Workshop: Curriculum Change not Climate Change
Back to overview| Author |
 Vivek Gilani |
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| Description | Irrigated and informed by the lived experiences of the Fairconditioning Program’s Architecture Academic Curriculum Change Project, this workshop attempts a harnessing of the catalytic potential of a head-heart-hands balance approach to ‘imagine (in place)’ and articulate alternate undergraduate architecture pedagogy paradigms in specific academic contexts (i.e. specific colleges) in Europe. These ‘alternative’ pathways will be defined by learning environments that engender empathy, curiosity, and cultivates skills so that students design sustainably cooled buildings for a heat-wave dominated Europe, as a non-negotiable value (and not a value-addition) as future architects. Participants will deliberate upon and examine a spectrum of possible responses to subvert a largely ‘reactive’ academic culture, subservient to the parochial and short-termism fetishizing patterns of the construction industry. They will be called upon to collectively co-create plausible theories of change and high-level action plans (including illuminating possible pathways to grant-funding) to act in consonance with the Indo-Swiss Fairconditioning Program, undergirded by a beginning-of-pipe approach (as in India), to bend the likely trajectory of the built space economy in Europe: one which is likely to wake up too late to the reality of a failed building stock that is unsuited for a hotter Europe and then lurch towards intensive energy-guzzling and climate-wrecking air conditioning as the new destructive climate-injustice perpetuating ‘default’. The ‘work’ of this workshop will be predicated upon the wholesome wisdom of a systems-thinking approach and will integrate body movement, mindfulness-in-practice and an ‘and-vs-or’ approach to subvert the classic dialectic of the thesis-antithesis and synthesis approach to conceive hybrid system-transformation responses that harness the merits of evolutionary as well as revolutionary means. |
| Topic | Rethink the (economics) curriculum |
| Format | Action atelier |
| Bio |