Educating the ‘Climate Change Architect’: an Application of Complexity Thinking to Architectural Design

The simultaneous realisation of the radical impact of the climate emergency on the built environment and the introduction of powerful digital tools represent the most important factors shaping the future design and social agendas for architects.
The Bachelor of Science on Architecture and Environmental Design at the University of Westminster (the first of its kind in the UK) confronts this new landscape with the aim of forming the ‘climate change architect’, a figure able to navigate the social, scientific, and technological complexities of the climate emergency to rethink what architects will build, what knowledge and tools they will make use of, and how they will work.
The conceptual and practical tools of complexity – which focus on relational thinking, emergence, collective behaviour, and avoidance of reductionist thinking – provide a useful framework to systematize this novel and intricate landscape in which scientific, aesthetic, social, and material aspects of design need to be studied anew and synthesised in a new approach to architecture. The paper discusses the ongoing research developed within the Programme by presenting paradigmatic projects that demonstrate how complexity thinking shapes both the curricula and the students’ output. The discussion will foreground the innovative aspects of the research such as: how evidence-based approach to design supports challenges how existing conditions are analysed and communicated; the interaction with other expertise (such as medicine and environmental consultants, and theoreticians), and the need to bridge between scientific and humanistic disciplines by combining digital simulations and anthropological analysis of specific spatial conditions.