Cats, Octopuses, and Barnacles: a Conversation on Architectural Competency

Abstract

<p>Within two months of WHO declaring the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 30, 2020, articles on architectural and urban design practice and education, planning, building construction, technology, and sustainability, speculated on how the coronavirus pandemic could change the built environment. By summer 2020, the “post-pandemic” was the most frequently used descriptor in architectural events and publications. As Covid-19 raged on, producing variants from Delta to Omicron to Deltacron, the pandemic made the inequalities and injustices in different places, including campuses, workplaces, and homes, ever more glaring. For architectural students, the pandemic has meant canceling studio travel, field trips, the end of access to libraries and fabrication labs, presenting in reviews via video, and no commencement celebrations. In Inhabiting the Negative Space, artist and writer Jenny Odell ruminates how periods of inactivity can be reimagined as fertile spaces for design predicated less on relentless production and more on a deeper, careful look at what is demanding our time and attention and how we might use this “strange moment” to respond (Odell, Whiting, 2021). In her foreword, Whiting expresses that Odell’s talk drew each person attending the event inward to identify “our individual roles in defining our attitudes, our roles, and our possibilities” (Whiting, 2021). How do we meaningfully discuss competency in a world overturned by a pandemic and systemic exclusion? In conversation with Seng, Whiting and Ho deliberate on the challenges and changing expectations on competency in architectural education and practice amid the latency of the historical moment. </p>