Professor Sergio Altomonte from the University Catholic Louvain, Professor Marilyne Andersen from EPFL, and Signe Sand, a Climate Activist, talk about the big question of how do educators and schools prepare the next generation for 2030 or for 2050 with the immense challenges, in particular climate change, in mind. 

 

Spumante, professor of architectural physics, commences with a general statement that we should value the variance of our buildings and our occupants rather than looking at central tendencies.. The project brought together seven universities across Europe. In accordance with that educational institutions need to promote multi interdisciplinary attitudes, approaches, and methods that actually prepare students for the work life to work with other people in teams.

 

Marilyn Anderson is a professor at the Swiss technology Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, and she does research on daylight. She was trained as a physicist, and then went to building physics, and then did her PhD in optics and daylighting. She has launched several initiatives at her university, including a makerspace where students could develop their own hands-on projects and work together across the campus to come up with new ideas and solutions.

 

Signe Sand is an architect by training, an activist and an advisor at Green Transition Denmark. She stresses that she didn't really hear about sustainability in architecture in her education, and that she realized how huge an impact the construction industry has on the climate crisis.

 

According to the panel, one of the main challenge in architecture programs today is that we are taught by professors that come from an educational system in which the creative part, the systems part, the calculation part, the plans part and the costing part were done separately. Further, most programs transfer knowledge in a sequential and linear way, without letting students to really engage with it. A way to combat that, according to Spumante, is a more diverse portfolio of education models, like project based learning, and an understanding that universities are places of knowledge transfer and with that comes critical thinking and adaptability.