Architectural Education: Evolving Curriculum & Alternative Paths

A What if you could start a movement to change the bill's environment? How would you help the architectural community come up with new ways to build a better world where people come together to live, work, and play in elegant buildings made of cutting edge sustainable materials. Stop dreaming. That opportunity is real and is at the American Institute of Steel Construction. They're looking for creative architects to reimagine the way our profession approaches structural steel by developing a program to help us harness structural innovation today and tomorrow. learnmore@aisc.org/architecture that aisc.org/architecture.

B I'm Evelyn Lee, and I'm Janine Chastain. We're collaborating on curated conversations to explore how the industry of architecture is changing.

A Together, we'll find ways to create new solutions current challenges while elevating the value of architects. Welcome to practice disrupted.

C Hello, listeners. Hello, Janine.

B Hi, Evelyn. High Disruptors. Today's guest is another friend from the Bay Area who I first met when he was teaching at UC Berkeley. He is now a professor and head of architecture at MIT. as well as a partner in his architecture practice modem. We've invited him onto the show to discuss what students are thinking about regarding their current education and architecture and what they hope to use their education for. We'll also discuss a bit about his career and how he's been able to successfully blend architecture, teaching, writing, and even installation work into his pathway?

C I think a lot of our listeners are always interested in hearing -- how individuals have forged alternative paths throughout their career and how they continue to actually remain adjacent to the profession as well. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Let's welcome Nicholas Dimoncho to the show.

B So, Nick, welcome. We always open up every interview by asking our guests to kinda introduce themselves. So maybe you can briefly introduce your background and point of view.

D I'd be happy to. And and Janine Evelyn, it's Lovely to be with you here today. So I am, as a as you, described, currently, professor and head of architect at MIT. I'm also, have appointments at MIT in urban Studies And Planning and, actually in the programming science technology and society, which gives a little a bit of a sense of the spread of my interests. And I was trained as a an architecture as both an undergraduate and graduate student and have worked in architecture practices in London and New York, but started teaching only a couple of years out of graduate school for 20 years in public education, public institutions. And then as of 3 years ago at MIT,

B Now we were just telling us before we hit record that MIT has been responding to a lot of the shifts that we're experiencing and observing in practice. Can you tell us more about both the history of how MIT has kind of been interested in that? And how it's meeting this change.

D Well, one of the reasons I was excited to come to MIT despite the inherent beauty of the Bay Area and my great delight in my colleagues in the institution that is, Berkeley is because of its singular role in the history of architectural education, in North America and what it means to be rethinking architectural education from the approach of MIT today. So for your list listeners who may not know MIT graduated the very first person with a degree in architecture in North America, in 1868. And, the program goes all the way back to 18 61 and the founding of MIT a week before the civil war started here in Boston. initially as a trade school to MIT as a whole was initially founded as a trade school to prepare technicians and workers for the exploding, industrial revolution here in Boston and the northeast. William Ware, who actually later would go on to found the architectural program in Columbia as well at the very last minute like, a month or 2 before the place was started, convinced them to, add a program in architecture to the 3 other courses. So we are to the state known as course 4 at MIT within its, very numbers and acronym based logic. And Ware made the case that there was no other no education in design at all. than in the United States and North America and that any institution trying to train people in both technical and intellectual arts needed design as an inherent part of its curriculum and the the motto of LIT is, you know, was was then as as its founding as today, men's at man's mind in hand So this idea of making and doing, which was then a revolutionary idea when most educational institutions in the US were had been founded to train ministers who don't do a lot of, you know, work with their hands as it were this idea of a what was initially, as I say, a technical institution with a new kind of institution for the training of of makers and doers and problem solvers.

D So from that beginning, MIT's course in architecture continued into the 1930s with a very consistent Ozark curriculum but was transformed by MIT's own transformation. MIT starting in 1916 moved to its current home on the Cambridge side of the of the river in Boston to a very grand so called main group that architecture didn't actually get to move into until the 1930s. but then the the the second major transformation was after the 2nd World War when thanks to its role in the invention and production of radar and other technical mechanisms during the 2nd World War in the very tight links that that built between the nation's science and engineering and research establishment and places like MIT, the university exploded in in size and scope and influence and really helped create the modern research university. I'd like to point out that when, Dwight Eisenhower at the end of his Second term, you know, warned us all of the so called military industrial complex. He actually wrote the military industrial academic complex in his speech notes, but his speech writer told him that that was too long. So, you know, MIT is obviously at the center of this big push for ex explosion in in research and research culture. And so from that day to the present MIT, you know, went from being a a, in some ways, a very traditional architectural education to really being disrupted itself by the the identity of the modern research university. And since that time, this intersection of design practice and research has defined the program and its contributions.

D So from the very first CAD programs, the very first CNC machine to some of the very first research in modern pre fabricated housing. All of this is tied up in the history of of the of the program and its generation of many other institutions from the Department of Urban Studies And Planning, which came out of the Department of Architecture in the 19 fifties, to the media lab, which came out of the department in the 19 seventies and mid mid eighties, you know, thinking about thinking, making new ways has always been a part of what the the program does. So what does that mean today? You asked a very important question. I think one of the things that means today is that we have on the one hand, thanks to the, you know, to the structures of the accreditation process and architecture program, which is technically identical to any other, the the the courses and distributions and and and qualifications are the same for every accredited degree in the country, but it is kind of immersed in this broth of a research and entrepreneurial culture that defines the modern university and the students in particular who are the most important part, of course, of what we do, often lead the way in in terms of, mediating between the structure and architectural education as it is defined. as part of our our professional licensure process and the environment of research and entrepreneurship. And we do the best we can to help. We have the only startup incubator in the school of architecture that we know of, design x, which currently has over

A $200,000,000

D of investment in companies that they've spun out. We have, you know, other structures that help people add on other degrees or research environments our students while they're studying architecture and professional degree can serve as RAs and and and research assistance and labs and and and research centers across the not only across the department, but across MIT as a whole. MIT is very interdisciplinary, both intellectually, but also spatially. So while we're currently moving into a more consolidated physical state, even to this, in the current day, are offices and studios are interspersed between chemistry labs and, you know, gas chromatography facilities and things like that. So that that's the nature of the place. What that means for our students is they graduate is, you know, could be understood in two ways. If you take a a from a certain point of view, we actually graduate potentially fewer licensed architects per, you know, per capita than many other programs in the United States hovering somewhere around half to do thirds depending on the generation and how you measure and survey responses and all the rest. But on the other hand, as we were recently just most recently discussing in in the context of our accreditation process.

D If you actually take a magnifying glass to what those amazing graduates are doing, particularly the ones who are not strictly speaking following a path of licensure and sole practitioner ship or working for someone else, they're right on the outside of what I would call the expanding idea of what an architect is in the world. So they're heading R and D operations for architecture firms. They're leading software startups. even other kind of, startups in construction, particularly, or or, most recently, particularly around areas of, response to the climate crisis or other, necessary forms of, you know, related forms of innovation in building, I I would say. And so I like to think of all these students actually just stretching the elastic envelope of what an architect is. And there's a there's a shadow that falls under of what what is a traditional sense that of of architectural practice and accreditation. And then as I say, there's this penumbra that they're pulling outwards, with all their work, which I think is a really, really important service to the profession and not something that should be seen as a decision not to enter the profession. It's quite the reverse.

C You know, one of the things we talk about with architects sounds to me like the curriculum at MIT is in dealing a lot of entrepreneurship and qualities and students that we don't actually see coming out of other programs. So, obviously, there's, you know, Design X lends itself directly to that through their ventures. But how do you think that entrepreneurship is kind of being built into the curriculum to allow for these, not only these more expansive ideas, but actually how it translates into a startup and a business going forward?

D I think that we are fortunate to be embedded in a larger culture. of entrepreneurship and innovation, which is from which we benefit and to which we contribute. That said, there's a real history there too of relationship to the architecture schools. Since I have one of the jobs of a department headed MIT, MIT is actually a quite small place. There's only 32 different departments 1000 undergraduates per year, a 1000 faculty. So so compared to my former home at UC Berkeley, for example, It's a much more smaller campus, but it's a campus that it and, that is much more interconnected. So talking to people about who we are and what we do and keeping us in the large, conversation, at MIT is very important. What I often find myself saying in that conversation is helping people appreciate just how much of MIT's culture of entrepreneurship and innovation comes back to the DNA of architectural education that goes through the history of the institution.

D So the the idea that, you know, some of the very first people at MIT to sit in a studio and draw something and make something and study something from life and put it together with an idea of how a technical exercise might be done. Those are actually all architecture students in the very, you know, very first DNA of MIT. So I guess I I I answered the question by saying, We're very fortunate to be in this larger, creative, entrepreneurial landscape, and yet, you know, I don't think it's acknowledged often enough, or understood, often enough how much the practice in teaching and architecture present from the origin of MIT actually has contributed over time to culture. So it's a it's a sort of a a a loop as you as it were of influence of of and so, you know, rather than, at various points in MIT's, architecture's history, particularly when, you know, during the cold war, when when some some architecture faculty felt quite alienated by this large technological machine of, of MIT. There was a notion that, you know, what are we even doing here? But in fact, the for better, for worse, that, you know, even if you looked at something like the RadLab, one of the the fundamental chapters of MIT's history when radar was created. There's a whole bunch of people. It looked like an architecture studio. A whole bunch of people working together.

D big open drafting tables, prototypes, model building, you know, that they that that's part of, that's part of what the institution is. So as to what, you know, as I say, I I can't say enough, you know, that there are 3 amazing groups of, of people at MIT Faculty staff and students, and they all contribute to that atmosphere. And, they all help each other actually negotiate what is a very also a very intense metabolism. You know, it it has been famously said that getting an education at MIT is like drinking water from a fire hose and and that kind of fire host cultures. It's called at MIT has positive or negative components that are also tied up with the with the history and culture of architecture studios and architectural production, and everyone has a challenging time negotiating the intensity of the culture at its very best It produces a lot of questioning, a lot of, intensity of that work and effort and creative production, you know, flow states all around. which is what we love about that culture, you know, when we've experienced it. But, at its worst, it's, you know, exhausting, overwhelming. You can't you know, you you cannot answer every email you receive because you would be working 28 hours a day.

D So MIT is a very special place with very There aren't many institutions that are featured in, you know, Wakanda forever and into the spider verse as as our or what was that? I forget the name of the Spider Man movie, but it's it's kind of like it's it's funny to be at a place that is so idealized in popular culture as a home of kind of innovation and advancement. And then to, you know, to be to be there and realize, well, yeah, it is pretty amazing, but that that, that amazingness has, again, you know, is not unrelated to what we love about our own profession culture because of the historical nature of it, but also, you know, worth questioning and evaluating for for all of its interconnected properties just like, you know, I admire you both for questioning the nature of architectural practice as well. they're they're all tied together.

B Well, we appreciate that. So not everyone, I think, does appreciate us questioning architecture, but I think we resonate with the idea that an education and architecture can really be applied in so many broad ways, and it exciting for us to hear that your students, you're empowering them to figure out how to jump to those opportunities. And so I guess one of my questions is in having to balance accreditation standards that play into that standard baseline education for architecture. Like, what kinds of classes and in what ways do you enhance and enrich their experience to allow them to make that transition? what coursework helps them find their way into these alternative paths?

D Mhmm. Well, I should, you know, I should plain that the the pace of curriculum and curriculum change is slow. And I have, been at MIT for 3 years now since June of 2020, which was itself a very interesting time to arrive. I I moved into my office only 18 months after beginning the job. So a lot of the curriculum is as the as my colleagues have developed it over time, and there's a lot of value in those developments that I wouldn't necessarily take credit for on my own. you know, the best moments in the curriculum, I would put it this way, are moments where traditional class boundary boundaries, and this is not, talking of social class, although we can certainly go there if it's all the complexities of how that relates architecture as well, but just traditional course boundaries breakdown and students are not being asked to do the work themselves. of integrating all the different challenging pieces of learning how to be an architect across a classes in structures, building performance, materials, studio design, etcetera, but the faculty themselves are performing those conversations and interactions for them. So you may have a integrated design studio and building technology, a structures class that meet together for almost all of their sessions and and that the have interrelated assignments or you may have, you know, temporary arrangements also whereby different, for example, my, you know, I think a a great innovation of my predecessor, Region Yoon was around the 150th anniversary of the program was to find funding for what at the time were called across studios that were where I'm historian taught with a studio faculty member or a structural engineer taught with a studio faculty member to, again, perform for students, experiments in in pedagogy.

D And that that has really continued with the and and is some of the best moment, you know, some of the best places of innovation that we have today. So One thing I I can take credit for is bringing in we we brought in recently the first endowed professorship and and associated funding in the department since the Agicon program was developed at MIT in 19 seventies, a gift of Alan and Terry Spoon, who are great donors to MIT and really focused on architectures role in addressing the climate crisis, both its causes and its effects, which is something that we're really, you know, orienting the whole, not just the whole school of architecture, but the new president of MIT's, has has really asked us to turn all of MIT's efforts to in a moment of real urgency. And so in the context of that effort, for example, we've my colleague, Christopher Reinhardt, who's the annoyed girl spoon professor and the recipient of the chair, is convening building technology educators from all around the country this fall to look at how carbon and energy use and building performance talk across the country and how we can continue to with the re all the resources that MIT has to support not just our own teaching, but teaching in those issues across the country. And my colleagues, Sheila Kennedy, and Kayla Mueller, are teaching together a series of integrated research studios. Caitlin is a publishes an undergraduate, graduate of our department has is trained as a structural engineer. and, Cheryl Kennedy, who's a noted practitioner in Boston on our faculty, are doing a whole set of research to use together across the next 3 years on the, what they call odds and mods, which are modifying using leftover building parts that are not normally entering the building cycles or cutoffs and and pieces and then also reusing, those are the odds and then reusing existing, building materials in a circular economy, which are the mods, and and how, you know, not not just producing studio content, but producing real research with an impact on building. And they just presented the beginning of that work at a symposium we held with architectural record on sustainability and practice, on Tuesday of this week. So it's a it's an exciting time for those kinds of collaborations.

D So We try to model in in how we deal with the accreditation framework and even this idea of entrepreneurship, something which I I do think we we need particularly to disrupt, which is the traditional kind of heroic architectural idea of of innovation and a kind of singular authorship going together. where everything we actually know about change in transformation and innovation tells us that the reverse history, that real innovation and insights come from collaboration, exchange, and a kind of a slightly more selfless attitude to what what might might I have to learn from somebody else versus what might contribute to the situation. So that's, you know, that's a big change that needs to happen in architectural culture, but it is also where I think some of these most exciting moments in both teaching and innovation and entrepreneurship all share that that quality.

C When I was a young high school student looking at what architecture programs I should go into, I didn't realize there was such a difference ultimately in our in curriculum from school to school. So I guess I'm wondering, and I and I've learned so much just in the front half of this conversation about MIT that I did not actually know it in terms of entrepreneurship and all of kind of the innovation sphere that was happening is something I definitely wouldn't have known as a high school student. So I guess my question to you is what type of students do you find MIT attracting based on what they know in their search for architecture schools.

D I think students are some of the smartest people in architecture schools as always. And I think, you know, we have I I should explain, and this is also an important part of that explaining the kind of research and innovation culture that we have pretty even mix at the master's level of 2 kinds of students One is the professional MRARK student, and the second is the post professional research student. But unlike the a lot of architectural schools who just have a single post professional degree, we actually have many flavors of our so called smarts degree, which is yet another inscrutable MIT acronym, but stands for special masters in architectural studies. And that reflects the the very distinctive structure of the department with with, nodes of faculty, a so called discipline groups who perform very high level research in different areas. from designing computation, to building technology, to history and theory and criticism of architecture and art to the Agha Khan program in Islamic architecture, etcetera. So There's there's very intense that the the kind of taste positive MIT is is small dollops of very intense flavor versus kind of larger architectural paste. And so the the the I think that that also has a lot to do with the kind of quality of of research and in entrepreneurship, and we we do the best when we bring all those intense flavors together and new combinations to extend the food metaphor. But then in terms of what students we tend to attract.

D I mean, one of the one of the great trade offs or challenges is, you know, we are very privileged to be the well resourced institution. And I'm very happy to say that, you know, in in my time as department head, we've moved our baseline or minimum funding for MR students from 50% fellowship support to 85% in fellowship support as the minimum, as well as adding stipends to help cover the cost of materials because we're very aware that when we can only admit you know, 20 some odd, you know, between 2030 students per year into our MR class, which given given the scale and structure of MITs, is the kind of both the financial and and also approaching the logistical limit. We need to do do a very, very good job of of the admissions process and of making that instrumental opportunity of coming to MIT available, not even so much to those who best merited or deserve it because I don't think that is a a useful way to think about it. What I have brought into or or what what I working with our faculty have kind of shifted the admissions conversation into in the last several years, especially is, those who are prepared for MIT, which is obviously a larger number of people than we can actually admit. Now those who are prepared to take, take advantage of the opportunity to whom it will make the most difference to whom it will be most instrumental in a larger, career pathway. So so You know, we stopped 3 years ago. We stopped ranking our students in the admissions process. We, you know, we have to go through more.

D We talk about sorting, not ranking. but we don't, for example, have a number 12345 admit, you know, nor do we negotiate offers nor do we do any of that stuff which which helps contribute to a sense that there's like a top admit and a second top admit because that's, you know, that that that is, an antiquated and an obsolete way of looking at these sorts of opportunities and what they mean. It is a kind of to better for worse, we we cannot admit anyone, everyone we would like we cannot help everyone, you know, give everyone we would like to access to this opportunity. So as I say, we we really try to look to the people you know, equipped for it to whom it'll be most instrumental, which has really expanded the the kind of geographic and life experience kind of balance of our of our, MR classes over the last couple of years, especially, but also, you know, building on work that was done also way before I got to MIT by some of my, you know, most amazing colleagues. And so our our class is very heterogeneous. You know, there aren't a lot of people who fit we haven't succeeded if a bunch of people from the same background or with the same set of experiences come because we understand I think like any good architecture program that most of the learning is done by the students from each other, and we are there as a faculty and staff structure to facilitate that and inject, you know, part of the most interesting and challenging opportunities for people to learn from from each other into the into the quick So I I can't tell you what an MIT student looks like because, you know, for every, you know, thirty five year old ex marine, there's, you know, twenty two year old from Hong Kong or the the it's it's a very broad or students from from, you know, very broad, intellectual diversity. I was very pleased you know, the the I had my own thoughts on being allied culture more broadly, but I did go one of the reasons I was very happy to go to the latest Venice architecture would be an ally opening is that we had not not only did we have 8 or 9 faculty represented, which is pretty normal even though we do have a that's a lot of our faculty. We actually had, four or five students who are on their own being represented in in various contexts.

D in competitions to design a curated prevalence from their home countries or being selected into the larger B and L a curatorship. So a large representation in the in the show. So our students are pretty amazing. And I'm inspired every day by by what they do and how they how they look at the world, but they're not amazing you know, they're they're amazing people who are taking advantage of an amazing opportunity of being being at MIT. And so our job is to bring those 2 together.

B I wanted to talk about your interest because I think your career is actually a very good example of someone who is used in architecture education and expanded and kind of redefine what the possibility of your career could be. You've been In academia, you've written a book. You've done exhibitions. You are also interested in technology. Can you tell us about both some of the coursework that you're interested in and how you're applying that to your work as well as some of your professional endeavors that you've been exploring.

D Sure. Well, I I think the courses I've taught at MIT are more of a representation of how I came in. So I came in, as I said at the very beginning, COVID in the, in June of 2020, and and we were scrambling to do a lot of different things at that time. so a lot of the courses I was teaching were kind of one offs to do with ways in which we're trying to support students. We had, in that first summer, we we had a kind of we actually ran a sort of crazy summer school because everyone lost their summer internship so I taught, you know, co taught courses on weird skills and making judy sick domes in your own home and anything we could do to kind of engage people and keep the community together in that summer. And then slowly, my teaching has gone from, you know, as we have come out of the pandemic has gone from more sort of opportunistic support of one off efforts to day to day teaching the the course and teaching now, which is probably, just finished teaching is probably most representative of both my interests and what we're trying to do at MIT is a course that I inherited originally begun by a median unitary Oxford called Design scales, which is a class to introduce MIT undergraduates broadly to design as its practice from the scale of architecture to the scale of nanotechnology to now better for worse the scale of geoengineering. And so what the fundamental questions are that connect those scales in in terms of both both ethics and and creativity and practices. And that really also reflects my own best experiences in the in the discipline.

D I was an architecture major as an undergraduate because I knew a little bit about architecture. My dad practices a and taught as a planner, but had originally gone to architectural school. So I kind of knew what it was. And after I realized astronomy wasn't for me, which is my first intended major, I knew that I could take all the classes that I wanted to take and, the venerable and wonderful Kent Plumer, who was the director of my undergraduate architecture major, would let me take anything from machine shop in the chemistry department to drawing to sculpture and set design and and count it all towards an undergraduate architecture major. So a very you know, that I benefited enormously from that very traditional idea of like, well, what's not related to architecture? And and what can't you bring into it? A very, very short short list. And so for me who have always had kind of either omnivorous or sort of interdisciplinary interest reflecting, I I think some of the threads of our earlier conversation has been less of a kind of heroic calling in the traditional sense than a than a kind of disciplinary, convenient disciplinary label to connect a set of interconnected inter interests in how we're assuming beings operate between realms of nature and technology, how we shape our environment, and ways it can be shaped better. Either, in my case, I've been privileged, I would say, to to both do that as a practitioner, as a historian and critic, And then most recently, as someone working in the realm of software and its relationship to design and community engagement and design for standability. And so, you know, the architecture of our world is much bigger than bricks, although bricks are very, very important.

D And I'm interested in that largest meaning of architecture, both as a sense of what we describe architecture as being, which extends far beyond buildings, both, in in, bigger than them and much smaller than them, and also extends far beyond the traditional notion of practice as well, even though I I value and really enjoyed the years I spent in that more traditional motion and practice as well.

B I feel like we should talk about some of your work because I think is what is super fascinating about you is, like, when I met you, you were working on an exhibition that went into the SF Moma. It also showed up at spur. You were also writing a book that was published called space suits fashioning Apollo, which really researched and looked into the fabrication of the spacesuits that astronauts wear when they go to space and I just think it's really interesting that you're able to reach into these kind of unexpected arenas and connect it back to architecture. I was wondering what inspired you through some of those exercises, if that was in pursuit of just things that you were interested in, or, you know, how did you how did you find your path to working on those projects.

D At the best moments, I was able to do what I always encourage are, you know, students to do when they come, the the this is the season, particularly like a week or 2 after graduation where a lot of people sign up for my office hours as they did even yesterday. and ask the kind of what what do I do with my life question that often follows a kind of structured thing like getting a degree and suddenly life becomes unstructured and and you have to make a pathway in it. At the best moments, I was able to I was able to do what I encouraged them to do, which is to be led and not by their fear, but by their curiosity. So which which can often involve taking a bit of a leap into the into the unknown. So as someone who had actually, as I said, you know, had a a pretty straightforward architectural education if if somewhat more heterogeneous because I got a you know, a BA in architecture, which made me very educating lots of all sorts of interesting things, but basically unemployable at least in to my first you know, 5 rounds of job interviews when I when I graduated and then a a traditional MR. Yeah. I'm just very lucky to be able to work on lots of different projects and to have you know, probably 2 very different types of professional experiences in architecture. 1, working for well you know, well respected traditional firms in in London, like, Davis Bernie bond, their London office or, Michael Hopkins, you know, relatively briefly, but, influentially, looking at just things that were built well and run well and what that, you know, looked like and and felt like to be a part of.

D And then in the US working over the course of several years with, much smaller back in those days, but still very intense and interesting version of what is now Dollar's video and Renfro on a very heterogeneous mix of projects there. And so with that, introduction to a whirlwind of practice. I was probably introduced to the idea that, again, I try to convey also to to younger, particularly younger faculty members and people who are asking me again, what what is the right way and and what I've learned is that you can what I try to tell them, which is you can do pretty much whatever you want as long as you do it well, which is to say that if you if you particularly in a discipline as and as broad and and heterogeneous and and, you know, with with links to so many parts of, of culture and technology and environment as architecture, We are we are very, very fortunate to have many flexible intellectual creative and professional pathways but doing things well and and and going through every all the the internal and external challenges are really a achieving excellence and work is hard, but but is its own reward because people tend to not mind what you do. As I say, if it achieves some some fundamental level of of being, you know, a good addition to the world. So not arguing that I'm certainly done that, but I've certainly tried to and what links all the projects have done, which to me are very deeply interrelated, whether it's the the first book on spacesuits, the second book, which was the sort of compendium of the project whose installations you mentioned, cold local code or the software work that came out of that or other essays I've written is a is a real fascination between about the difference between what I would say the world as it is in the world as we would like be. So, the world as it is messy, interconnected, sometimes sloppy, miraculously adaptive, the world as we would like it to be, certainly particularly as architects, which is organized coherent, rational, subject to measurement, and optimization, and and the I feel like a lot of, at least from my perspective, a lot of the challenges we're facing culture as societies and economy come, you know, relate to this fundamental conflict and the work, whether it's writing about how the Apollo space suit was not as was intended, you know, masterly produced by military industrial contractors, but by a small industrial division of the Playtex Braun Girdle company or writing about or or speculating on on how, software tools could help us design, you know, alongside and into the real metabolism of cities versus trying to rationalize them into ways that make them more coherent but less functional, which is what a lot of our highways and other zoning and other planning interventions have done or or simply, you know, has in a recent set of essays and research looking at, like, you know, the origins of, modern, computer graphics and how that relates to how we see and understand the world today. The these are all preoccupations at that boundary that I tried to describe.

C You mentioned, Nick, that, you know, all these students are coming to you and they're like, what's next? What do I do with my life? So what has been your response to them?

D Well, I mean, it's sort of like what I said to you, the be led by curiosity, and passion and frustration and outrage and all the things that lead us to do, you know, real real things in the world. Right now, tell another MIT story. We we have, again, before I came, my colleagues began, and I have tried to foster and expand a role that the architecture department now has in opening up education and design and creative problem solving to every MIT undergraduate. So our design major and design minor, which the course I was describing before that I teach is a coach with with, Rosa Garabario is embedded in is now the fastest growing and 2nd largest minor at all of MIT, which we're very happy about and is now linked to the founding of a new institution here at MIT led by my colleague, John Oxendorf which is the Morning Side Academy of Design, which comes from a big, donation by the Family Foundation of Joel Chan, and and it's a it's a really exciting moment for Designage education at MIT and design as a as a larger way of thinking around around the world, but the the most popular undergraduate minor and major is computer science. Some 68% of MIT undergraduates now major in computer science. And I fear that that choice is not entirely led by curiosity, but partially by the fear that eighteen and nineteen year olds many of them 1st generation college students at MIT these days have around the state of our economy and society and a job which will lead to security. And I I would hope to be able to bring to that undergraduate education through through design teaching but also to our graduate architecture students, a sense of both, you know, as, as Angela Davis once said, you know, optimism of the intellect, if not of of the heart, about where we're going and what we need to do and and be led therefore by, as I say, curiosity and passion into Korea Pathways that are both unexpected and impactful. And I do think a lot of our graduates, as I was saying, are able to to do that, particularly in our graduate program, and I'm very proud not so much of us, but of them for their ability to to do that.

D So that's that's the advice. You know, I gave in terms of the the the profession and what we're trying to do. I mean, one of the, you know, one of the other, the we need to expand the profession. We need to expand its impact. We need to expand its sense of ethics, expand who has access to it. One of the most kind of important stories, true, we were also talking about a little bit before we started recording. which I'll I'll include here. And I, I'll give particular credit not to so much myself, but to my, counterpart, Quincy Daniels at Tuskegee University, and it's Robert Taylor School of Architecture, you know, Robert Artaylor was MIT's 1st black graduate, not just of the architecture program, but of MIT more broadly focused in 1991, and he couldn't find work as a as an architect that was hired 2 years after graduation to by Booker to Washington to bring MIT's curriculum to always the end of Tuskegee Institute.

D And not only did he do that, but he actually added components of a more even more applied training so that subsequently 48 buildings were built to Robert Taylor's design and with the student labor out of the clay on which Tuskegee campus sat turned into bricks and turned into the amazing architecture of that campus today. for all the links historically and creatively between MIT and that curriculum and that campus, there had never actually been until a couple of years ago any relationship between the two institutions or between the two programs. And I'm very, very happy in the last couple of years just as a as a small piece of trying to beyond the students were able to admit, expand the kind of influence and impact that we're able to have in the world. We partnered with, Quessy and the school and Tuskegee as a whole, to not just create exchange programs focused on entrepreneurship in particular and digital fabrication between MIT students and Tuskegee students focusing as much on what we have to learn there as what they have to learn here, but also out of that program, we've we're expanding research links between researchers and faculty across, you know, far beyond architecture across both institutions. So I I think, you know, that's a small story of impacts we're trying to have, how we're trying to broaden MIT's impact in the world. But I think our profession, which which occupies a strange place, you know, we when I taught the intro to to environmental design as part of Berkeley's curriculum. I used to devote a a whole lecture, pretty early in the course to why architects wear black because he was one thing that, you know, confused and and, like, you know, explaining especially to students who are new to the profession or may maybe even new to higher education. Like, who who are these people? And why do they do the way we do? We typed there are 2 parts of the lecture.

D 1, you know, why why does why architects have funny handwriting generally, you know, long after we need to use it on, you know, on on blueprints, and why do we wear black? And if you look at it, why do we wear black historically? Like, Michelangelo actually wore black. Right? This is not a recent thing, and and it's very has a very a history to do with both the conveyance of expertise. So the occupation of a professional class had professional classes have uniforms, doctors have lab coats, lawyers have, you know, suits, and we have our own sort of professional garb, but then it also Michelangelo, if you dig into his correspondence, what war or black because he was always in a room full of people much richer than him, and he couldn't compete with the opulence of of popes and cardinals and Medicis and all the rest. And so it it it really speaks to, like, we have this professional class quality. We're close to power, but we don't necessarily occupy you know, power. And in fact, we're often quite, you know, if you look at the debates today around, you know, projects like Niam or or, you know, we we are for for all of our the ways in which architecture is a font of really important thinking about, you know, equity and impact and transformations and Society. We're still service professionals at the core of our training, and it's, you know, and many architects will go work for who's paying. And that that, you know, then is now and don't have an alternative maybe because they have a payroll or whatever.

D It's not I'm not not necessarily saying that as a value judgment. Although, there's definitely people I would you know, not work for and and don't think anyone should. How we advance the the do the vital work we have to do in both in the interconnected spaces, particularly of climate and equity, and yet reconcile that with our service role of the profession is is is a massive challenge. And I do think this is one of the most important reasons to expand what we mean by the profession because the for better or for worse, the traditional fee receiving model of architectural practice has so little agency. or only a very specific kind of agency, you know, the the the client is always right, but you get to decide how they're right is what a prisker prize winner once said to me about how, you know, how they had to how they had to operate. And in this world, I don't I think we need other ways to speak. That will always be a way to speak when you're, you know, providing services, and we won't, you know, ever get away from that because it's a so foundational to the profession, but to try to develop other ways to speak through the creation of of companies of agendas, platforms of of other ways in which change happens in in this world. We don't have time to change the whole system, you know, particularly if we have you know, less than a decade to address the fundamental challenges of climate and how it relates to building.

D We have to operate, but we have to operate within more systems than we have traditionally in order to have the impact we need to have.

B Yeah. Totally. Now I completely agree with that. Well, first of all, I always heard how much a lot of the students enjoyed your classes at Berkeley, and then also just get to know you. And it cool. Your work is very interesting, and I think it's nice to see someone who's leading in this space and trying to, like, make a difference in all of these great ways to expand the profession and help other people find their way into these alternative pathways.

D Well, thanks so much. High disruptors.

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