Beth Blostein
Architecture Section Head

Architecture is a practice. By this, we mean in simplest terms that we get better by doing it, like playing a sport or a musical instrument. More profoundly, architectural practice is a mode of understanding and operating within the world. Technique is important, certainly. We deploy an array of manual and digital techniques when designing a building much as we depend upon all manner of technologies to construct a building. Techniques and technologies are not mute tools, however, they testify to our understanding of the world and our desire to project a world. We must examine our understandings of the world if we are to intelligently operate within it, particularly as that world becomes more diverse in its cultures and more constrained in its economies and ecologies. At the Knowlton School of Architecture, we are committed to all aspects of architectural practice: its techniques and technologies, its histories and capacities, and its central creative activity of design, which fuses all of these and answers our profound desire to address the present by building a future.