viewpoints — I’m talking about who’s at your meetings as well as what your go-to citations might be — then one brown faculty member can seem like the end of the world. My presence will demand a level of thought from you that you find unfair.

It seems that inclusion has turned into something a nice white lady can manage from an office desk. It's not something that becomes an intellectual pursuit or a political imperative. It follows bigger changes; I would say most of the West has completely given up the idea of long term discursive intellectual engagement. It’s become controversial to think or say things that Fanon or Sartre were saying in the fucking 1950s!

In architecture there’s this deep desire for regression, to move on to the “real stuff” of education — basically, to formalism. As if my work, or my being there, isn’t real architecture or real research. It's the regressive idea that everybody knows what design actually is, and that looks like the work of white star-architects. Even though that's a model that has failed.

It’s frustrating, but at the same time, I have a project. I’m still doing the research that I was doing when I wasn't affiliated with a school. I don't have to deal with insecurities about where my work fits within some hypothetical uncertain future, where minorities are just running around unchecked. I don't have that anxiety. What I have anxiety about is that we are preparing our students for a job that doesn't exist.

For example, as excited as architecture has been in the last few years about AI, in reality the actual impact that AI will likely have on architecture is that it becomes a tool — not for architects, but for developers. Which means that the larger role that's opening is for architects who only provide a stamp of approval, rather than for designers. We need to put tools in these kids' hands not so they can have a “design impact” but to radically change the profession. It’s about more than how to make a facade out of algae, it’s about a complete professional remodel of this discipline. Because what we're allegedly training them for doesn't exist anymore. Nobody is graduating and flying straight to Rotterdam.

So much of what people think architecture is right now — and it’s many very different things — is just a fantasy. That being the case, what does it mean to graduate into a field that does not exist, alongside other students who have come through more innovative curricula?

The narrative is just so deeply ingrained that people become completely incapable and incompetent at identifying what the actual threats are. Look, whiteness does not have the tools to see itself. I'm the only full-time faculty of colour here. But when we sit in a meeting together, it's as if my presence makes it feel like, oh, we have so many BIPOC faculty now! What? What is happening? The idea that a few more faculty members of colour are going to drastically change “the true essence” of architecture, blinds you to the fact that “that” architecture is kind of over.

Bio

Lev Bratishenko is a writer and recovering curator. His most recent publication is 21 Games you can play with a Cosmic House. Curatorial inventions include the Come and Forget series, proposing benevolent acts of mass amnesia, and How to, a workshop that brings strangers together to produce interventions in architectural culture: How to: not make an architecture magazine (2018); How to: disturb the public (2019); How to: reward and punish (2020); How to: not become a ‘developer’ (2022); How to: do no harm (2022); How to: mind the moon (2023). He was the inaugural Curator Public at the Canadian Centre of Architecture.

The Anti-Fantasist has been teaching architecture for over a decade at various schools across Europe and the USA.