House of Architecture
Humanizing the Future: Making, Meaning, Matter
This spring, the Urban Future Lab brought its experimental ethos to Trinity University teaching an advanced course in critical theory and environmental philosophy titled the House of Architecture, shaped by a forthcoming book manuscript. Rather than offering answers, the course began with disquiet: a sense that something vital has gone missing in architecture: intuition, presence, relation. It did not present a solution but opened a threshold.
The House of Architecture reimagines architecture not as a system or product, but as teacher, mirror, and relational act. Structured like the book it accompanies, the course unfolds as a metaphorical house—each room holding conflict, ideology, and vulnerability, and each threshold inviting students to dwell in contradiction and complexity. It is in these thresholds that the Third Condition emerges: a space beyond binaries, where intellect meets intuition, and uncertainty and discomfort become productive.
This is not about perfecting practice but humanizing it. Students from the fields of urban and environmental studies inhabited architecture as a living structure—intellectually, emotionally, and politically. They moved through experiential “rooms” that refuse easy separations between the poetic and the political, the intellectual and the visceral. The aim was not to teach architecture as content, but as context, asking students to see themselves not outside of architecture, but within it.
Throughout the course, the journal served as our most vital medium—more than a place for notes, it became a space of dwelling, of return. Students developed their journals as living documents: spaces to hold uncertainty, trace questions, construct meaning, and document transformation. Writing was not an afterthought, but a form of practice and a way to think through the body, reflect with intention, and render the invisible visible. The journal allowed each student to engage the material not from a distance, but from within, cultivating presence and attentiveness as both method and ethic.
The course resisted coherence in favor of relation. It centered presence over production, asking: What architect are you? Not as a professional identity, but as a way of being in the world. At once speculative and grounded, the House of Architecture became a companion for those who sense something unraveling in the built environment and seek not to escape the dissonance, but to inhabit it—with care, courage, and imagination.