CHANGE NOW, ARCHITECTURE LATER: a practice-based exploration of the controversies between university, practice, profession and society that underlie becoming an architect in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous social condition

Supervisor: Eike Roswag-Klinge, TU Berlin
Second Assessor: Prof. Jane Anderson, Oxford Brookes University

Change Now Architecture Later offers an insider perspective on the difficult choices faced by today’s architecture graduates after completing a programme of studies that is entangled with the need to qualify them for professional accreditation while simultaneously offering the impression that the last thing the world needs is more architects.

Becoming an architect has always required graduates to bridge the practice gap, a disconnect arising from the stark differences between the expectations of being an architect raised by universities, the architectural press and the public perception, and the reality encountered in much of professional practice. However, for today’s graduates, Climate Breakdown is forging a new set of narratives with which to understand the past, present, and future of the profession, providing them with a lens through which to examine the root causes and effects of a series of long-standing professional crises. Furthermore, the increasingly transversal nature of the job market for architecture graduates means that many are opting to ignore the baggage of the profession altogether, exploring opportunities beyond the traditional architecture competency. These dynamics are further driving demands for a drastic overhaul of the profession’s prevailing stereotypes, and the thesis illustrates how climate offers graduates a framework for shaping their professional identities and a potential means to transcend these controversies by reinventing themselves as architects in society.

The investigation centres on a small case study group of nine architecture graduates two to five years after graduating from the Technical University of Berlin. This group comprises diverse perspectives, including a civil servant and a journalist, as well as graduates working in architecture offices, a collective, and two start-ups. By employing a broad array of qualitative and practice-based methods, such as interviews, portrait photography, and narrative inquiry, the investigation develops a nuanced understanding of how these practitioners perceive architecture as part of a dynamic professional “self-understanding” that reflects their life politics — the framework by which they make decisions in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous societal condition. However, the difficulty that graduates in alternative careers face in disentangling their identity as architects from traditional role models and stereotypes associated with the profession demonstrates that the field is still not sufficiently open or receptive to these transversal perspectives that could offer a pathway to escape the tensions thematised throughout the investigation. In this sense, Change Now Architecture Later contributes to the growing field of research on the transversality of architecture graduates and provides a contemporary update to the study of architects, their work/labour and their professional identity from the viewpoint of the emerging generation of practitioners.

More Info (via matt-crabbe.de)

Key Literature

Participants: Maire Cordts, Reingard Hesse, Leon Klaßen, Max Pfeffer, Lukas Wichmann
With: Matthew Crabbe