Facilitating the Becoming of a Caring Practitioner

In a climate emergency, the work of architects should promote care and resilience. This can only be achieved through professional identities and praxis that strive towards holistic sustainability. Their foundation is formed through education. Broadly, values and cultures transmitted through education form the foundation of one’s knowledge, worldview, and mechanisms of meaning-making. In the context of professional education, they form the foundation of one’s professional praxis.

To promote a transition towards care and resilience, it is paramount to understand what kinds of professional identities and praxis architectural education currently transmits, explore their justifications, analyse their validity in the climate emergency and propose alternative courses of action.

Unsustainable design praxis produces unsustainable architecture. In her master’s Thesis “Becoming the Caring Practitioner” Ila Narjus proposes an alternative approach to being an architect. Instead of following a series of linear steps apart from the communities one works with (strategic briefing, concept design, spatial and technical design, construction, handover…) being an architect can be about iteratively adopting a series of positions in relation to the communities one works with – becoming an integral part of the community, being a tool(kit) for the community, and being available.

Through a narrative literature review, this contribution explores how architectural education can promote radical care for resilience by introducing these positions as a foundation for the educational process of becoming a caring architect. We explore how, through education, we could facilitate the formulation of architectural identities and praxis that promote social justice with what already exists.