Photo by Felipe Guandelini on Unsplash

Design educators have a unique responsibility. They are charged with preparing the future architects of our world. Not just the architects of buildings, but also the architects of experiences and products. So, it is reasonable to expect that these design educators have thought a lot about the theory, application, and pedagogy of design. Design educators are responsible for teaching young designers to invent the future. And from time to time, it is useful for designers to think as design educators to understand how they might continue to grow. Here are 10 quotes from architecture school websites that provide some nice meta food for thought for those that are designing the future.

1. Virginia Tech

“Like art, architecture is permeated by dualities. It is stable and transitory, measurable and immeasurable, and capable of both being touched and touching us. Like science, architecture involves systematic study. Its methods are iterative, experimental, and rely on intense observation.

By intertwining the poetic and practical, architecture is uniquely poised to address the challenges of contemporary life and build the culture of the 21st century.”

2. University of Virginia

“The constructed environment is a continuously evolving realm that:

1. Encompasses the material, socio-economic, and political systems of the human mediated physical world.

2. Spans a wide range of temporal-spatial scales, from plants and species to building elements, assemblages, sites, neighborhoods, cities, and global infrastructures, across historical narratives, present conditions, and future projections.

3. Is the product of competing agents drawn from across the socio-physical environment including microorganisms, climatic conditions, interfaces with virtual realms, urban conglomerations, migrating populations, and the intentional and unintentional efforts of designers, planners, and policymakers.”

3. Rice University

“While the problems we face are global in scope, the solutions best arise from local circumstances, the constituencies they affect and the evolving political and cultural institutions that are fashioned in response.”

“Totalization sees the architect as the negotiator at the center of a diverse team of collaborators. Projects are understood to be contingent and evolving — a totaling up that is never fixed or finite.”

4. UC Berkeley

“In studio culture, we believe collaboration trumps competition. Students and faculty maintain an atmosphere of mutual respect for and interest in each other’s ideas. Our work will always benefit from conversations with colleagues about shared themes, precedents and resources. Even in a portable, digital age, it is an essential requirement that design happens in the studio. Working in studio moves beyond logistics, nurturing studio culture and fostering the collaborative atmosphere that we most value. At the same time, care for our working environment is an essential part of our design ethic.”

5. MIT

“We actively pursue interdisciplinary collaboration, being keenly aware of the necessity to learn and borrow from, as well as to instigate exchange, with other disciplines. Yet we believe the foundational intelligence of architecture should be generated above all from the bottom up and within design itself.”

“Design today cannot afford not to address contemporary conditions such as climate change, globalization, technology and urbanization. As challenging as this may be, we are committed to investigating how these issues will inform and inspire design, as well as architectural education.

Architectural Design focuses on a broad range of perspectives linking several common concerns: site and context, use and form, building methods and materials, and the role of the architect. We see the architect less as the sole creator of an autonomous building than as a collaborator in shaping the physical environment.”

6. Columbia University

“The spatial applications of computation and data permeate all aspects of daily life, from our homes to our cities, transforming the ways we live, work, move, and interact. Advances in information, manufacturing, and material technologies are fueling new modes of making and thinking about designed environments, both physical and virtual. While emerging technologies have increased social connectivity and introduced new forms of collectivity, they have also empowered institutional systems to implement discriminatory and extractive practices. How can the disciplines of the built environment harness these emerging technologies to design creatively, equitably, and sustainably, while also interrogating and actively confronting their pitfalls?”

7. Yale University

“We seek to respond to the complexity of today’s globalized world — rapid urbanization and climate change, contested spatial and geographic borders, the increasing disparities in living conditions — with the claim that architecture has never been more important, more challenging to create, and more potentially transformative. And although the global nature of our work would take Vitruvius by surprise, he might recognize some version of his call for theoretical and practical mastery — for a rigorous, syncretic approach — in our own educational program.”

8. University of Texas — Austin

“The school affirms the value of design intention, design process, as well as design product, thus both encouraging and evaluating (1) the student’s understanding of the ideas that motivate and the forces that inform the project at hand (“grasp”), (2) the student’s assiduousness in the development of ideas and use of information in the process of design (“process” or “effort”), and (3) the material and graphic quality of the studio’s final products — be they models, drawings, or representations in other media — as well as the appositeness of the proposed design in its real-world context (“product”).”

9. Syracuse University

“Architecture has been called the “art of occupation.” Why and how we consciously inhabit our world has been at the core of the discipline for thousands of years.

The answers to these two questions, like the societies they serve, are always in an uneven state of conversion. For nearly 150 years, Syracuse University’s architecture programs have been at the center of conversations of what architecture means and how we make it in any given place and era. This flexible investigation is always connected to a disciplinary core of knowledge with its own history, theories of purpose and production, methods of construction and understanding of building performance — all of which connect to larger urban and social contexts in which architecture operates.

Interrelated to this core intelligence are necessary visual, verbal and written forms of architectural communication that combine to form a central and highly regarded piece of the education of architects at Syracuse. These important educational aspirations are essential to preparing our graduates to be successful in the contemporary and ever changing character of practice across the world.”

10. The Cooper Union

“The traditional and essential skills of drawing, model-making and design development are complemented by a full investigation of the analytical and critical uses of digital technologies. The study of world architecture and urbanism is deepened by the understanding of individual cultures, environmental, and technological issues at every scale. The theory of the discipline, past and present, is investigated through the close analysis of critical texts and related to the theory and practice of other arts, such as public art, film and video.”

“In these studio experiments students and faculty together explore the potential contributions of architecture to our changing world, redoubling their efforts to imagine a positive future for an architecture that is, after all, a discipline of design. This task does not involve a wholesale rejection of the past — our traditions and historical experience — for what has changed are not the principles, but rather the determinants and the materials of design. We are in the process of re-learning the poetics of a space of life: of air and water, of geology and geography, of culture and society, of poetics that lie deeply within these elemental forces. On this re-framing — programmatically, technologically, and above all formally — rests not simply the future of architecture, but of our life in the world. Gradually, out of this process, architecture, once more, may become a force through which life is transcribed into art in order to enhance life.”