This text was written by two contributors of Nu magazine. We are about to finish our degree course; soon we will be architects. It’s not hard to imagine the kind of questions that preoccupy us, the conversations we have in the corridors. How will we find work, with so many architects out there? Will there even be architecture to be done? Who will want to build when there is no money, when they say we’re junk? What role can the architect have – knowing that the usual commissions are becoming rarer and rarer – in this crisis situation? If we don’t emigrate, we could invent a whole series of things to do if we are unable to build, like so many others are doing. Creating installations, or writing, or doing PhD courses, submitting ideas to competitions or at our own initiative, the so-called “new spatial practices”, heterogeneous and inventive, of a new lost generation. These are all important, essential things, things that have always gravitated in the sphere of architectural activity, including as revision of the discipline itself, but which – one inevitably thinks – while serving as entertainment “while the crisis lasts”, and becoming, after a while, a large set of little tests on how architecture  could operate “if…”, and reflections on and views of architecture itself, they run the risk of becoming discourses on an object which, at a certain point, is not there. If there are crisis scenarios in which all one can talk about is architecture without architects, here, in our crisis, we can almost speak of architects without architecture.

Personal concerns about how we are going to find work and do well in life are joined by questions about this place now classified as “junk”, but where, despite all, we would still like to work. Ever since we first wanted to be architects, they have us believe, and we still believe it, that architecture is not egoistic, not an activity absorbed with itself and its own causes, results, profits and crises. On the contrary, we were told to see how generous architecture can sometimes be, how it offers itself to those entities we refer to as “people”, “city” and “life”. How it can serve, with ambition and a sense of modesty in the right doses. And so we believe that architecture really can have the tools and achieve outcomes that are positive for the way we all live and that it can by no means be relegated to the second level when, as is the case now, where we have this Junk status, there is apparently the possibility of rethinking forms and patterns of living. If architecture, which is always dependant on economic power, is called up when there is money for large-scale projects (or, when the money is not there, for postponed large-scale projects), why should it not be heard and go into action during a crisis that offers an opportunity to rethink, reassess and rebuild our cities and the way in which we live in them on the basis of new criteria?

There are several words that come to mind when considering this possibility – rehabilitation, sustainability, maintenance, minimal resources. Others too, perhaps. But from the position of the students we still are, it is inevitable not to fear the disconnect between this type of work that we may come to do in a crisis situation and the training we receive during our studies.  While we feel also this in terms of practical tools – the lack of course units focusing on rehabilitation and ideas of durability and material economicality, for example – we feel it feel it first and foremost in a type of mentality that is, in a certain way, established in the teaching and learning of design. The type of programmes we work on, the scale of the proposals and the thought logic used seem to have more to do with a “normal” economic model – one of large commissions, an enviable capacity for absorption of programmes and cities with a growing need for expansion – than with the current state of affairs. In looking at the city of Coimbra in the academic context, for example, a number of infrastructures are taken as acquired facts that never made it off the paper and for which execution plans are frozen indefinitely. Not only is there an assumption that the city is what it might never be, but it also taken for granted that the infrastructures in question will subsequently generate urban growth, new neighbourhoods and large extensions of plans for buildings and facilities that the students then design, seeking perfect proposals for the city. While, on the one hand, we understand the usefulness of such imaginative exercises, which make it possible for a large number of students to carry out work on differing scales across the whole city, and that there are important skills to be learnt from them, it nevertheless leaves a bitter aftertaste that students, professors and critics alike feel and from time to time comment on as to how unreal these plans are, and how disingenuous and frustrating it is to be executing them in the middle of a crisis. As if we were all on stand by accumulating plans for “when everything is back on track”.

It is true that the “teaching architecture without building” exercise may seem absurd if taken to an extreme, but laying it down as a challenge could improve efforts in the schools in terms of interventions and strategies that are appropriate to the times we live in and the real city, opportunities that the academic milieu offers particularly well. Thought on how one can and should see architecture, and what is appropriate and makes sense now seems to function on two levels in our schools – we learn to develop a critical mind, but we only manage to channel that partially into the design aspect, because we are used to almost always having the same form of doing things as a starting point. It is that bridge which we are lacking, and which we hope to build in the times ahead, when we will endeavour to be architects with architecture, of the kind that is not egoistic.|