The world is on fire, materially, politically, socially, and there's no sign of any appeasement ahead which could prevent these different hotbeds from converging in the coming years. In this situation, the narrative promoted by architecture schools is to keep on producing buildings by "building better", with "zero carbon emission", "green" constructions. Architecture schools have yet to understand that the problem is of a different nature, at a much wider scale. It is the whole system of human settlements that needs to be reconsidered.
To address this situation, we have created the Architecture in a World on Fire program at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Saint-Étienne. It's goal is to take architecture out of its small problems in order to put it at the service of big problems.
We seek students to help us demonstrate that architecture is a form of knowledge capable of playing a decisive role in a world on fire.
For thousands of years, architecture has been used by architects to address the crisis of their times. Vitruvius used architecture to help understand the mechanism of the universe. He also provided the military with an architectural knowledge of war machines. Through buildings, economic theory, the reform of grammar, mathematics and other projects, Alberti used architecture to help create a healthy and stable world in a time when the black plague wiped out half the population of Europe. Palladio reformed the art of war in a world in which warfare was intensifying through the perfection of artillery. Vauban designed a general income tax for the entire French Kingdom to oppose the neverending famines and vast destructions caused by Louis the XIV’s perpetual wars.
Closer to us, the “modern movement” was heavily invested in the mechanization of means of production. Architects played a decisive role in transforming the world of handmade objects towards industrial production. Even the immense work that Le Corbusier produced beyond the production of buildings is mostly ghosted. The project of the "Modulor" for instance, is still vastly misunderstood. This measuring system wasn't meant to produce buildings, but rather to merge the two global measuring systems into one. As he noticed, it created massive problems during WWII as the difference in measuring standards made the French and British ammunitions incompatible.
During antiquity up until the Renaissance, this uncertainty of times had a name. It was called “Fortuna”. Climate change has brought back Fortuna to the forefront as we now decisively live in uncertain times.
Our task as architects is to awaken the archaic function of architecture : Organizing reality to preserve the living, including the non-human, from the misfortunes of times.
We are in a daunting and paradoxical situation where “architecture as buildings” is now the major gasoline of the general ongoing ecocide whereas “architecture beyond buildings” would be one of the few organizational tools available to get us out of this mess... For this reason we need to massively and urgently transform architecture schools in Vitruvian terms, i.e. as tools to transform the general economy of our reality. In the face of the generalized ongoing ecocide, architecture has long demonstrated its capacity as a powerful organizational tool, beyond the production of buildings. Architectural knowledge is is able to present us with alternative orderings of reality : by participating in the reform of the means of production, proposing alternative ways of redistributing wealth, implementing the transition from very high-energy consumption societies to low-energy societies...
In order to put architecture back on its feet, we need to give it a working definition. Our proposal is simple: architecture is the knowledge of systems. There's nothing new in this definition, which Vitruvius had already codified in his “De architectura”. It is this meaning that enabled him to take on objects as diverse as the organization of a building, the systemic description of the universe or the construction of machines. We need to find our path back to such a comprehension of architecture.
This architectural shift is long due. It is time for a collective recognition of the significant gap between the contemporary restrictive understanding of architecture as "production of buildings" and the much wider role architecture has played in human affairs from Vitruvius to the "modern movement". Such an awareness is necessary for architecture schools and architects to stop being part of the problem and regain a grasp on important matters of our collective reality.
