Background illustration by Lilli Carré.

The role of Archinect’s series Cross-Talk is to bring forward the positive aspects of the polemic and allow for the resulting conflict to bring to life an otherwise still and comfortable climate of creativity—if there can be one. Cross-Talk attempts—if to only say that it did—to allow text the freedom that the image has accepted and embraced. Cross-Talk attempts to force the no, to contradict itself, to anger, to please and then anger again, if only to force a stance, to pull out the position of the self, of the discipline and of the hour as a means to begin and maintain conversations moving forward. 

In this series, we are looking at the autonomy of the student and their role in today's institutions as it relates to creative rights and intellectual property. 

Following the publishing of 'Has Educational Complacency Diminished Today's Discourse?' on Archinect, a series of conversations have come forward—these discussions challenge the article’s statement, agree with it, and, most interestingly, find new ways of dissecting the topic and addressing the issue.

One potent point of dissection to emerge from these conversations is how the means of dissemination of relevant disciplinary trends might contribute to this complacency. The current direction of image-sharing distills projects of difference and rigor into a mere image, plastered on a press release or post declaring institutional dominance. Words are slowly finding their importance diminished, unable to compete with the image, whose sources and inspirations are glazed over by a swipe. 

How are we to fight such declarations? How do we reestablish words as the platforms for the images? What meaning has been lost in the practice of instant swiping and how is this understood on a practical level? Whose duty is it to move past these dull tools and develop new ones?

This is not to say that others will not follow, but they will follow, waiting in the safety of shadows awaiting the light ahead in order to reorient themselves to it. 

The instant quality of these tools has its obvious pitfalls. We lose meaning, history, and context, rendering sharing as a tool, not of education, but of ego. When we lose these particular aspects another issue arises: that of plagiarism, copyright, and intellectual property. In a culture oversaturated by tools of dissemination, each image seemingly lives on its own. Divorced from the ideas that inspired it, the unattended image exacerbated existing conflicts of ownership. 

To truly combat these issues a new approach must be developed—one that goes deeper in giving credit to ideas and inspirations past, while applauding the present’s exploration and progression beyond it.

How then do we approach ways to unravel, grow, and change our current systems? Finding new ways of questioning these tools may be daunting, but those, at times complacent, institutions are the only ones questioning and building upon these cracks. Our default modes of communication have reached their limits, and the creation of new modes may be the answer to the issues drawn out by our current toolbox. 

The development, implementation, and growth of programs focused on pedagogy, media, and theory have slowly garnered more and more attention. Programs like Theory and Pedagogy, Art and the Public Domain, History and Theory, Fiction and Art are rumblings of a new means of disciplinary growth. They are the institutional response to an outcry for new variations of modes for speaking. Institutions feel their voices being muted, forced to participate in a game of charades attempting to declare their relevance through tools not made for such a task. Such programs are beginning to question that very framework and the normative tools that their successful notions had supplied and reinforced. This marks a drastic change from previous notions of institutional presences to a keen engagement with where the discipline is heading.

Such programs are beginning to question that very framework and the normative tools that their successful notions had supplied and reinforced.

Along with the autonomy of the student, the student as an institution is simultaneously coming into its own. With democratic modes of dissemination increasingly available to the student, they have begun to formalize and implement their own trajectories. Only those institutions keen enough, mobile enough, and willing enough to take a chance and experiment in its truest form will foster this path for the student. 

If we visit those same institutions from the earlier comparisons, it is obvious to see that they have become aware of the needs for adjustments to the disciplinary framework that we and they have inherited. SCI-Arc and Harvard have become the origin points for contemporary disciplinary movements. It is no surprise then that it is here that we see the first inklings of progress and reworking to find ways to investigate and understand disciplinary trends, fault lines, and frictions and how to better keep the integrity of such institutional explorations alive.

To start, take SCI-Arc’s Design Theory and Pedagogy. Created as part of its Edge Program, the course is framed as an explorative and declaratory understanding of the meaning of teaching in today’s discipline while simultaneously being capable of identifying and understanding what constitutes a student in today's world. The program is a direct injection of the same blood, energy, and ethos upon which SCI-Arc was founded upon and has used to launch itself to the top ranks of the architectural world. Such a program surgically begins to dissect, prod and question the notions of education, the role of the student, the role of the educator, and even the role of the institution itself. It is no surprise then that the format is experimental itself. 

This year’s final review found itself reimagined and replaced with a modern day final salon, an evening of chasing refining architectural taste and knowledge through communal conversations over plates of edible delights and intellectual inquiries. Such a night produced a radical shift from the hierarchal format of accepted notions of colleague and professor reviews and instead created a space of communal, stripped bare conversation creating a place for the exchange of ideas. This process takes the entertainment factor of current tools and turns them on their head, creating an engaged mode of communication. While institutions may be defined as places of stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior, they may, in fact, find strength and longevity from the ability to develop contemporary values, contemporary patterns, and contemporary means of stability.

Another example to draw similar parallel is Harvard’s Graduate School of Design’s yearly student work publication Platform. Devised as a medium between what the school wanted to market and what the students themselves made, Platform has been an invigorating improvement on the model of school publications by allowing students, rather than faculty, to organize. What used to be a tool driven by the institution, given to young, hungry and relevance-seeking faculty, has now been given new life by allowing the students themselves to dictate how their work is presented. This allows, and rightfully so, the largest demographic within the institution to control how their work, identity, and tendencies are being communicated.

While institutions may be defined as places of stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior, they may, in fact, find strength and longevity from the ability to develop contemporary values, contemporary patterns and contemporary means of stability.

Understanding the integrity of our ideas—the modes in which they are communicated, appropriated, sourced, and translated between each other—is of the utmost importance. If our discipline wants to continue to be a discipline, and not just a visual portfolio of ideas that never had a chance to speak beyond their  visual representation, we need to begin to question their complete validity, their complete success and/or failures.