Bard Architecture at the liberal arts Bard College and The School of Architecture are two experimental architecture programmes in the US. While the first is undergraduate and unaccredited for licensure, and the second is graduate and accredited, both attempt to set new standards and methodologies in the panorama of architecture schools through their innovative pedagogical approaches, proposing different ways of practicing architecture and contributing to shaping the architect’s political role.

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

VALERIO FRANZONE Bard Architecture is a new programme founded at Bard College, a liberal arts college, while The School of Architecture has a long history that recently culminated in a new location and name. Can you tell me your stories and what urgencies drove you to (re)start an architecture school today?

STEPHANIE LIN The School of Architecture has had many “startup” phases in its history and has been a continuous experiment that has evolved for over 90 years. It started from Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin fellowship, founded in 1932 at Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Starting in 1937, the school regularly moved back and forth between Wisconsin in the summer and Arizona in the winter. It wasn't officially a school but a fellowship and apprenticeship until 1986, when it was accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. It became accredited by NAAB¹ in 1992. In January 2020, it announced its closure, but a couple of months later the board reversed that decision. In May 2020, during the peak of the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, I was invited to be part of the school as it was planning a relocation to Arcosanti. I was teaching at the Cooper Union at the time. It was a time of major upheaval in the world, and there was a demand for new forms of participation. The priority was to continue this educational experiment but bring it into the context of global social and environmental crises. After months of planning, I started my job in January 2021.

KOOZ Stephanie, was there any pedagogical connection with Arcosanti, or was it purely a logistical match?

SL Our former location at Arcosanti, a fellow nonprofit, has priorities similar to ours: it’s focused on learning by doing, building with the landscape and with ecological sensitivity. It wasn't hard to translate our curriculum into that context, with the added layer of Arcosanti’s unique form of community and the task of integrating ours. After a year, we created a new class called Arcosanti in Context, led by Professor Daniel Ayat, that engaged the various departments at Arcosanti to provide students the opportunity to interact meaningfully with the community. This place also impacted our thesis design-build programme, also known as The Shelter Program, which evolved from the early days of the Fellowship when apprentices built tents to live immersively in the desert environment; then, in 2018, under Aaron Betsky, it was formalised as part of the thesis requirement, and students continued to build single occupancy shelters for dwelling. As we moved to Arcosanti, and later to Cattle Track, our shelters became more participatory and answered more directly to a wider community’s needs. The students took ownership of a new model inviting the whole community to the project reviews to provide feedback from a different perspective from a typical studio. It was an incredible, student-led, challenging process that evolved the thesis sequence toward producing projects for the wider public versus the individual.

KOOZ The built environment shows several criticalities linked to architecture’s failure and its connection to capitalism. We must re-understand architecture’s limits and potential to determine its possible new role. How do your schools address the capitalist dogmas and their implications, and how do they reshape the role of design in addressing environmental, societal, cultural, and technological urgencies?

ROSS EXO ADAMSPart of these dogmas of capitalism will somehow disappear. It's only recently that we've been able to say the word capitalism out loud, in public, and not necessarily get weird looks. However, I might not use the term ‘dogma’ to indicate something like a hegemonic social relation that organises other social ties. But I like your framing of capitalism and its consequences; this is in fact how we discuss it with our students. Because we are taught architects are problem solvers, it makes sense that we tend to insist on climate change, racism, poverty, etc., as ‘problems’ architecture can solve. As a result, we end up trying to solve the consequences of a large, yet unnamed, structural system — capitalism — without addressing it as the problem itself. So we teach that those aren't problems but effects — not to downgrade these issues but to shift the question and ask for their causes. This goes back to your question about the urgencies. In the past 10 or 15 years, architecture has started to reckon with the effects of liberal capitalism: we tried to solve climate change with sustainability, white male supremacy in offices with DEI³ campaigns and Title IX⁴ regulation, and gentrification with community-based and participatory design. These fixes often don’t address the structural relations in which architecture plays a key role, and sometimes they end up amplifying the problems they attempt to tackle.

KOOZ Interestingly, your schools have many similarities but also have a structural difference: Bard is unaccredited for licensure, while TSOA is accredited. As architects, we design the built environment; how do your programmes relate to professional practice?

ISO The profession has been important for Ross and me. I wouldn’t be the same without it. I emphasise to my students that it's essential to understand one’s relationship with the profession. We have always been interested in the relationship between the profession and politics, and we ask our students to do the same and use various modes of engagement in the practice. I think NAAB is trying to have a more expansive understanding of professional practice, but it still doesn’t recognise liberal arts education or interdisciplinary approaches to architecture. Nevertheless, liberal arts education can complement the NAAB model in many ways. It helps to decenter the discipline and relate it back to public concerns. At Bard, half of the students’ time is dedicated to the disciplinary architecture curriculum, and the other half is reserved for students to explore other disciplines to give a more grounded and critical perspective. Consequently, decentering architecture involves more communication between us and the students. When they do their study plan, we encourage them to take the other 50% of courses in those related to the built environment. Ross and I read every course description that passes through Bard and cross-list those connected somehow to architecture. It’s not just a matter of giving options, but actively seeking cross-pollination between other fields and architecture. Many of our students will enter professional practice: this is the first year our students have started applying to M.Arch programmes, and we are seeing very positive results of the curriculum. But we hope they will enter practice by asking more societal-related questions, bringing in other disciplines, and expanding the practice.

REAOur students have a criticality about the world we admire. We're happy to know that they don't accept everything at face value, and interrogate issues that naturally spark discussions across the different disciplines.

SLWe just got our eight-year NAAB re-accreditation and our interest is in how we can provide an environment that is experimental while also being practice-oriented. We are early adopters of the NAAB 2020 conditions. NAAB was looking to the school to define how we address and assess its various criteria such as design, leadership and collaboration, and ecological knowledge. More importantly, it was an opportunity for us to reinforce how we define the uniqueness of our master’s programme at TSOA. What does learning by doing mean? What unique infrastructure do we need? What is the importance of a community life component? What is material experimentation? What is immersive learning? These questions express our identity. We received a distinction from NAAB on Leadership and Collaboration which speaks to the students’ significant voice and role in collaborating with faculty and leadership to build this latest version of the school.

KOOZ I agree that architecture needs interdisciplinary approaches to contribute to complex societies and environments; otherwise, it becomes a real estate commodity instead of participating in just reworlding actions.

REAIf we were to talk about interdisciplinarity 10 or 15 years ago, it would have been a conversation easily dismissed; in the US in particular, architects have for so long been obsessed with defining disciplinary boundaries. Every Log issue and every conference was about what architecture is (and thus, what it is not). Luckily, this isn’t the conversation anymore, and it signals a shift in a field that is becoming more aware of the injustices and complicities it’s entangled with, and the need to embrace other practices that may draw from or draw in other fields. The question of interdisciplinarity is crucial because we're also trying to reevaluate the field.

KOOZ Not only in the US; architectural design has been viewed as a compositional and formal process for a long time. Yet, issues of material extraction, labour, colonisation and so on are innately part of its operations, which means architecture is intimately interdisciplinary. So the question shouldn't be whether we accept interdisciplinarity, but rather how or why did we accept the idea of architecture as a self-referential discipline for so long?

SLOne of the most exciting aspects of this generation of learners is its more critical perspective of the processes we may take for granted in the profession. I did my graduate studies at Harvard GSD, where there was an emphasis on form and geometry. It’s exciting that the discourse is starting to open up to include and experiment with a multitude of approaches that ultimately aim to share what we do rather than to protect what we do. That’s becoming a common goal across many schools.

KOOZ I’ve always been more interested in design as a collective action than the work of the single figure. It is an issue of ego, different knowledge, and debate, and as architecture addresses cohabitation, it needs to come from a collective effort. How does your pedagogy address this issue? Stephanie, I find it relevant that you all live in the same building at TSOA. Is there a specific role for tutorship?

SLTo the first question and previous points, we deal with the singular figure a lot: Frank Lloyd Wright founded the school, and consequently, we have students who enrol because they admire his work. It’s hard to avoid but we also try to put this in as much perspective as possible for the students, such that important conversations around historical contexts, contemporary works, and collaborators are also recognised. We have to examine what is valuable in the legacy and how to preserve it while maintaining the progressiveness of the programme. And to your latter question, our culture of community is part and parcel of our pedagogy. We’re distinctive and unique in that way; everyday life is very much blended with academic life to an uncommon degree, with the outcome being that students and faculty can really easily approach each other within this collaborative environment. Our studio building is a former residential building with a daily life routine incorporated into the academic schedule. It speaks to our larger ambitions of providing as many platforms for producing knowledge as possible. It's constructive for students to be able to switch between different formal and informal modes of discussion and interaction as a way of processing what they are learning.

REA I’ll push a bit against the question’s framing, insofar as it makes an opposition between the ego and collective practice. Somehow, I don’t think this opposition has the same rhetorical force it once did. Even corporate firms, including those run by figureheads, embrace a team mentality nowadays. What I think we need to ask, though, is about collective design. We’ve been trying to approach collective forms of design differently in our programme, in part by asking: is collective design enough? What should it do? At Bard, Michael Robinson Cohen has been fine-tuning a pedagogy of collective design as part of our core studio-seminar ‘Constituencies’, where students begin by critically assessing the field of ‘participatory design’ and then seek to put in practice a different approach that involves understanding grassroots organisations historically and imaging the group’s ‘potential histories’, drawing from the work of Ariella Azoulay.

The larger field of architecture has been trying to tackle questions of social justice through community-based or participatory design, which aim to expose the design process to at least a gesture of collective decision making. However, despite that everyone seems to agree that this is a positive move, these practices often cannot account for the structures that operate to divide, displace, and exploit communities. Ultimately, we're talking about a system of extracting labour power for profit, whether that's a team everyone likes or where everyone is enslaving themselves to a central figure. So, we're rethinking how to create a different pedagogy by instituting collective design processes. We want not necessarily to aim for consensus but to create situations where conflicts, divisions, and debates emerge because we want students to learn to take political positions. It's about curating a studio not to make a cool building, but to ask how a collective group makes projects with complex histories dealing with questions of real estate power, gentrification, and the role of architecture as a contested site. Architecture, understood this way, is a narrative projection of future spaces and worlds. To make conscious a collective future — thinking of designing for collective living — we should translate this question of individual vs. collective: instead of designing for a single client, what if architecture can work for a particular group of people trying to fight for housing justice?

KOOZ I agree. The team I refer to is not the flat corporate one or the one self-enslaved under the leader. It’s the place for debate because architecture is somehow always the place for cohabitation.

ISOPutting that in place through design methodologies is hard, especially if you enable debate. Recently, I went to a studio review of our architecture fellow, Stephanie Lee, and it was a wonderful experience: students created a five-foot by five-foot collective drawing to understand and represent how labour in rural spaces is distributed. Because they began to take ownership of specific positions within the rural landscape, the spaces they drew became a collective site of positive contestation. Regardless of the methodology, collective work also involves a discussion about students’ resources and institutional support: a faster or a slower computer is not a detail. Before starting the programme, Ross and I studied the design of architecture classrooms, questioning whether to use individual or collective desks. We eventually conceived of a model shaped like two concentric spaces with a row of school computers, preloaded with all the needed software, on the outside and a seminar space in the centre. We want the classroom to be a collective space for gathering. As part of a discourse on equity, Bard has been funding all supplies and materials students use. This is happening thanks to the help of our administration because the institution has to change as much as the curriculum. As we grow our student numbers, this has become more and more difficult, but we hope to continue advocating for the even access to resources among our student body.

KOOZ I have one last question. Architecture and pedagogy are two political disciplines, and I have always been interested in the intersection between theory and practice. Are your schools connected with the territory they are based on and the local communities? What is your political agenda?

ISORoss and I think a lot through political education. Architecture is political. Whether you want to admit it or not, it’s just a matter of analysing and understanding its history and relationship to social struggle. Whether you take a position or not, architecture doesn't stop being political.

KOOZ It also constantly perpetuates or subverts the established conditions; it cannot be neutral.

ISOAbsolutely. So, how do we teach students to understand the political agency of architecture? How do we help shape a spatial, collective consciousness? We are inspired by people like Paulo Freire and bell hooks, who, for a very long time, have asked students to consider structural issues, the roots of the conditions of the oppressed. It’s the same for architecture. Think about housing cooperatives: if there's no political education, it is hard to sustain, in the long term, certain alternative models to private property — if there's no understanding of the reasons for the project itself. Especially with the architecture fellowship programme, we're interested in engaging with real societal questions — as in the case of Stephanie Lee, whose research on BIPOC farms in the Hudson Valley activates students to engage in these broader systems. We are interested not simply in our students visiting sites, but in directing them to engage in their historical, environmental, and socio-political realities. Once this is established, we let their interventions evolve as the context calls, using architectural tools not only to propose new interventions but to produce acts of reworlding through pedagogy, storytelling, fiction, and potential histories. One of the benefits of not being accredited allows us the flexibility to resist the constant anxiety for design innovation. Sometimes, the best result for meaningful socio-political impact is, for example, documentation and not intervention. Our aim is to develop a collective consciousness around space.

Bios

Ross Exo Adams is Assistant Professor and Co-Director of Architecture at Bard College. He is the author of Circulation and Urbanization (Sage, 2018). His research works at the intersections of architectural and urban histories with political geography and environmental humanities, posing questions about how practices of design produce and reproduce systems of power in space. His current project charts the legacies of settler colonial modes of spatial production in modern and contemporary urbanization.

Stephanie Lin is a Canadian designer and educator. She is the Dean of The School of Architecture (TSOA), now located at Cattle Track Arts Compound in Arizona, and the founder of Present Forms in Brooklyn, New York. She was recently named the recipient of the 2023 AIA AZ Design Pedagogy Award for her teaching work at TSOA. Previously, she taught at The Cooper Union School of Architecture, UC Berkeley, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University GSAPP. Lin’s design practice combines artistic and architectural modes of thinking, using ephemeral materialities to uncover embedded cultural narratives and hidden orders. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at The Museum of Modern Art, Storefront for Art and Architecture, The National Academy of Design, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, A+D Architecture and Design Museum, cneai=, Forum Stadtpark, and several universities. Lin received her B.A. in Architecture from UC Berkeley and her M.Arch I AP from Harvard GSD.

Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco is an architectural historian and educator whose work looks at Latin American histories of housing rights and social movements against private property. She holds a PhD from the Architectural Association, an MArch from the Berlage Institute and a BArch from Universidad de las Américas Puebla. As an architect, she has collaborated with Arup Integrated Urbanism, Foster + Partners, Wiel Arets, and Fernando Romero. As an educator, she has taught at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, Iowa State University’s College of Design, University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, and Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design in London. Currently, she co-directs the Architecture program at Bard College.

Valerio Franzone is the Managing Editor at KoozArch. He is a Ph.D. Architect (Università IUAV di Venezia), and his work focuses on the relationships between architecture, humanity, and nature, investigating architecture’s role, limits, and potential to explore new typologies and strategies. A founding partner of 2A+P and 2A+P Architettura, he later established Valerio Franzone Architect and OCHAP | Office for Cohabitation Processes. His projects have been awarded in international competitions and shown in several exhibitions, such as the 7th, 11th, and 14th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. His projects and texts appear in magazines such as Domus, A10, Abitare, Volume, and AD Architectural Design.