Our profession is very particular. We react very fast to current issues with our ideas, yet our buildings can take quite some time to be erected. For example, the project of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange building by OMA in China was the physical image of the new Chinese economy back in 2006. Five years later this new economy has taken the world by storm yet the building is still under construction.
Also, the exchange of knowledge in the age of information has made our profession move at an unprecedented speed, and thanks to the Internet the new ideas are not coming from the usual centers (New York, Milan, London) but rather from Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe.
In this new panorama, architectural education has to move faster, and smarter. It’s not about teaching how to use the latest tools, bur rather how to be part of a new world.
When we visited Preston Scott Cohen, Chair of the Architecture Department at Harvard GSD, we asked him about the challenges that architectural education is facing today, such as how our field is expanding to work on areas that were totally out of our scope until a few years ago.
With more than 120 architecture schools in the US, there are several perspectives about this. It would be great if you could tell us your opinion about this important matter.
