Other People's Dreams

Abstract

Architects work at the service of other people. We are engaged to make real the dreams of others, but those people and their dreams have become more and more privileged, and the architect's role more focused on meeting the needs of privileged elites. Architecture therefore finds its purpose as either lifestyle or spectacle but only to those that can afford it or profit from it, rather than being the tool through which we manifest something positive for all people all the time. Most architectural practice in the UK is complicit in perpetuating this culture of architectural production, a culture that fails to incentivise creating sustainable, lasting, healthy, equitable and accessible places. Preparing students for practice in this culture only perpetuates this unsustainable and inaccessible industry.

Instead, this paper proposes alternative modes of practice and associated pedagogies that prepare students to be a different kind of architectural practitioner. It will present the ongoing work and impact of Other People’s Dreams, a live-action research office and final year Master of Architecture studio at the University of Lancashire. OPD engages in a critical and durational way with community organisations in the northwest region of the UK that work with marginalised groups, situations and ideas, to rethink the potential of people and place. This work and its context are then used as a pedagogical framework for the students, who are themselves often from the same communities and from the same ‘real world’ that we wish them to address through architectural education and practice.