Pushing back the dark forces of modern ills by reform in architectural education: rambling in group conversation

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Discussing whether sustainability should be a niche for an architecture program.

After years of  claiming our focus on sustainability, with a certain degree of success, by now sustainibility should be in our DNA already. On another hand, now almost all university programmes has to embed SDG goals. Its a matter of implementing it that its found wanting.

If we still put sustainability as our niche, soon it will be like a medical school putting health as its niche, which should be given already.

Yes, we should always strive for sustainibility. Perhaps the reason it could not be a niche is  because only a few subjects insist its use. Because we currently understand sustainibility only its technical and environmental dimensions.

Whereas current wisdom shows that it is humannes aspectthat make or break sustainable agenda itu berjaya. So i believe if we strive for human dimension, sustainibility will be a strong component in it.

Perhaps Its not clear what i meant by humanness. It stems from my thesis when I studied two model of thermal comfort and the problems asscoiated with them. And when I analyse this issue on other disciplines, be it tech, education, politic and economy, it suffers the same consequences from the duality of human/matter division. same pattern seems to appear. It runs for over 500 years now. Now people in economy and education begin to realize this systemic malady. It was first realised by a physicist no less than 30 years ago. And I find today our knowledge and education system is suffering from this, but scholars are happy choosing the default mode. If we look at how it ruins our primary education its scary, our future generation is stuck in the education mode that causes all the modern ills we keep lamenting. I believe it is the responsibility of universities to merungkai this problem, at systemic level.

When sustainability first enters into world agenda it was triggered by a biologist, but the modern sustainbility move was empowered by architects (e.g. Robert and Brenda Vale), then the rest of civilization field follow suits. Somehow, the sustainabiity movement cannot seem to push back the assault of modernist thinking on environment and society. Yes we manage to push for green building and all, but the  'dark force' (capitalism, neoliberalisam, neo colonialism) still dictates the world economy and the rest. Now we are in need of new thinking system, one that bring wholism and humanism back into epistemology. I believe it has been highlighted by scientists themselves, (Fritdjoff Capra, James Lovelock,) but i still believe it would be architects who would create the revolution. that's why I believe our school has the opportunity to be the changemaker in the modern world.

This time it would not be about techniques and technology anymore, but worldview. Architects have always been good holistic thinker, but the reductionist forces from the engineering is always pushing fot their way, now we see, mechanistic thinking system creeping into architectural education too. People begin to focus on concrete but small solutions. The cities continue to push  on on the march order by rationalist thinking (which spawn are reductionism, taylorism, etc) continuing destroying humannness and environment.

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