CHANGE NOW, ARCHITECTURE LATER!
a practice-based exploration of the controversies between university, profession and society that underlie becoming an architect in Climate Breakdown

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

All contents © Matthew Crabbe

Matt’s PhD Dissertation “Change Now Architecture Later!” is a contribution to the study of architects and their motivations. It provides an insider perspective on the challenges faced by today’s graduates becoming architects in Climate Breakdown.

Becoming an architect has always required graduates to bridge the practice gap, a disconnect stemming from the stark and longstanding differences between the expectations of being an architect raised by universities, the architectural press and public perception, and the reality encountered in much of professional practice. However, today’s architecture graduates are entering a field characterised by rising tensions, shifting narratives and seemingly intractable professional challenges in which Climate Breakdown is creating new ways of ordering the architecture profession’s past, present, and future — and the next generation’s role within it. The thesis asks: how big is the gap between how graduates want architecture practice to be and the reality they encounter? How do conflicting demands of university, profession and society create this practice gap? How does Climate Breakdown necessitate a fresh appraisal of these already fraught relationships?

The longitudinal study focuses on nine architecture graduates, two to five years after graduating from the Technische Universität Berlin. This group comprises diverse perspectives, including a civil servant, a journalist, graduates working in architecture offices, a collective, and two start-ups. The practice-based research design oscillates between “Chapters” providing context, methods and theory, and “Tasks” which deploy diverse methods such as interviews, portrait photography and narrative inquiry, often thematising the tacit knowledge and assumptions of researcher, participants and reader. These methods show how graduates perceive architecture as part of a dynamic professional “self-understanding” reflecting their life politics and career ambitions. Exploring the practice gap reveals a series of controversies surrounding climate, societal role, labour issues and generational attitudes to work that lead the graduates to question their motivation to practice architecture. For some of the interviewees, transcending these challenges has resulted in them pursuing careers outside conventional architecture practice.

The research reinterprets the practice gap as a dynamic mechanism that shapes the interaction between university and practice through the agency of graduates. Climate Breakdown offers them a lens through which to scrutinise the root causes and effects of longstanding professional crises, revealing their structural entanglements in extractive and exploitative ways of thinking and doing architecture. However, the difficulty that graduates in non-typical careers face in disentangling their identity as architects from traditional role models and stereotypes demonstrates that the profession is not receptive enough to the new perspectives that could help diversify the profession’s knowledge base and provide a way to overcome the longstanding “job/calling” binary through a new social and ecological definition of what it means to be an architect in a rapidly changing world.

The project “Postcards from Practice” uses a novel methodology that combines portrait photography and reflective photo-elicitation to explore the professional self-understanding of nine architecture graduates.
Each graduate was photographed in a situation typical for their everyday work as an architect, the portraits were then sent to them as a postcard.
Reflecting on the portrait of themselves, the participants then returned the postcard to me with an answer to the question: “what does becoming an architect mean to you?”

Key Literature

In the short film “Everyday Architect?” a group of graduates discuss their next steps and priorities for their job search after completing their master’s degrees.

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