Schools are preparing students for climate conditions that no longer exist
Six years ago, in the wake of 2018’s conservative-yet-still-nightmarish IPCC Special Report on 1.5⁰C of global warming, I wrote as a student about a need for schools of architecture to integrate training into their curricula to ensure students learnt about adapting buildings and designing for our climate reality.
Looking back, it was one of the least provocative things I’ve ever written: suggesting a reasonable benchmark for courses during the worsening climate crisis to ensure students are given a voice and are taught how to contribute practically to sustainable architectures.
I believed, and hoped, that sufficiently climate literate educations for architectural students and workers could lead to cascades of positive change throughout the sector. But, just as much, I understood what continuing without transformative change meant. At that time there was, and there still are, significant, systemic issues with the built environment: how it’s created and from what materials, parts and products; its carbon, energy and pollutant intensity; and that it is not consistently well-maintained and stewarded.
‘Business as usual’ in construction under today’s dominant economic and political conditions has led to rising toxicities in what we build with and live within. I’d ended my piece by listing consequences of the do-nothing approach with: ‘business as usual led to the Grenfell Tower tragedy’.
As Olly Wainwright identified in a recent analysis of architectural education in The Guardian responding to the Phase 2 report of the Grenfell Inquiry, architectural education doesn’t consistently prepare students for the real-world practicalities of building or proactively respond to real-world challenges. My opinions on Grenfell won’t take up space here because I feel strongly that we should be listening to the lived experiences of the survivors and bereaved as represented by Grenfell United and recent articles by Natasha Elcock. But the parallels with the climate crisis are there.
In 2021, ACAN’s Climate Curriculum Campaign found that 77 per cent of student respondents didn’t feel courses were properly readying them for future work and 69 per cent believed tutors weren’t responding appropriately to the scale of the climate emergency. The AJ’s 2022 student survey then revealed that about one in eight respondents were graduating with scarce training on retrofitting existing buildings, and 4 per cent of respondents weren’t getting any sustainability tuition.
‘The past is doomed to be repeated if education repeats the past’
Educational trends converge in Professor Susannah Hagan’s Revolution? Architecture and the Anthropocene, her 2023 critique of the architectural profession, its clients, and the educational system’s approaches to environmental issues, where she writes: ‘The past is doomed to be repeated if education repeats the past. Tutors trained in the old ways train students in the old ways.’
With 2023 recorded as the hottest year on record, and 2024 looking to surpass it, teaching students in the old ways prepares them for environmental conditions that don’t exist, even if that teaching considers climate breakdown at all.
Responding to the challenges of the climate emergency is also not just a simple matter of teaching students to count carbon emissions, to better understand material choices (and the physical junctions between them), or to understand the fundamentals of the climate science.
We need this – and more. We urgently need educators to continue cultivating their own climate literacy alongside their students, and the reimagining of curricula and design briefs. This would imagine adaptations fit and ready for 3⁰C futures and help service a Just Transition, rooted in local needs.
Like every system people have designed, architectural education can change, despite what academic cycles and traditions suggest and stipulate, and it could do a great deal of good. It doesn’t matter if it’s an education system, an economic system, or a planning system, the Rosebank Oil Field, the UK’s hostile environment, or a demolition decision: if something began in the human imagination, it’s inherently malleable and it can be changed.
If architectural education is to prepare students to handle the practicalities of construction – no longer presuming that on-the-job learning will fill in curriculum gaps – and to tackle real-world sustainability challenges as climate breakdown intensifies, schools must make time to fundamentally reimagine how architecture is taught, together.
