113th Annual Meeting

Architectural education is in an age of repair. How we meaningfully address the past and present harms of the practice, culture, and pedagogy of architecture will be crucial to setting urgently needed new directions. In the 2022 issue of the Journal of Architectural Education, entitled “Pedagogies for a Broken World,” editors Jay Cephas, Igor Marjanović & Ana Miljački wrote, “Indeed, seeing the world for what it is enables recasting our characterization of it from ‘broken’ to ‘unfinished,’ from narratives of progress to tactics of care.” As opposed to the consumptive practice of throwing away and building anew, repair is grounded in an ethical appreciation for the value inherent in what exists. Repair, as an approach, requires an understanding of the root causes of breakage and careful consideration of anticipated conditions and future use, to enable us to move forward.

Repair also often goes unrecognized. For this Annual Meeting, we hope to put these discussions front and center. Situated in the city of New Orleans, 20 years after Hurricane Katrina, this conference asks us to reflect on repair in practice, repair in teaching, and the ethics of repair in engagement, especially in schools of architecture. How does our discipline shift to address a “broken world” shaped by social inequities, polarization, misinformation, ecological degradation, climate change, and conditions of acute devastation due to wars and natural disasters? We invite architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, policy-makers, social workers, health practitioners, community leaders, advocates, and educators across our allied disciplines to join in a critical examination of our collective capacity for repair through care, healing, rebuilding, rewilding, and other yet unexplored actions in the built environment.