2025 ACSA/EAAE Teachers Conference

As architectural concerns expand to account for today’s social and environmental crises, architects are increasingly caught up in a multitude of conflicts. These conflicts transcend individual scales: from the classroom to the community, and from the building to geopolitics. Architects may orient architectural tools toward social ends, but architecture is not conventionally defined as a practice of mediation, negotiation, or reconciliation. Architects are not trained in conflict resolution. To consider how the built environment produces or diffuses conflict is to rethink the role of the designer, imagine new interdisciplinary interactions, and clarify the social, political, and technological motivations for architectural pedagogy.

Building on agonistic models of democracy which present conflict not as an obstacle but an opportunity, this conference acknowledges that conflict is inevitable and asks how architectural education and practice can respond to the increasingly palpable conflicts around us. Differences of opinion in the studio, curricular obstacles, preservationist activism, the architectural labor movement, tactical and humanitarian architecture, war and urbicide—how can the discipline actively engage difference to move beyond polarization? Educators today have been tasked with equipping the discipline with a toolkit for vastly divergent concerns. Yet even macro-conflicts linked to humanity’s addiction to oil, reparations, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and migration policy demand highly localized spatial actions that can ripple within communities. At the middle scale, the global crisis of public space can also be considered: with the increasing privatization of space, what room is there for dissent and democratic rebuilding? Conversely, emergent material investigations and design-build work can be starting points for rethinking conflicts linked to extractive systems and resource scarcity.

Beyond mapping architectural “controversies,” this conference asks how conflict situations can be reframed as sites of design. In this international conversation on pedagogy and research, there may be divergent frames of reference for the relationship between politics and architecture. Acts of representing, making, spatializing can render the mechanics of disagreement visible and suggest alternate pathways for equitable futures. The task is also to assess architecture’s disciplinary vulnerability: interdisciplinary alliances or “cross-appointed” experts can produce nimble models of practice that reconsider how institutions can legitimately participate in social change. Conflict reorganizes the relationship between construction and repair. What new structures for resolution are possible?