ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates contemporary architectural education, its historical and ongoing relationship to climate inaction, distilling how this has led to a failure to prepare successive generations of students for the future. As the climate and ecological emergency cascades into an international cost-of-survival crisis, this truth has been brought into sharp, unignorable focus.
Students have not been prepared for their unpredictable futures, and design studios continue to be run in a vacuum – insulated from the cultural, economic, environmental, technological, and political realities of the world outside the university environment. A combination of institutional inertia, climate denial, and academic choices has resulted in architecture schools’ curricula lagging far behind what is needed to adapt to a new climate reality and to aid a Just Transition away from fossil fuels.
The role of the architect must evolve from the creation of buildings – with designed obsolescence – to a role of stewardship – of existing buildings, of resources, and of community infrastructure. To this end, reflections and lessons from the Anthropocene Architecture School are offered on how to educate students like the house truly is on fire.
