INTERESTING ARTICLE - ADAPTABLE ARCHITECTURE

Adaptability

13 April 2011

“As architects, as artists… the first lesson I would I tell any of my students: stay alert. Observe, stay alert, understand the nature of the change that is taking place and adapt to those changes. Darwin already got it–the strongest, the smartest are not the survivors. It’s the most adaptive. He got it 100-some years ago and he was correct. Not the smartest, not the strongest, the most adaptive. Those are the ones that survive. And we’re in a profession–not the artistic part… I’m talking about the profession as a whole–the broader notion of what an architect is… and that takes some energy in this culture to stay alive. And it starts here (in architecture school). You want to come out of here and look at the world and be alert to that world and feel comfortable that you have something to offer. The world is a competitive place right now. The schools are fascinating… Schools should be, of all places, where you’re looking at ideas. Building is about opportunity, and (you have to look at) exploring possibilities and potentials. It should be filled with failures AND successes–because you can’t succeed without failure. It’s not possible. And this notion of History is just killing us. Absolutely KILLING us. I look at some of the things on this campus (CMU) and it’s just frightening–they are dead. Dead on arrival. They build something that was dead a hundred years ago. You should be looking at these things and be stimulated to see things that you’ve never seen before. They can be environmental, formal, social, cultural, technological, or things that behave in a certain way. And it should be constantly demanding inquiry–because that’s the basis of education–to push curiosity. And it’s that inquiry you’re here for. It’s not momentary–it’s embedded, internalized. So you leave that way so that ten or twenty years after leaving here you still have that drive.”
Thom Mayne
Lecture at Carnegie Mellon
22 April 2010