2020 Administrators Conference

The future offers our discipline significant opportunities to rethink who we are, where we fit, and who is at the table. As administrators and educators, we have the power to work together and with others to shape the next chapter of our discipline’s history and to expand possibilities for future generations of students, professionals, and academics.

Global contexts, removing inequities, emerging technologies, world pandemic, impacts of climate change and evolving models of practice present us with new opportunities. These also present challenges that must be carefully examined, analyzed, and addressed as we consider directions, boundaries, and identities for architectural education and the discipline. Now is the time to embrace these challenges directly as we set a course of future possibilities for the discipline and the profession.

This conference explores three themes with respect to contemporary conditions that offer increased vitality for architectural education:

1. Community Table – How can new demographic realities encourage reconsideration of the role of power and privilege in academic and social exchanges, particularly in our relations with historically underserved communities? What new opportunities for meaningful and mutually beneficial scholarly and educational endeavors emerge from recalibrating our foci? How might recalibration transform the messages we convey to students and to local communities about the role of academic institutions and the role of architecture?
2. Effective Exchange – How efficacious are our curricular goals and pedagogical practices for embracing the future and taking advantage of the opportunities it presents? How can we measure our effectiveness and retool our methods to better target outcomes? What new possibilities exist to bring greater resources to our efforts? Can we challenge academic norms of scholarship and financial support to increase our effectiveness as doers and makers?
3. Future Generations – Students are the future for architectural education and the profession. What potentials will broaden our reach with respect to future generations? As we rethink what “inclusion” means in our field, how can we best see, support, and celebrate the already existing diversity in our academic communities? And how will we grow and expand that diversity over time, with openness to how new voices will enhance and transform how we shape the built environment? What redefinitions of focus and boundaries do increasingly urbanized global populations, growing inequality, and physical vulnerabilities offer?

The virtual conference will provide an opportunity for collectively considering these themes as we ponder who we can be, where we should fit, and what we could look like in the future.