Exploring futures

I partially switched faculties this month. After seven years at Mechanical Engineering, I now work half-time at Architecture and the Built Environment.

‘Real’ engineers sometimes view Architecture as an education in creative tinkering and consider it a little odd that its graduates are awarded an engineering title. And of course, the idea that people at Architecture are ‘not that technical’ is true, in a way. At least in terms of quantitative analytics. Just count the number of mathematics courses in the curriculum. But the other side of that coin is never mentioned in the jokes about those strange half-artists. I only discovered it myself after I started to spend more time there.

Let me begin by saying that often I am actually impressed by the technical expertise of the architects with whom I teach. Based on just a few basic sketches, they often see precisely where insulation will be a problem, how a building should be situated in relation to the direction of sunlight and wind, what materials are and are not suitable, how thick a column should be, or simply that a space is totally impractical. All this before I have managed to even locate the front door.

Still, there is a grain of truth in the caricature of the megalomaniac architect that designs socially progressive buildings that actually don’t work at all and whose roofs start leaking in no time. They are sometimes more interested in the societal significance of a building at Architecture than in its technicalities. But engineers often make the exact opposite of that mistake: working out a flawless construction and meticulously modelling the dynamics of something with questionable value to society. Or simply not critically examining that value.

Technical people tend to present projects as the one and only logical next step

Well, that is a bit of a caricature as well, of course. Many projects at TU Delft are explicitly intended to solve societal problems. But technologists tend to present such projects – self-driving cars, hydrogen-powered airplanes, more efficient ships – as the only logical next step. The future. Singular. As if there is no other choice. What I value at Architecture and the Built Environment is the number of different futures that are explored there. Even when the issue as to whether something can actually be built is not considered too deeply, you can be sure that a lot of thought has gone into the question of what we want to build. Or even: how we want to live.

At their best, I think that at Architecture they understand more than elsewhere at TU Delft what it means to have an academic attitude towards your discipline. This includes exploring possibilities that are completely unrealistic in today’s society. Not only seeking answers to pressing problems faced by society today, in collaboration with currently powerful institutions and companies, but also exploring how a different kind of architecture or differently designed technological systems could make possible a different type of society and different types of futures.