Despite the evergreen emphasis on a “final” product, Architecture was never just a white box in the landscape. Architecture, as education, practice, environment, and institution, is a fundamentally political act and political object. The ways and the things we build have the power to amplify our shared cultural values. But when probed, those values often reveal our own culpability in supporting a systematic, exploitative, racist, and staid status quo.
We choose to reify Architecture through the lenses of how, why, for whom, and by whom. Through amplifying process, people, and politics over final product, we aim to illuminate the narratives and ideas that will yield a more inclusive, considered, and justly constructed world.
Under Construction will feature traditional Lectures supplemented by pithy Hot Takes—candid discussions between invited guests and students. Through this series of public conversations, we shift our gaze away from Architecture as a finished product, toward Architecture in all its diversity: as a series of decisions, modes of working, and networks of broad stakeholders within the larger context of history, culture, and social justice.