There is currently an encroachment on free thinking in academic spaces. Educational environments are no longer places that allow students to develop naturally and autonomously. As a current student of higher education, I have seen this throughout my academic career. As a result of political polarizations across the spectrum, there is often a narrative that there is a correct answer and deviation from it results in ostracization. I have watched the results of this across subjects and seen it create conversations that lack diversity of thought and are guided by the opinion shared by the majority. Not only do many students now harbor near identical opinions because of this top-down dictation of right and wrong, but those who think differently find it hard to share their opinion out of fear of being labeled a radical, controversial thinker, or offensive person. I personally often catch myself hesitating to contradict arguments or raise potentially controversial points because in my experience it is often met with either backlash or unsubstantiated responses; and through discussions with my peers, I know many share the same experience. Entering my second year in a professional degree program and witnessing little to no change in this trend, I have grown concerned about the future state of academia. As schools begin to accommodate this growing intellectual movement of close-minded thinkers, they are at risk of forgetting the true value of education: developing individuals that are capable of responding to their environment and actively attempting to change it in accordance with their own moral values.
What is our role as architects in this? The value in art and design is rooted in their inherent complexity. Any work of art, whether you define it as painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, or something entirely different, reflects an identity, a culture, or a moment in time. Art is the epitome of a primary source, capturing the zeitgeist of an age in tangible forms. Whether it is the absolutist and oppressive political rule of the Ming Dynasty represented in its capital city Beijing, or the idea of the engineer’s aesthetic being captured in the work of Le Corbusier and other modernist architects of the 20th century, art and architecture is a physical catalog of every perspective that has been had in history, no matter on which side of the political coin they land. But as students think less and less for themselves, society is at risk of losing such valuable resources because our younger generations are either afraid, or not sure how, to approach controversy. It is rare to experience civilized discourse regarding any political topic without it immediately becoming emotional and full of unfounded claims and uncited sources.
As architects this is something that we cannot afford to ignore. We are designers, researchers, and analysts. We build the cities and forms that will represent our time and will extend beyond our lives for centuries. If the architects who graduate today are unable to address controversial topics, everything built will harbor the same history and agendas. This will halt the cultural advancements of society and leave only like-minded individuals to be studied a century from now. Many recognize that these issues are present, but the path to resolving them is unclear, and people are tentative to approach the topic to not contradict the majority opinion. To allow this trend to overwhelm architecture schools would be a disservice to all those with great ambitions of becoming prominent architects. Rather than producing designers and critical thinkers, architecture schools are now at risk of producing cogs of commercialized machines that excel only at bringing someone else’s ideas to fruition.
It is difficult to stray from this path of bland thinking because of how immersed in it we are. The largest source of our knowledge as students is, of course, our schools. Almost as dominant, however, is social media and the creation of ultra specific threads and communities of like-minded individuals. When students do not venture outside of these environments, they find themselves in a bubble where their generic opinions are never challenged. Then, when any argument, no matter how insignificant, is brought up, the bubble is popped and students do not know how to respond to them because they have only ever been affirmed of their beliefs. When academic institutions do not push their students to engage with the unknown and provocative, this echo chamber becomes incredibly detrimental to the students’ ability to think critically.
It is the responsibility of academic institutions, architecture and beyond, to actively attempt to prevent this trend from growing anymore. It begins with providing historical context. Context is vital because it is difficult to entirely reinvent the wheel. Almost everything has already been done or thought of in some capacity. Furthermore, understanding the context behind a work of art can vastly change its meaning. This is why the role academic institutions play is so important. They must teach students how to objectively analyze a work, not under the diction of someone else’s political bias, and to be able to extrapolate the most untainted interpretation possible. This is similar to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s belief that often children are the freest thinkers because they are uncorrupted by societal influences. If architecture schools begin to follow the present trends and censor certain contexts or discredit foundational works or artists, they will inevitably prevent their students from being able to think for themselves from a critical lens. A recent example of this are mild protests against celebrating David Adjaye’s innovative work because there are unsettled workplace misconduct allegations against him. We are essentially in a modern recurrence of the intellectually flattening cultural climates we have strayed away from in the past like absolutist regimes, industrial revolutions, and now hyper-standardized education systems that prioritize memorization and learning the what but never the why.
This matter is so urgent to us architecture students because we are currently at the age in which we are learning how to respond to our environments, so we must ensure that we learn to do so autonomously to prevent a bubble in which we parrot the beliefs of our professors and administrators. Not only that, but we live in a time where our generation can make a genuine impact on the world, something rarely seen in history.