Rethinking The Future: Architecture And Its Education

“I want to be like animals, the bird makes a nest in one or two days, the rat digs a hole in a night, but intelligent humans like us spend 30 years to have a house, that’s wrong.” - Jon Jandai

- Varun Thautum

The shrinkage of a practice and the accretion of practitioners

As of November 2016, India is the second most unequal country in the world after Russia. The richest 1% of Indians own 58.4% of the wealth. The richest 10 % of Indians own 80.7 % of the wealth. This trend is going in the upward direction every year, which means the rich are getting richer at a much faster rate than the poor. India’s economy continues to grow with its GDP rising faster than most nations. But a rise in national GDP is not indicative of income equality in the country. The growing income inequality in India has negatively impacted poor citizens’ access to education and healthcare. Rising income inequality makes it difficult for the poor to climb up the economic ladder and increases their risk of being victims of the poverty trap. People living at the bottom 10% are characterized by low wages; long working hours; lack of basic services such as first aid, drinking water and sanitation. While little interest/monetary gain exists in providing design solutions for the majority of the population, the percentage of the population that would be able to hire professional help for the “design” of the built environment is rapidly shrinking.

With urban densification and cities scrambling for space, vertical growth is continuously reducing the scope of architectural practices. The increasing complexity in modern buildings has created the need for a diverse set of specializations and brought in an even larger number of professionals designing parts and components of buildings. The practice has become excessively collaborative, certainly reducing the scope of the architect to design with the authority that has always vested since the beginning of the practice.