Architecture finds itself today in a world that resists easy characterization. It has been called the age of globalization, information, and biotechnics; post-industrial, post-metropolitan, and post-human; a network economy, a control society, an ecological crisis. It is an age that produces theories of complexity, which are, in fact, urgently needed. Transformations of the economic-technological-social matrix over the past thirty years have affected every aspect of architecture, its place in the world, potential contribution to culture, and status as a discipline and an art.
As the modulation of life practices, interactions, rhythms, and experiences becomes the focus of economic investment, cultural interpretation, and political contestation, architecture's expertise is being reconfigured within an interwoven field of material practices, including engineering, industrial design, graphic design, new media, furniture, fashion, art and entertainment, but also ecology, urban planning, and business management. The more diverse architectural practices become, the more evident it is that the skills and modes of thinking developed through architectural education — analytic, creative, synthetic, and applied — are polymorphous and adaptable to a wide range of challenges and opportunities. Graduates today pursue diverse and hybrid careers not only in architecture but in many spheres of creativity activity.
From its founding in 1890, architecture at PennDesign has emphasized the link between theoretical speculation, professional practice, and artistic expression. Our faculty are distinguished precisely by bringing these trajectories together, engendering new ways of seeing, new trajectories for imagination, and new models of practice. Since the time of Louis Kahn and Robert le Ricolais, the program has maintained a focus on architecture's relationship with technology, understood in the broadest sense as technologies of construction, representation and organization. Today, the implications and potentials of digital technologies are pursued in every aspect of study as they are in every aspect of the building industry and professional practice.
Architecture at Penn provides leadership in a changing and often uncertain world. We provide a robust academic infrastructure and supportive milieu for students to orient themselves in that world and acquire the knowledge and skills needed to pursue their own direction for a creative and rewarding career.
Detlef Mertins
Chair, Department of Architecture
To read the Archinect.com interview with Detlef Mertins where he discusses
architectural education and the graduate program in architecture at
PennDesign, please visit http://archinect.com/features/
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