Students at Bard College’s new architecture program display “An Atlas for Housing Justice,” a project for a class called Housing and Collective Care.
Photo: Bard College
A Radical Way of Teaching Architecture
At Bard College, architecture students use buildings and design as a way to view the world — and take apart the profession’s traditional relationship to its clients.
At the new architecture program at Bard College, now in its fourth semester, there’s lots of “troubling” and “unsettling” (used as verbs) to be done.
Here, architecture is a method of critique, not a profession dedicated to making shelter. And instead of world-striding creative visionaries, its practitioners are presented more as beleaguered functionaries in a global chain of resource extraction and wealth consolidation — often on the wrong side of history.