3%

3%

Schools of architecture must be abolished, they are no longer of any use.

They made sense when architects thought they could change the world or, failing that, make it better, when communities and donors had enough money to finance projects they wanted to be innovative and relevant.

But there is no more money for public projects and the audacity of private projects is reduced to market buildings.

Architecture critics worthy of the name are fighting against the current to assert what remains of quality in this profession despite adversity, others are spreading in agreed writings on the net and at best are witnessing collectives who think they can resist the world as it is, with pallets of building sites and containers of good feelings.

Anyway, the artificial intelligence has already started to kick in. Algorithms are being created to propose the most suitable housing for the intended target. You don't just design for people anymore, you offer a product to a client. The liberal architect serves the soup to the client to help him turn his balance sheet around.

Its only visibility, its banner, is to be seen, in the lounges where one can imagine how it is considered. It represents at best only 3% of the balance sheet of an operation. How then can this 3% claim to have the least weight? These algorithms will soon render obsolete the city thinker and life agitator that the architect should be.

Here we are.

But here comes the strike of the ENSAs, who are awkwardly expressing their anger. And this anger, naive and corporatist at will, makes this movement derisory.

It seems that Macron is right to think that architecture is no longer a cultural discipline but a strict tool to accompany the ecological transition. His logic of reducing credits is to lead architecture schools towards an Anglo-Saxon model: fully privatized schools. We have to realize what this means. Architectural education will no longer be a public service, no longer a priority of the Republic.

What world will we leave then?
What machine will show intuition and daring?
What software will take the risk of experimenting?
What will happen if we try nothing more?
What if we claim nothing more than our own personal comfort?
If you no longer project the world to make it better?
If the world is left to specialists rather than dreamers?
It's simple though: he will die.

If they are nothing more than chapels of embittered professionals and disconnected academics, the schools of architecture will disappear and architecture in their wake. The administrative and financial burden will end up burying the possibilities.

But first, what do our students say? Reading their statements, through press releases, their ambition is to study comfortably in order to enter a conformist professional life. If this is their ambition, they would do better to study at a business school.

Does this prefigure a city without works? To make work is to force reality to the idea of the world as we imagine it, in order to find its place in it.

How to restore nobility to this scorned profession? Our only quest is the search for beauty, not programmatic, technical or financial performance.

The school of architecture is the last place where one can dream the city as it might otherwise be. Where one can dream life in a collegial and transdisciplinary way.

It still has to be done! We have to do it again!

Matthieu Poitevin for L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, February 2020
The website of L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui welcomes the comments of all those who wish to express themselves on architectural news. Published articles are binding only on their authors. A 434 - December 2019 - Direct link to the forum in A.A.