They stay in MIT because they think that they can change the world, or they want to change the world. That's a different connection, and if the place is going to be transformative of how they will think about their role as architects, yes. Welcome to Architects' Sessions 1-1. I'm Amelia Taylor-Hoffberg, and this week, December 7, 2015, I speak with Hashim Sarkis, architect, scholar, and dean of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning.
Previously, Hashim was the Aga Khan Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism in Muslim Societies at Harvard's GSD, and continues to run his own practice, Hashim Sarkis Studios, located in Cambridge. Sarkis' experience working in two of the most highly regarded architectural education institutions worldwide while also managing his own firm, puts him in a unique position to approach theoretical questions in the two often-discordant spheres of academia and practice. Our interview revolves around the same questions we ask in our Dean's List series, how architectural education and practice are changing, how to address student needs, MIT's particular take on how to cultivate exceptional architects, and the culture of the school in a global urban context. I hope you enjoy our 1-1 interview with Hashim Sarkis.
I started January 7, 2015, so it's been almost nine months now. And you're also currently teaching, tell me about the balance between being in this new position, a leadership position, and also being a teacher. Being a teacher helps me understand much, much better the school. I have to tell you that in the two weeks of registration and dropping that, I got to know much more about how the school runs than any other day, how you add the class, how you drop the class, how you reserve a room, what the equipment requires in terms of renting it, or bringing it to the class.
The sizes of screens in the different classrooms. That culture is a very, very important one for me to understand. But the most important part is obviously maintaining very close contact with the students on the intellectual level, rather than being the confession boot for them all the time. So I like that a lot, and it allows me to feel part of the faculty, which is primarily what I am there.
But it also entices me to think about what I'm working on in relationship to this new environment, and to respond to it. And I feel that that is very enriching. Because the material I'm teaching now is material I had taught before at Harvard. And ironically, some of it, I started teaching at MIT when I first started teaching in 1989.
So my first teaching job was at MIT. But it's obviously evolved and changed as a set of lectures and themes. And now that I'm back at MIT, I realize first, it's very, very different material. It's a very different MIT.
And yet, I now understand the impact of the setting in which you deliver the classes and the way you do research on the research itself. And how, that's 25 years, almost a little bit over span of being able to reflect on your own pedagogical stance towards architecture at the single institution. How would you describe just as brief as you desire your basic stance now, as in what architecture education should be, or your pedagogical lens that you see things through? Let me just qualify architecture by saying that this is a school of architecture, planning, art, and media.
And even though there are certain things that connect, there are also certain things that do not connect among them. But that when I'm thinking about talking about pedagogy and architecture, it does get into a little bit by the other pieces. Into this is a bad word. Let's say, in butte ora.
There you go. So that's, when I speak of architecture, you should hear the other things working as well. But I do feel that architecture education is ready for a major change, major overhaul. And I think that that overhaul will have to start with the sacred space of the studio.
That space that we cherish, that we think is the most important instrument venue for architecture education. We even sometimes mistake it for a method is ready for interrogation. And it does take, sometimes, I don't know if we can call them shock changes or shocks from outside to do that. And then it's setting like MIT where there's a very strong interest right now in the impact of online learning, on teaching, on residential environment.
I think we can begin to interrogate the design education where I also feel that with the other fields, and other fields, I mean, engineering, science, management, coming to us and telling us, we're interested in design. Can you teach us how you teach design? And then over the sudden, we catch ourselves off guard. What do you mean, teach us how to teach design?
We teach it the way we've been teaching it. And this kind of self-reflection has helped us a lot. And I think what we're embarking on right now is an open discussion about how do we update, push forward the teaching of designers, so that they benefit from access to big data, access to information that makes what we had considered in design always contingent and therefore needed to be suspended while we define the design problem, no longer contingent, but able to be incorporated early on. We can benefit from the open source design investigations that people in management are doing.
We can benefit from systems design in engineering, and even all of the work that they've been doing on prototyping and design thinking. It's time we bring these issues to bear on design training. I think the insularity of the studio has been extremely helpful, but it's time to try other models. And so as a dean, how do you try to encourage that active collaboration and cross-pollination between different departments when you still are mostly contained within the school of architecture and planning?
That's actually quite unique about MIT. I don't need to do much of that. When you come in as a student and when you come in as a faculty, you usually walk in through the door of your school or department, but you quickly realize that you're part of this very large entity, community, called MIT. And because MIT is pushing more forth thematic organizations rather than disciplinary organizations or rather the cohabitation of both, you quickly find yourself in networks of people doing work in common areas of interest.
Obviously, it's easier to have them done. But then when you find an opportunity, when there is a purpose, when there is a project, things happen, and they happen quite fast. And so you spoke earlier about having online education becoming more of a priority in interest at MIT, while at the same time looking to interrogate and perhaps reevaluate the value of studio culture and studio for architecture pedagogy. And those two things seem totally opposed to one another, right?
Because you're one is intensely and inherently physical and present while the other one is opening up to the world virtually. So how on earth do you get those two things to work together? The discussion at MIT in general about the MOOCs and the impact has been exactly about this is that when we turn a course, a lecture course into a MOOC, that doesn't mean that the lecture or the physical presence of the teacher and the interaction with the students will go away. To the contrary, it will intensify much more that interaction and transform it, quality wise, and I think content wise to other topics that are necessary.
So instead of the classroom being a place where you broadcast knowledge and the students passively receive it, that can happen in a different environment mediated, of course, and facilitated by the teacher. But that will allow the students and the faculty to have a very different environment, what we're going to residential learning, than the one that we right now have. And you absolutely right, the studio tends to be the antithesis of all of that, the opposite, meaning it requires personal interaction and discussion. But let me just go further out and say that the studio has been quite unrigorous as an environment of teaching, and that we can benefit from a lot of the support material that we get online and that we can prepare online as a way to test how do we thicken the definition of the design project and the problem before we enter into the space of the studio, make the parameters richer for us to be able to indulge in the design problem in a more vigorous manner.
So rather than going all in on studio, you're managing to create more of a challenge and different atmosphere through the MOOCs, which is the massively open online course to kind of prepare and create all these connections beforehand. And right now the MOOCs have one or two formats, or maybe a few more, but still it is in a testing and gestation period. But there is a very strong commitment on the part of MIT that this is a way to democratize teaching and learning. It might be a very strong honest message, technology to change the world and learning technologies.
We'd rather call them learning than teaching because teaching implies dictating whereas learning is much more of an active process on the part of the students. So those technologies are seen as an instrument towards that. And even though we do not have a school of education at MIT, education is very much on everybody's mind. And between faculty and planning, faculty in the media lab, and faculty in all the other schools, we've managed to take this discussion to higher levels and to test it.
That's what's great about MIT. You have a good idea, you test it, but rather than spend a lot of time developing it before you test it. And that's what we're hoping to do. It's a very early discussion among the architects and designers about the way in which MOOCs can influence design, but we're having it among the faculty and saying, okay, what do we do next?
And that's, I'm sharing it with you over here. No, it's very exciting because MOOCs, of course, haven't been around for so long, but of course, offer so much potential towards not just architecture students, but of course, any person seeking knowledge. And of course, a place like MIT, having a pretty high bar set is going to attract a lot of attention for offering courses online and a more democratized setting, either for significantly less money and also for significantly less rigorous acceptance rates. So how do you imagine whether or not the MOOC audience really grows or not?
How do you imagine right now the kinds of students that are really attracted to architecture and replanning at MIT? MIT is a very small school compared to other schools. Between architecture, planning, and the media lab, we have about 600 students. And if you take away the PhDs and just focus on the master students, we have very small classes every year, the M.R.
program, for example, admits about 20 to 30. It's in its intent. And it's at one level, very intense. And these students are, they come in and they know that they're going to be working both horizontally and vertically, in what sense, horizontally in the sense that they have to follow the credential requirements for the degree, they courses in building technology and history in design, et cetera.
But they also know that MIT is structured in a very strong vertical way, that the people who teach on technology are not just seen as consultants for the architecture studio. They are really cutting edge researchers in building technology that are doing their own thing, and that there are students doing their masters and PhDs with them. This research-focused environment is unique in MIT. And I would say that with universities all around the world, realizing that their professionals have to do much more, have to open up towards research and become part of a research culture.
Many architecture schools around the world are emulating the MIT model in terms of the building up of research capacities in these different areas around design and within design itself. So what are the biggest challenges towards adopting that more research-oriented philosophy? How to marry rigor with creativity? How do we define design research?
How do we mediate between the environment of the studio and the environment of the laboratory? How do we transition between the design environment of the studio and the makerspaces and fabrication world, which are not just tools to improve on how we design, but a really different way of thinking about production and even design itself? So I think we're very exciting times for MIT students, and you can see that in the way that they take everything in. They're really, they're like sponsors taking all of that in.
But at the same time, they know that they need to focus. They need to find, they need to make their own contribution to this immense body of knowledge that is around them. So MIT is not a supermarket, it says that you can take a bit of everything and then get out. It is obviously satisfying the generalist requirements for teaching a planner, teaching an architect, teaching a person in the media arts and sciences, or even in the arts.
We have an excellent arts program at the school. It does give you that exposure, but you really feel that you're there building on an ongoing research and body of knowledge of the faculty and making a significant contribution to that body of knowledge. So what about the students who are talking a little bit more about the your perception of the kind of students that are coming into the school today? Because of course, you have decades of teaching experience, but also similarly incredibly rigorous and high status institutions in the US.
And of course, over the course of the last two decades, we've seen major disruptions in the architecture market and what it means simply to be architect, what an 18-year-old or a 22-year-old thinks of when they decide that they're going to go to architecture school. So how would you describe the kind of students that come to MIT now? I'll probably change my mind. Yes.
Because I've just started interacting with the students in a more immediate way now. They are amazing. The intensity is there. That is very important for me.
They do gel quickly in the sense that they create a team among themselves because of the size, but also because of the kind of commonness of purpose they come together. The skill sets that they have are not yet accessible to me, at least I've seen them on reviews. And they are, you can tell that there's a lot of emphasis on interface between technology representation and design. We are off the roll in an environment based on technology, but the instrumentality of design and weaving across these different areas of expertise and beginning to interface with the technology might be quite unique there.
It is a term that is being applied to different arenas. I know having a science, having a business, having another business, but when it comes to looking at it in architecture, you can see that the bracketing of a particular problem of a particular issue and honing in on it is another unique approach at MIT. And people are able to do that. I've seen much more than in other places.
And I admire that. But they're also quickly able to zoom out and integrate it into a bigger mission about the role of architecture in society. And that, again, is very central concern of this. It's MIT ethos in general.
You're certainly well positioned to have the students focus on international issues and being more of a world focus rather than a say, cyber-local focus. But that being said, obviously, MIT, the institution that it is, must have a very strong relationship with the local government in the local area. Can you describe the kind of relationship the school has with local government and as an architecture school and being able to perhaps do local projects or collaborate with the community? One of the things that the students like about MIT in the architecture school, and again, this is a kind of changing mindset since the days I was a student, is that they are coming to MIT to be at MIT and to benefit from the environment of MIT every minute of the day.
They do not think of their traveling studios as being a plus. They love traveling. They love doing international projects. But it's no longer the perk that everybody thinks the traveling studio is.
Actually, when they travel, they want to travel with a certain body of knowledge and commitment to the cultures that they're visiting. And there's a lot of work on that question of what does it mean to be a global practitioner? And we're having a lot of discussions about that, both in the planning department and in the architecture school, in the architecture department. So I like that.
And then the other phase of that is that when they are there, they really want to benefit from the surrounding environment of the Boston area, because it's a small school, but also because the school is very committed to having its teachers present. The students don't like the fact that the teachers travel in and out. They want them to be there with them all the time. They don't buy that.
We have over the built design faculty that is very strongly anchored in the Boston area. Most of our design faculty have practices in the Boston area, which is great, because the students then go out to the city to see the work, sometimes do ex-menships there, ex-menships with other Boston-based alumni who support the school. And MIT is very, very connected to Boston. There's a strong connection between the planning department and the city of Boston, where we constantly talk to the Boston Foundation to the mayor's office doing collaborations there.
Some of our faculty are very invested in community support in the Boston area. It's a very beautiful laboratory at the Department of Planning called the Colab, which does a lot of work with disenfranchised groups, but not in order to preach more in order to learn, called learning from the margins. Their slogan is learning from the margins. So we have a very deep connection to Boston.
Like when the mayor wanted to launch the ill-fated Olympics, he involved MIT very closely in the discussions and debates. We do a lot of work on transportation in the area. We do a lot of work on environment in the area. So our students and our faculty think of Boston as part of their larger working environment, rather than the background.
I knew yourself. Your firm has anchored. How does that work? How does managing it between Beirut and Cambridge?
With a bit of difficulty. I imagine. I am based in Cambridge and Beirut, yes. Sometimes the time difference helps.
Sometimes it hurts. How does that, because you're straddling these three roles, both running the firm, being the dean and also teaching at the school, how on earth do those things kind of meld and influence each other and how important specifically that relate that? Is it to you to be able to continue doing the practice while you're also in this leadership position? It's time for the existential question.
Yes, exactly. We've reached time for that period. I guess I'm what you call the architect PhD. It's like the MD PhD model.
There's an architect PhD model. I'm an academic scholar. I love the academic setting and environment. I also think of my practice as being an extension of that.
I think of it as my laboratory rather than as a corporate office or a larger setting for milling projects. I do not want to be little that tall. That is a very important position to be and to have a large office that takes on projects and produces work across larger scale. That's another cause.
But for some reason, my office, maybe for the reasons you've just listed, has always been a smaller office and with very focused explorations. That is obviously a challenge to run across continents and with the other jobs. But over the years, I have been very lucky to work with amazing people in both offices in Bigwood and Boston. I rely on them a great deal.
There are challenges in terms of schedule. But I think I would not have it any other way. Why? I don't know.
I find myself in it. It's not like I planned it that way. But even when I was working on my PhD, which requires a certain commitment and selfishness, I sort of snuck out every now and then and then projects. I mean, I love that you interpret it as an existential question just first off because to me, it seems like a very pragmatic, in a way lifestyle to be able to be both in the world of practice and very committed to that and the experimentation, whatever form that practice may take, but in the world of practice while also having the foot in academia and management of that field.
Because obviously, one of the things that people will constantly be concerned with the state of architecture education is its access and its transition into what actually practice is at any given time. And you, of course, are not only running the practice, but also running the school in a way. So you're able to have this perspective of quite still specific to your firm and your practice, but a very close connection to what is happening in the world of practice. So I'm wondering if you have had any experiences in running the firm that have directly influenced your idea of how the school should be run.
I guess they are ingrained in some certain managerial or maybe I would say the dramatic parts of the brain that I might need to exercise as dean. It's too early to tell which are the direct connections between the two, but I can say that there are many cliches about being a better teacher when you're a practitioner, many cliches saying that if you manage a project, you can manage your school. I hope they are true. That's what I'm saying.
Because I will need them. And there's also another important thing that MIT highlights very strongly. It's motto is Manci Manus, mind and hand, and that the continuum between the application and the theory is very, very important for the place. And as much as it is a cliche, that one is also very true.
I've experienced it immediately, stepping into MIT. I've noticed how, for example, theory courses are embedded in the practice courses, but rather than a separate world, even though we have an excellent history theory program. But when you look at the political technology group, when you look at the computation group, when you look at the planners, there's a way in which the knowledge about the epistemology, the theory, the philosophy behind what they do is embedded into what they do. And that's quite beautiful.
I'm beginning to understand better the culture. And that's something that I think that the casual observer might discount coming from a school like MIT, simply because it has technology in the name, really. And just to a certain observer, a lot of the things that come out of MIT and are covered in the media are heavily focused on technological innovation. They're not at all, or at least they're not clearly wedded to this kind of humanities background that you're referring to.
They're more have this amazing quality of just wowing everyone because of some technological event. Let's not forget that one of the best art schools in the world is at MIT. And that relationship, I'm sure, is absolutely invaluable. Yeah.
One of the best philosophy departments, one of the best schools of humanities, linguistics, are all there. And we have an amazing group of people in the science, technology, and society who are at once looking at technology and studying it, but also creating a critical distance from within. So that positioning of us being immersed, I guess, in technology, but able to find the position where we can look at it from outside, transform it is very important. And I use the arts program to explain that probably more clearly because art at MIT is not a huge program.
It's a smart program. But it's a program that is very much invested in thinking through technology as a way of expanding the medium, changing the medium, creating a new media. And yet, using these very media as a way of critically examining technology. Since the days of Kepish, the church at Kepish who started the whole program, and the program has gone through several iterations to people like Otopieni, John Jonas, who was at the Venice Biennale this year, and current faculty like Grine as Raxachimi, and Gereminas Urbonas was the director of the program.
We have amazing people working on exactly that cost. And then the students then that are coming in, do they often also, and of course these answers will change over time, but just your impression, are they mostly coming from explicit architecture backgrounds or do they, or explicit engineering backgrounds, or do they have more of a varied background? For the architecture students, you will be surprised as I was that the body of students who applied to MIT are the same body who applied to Princeton, Columbia, Yale, Harvard. They choose to come to MIT for almost similar reasons that they would choose to go to the other places.
But they stay in MIT because they think that they can change the world, or they want to change the world. That's a different connection. And if the place went to be transformative of how they will think about their role as architects, yes. And I've seen that even though again, there have been big changes in the evolution of the school itself.
You see that among alumni from the 1950s, 60s, 70s, that mission is still very strong. And what more precise, concise, but beautiful mission can you have for the school? That's lovely. I also aligns very well with the what seems to be, at least for someone like myself, working for ARKNEC in this position of architectural media, a complete explosion of what the idea of the architect is, and that explosion meaning both extreme possibility and potential expressed by the people within the profession, but also a sense of kind of existential fear of like, what does it mean to be this person, to be this professional, have spent this amount of money, or however, to be practicing as an architect?
But in being in a place like MIT, it sounds like based on your description, like you really don't have to choose or compartmentalize yourself in that way. So this might be completely absurd to ask, but can you try to give me like your conception of what you think the architect is nowadays, because we see it changing from the traditional idea of someone who designs buildings or so, but more of this explosion of different technical and design philosophies? I can say it with a dose of confession and a dose of pride that I never knew how conventionally practiced I ran until I came to MIT, because I look around me and I see both the faculty, the students, startups, and the research scientists taking on extremely unusual approaches to the design of a building or a project. The commitment to the project, I think, is what matters.
And the commitment to finding new frontiers, whether through materials or through general technology or structural design or systems engineering or ways of thinking that will actually bring architecture closer to a larger social mission, but also not forgetting design excellence. That is very central to the way we work is definitely an overarching concern. Now that's just too abstract, it can mean anything, but I would say that as much as that could lead to this explosion or let's say expansion of the role of the architect, it is surprisingly making us aware that what binds us are a few simple but important concerns, a concern for the built environment that will not go away. The minute that goes away, you become another kind of designer.
And that's not unwelcome, but in the school like MIT, which is small, somehow the focus of that question is necessary for us to be a department of architecture. And I do feel that what MIT does very well is that these explorations, they can go very far, but at the end of the day, somehow they need to come back home. They can graze on the wildest cross, but they have to come back home to that barn, which is architecture, so that we can say, okay, what have we brought back today? The cycle and the motion is something that I've noticed more at the media lab, like how far can an exploration go before it needs to come back?
What is the breadth? What is the patience? What is the limit of elasticity we can give to an idea before we say, okay, and I do feel that there is, yes, there is this idea of the expanded architecture as has been called in the past 10 years, but I do feel that there's a moment of pulling things back together now and a very, very strong, not potential, but I would say even commitment to synthesis at MIT, because there is another dimension to the Institute at large, but to the school in particular, that we are not interested in solving discrete problems. We are here to solve complex societal problems and cities are complex societal problems, buildings are complex societal problems.
If we break them down into their small parts, we can do that. But the challenge for us right now is to bring them back together, to assemble them back together, to say, okay, it is great system might impact the environment in one way, but if we bring seven discrete systems together, which is what a building is, even an infinite number of them, how do we impact the environment? That's what is really amazing about MIT. It's a possibility to explore in breadth, but then ultimately be responsible for collecting things back and synthesizing towards that purpose.
And I think that elasticity works both within or grounded within a community of a school like MIT, but also in a kind of present grounding. So based on time of saying I'm in a certain generation of architects and I'm going to do this type of research that it has no return trajectory. It kind of seems so far out there that how on earth will this relate, but there's this investment in these ideas that feel presently necessary to do research in as an architect with the knowledge that it might not be clear how this will become applicable, but it is absolutely essential to the discipline. I also feel that we are beginning to show increasingly as an institute how significant our contributions to the design world have been.
Almost inadvertently, there's a certain quirky modesty about MIT and its faculty in the place, which I admire. It sometimes comes in the way of communicating and articulating what you're trying to do to each other to the world, because being in a position of leadership requires that it's not claiming the leadership or statement articulating what is it about what you're doing that is giving you that importance and visibility. So we do have work to do on that front. But when you see our faculty work on the cover of Architect Magazine, Mijian Eun and John Oxendor's Collier Memorial, and then Sheila Kennedy's Anthropology Building at Harvard, you begin to realize that something is going well here, not just in terms of the flash of the appealing on the magazine, but that these works are all about these complex explorations that happen in the laboratories and the design studio and in the offices of the architects and structural engineers and environmental engineers that are yelling so beautifully into objects of desire.
And referring back to this idea of going out and doing these multidisciplinary researches to come back and eventually inform architecture, there is a certain kind of major criticism that does come into those types of forays for architects, because either especially in the social sciences, if you have an architect who's doing, say, research on a specific population, so that they can do some type of proposal for an affordable housing unit or something like that. Oftentimes there is both within the community and without this kind of, that work doesn't belong to you or you're not prepared to do the work, that kind of work and that kind of research in an ethical and appropriate way to the discipline. And that is kind of, I mean, that's a whole other kind of worms that we probably don't have time to go into, but that it does come with this question of, as architecture does expand and you are encouraging us to go like MIT, these researchers in different areas, how do you still instill a core idea of what is an ethical architect and how to be ethical as an architect? That's a long lead up to a relatively short question.
There are different ways we can answer it. One is by saying, well, professions have somehow turned these questions into practices, policies, laws, regulations that guide what an architect does in society and all. That's the easy answer. But that's ultimately how the legal world, the political world, understand the placement of the profession, a kind of institutionalized approach to positioning an architecture group or a professional group in society at large.
Again, I'm not little in the tool. It's a very, very important position to have as a power base that uses the collective ethic of the profession and its responsibilities and roles towards society at large to speak on behalf of the profession, to make a mark on society and change that. But some of the more important ethical questions are difficult ones to answer, because sometimes you find yourself in dilemmas where you do not know whether what you're doing is the right or wrong thing. Maybe it's right now based on certain criteria that you have in front of you, but that ultimately five years down the line, 10 years down the line, there are going to be certain issues that emerge that will disprove everything that you have done.
It's not unique to architecture, it's unique to me. It's part of many professions, which is why questions of robustness, resilience, sustainability have emerged to help not just address real problems, but help us in calibrating the impact of what we do on society, on the environment as well. It's a provisional answer, but I would say that the ethical question is in everything we do and that we do ask it from the professional ethic point of view, but I also think we should be asking it more and more at those very difficult moments when we don't know which decision to make and how the ethical component is going to sway it one way or the other. Because inevitably it's going to bring with it a whole ideological dimension that is embedded in every ethical question, especially those for which we don't know the answer, where we have to rely on principles that we have inherited from somewhere else.
The challenge right now, I think, for us is when we don't know the answer, what are the ethics that we set for ourselves? And to be aware that when we venture out into un-throbin territory, and that's what we train our students to do, that we are able to ask that question and there to act when there is no clear answer. I think with a lot of the conversations around very well-known architects practicing in areas that they may not have any other type of connection to, other than the fact that they are now building there, there is a lot of, again, kind of an each criticism around not inherently that architect is not prepared to work there because they don't understand, in quotes, the site, but for some integral reason. And of course, those criticisms are kind of unfair and they're often blanketed.
But then the question becomes, okay, how do we create not necessarily a code of ethics in the way that the AIA has a code of ethics, but how do we encourage a kind of hypocratic oath of sorts in the profession and often the responsibility of creating something like that, and in generating it falls on schools, which is previously not really something that I think was seen as a responsibility of academic institution. So just think it's fascinating now that these conversations are kind of falling back on the responsibilities of architecture and education. I also feel that there's a very strong ethical mission in producing beautiful things that we tend to forget. There is an important dimension that we keep forgetting about in terms of the role of the architect towards society.
I guess that is what ethical means, or playing a productive constructive role in improving the lives of people and practicing in, according to standards that are understood to be ethical in society at large, and not just within protracted world of architecture or design. That dimension is a dimensional beauty. The responsibility towards producing, the responsibility towards society in terms of producing beautiful buildings, beautiful spaces, spaces that inspire us, that transformers, that transcend the situations wherein and give us a sense of optimism by virtue of their desirability, by virtue of an aesthetic experience that we have in those spaces. That is a very big responsibility that we tend to be little, but ultimately the only transformative or the main transformative capacity of architecture is to move us, is to move us in that way.
And we tend to overburden our thinking about its ethical role and responsibility with certain things like performativity, best practices, which are all indispensable and excellent. But for some reason, this discussion tends to happen exclusively without consideration of beauty. And if there's anything sure about what we do is that, and why we leave it out, I'm not sure. I think we need to bring it back into the discussion.
Obviously, the discussion of beauty has been exiled several times from public platforms. But I am hoping that we can bring it back with a strong sense of focus, one that allows us to say that if you want to measure the impact of something beautiful, then you're probably using the wrong framework to ask the question, because if anything, beauty is not something that we want to understand its impact directly. It has a certain effectiveness, it has a certain transformative value to it. And yet to turn that into a functionalist question, into a pragmatic question, is basically to lose the value of what we understand to be beautiful.
That's a very, I mean, we see schools kind of dancing around that question, because obviously it's an extremely difficult question, one that has been brought in and out of the discourse with various controversies. But somewhat ironically, a lot of the research that I'm personally aware of around scratching, trying to tease out this idea of beauty as something that actually can be quantified is done from the perspective of people who believe that the better we can understand how our brains understand the built environment, the better we'll understand what beauty is and the better we'll be able to produce beautiful things. And that seems like in some ways a very counterintuitive answer to say like the only way we can really understand beauty is by quantifying it to a billion, no, trying to figure out how much data we can build behind these things. There's a lot of merit in asking the aesthetic question and non-estatic terms, but that doesn't mean that it will go away.
I think that we're simply postponing it. And maybe it's one of those questions that you cannot ask directly, but only indirectly. Maybe that's the ethical approach to asking the aesthetic question. But I can't have to go back to John Keats and his letter to his brothers where he proposes that ultimately a work of art, in his case, a poem may not need to explain the world in order to make a proposition about the world.
That would be too much to ask, but that we can make propositions and that they move us for their transformative capacity to take us somewhere else to be attracted by their values, by their proportions, by their seductiveness. And what that impact is not clear in terms of its impact on transforming the world, but that that leap, that capacity for it to take us somewhere else is in of itself important. What John Dues called the consumatory experience, that is the aesthetic, I think it's very important for us to look at. And Keats talks about all of this in the letter to his brothers as being that negative capability that we have, as artists, our capability to operate in the middle of uncertainty.
It's not in order to give certain answers, it's in order to give proposals, projections, concrete propositions that in and of themselves stand tight. They propose to us alternative worlds that work internally quite well coherently. And because of their ability to help us rehearse the world outside, they help us transform it. And it seems like school is the best place to ask these questions and encourage just kind of thinking.
I would also. Yeah. So as a kind of way to round off, and of course you've only had less than a full year under your belt in MIT, but do you have any goals or specific ideas for how you would like to leave? I want you no longer for the position, how you would like the school to change in your tenure?
Someone told me that'll take two years for me to understand what I'm doing. I'm hoping that that is true, because that gives me some time to answer your question. I do want to focus a lot on the educational aspect. We tend to forget that what we do as deans and heads of departments and as professors is engage in pedagogy.
And I think that the pedagogical models of our fields, architecture planning, and the arts that require some major work. And I would like to invest a lot in that. I would also like to think of the School of Architecture and Planning today as being the convener of ideas, not imposing one idea, but open to many orchestrating debate, orchestrating broader discussions that include the rest of the institute, but not turning that into anything goes, pursuing that with a sense of purpose towards the improvement of that central vision, which we talked about being the MIT ethos, that we're asking these questions in order to better equip ourselves to solve complex societal problems. That's very exciting.
Thank you so much. It's been great to talk to you. Thanks for listening to our one-to-one interview with Ashim Sarquis. Dany Lo Buoynoff edits the podcast, and that's skilling his composed music.
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