The present crisis should encourage both practice and education to embrace the innovative potential of networks, says London School of Architecture founder Will Hunter
WeWork was founded in 2010 and is now London’s biggest office occupier. A decade ago, the future of work was about bringing people together to share space and ideas. Today we are in lockdown. WeWork’s strength is now its weakness. A working environment that fosters interaction at close quarters is the last thing wanted in a viral pandemic. A business model built on month-to-month leases is highly vulnerable to an economy on pause.
Every business is grappling with different challenges, but one thing in common is colleagues dispersed and isolated at home. WFH is not only the new normal, it is the law. The challenge is to combine co-working with social distancing. New online etiquettes must emerge (like how to do introductions round a table when there is no table).
When we founded the London School of Architecture in 2015, our slogan was ‘the City as the Campus’. We were inspired by the co-working principle of access over ownership. The school itself was ‘based’ at Second Home, the cool Selgas Cano-designed workspace, which in reality meant a desk and meeting rooms when we needed them.
We worked in partnership with our Practice Network, a community of 120 architecture firms in London. Instead of taking a long-term lease, a handful of generous core supporters have lent us seminar and lecture spaces. This has had the double benefit of students being able to see how practices work and practices being able to see how we work.
We are still evolving our approach to studio culture without a studio using WhatsApp and Instagram”
But overnight the way we work has changed. We have found Google Hangouts is best for lectures, and Zoom for tutorials. Not only can students share their presentations, but tutors can draw ideas on top. Tutorials work just as well, students have said.
We are still evolving our approach to studio culture without a studio using WhatsApp and Instagram. I am piloting a ‘mate-rix’ that has placed all students into social clusters that I will ‘hang out’ with at arranged times – this sounds stiff, but how else to choreograph the casual collisions of actually being there?
Our assumptions have been challenged. Our Part 2 includes a 12-month part-time work placement in the Practice Network. We had always thought that we needed everyone to be nearby: the London tube network and our Practice Network are roughly the same size. But if we could make design teaching work online, then is distance no longer an obstacle? Could our new Part 1 programme – set to open in 2021 – operate at a national scale?
In March, the LSA announced its further commitment to widening access to architectural education (and thus the profession) with a target for our student body to be 50 per cent ethnically diverse and 50 per cent from disadvantaged neighbourhoods by 2030. This will require a national strategy to reach students who are remote from London and its privilege. Perhaps our new enforced hyper-connectivity will be an advantage here.
Top: Map of the LSA’s Practice Network in London.
Above: The LSA’s “experiment in replacing hierarchy with heterarchy”
As a network institution, the LSA has been trying to figure out our critical mass. There are challenges in being an institution of 100 students in a regulatory system more suited to universities of 10,000. We have been told anecdotally that 300 is the sweet spot. The Practice Network contains some 20,000 employees and this is growing to adjacent disciplines, such as founding partners Kingspan Insulation, Savills and Stanhope.
As we move from start-up to scale-up, I have been reading theoretical physicist Geoffrey West’s ‘Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies’. He found that cities scale ‘super-linearly’: as they get bigger you get proportionally more innovation per head by 15 per cent. Conversely as organisations grow, they become less innovative by the same ratio. The exciting opportunity for the LSA is to make an educational provider operate more like a city than a university, to avoid ‘top-down’ and embed innovation at all levels. In evolutionary breakthroughs in human collaboration, different stages of organisational culture can be characterised as progress from ‘wolf pack’ to ‘army’, ‘machine’, ‘family’ and – finally – ‘living organism’. The latter’s breakthroughs are wholeness, self-management, and evolutionary purpose. We have long-term ambitions to become ‘Unicity’, a sobriquet for the University for Cities that also means ‘unique’ and ‘united as a whole’. That sense of integration is very appealing.
Coronavirus is the most pressing example of our vulnerability and need to change, but it will not be the last. The role of higher education in the future must be to harness human ingenuity to tackle some of our biggest challenges and opportunities”
There is a real appetite to work together in new ways, to partner with people who share your purpose. I have been delighted to survey the London scene and see so many exciting initiatives. There is Public Practice working with local authorities to transform planning, and Year Here attempting to “build solutions to some of society’s toughest problems”. And set to open in 2021, the London Interdisciplinary School is “building a university to tackle the most important and complex problems”, while TEDI-London is offering a new collaborative type of higher education in engineering.
Geoffrey West also found that cities grow ‘super-exponentially’. To keep civilisation on a treadmill of super-exponential growth, he writes, “world-changing innovations will need to happen more and more rapidly, and resource demands will become literally infinite within a finite time span”. The world is a volatile place – coronavirus is the most pressing example of our vulnerability and need to change, but it will not be the last. The role of higher education in the future must be to harness human ingenuity to tackle some of our biggest challenges and opportunities.
We must increasingly work together – across disciplines, institutions and geographies – to find these world-changing innovations. Life has changed overnight. Though tethered, we must unleash our imagination. Our zone of movements is currently small, but now is the time to think big.
