Over the last thirty years, architectural education has undergone significant changes as a result of industrialization, globalization, and digitalization. The effects are inescapable, and to keep pace with and adapt to these circumstances, our educational institutions must confront these dynamics and ask themselves some unsettling questions.
Design is a discipline in which aesthetic, ethical, methodological, economic, and functional problems are correlated. To internalize certain attitudes within their students, our schools have compartmentalized these issues, causing students to lose their will to be architects. Architects themselves have become pigeonholed as practitioners, designers, or theoreticians. Deprived of the dynamics that form the whole of the profession, architects have surrendered their critical responsibilities to other disciplines, which is causing the profession of architecture to disintegrate in time.
The ambiguous design and criticism in the universities, which should be liberating architecture students, have caused confusion among young, new entrants to the profession with respect to the realm of their autonomy. In recent years, creative platforms, travel, and alternative schools have emerged around the world to fill this gap. Indeed, research conducted in Europe has suggested that the most effective training is outside the domain of higher education. When the legal frameworks that constrain our “official” educational institutions are themselves unable to keep up with the rapidly changing world, it is impossible for those intuitions to sufficiently adapt – a situation that is incompatible with the discipline of design.
Under the heading “archeology of architecture”, we seek to rediscover the integrated whole by bringing together young architects emerging from orthodox educations with industry, the public, social platforms, and professionals from whom they are cut off.
In the process of creating experience from knowledge and knowledge from experience, we invite participants on an experimental journey. We aim to help participants at the start of their careers by bringing them together with inspiring individuals from various disciplines to answer their questions during their inner search and to raise further questions.
LIVE-PROJECT
The GAD Foundation Live-Project is an annual, full-time experimental noncredit program that will take place at the heart of GAD, GADlab, GADlibrary, and the editorial group.
Within the scope of their experience, we ask participants to transform insights they glean from professionals in the discipline, such as architects, academics, and artists, and turn them into a program of research, self-edification, and action.
By the end of this process, which we call “Live-Project,” participants will be able to reflect on their experiences together with the design teams and reevaluate their prior training in the scope of traditional architectural education. We want participants to undergo a process of self-construction, filling the gaps in their knowledge and realizing their own archeology.
