Discussing the relationships between architectural education and practice, Tatiana Bilbao (Tatiana Bilbao ESTUDIO), Elisa Iturbe (Outside Development), and Ayesha Ghosh (Studio Ghosh) highlight their fundamentals. These three designers and educators intertwine professional practice and pedagogy and address architecture in their projects and classes as a political act. From representation to formal organisation through collective designing, their design and educational activities deal with spatial, social, economic, and environmental systems and processes, understanding architecture as a tool that permits our cohabitation on the planet.

This conversation is part of KoozArch’s Issue #03 | New Rules for School.

VALERIO FRANZONE / KOOZ You all come from architectural practice; how and why did you start teaching? What is the relationship between your design and teaching activities?

TATIANA BILBAO At 34, I started teaching at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and immediately understood how beneficial it was for my continued learning on many topics. I have always taught design studios, except for a seminar during my first year at Yale School of Architecture. My interest in teaching is about learning; it is a virtuous cycle where teaching feeds the design practice, and the practice feeds the teaching. It's an essential part of my professional life, and vice versa.

ELISA ITURBE I started teaching early. As a student, I understood that academia is an extraordinary place to do things differently from practice. It is a centre of conversation that produces new ways of thinking. Academia and practice complement each other, and I'm interested in how conversations in academia can change what's possible in practice. It's a place where we can put aside the material and the economic constraints of construction to ask different questions. That's valuable, and we need to find more ways of integrating the knowledge produced in school with practice.

AYESHA GHOSH After assisting Tatiana at the University of Milwaukee and UC Berkeley, I started teaching at Syracuse University. Teaching offers the time and space for exploration and research; it nurtures criticism and self-reflexivity. It’s also about being part of a community, and I learn a lot from other faculty and students, who’ve informed both my pedagogy and my practice. The architecture department at Syracuse allows me to balance self-driven projects with ones nurtured by the community. Academia is also an avenue for new ways of looking at the world and making social change, creating collectives, and radically upending systems in politics and economics.

KOOZ You mentioned that teaching is a special place for experimentation compared to professional practice. Does it depend on the fact that there’s no reliance on clients and profit? How do you prepare your students to confront our dependency on capital and its constraints?

EI Well, nonetheless it’s common to hear the idea that academia is an ivory tower while the ‘actual work’ gets done on the ground. But this does not take into account the fact that the constraints of our economic system are tight enough that professional practice is entirely inside a capitalist neoliberal process that we cannot always affect, and as such, it is limited in how it can react to many societal and environmental issues. My work is about understanding how the spatial organisation of society is one of the causes of climate change. Professional practice doesn't always allow an entry into that problem. In fact, some of my students who have graduated seem to struggle, saying they can’t find anywhere to work that aligns with their principles, which is a problem. I'm interested in finding other ways architectural thought can produce change. We must build new avenues for the knowledge produced in architecture schools to reach policymakers or the public to create a larger consciousness around architectural impact in the public realm. We also must invent new ways of working. Part of my activism with the Architecture Lobby advocates for government-initiated projects addressing the climate crisis. In that context, architects can become part of a climate labour force in a way that is not currently possible within the private sector.

TB We are embedded in a system guilty of many things and cannot escape it. However, some architects and some professors bring activism and do things differently. I teach in the US, because I believe Mexico is following many of the ways in which the US operates, so I believe I need to learn from it and vice versa. One of the aspects in our country is that although academia seems as disconnected from reality as it seems everywhere, teaching in the US has taught me that in Mexico there are more bridges, and I'm trying to bring that understanding to my teaching. In Mexico I could say teaching is closer to reality and reality gives a more open ground to reactionary and experimental work than in the US.

AG Regarding experimentation and practice, I’ve observed that collective action is the largest and often only available avenue for impacting built space and the environment. Recently, I have been writing for the Brooklyn Rail on this exact topic — how collectives in architecture can produce change, and how projects that promote collective living can alter our social and urban landscape. In the last ten years, in Europe and the United States, we’ve witnessed an increase in architecture collectives. It's through these groups that new ideas can sneak into the building process. They are founded by people dissatisfied with the current labour system and modes of producing architecture. Architects and designers are drawing on the agency they had in school into the workplace, to push against the existing rigid structures of practice. The collective action of the encampments on university campuses are intergenerational; in places like SU, faculty are often banding together with students because they feel a responsibility to protect those who are formulating ways to empower a field in which capitalism and neoliberal politics conspire to disempower practitioners.

KOOZ This connects to something I have been interested in recently; I’d like to know about the shift from practising and teaching design through function and composition — gestures based on formal aspects such as geometry, genius loci — to the ways in which current societal and environmental urgencies drive new approaches, in practice and design pedagogy. It's a shift from disciplinarity to interdisciplinarity and about accepting that architecture is always intrinsically political.

EI They shouldn’t be mutually exclusive within the curriculum; still, the conversation around integrating political and environmental consciousness is often considered to be at the exclusion of these other things. I studied at Yale when Bob Stern was dean and then worked with Peter Eisenman, so I had formalist training. That formal aspect was beneficial because my early education had not included any aesthetic training, so it helped me understand what makes a good space and plan. No matter what architecture you make, you must always express it through form, space, material, etc, so one of the foundations of architecture is spatial and formal thinking. The question is whether we can make the jump to understand that form and space are always linked to power. If we can accept that, then there's always an entry point into being political. And it's not at the exclusion of formal thinking, but in fact the opposite: formal thinking sets the foundation for the specificity of a discipline that is, by nature, interdisciplinary. I'm unquestionably in favour of interdisciplinarity; my work depends on different disciplines, but part of what I want to understand is how spatial thinking — which has a very specific tradition within architecture — can contribute to the richness of that knowledge. Space and power are intimately related; the problem is when we pretend they are opposed. My pedagogy teaches against this dichotomy, which was foundational to my education. I did two master’s degrees at Yale, one at the School of Architecture and the other at the School of the Environment, and it was constant that people at one school didn’t understand what I was doing at the other. I've always been interested in building that bridge between them, which I think is essential for political change.

KOOZ Architecture often addresses collective living and commonality in response to contemporary issues. I am always interested in how the classroom and the office can be laboratories for topics addressed in the projects. How do you approach commonality and collective experiences in your office and classes?

AG Collectives are part of my current research. From a young age, students are taught that their education is essentially about personal success. I frequently incorporate collaborative assignments to nudge them toward the idea that things must be made together in the design process. I have asked students to take on responsibility regarding their final deliverable. For specific assignments, I ask them to participate not only in deciding what they need to produce but also the collaboration mechanisms through which they would do that — promoting consensus and group decision making, with me as just one more collaborator. It’s a stimulating teaching method, since the students are excited to have more ownership in the collective work. Teaching how to let go of ego-driven academic success lifts the entire class's performance. Thus far, all courses I have taught have included the requirement that they are social spaces and address an entangled environment, inviting students to think critically about relationships between people and also with nature.

I practise solo; thus far I’ve had the privilege to work closely with friends as clients and I approach those projects as collaborations as well, which changes the tone of traditional client-architect relationships. The projects become places of gathering for sub-culture communities in Mexico City and New York City. Following my experience in large teams, I've started inviting other people to my projects. I'm currently designing a factory adaptive-reuse project in Syracuse, for which we've created a collective of seven faculty members, and we're using modified mechanisms for decision-making that a traditional practice would use. Our system builds in mechanisms of support and expands our capacities. In practice and academia, we need to break with received ways of thinking to commit to a collective process. It takes emotional and economic labour and a lot of experimentation to be a collective. I have been trying to integrate these approaches into everyday life; it becomes easier with time and is a lived proof of concept.

KOOZ I agree about the ego aspect — but doesn’t teamwork also have cons? For instance, not recognising the specificity and value of its members, acknowledging only the collective name, and becoming another exploitative labour system…

TB I like to think of architecture as a collective act. Since my first day of working, I've pursued it in many ways — including through collaborations — always with the understanding that I don't know everything and need others to enrich my thinking. It started as a necessity to learn from others, and now it is a conscious methodology. In the office, we produce thoughts and projects horizontally, the same way we do in school. It’s a two-sided process that enriches the practice. For me, it's not just about talking about how we should live because the office and the school are not cooperatives; someone makes the final decision. It is a non-balanced relationship. I address those imbalances both in the office and the school, with questions about how those approaches could be merged and benefited from, the constraints and the freedoms those things give, and so on to promote a sense of collectiveness. Our projects are not entirely designed collectively; they start collectively, become individual, and then again collective. Obviously, in school, not all the studios are the same. However, as I always tell the students, they don’t have to think individually about collectives and common living; they should think collectively about it.

EI I've been to Tatiana’s studio reviews for many years at Yale, and it may be the most collective work I've seen. Tatiana is very successful at cultivating a culture of collaboration; even if the students aren't directly working together, the review clearly shows collective thinking, which changes the nature of the conversation. I don't like working alone, and I think better in conversation. With the right collaborators, they free my thinking, open many doors, and show me my blind spots. Better work emerges in conversation, especially when building on ideas that you wouldn’t have had on your own. It's enriching. There are also practical reasons for making students work in teams, including increasing the time available in class to discuss each project. That said, there are difficulties too, especially with students in the first years, because they don’t know the dynamics of working together. I have conversations with them to manage their problems with teamwork. It’s important not to romanticise it, but I still think working together is essential because, as Tatiana said, architecture is always collaborative. We don’t choose our teammates, clients, or contractors when working, so learning to negotiate is essential. Understanding healthy teamwork and collaboration must be foundational to education. That speaks to the point about taking ego out of the equation because teamwork shouldn’t be a battle but a conversation. It’s a culture that can be taught in school and cultivated in the studio.

TB I often seek collaborations with the people who push me to my limits, with great admiration and humility. When you're a boss in an office, there are minimal possibilities of having conversations. Still, I put myself in these confrontations in my design studios and teach my students that we are interdependent. The level of interdependence is linked to our survival on this planet. It starts from the fact that we can’t be born without others. So the more you are confronted, the better; the more you are faced with ideas, the more you have to reinforce and suit them for the conversation. The less you're confronted, the less you can hold on to anything. I provoke these types of confrontations, even if they are complex. That's how you build strength, endurance and relationships.

KOOZ I am interested in the design and representation of architecture. How do they intertwine in your professional and pedagogical activity?

TB Architecture is representation. When I started my practice, I understood that the tools I was given in the school served the purpose of the formal approach to architecture; they were the goal and not the means. But they reinforced my way of thinking. So, I started struggling with the forms of representation, looking for options and understanding what I could use to represent my projects and help my thinking process. From being a goal, technical drawings, like sections and plans or renders and perspectives, become design tools. They're not the representation of the design, nor the design itself. We continuously test different forms of representation linked to the ethos and the purpose of what our architecture aims to be and use them as tools to develop architecture. I teach my students the same approach; I challenge them to understand the best way of representing and what tools help inform the design process, the project, and its future public. Part of my teaching is specifically about representation. Still, there's no one way — every person has a different way of representing, interpreting, communicating, and designing; it is personal. Every studio has an entirely different approach, both collectively and individually, and it's crucial to promote these substantial individual forms of expression to create a collective goal at the end.

KOOZ Representation in architecture can sometimes become a trap — it’s the seduction of the image. How do you prevent your students from falling in love with formality as a signature, and keep considering it a design tool?

TB I encourage them to understand that every process, project and approach has its form of representation, which is not something predetermined. Everybody talks about Tatiana Bilbao's collages but only some projects have them, because collages only work with specific projects and design processes. In my case, in teaching and practice, the representation is linked to the specific design process of the project, so every time, it is different.

AG Teaching in the first years of architecture education, the challenge I've encountered is getting students to fall in love with new and personal forms of representation. I teach them that architectural representation is an undefined form of artwork and creation, but they still need the foundations of drawing and digital tools to manipulate it. To introduce the idea of using different styles, I need to provoke them so they produce something from their imagination and not necessarily copy what they have seen.

KOOZ One last question. Pedagogy occurs in schools and the office, where tutorship, mentorship, and intergenerational dialogues have been fundamental tools for learning. These models have old roots and have passed through places and systems that no longer exist or have changed radically. In recent years, they have revealed several systematic imbalances and subordinate, even abusive relationships. Are these still valid tools, or are there also other models?

TB Things are changing rapidly in many ways. In most of the Western world — I don’t know the rest enough to speak about it — there was one way to teach architecture and talk about it, which was set according to the school or the office you were in. Recognising these models and their truths has opened the possibility for many ways of learning, teaching, working, and thinking about architecture and has changed profoundly. The good thing is that there are many possible paths now. I was asked to lecture when I was invited to teach at Yale School of Architecture. In that lecture, I spoke about my path from formalistic learning to a more comprehensive understanding of architecture. I was talking about those things that weren't discussed in school then. Dean Bob Stern stood up, saying I was there talking about architecture as if I was speaking about abortion in Notre Dame. That’s not the case today; nobody would make such a comment. This is to say that some power dynamics happen because they are systematic in our social system.

EI I appreciate the question because there is a current desire to address the problematic culture around architectural labour and exploitation. Still, I only had positive mentorship experiences. The intergenerational dialogues with my teachers have been extraordinarily productive, and I want to understand how that can continue. I especially benefited from working with the same teacher for several years; now that I am a teacher, I try to find those opportunities. At The Cooper Union, I’ve worked with some students starting in their first year all the way to the thesis. Getting to know each other’s work so profoundly was beautiful. It’s an extraordinary relationship, and I’m interested in cultivating and making these relationships even longer, more productive, and reciprocal. I've been fortunate; I haven’t had a lot of toxic examples. Of course, my very first job in architecture was unpaid and other stupid things like that happened but that culture is changing, even thanks to the younger generation who refuses it. Mentorship is fantastic, and intergenerational dialogue is essential.

AG I've had the privilege of having unique people share their experiences with me, though some of those I’ve heard about have been stories of exploitation. Personally I’ve had highly positive experiences — like with Tatiana — but also negative ones. We all need to consider how to approach this matter in our academic and professional activities. If you have had good experiences, you must replicate them with the next generation, but if you have bad experiences, just the opposite. There are a lot of people who think that everyone has to do unpaid internships because they did them. The idea that we're endowing experience to an employee instead of paying them undermines the value of their labour. This question about tutorship and mentorship represents the opportunity to demonstrate positive change in the field. When I worked at Tatiana’s office, I was shown how to behave and make someone feel valued, which is very important. I think it's just a matter of changing the way we do tutorship and mentorships; understanding that through sharing, we all learn from each other, no matter our level of experience.

Bio

Tatiana Bilbao founded her studio in 2004 to integrate research, design, community strategies, and responsible construction. This allows her design to be used for diverse circumstances including reconstruction and crisis scenarios. Before this, she was an Advisor in the Ministry of Development and Housing in Mexico City. Bilbao teaches at Yale University and has taught at Columbia University GSAPP, Harvard University GSD, Rice, University of Andrés Bello in Chile, and HS Dusseldorf in Germany. Her work has been published in The New York Times, A+U, Domus, Arquitectura Viva, and El País. She has received many awards, including, Kunstpreis Berlin (2012), Global Award for Sustainable Architecture (2014), Marcus Prize (2019), Tau Sigma Delta Gold Medal (2020), Honorary Fellow of RAIC (2021), Richard Neutra Award, AW Architect (2022), J. Irwin y Xenia S. Miller Prize, and ArpaFIL Award (2023). Boston Architectural College recently awarded her an Honorary Doctorate in 2024.

Ayesha S Ghosh is an architectural designer and researcher based in Mexico City. She founded Studio Ghosh in 2022. Her practice creates collective experiences to strengthen community ties, working in collaboration with other disciplines. Her work engages experimental documentation and archival methods, using informal construction to make architecture accessible. She is a founding member of Archivo Auxiliary, a collective studying electronic music in Mexico City. They were the recipient of a Het Nieuwe Instituut 2021 grant for the research and exhibition project, “Cyberstreams.” Ayesha is a contributing writer to the Brooklyn Rail, writing on the role of collective practice and living in contemporary architecture. She was a co-editor of the book Two Sides of the Border, and author of texts published in AA files, E-Flux and more. She is currently a design studio instructor at Syracuse University. She has taught at Columbia GSAPP, UC Berkeley CED and University of Milwaukee SARUP.

Elisa Iturbe is an architectural designer, writer, and educator. Her work studies the relationship between energy, power, and form, with a focus on how the adoption of fossil fuels changed the spatial organization of the built environment, producing an urban and architectural paradigm unique to the carbon age—carbon form. This concept was first published in Log 47, titled “Overcoming Carbon Form,” which she guest-edited in 2019. She also co-curated and co-produced the exhibition Confronting Carbon Form at The Cooper Union, which exhibited original works in various media that work together to define the spatial concepts of the carbon age. Her writings have been published in journals such as Log, AA Files, Perspecta, and E-Flux, as well as several essay anthologies. Iturbe is Assistant Professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and she previously taught at The Cooper Union, Yale, and Cornell AAP. She is co-founder of Outside Development, a design and research practice.

Valerio Franzone is Managing Editor at KoozArch. He is a Ph.D. architect (IUAV Venezia) and the director of the architectural design and research studio OCHAP | Office for Cohabitation Processes. OCHAP focuses on the built environment and the relationships between natural and artificial systems, investigating architecture’s role, limits, and potential to explore possible cohabitation typologies and strategies at multiple scales. He has been a founding partner of 2A+P and 2A+P Architettura. His projects have been awarded in international competitions and shown in several exhibitions, such as the International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. His projects and texts appear in magazines like Domus, Abitare, Volume, and AD Architectural Design.