Astrágalo A39
Introduction to the issue
Editors in charge of the issue
Victoria Farrow School of Arts, Design and Architecture De Montfort University, Leicester, UK victoria.farrow@dmu.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0009-0000-8085-9453
Alona Martínez Pérez. School of Arts, Design and Architecture De Montfort University, Leicester, UK alona.martinezperez@dmu.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5438-5992
https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/astragalo.2025.i39.01
From Contested to Catalyst: Transforming Architectural Learning
We stand today facing some of the biggest changes and challenges within architectural education in the last 50 years. Architectural education is undergoing a significant reform, particularly within the UK, with the Architects Registration Board (ARB) and Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) moving away from the traditional three-part system to a more flexible, outcomes-based model. Key changes include focusing on demonstrated competencies rather than prescribed pathways, introducing flexible routes to qualification, integrating professional practice earlier into the learning process and adopting new technologies like AI. The aim is to create a clearer set of standards, reduce the time to qualification and allow architects to demonstrate relevant skills and knowledge through varied qualifications. However, an absence for consideration of the challenges faced within higher education currently, both financially and structurally and the fast pace with which changes are being rolled out have created a tumultuous storm for educators to contend with.
Research into architectural education has become compromised, not only as a result of funding disparities, with research in some areas of humanities and art and design historically receiving less funding compared to building science but also as a result of challenges stemming from the practical, design ordinated nature of architectural education, which often struggles to fit within traditional academic research models. Researchers in this field have specific methodological and institutional obstacles when tackling complex problems. There exists a disconnect between teaching and research within architectural education with many architectural schools employing non-research active staff. Practicing architects are in the majority for teaching students in architecture, and whilst this is certainly valuable, it can create a barrier between research and teaching and consequently, research in architectural education can often become divorced, certainly from professional practice. As a result of the multidisciplinary nature of the subject this critical tool that could potentially assist with blurring the lines between education and professional practice has indeed suffered a diminishing impact.
Over the fence within professional practice, Architects face challenges such as economic uncertainty impacting project pipelines, the need to integrate complex new technologies like AI and VR, pressures to create affordable houses and issues with fee compression and profitability. Retention, talent acquisition, regulatory hurdles, increased global competition, client demand for sustainability and the overall high stress, time intensive nature of the profession is squeezing practitioners to breaking point. In acknowledging the serious challenges faced by each of three stems here in architectural education, research and professional practice, there is no wonder that gaps between them exist. Despite this, in a quest to continue to take steps to make improvements, the issue “Blurring the lines” seeks to initiate a conversation regarding what can be done to begin healing through showcased and selected examples.
“Practice ready,” “prepared for office,” and “ready for the real world” are recurring phrases in architectural education today, particularly at the critical juncture when students transition from higher education into professional practice. These terms often carry the unrealistic presumption that graduates should emerge from architectural schools as “ready-cooked” practitioners, capable of slotting seamlessly into professional offices.
While employability and the ability to contribute confidently in practice are undeniably central aims of architectural education, they cannot be its sole objectives. In response to this ongoing conflict, this issue unfolds a series of diverse articles from 3 continents and 6 countries to consider what else could be happening within the education of future architects and through this action, bring to the attention suggestions of positive potential solutions that others could facilitate. In doing so, this issue hopes to bring benefit to the wider field of architectural education and professional practice through the initiation of a conversation, whilst acknowledging the that the articles included document works that are ongoing amid a current climate that is both uncertain and suffering multiple difficulties.
Questions of readiness are not confined to the exit point of education but emerge at every transition: from secondary to tertiary education, between stages of architectural training, and finally, into professional practice. Educators continually adapt pedagogical methods and curricular tructures to address these transitions, balancing the immediate needs of incoming students with long-term preparation for an evolving profession. Yet the reciprocal question is less often posed: to what extent are practices themselves “ready” for the graduates they receive? How is industry reflecting on mentoring, workplace culture, and professional development in response to shifting societal conditions and to the transformations that are continuing to occur within architectural education?
The changing landscape of both architectural education and architectural practice raises pressing challenges. Today’s students arrive with advanced digital literacies, heightened awareness of the climate crisis, and a strong demand for equity, diversity, and inclusivity, while simultaneously navigating financial precarity. Architectural curricula must therefore adapt, incorporating emerging technologies such as AI and BIM alongside critical issues of sustainability, material innovation, and social justice. At the same time, professional practice is under scrutiny for issues of low pay, discrimination, and workplace cultures that undermine well-being. The impact of the pandemic and the climate emergency have further accelerated the need for both sides of this junction to rethink their responsibilities.
This issue pushes forward a central question: what should architectural education for future architects look like, and how should the junction between higher education and professional practice be reconfigured? This is a question often discussed, but rarely answered with confident solutions that explore the full range and pedagogical potentials and therefore, bringing together articles from a diverse range of authors, including architectural writers, educators, architects, researchers and students who have shared pedagogical innovations as examples for preparing graduates, not only for practice but for the broader challenges within our changing profession, becomes an important first step. Through interrogating the historical, epistemological and political fault lines that structure architectural education’s entanglement with professional practice, it is not merely the transmission of technical competencies, but the reproduction—and possible reconfiguration—of the disciplinary, institutional, and societal logics through which architecture legitimates itself.
A historical-critical account covering nearly two centuries of regulatory determinations in the United Kingdom, situates this nexus within regimes of governance, recalling Foucault’s (1977, 1991) analysis of governmentality and the ways in which state apparatuses and professional bodies inscribe conditions of pedagogical and professional possibility. The issue then covers the displacement of technocratic concerns with methodology by reframing architectural teaching as an ethical and epistemological problem, foregrounding ontological stakes of “what” and “why” over “how,” which resonates with Heidegger’s (1968) critique of instrumental reason and Biesta’s (2010) insistence on the ethical dimensions of education.
These tensions are mediated through the dispositive of the Invited Workshop, a pedagogical formation that hybridises academic and professional rationalities, echoing Bourdieu’s (1990) account of field-specific habitus and institutional reproduction. Subsequent interventions open a critical counter discourse through looking at the mobilisation of decolonial and care-based frameworks developed in a South African context in order to decentralise dominant paradigms of “practice readiness,” and enact an epistemic rupture akin to Santos’s (2014) “Epistemologies of the South” and Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) ethics of care. This destabilisation is then extended by advancing performative and embodied epistemologies, elaborating with further hybrid pedagogies of care that situate affect and action in urban environments, a move that resonates with Haraway’s (1988) notion of situated knowledges and Latour’s (2005) insistence on the relational constitution of socio-ecological assemblages.
The final contributions recalibrate the discussion toward the professional sphere while retaining a critical lens. The necessity of preparing students for multi-disciplinary collaboration is spotlighted, echoing Lave and Wenger’s (1991) work on communities of practice and contemporary scholarship on collaborative design ecologies. The issue is closed by articulating socially engaged models that seek not merely to adapt to but to transform architectural practice, recalling Freire’s (1970) pedagogy of the oppressed and Lefebvre’s (1991) call for the right to the city. Taken together, these contributions delineate a contested terrain in which education and practice cannot be conceived as discrete domains but as co-constitutive formations whose governance, epistemologies, and political stakes must be critically interrogated. In drawing on and extending frameworks from Foucault to Freire, Haraway to Santos, this issue advances an agenda for architectural pedagogy that is historically situated, philosophically rigorous, and oriented toward emancipatory futures.
Forward thinking, it must be noted that this is an ongoing works, and we cannot conclude these solutions to be the limits of investigations into the space that exists between architectural education and professional practice, although these articles do indeed begin to explore and extrapolate new directions that can advance us towards such a position.
Continued exploration must involve the topic of longitudinal tracking of graduate outcomes, whereby there remains little evidence of what happens to our graduate students when they do enter offices. A gap continues to exist in connecting education interventions with measurable career progression, satisfaction or adaptability in practice together with a need to look at explicit frameworks for digital technologies, AI, parametric design and BIM integration in curricula, which remain underexplored. To go deeper, we must consider how students develop critical literacies alongside creative and ethical decision making in professional contexts and address the need to link technological fluency with readiness for professional practice.
Professional readiness is most often framed in terms of collaboration, ethics and practice exposure, however financial literacy, business management and entrepreneurial skills are not systematically addressed. Graduates may understand design and collaboration but are often unprepared for unning or contributing to small practices, budgeting, contract management or navigating freelance structures. The question still therefore remains within architectural education in so far as how we can provide positive remedy for the distance from industry that exists here. On a similar note, mental health, wellbeing and resilience in professional practice continues also to be of concern. Socio-ecological precarity and workplace challenges are touched upon but with little systematic treatment of mental health, resilience or coping strategies in office environments. With high rates of burnout and reported negative cultures in architecture, these competencies are essential for our graduates’ professional sustainability and provide scope for expanded research in future.
An exciting output and benefit of this issue is evidenced through the return of texts from multiple continents and countries, allowing cultural competency and global practice awareness. The articles consider decolonial pedagogy in specific context, but we must address still the lack of systematic cross cultural or global practice preparedness within architectural education. An expansion for research might be to look further at how graduates are prepared to navigate professional environments across different regulatory, cultural, and economic contexts. Similarly, embracing an integration with disciplines outside of design (urban planning, social sciences, public policy, engineering etc) remains yet to be explored and therefore, exists as a challenge to the existing gaps that have been dissected. More work is required on both sides in order to do this with explicit attention on professional ethics in complex, real world dilemmas. While decolonial and care-based approaches are included, attention must be given also to ethical decision making in commercial, legal or politically complex professional scenarios. Graduates maybe socially conscious, but unprepared for conflicts between client demands, regulatory constraints and environmental or social responsibilities.
Bridging the academic-professional divide structurally stands underdeveloped with the systematic integration into curricula beyond discrete modules being an area that would benefit from further debate in architectural education and architecture in general. We also continue to observe a gap in designing scalable, sustained and institutionally embedded structures that expose students to real-world offices, mentorship and professional networks.
With this in mind, the editors of this issue conclude with a simple phrase, “What’s next?".