Exploring Architectural Education from the Resilience Perspective: After the Pandemic Experience

Abstract

In recent decades, the world has witnessed numerous disastrous events, including natural disasters such as tsunamis, droughts, heatwaves, forest fires, and earthquakes. Moreover, societies have faced significant challenges such as economic collapse, pandemics, social conflicts, poverty, the gradual depletion of global resources, the impacts of climate change, terrorism, and war. Amid this era of crises and disruptions, there is a growing need for resilient systems capable of coping with such disturbances.

Resilience is a concept that emphasizes a system’s capacity to absorb shocks and continue functioning amidst change and disruption. It has been applied across various disciplines to understand the behavior and characteristics of complex systems under stress.

The global health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted numerous sectors, including architectural education. Most educational institutions worldwide temporarily closed, leading to the implementation of “emergency remote learning.” This abrupt shift highlighted the necessity for higher education systems to be flexible and resilient.

During the pandemic, new tools, methods, and approaches were adopted, and it is anticipated that some of these will be retained. This adaptive response aligns with the concept of adaptive resilience. In this context, the pandemic provides a real-world example of how architectural education adapts to major disturbances.

To support and guide the transformation of architectural education, it is essential to analyze the current changes. Although there are several studies evaluating the effects of the pandemic, it is still important to discuss if this experience has ever changed or improved architectural education – such as the curriculum, tools, learning environments, and modes of interaction.

A literature review is conducted to examine how educational systems have responded to disruptions. Architectural education before and after the pandemic will be evaluated in the light of this framework. Then the pandemic experience of the Department of Architecture at TOBB University of Economics and Technology is analyzed to provide data for developing strategies to enhance the resilience of educational systems.