FE15 will focus on the status quo of research related to circular building products but also on ways of accelerating and scaling up the transition.
Building products are the basic components of the built environment and thus central to the circular transition. In recent years, there is considerable research in materials, modes of design and manufacturing as well as new implementation protocols; however, circular practices fall short from becoming mainstream whilst circular implementation is further compromised by phenomena of greenwashing.
What should be the industry’s circular targets for the upcoming years? And how are we going to achieve them?
ICSA 2025| University of Antwerp, Belgium. 8-11 July 2025 | Restructuring Architectural and Engineering Education Special Session | Coordinators: Olga Ioannou (TU Delft), Maria Vrontissi (UTh), Bob Geldermans (UA) | Research topics: architectural and engineering education, learning in uncertainty, pedagogy
In July 2025, the 6th International Conference on Structures and Architecture takes place in Antwerp, Belgium. Chaired by professor Mario Rinke (University of Antwerp, Belgium) and professor Marie Frier Hvejsel (Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark), the conference calls for a re-imagination of current practices regarding structures and architecture. The title of the conference “REstructure REmaterialize REthink REuse” underscores the aim to reassess the design and construction of our built environment with new settings and tools, in response to the pressing global climate and energy crisis.
As part of this international conference Olga Ioannou, Maria Vrontissi and Bob Geldermans teamed up to organise a special session, on architectural and engineering education. This session aims to bring to the foreground how learning is conditioned by the tensions of a world in flux. It further aspires to provide the space for reflection on the current positioning of education between pressing global environmental challenges and the opportunities that arise by research and design experimentation on/for the built environment. How can we as educators facilitate learning in these times of uncertainty? We are looking for contributions that discuss innovative educational practices in formal and/or informal learning ecologies as well as reflective papers on pedagogy and the shifting roles of educators and learners alike. For more information about this special session, please contact o.ioannou@tudelft.nl
SUBMIT AN ABSTRACT | Would you like to join this special session? Please submit an abstract before 28 February 2024. Contributions must be submitted in English and must include:
the name of the author(s) and affiliation(s)
the title and the main body of your abstract (max. 500 words)
the topic of the session (select “Restructuring Architectural and Engineering education” for this special session)
up to five keywords
Please ensure that you cover all relevant aspects in the abstract: the main research goal/question, context/current state of the research, methods/sources and the expected contribution to the field. All submissions are made through ConfTool (https://www.conftool.net/icsa2025/). You have to create an account in ConfTool, before you can submit your contribution.
IMPORTANT DATES
Abstract Submission: 28 February 2024 (23:59 CET)
Preliminary Abstract Acceptance: 15 May 2024
Full Research Paper Submission: 30 October 2024
Full Research Paper Acceptance: 15 February 2025
Conference: 8-11 July 2025
PROCEEDINGS | The Conference Proceedings will be published by CRC Press / Balkema (Taylor & Francis Group). The papers will be reviewed by at least two members of the conference’s scientific committee. Proceedings will be sent for indexation by both Thomson Reuters and Elsevier.
While it is impossible to rule out the sudden appearance of new ideologies or previously unrecognised contradictions in liberal societies, then, the present world seems to confirm that the fundamental principles of sociopolitical organisation have not advanced terribly far since 1806. Many of the wars and revolutions fought since that time have been undertaken in the name of ideologies which claimed to be more advanced than liberalism, but whose pretensions were ultimately unmasked by history. In the meantime, they have helped to spread the universal homogenous state to the point where it could have a significant effect on the overall character of international relations.
Fukuyama-End of History 1989
I read this article today and two things came to mind: the first was Ian McEwan’s latest book, Lessons, a meticulous monitoring of someone’s life over the second half of the 20th century in the UK [the hero would be today at the age of my parents]. ‘Lessons’ followed the slow transformation of his world politics/ideology informed consciousness to what seemed to be a retreat to the personal and the individual towards the end of his life. But the book and its painstaking length did make a point in showcasing how in the mid 20th century the personal was inextricably linked to the world and how major world events (like the Bay of pigs incident) affected individuals even if they lived miles away from what was actually happening.
And then there is this little segment from a tv series, Euphoria, a 3,5 min reel that summarises (in the best possible way, if I may add) how economic liberalism has corrupted our world of ideas; how values are exploited and monetised; and ultimately, how people get disentangled from feeling they belong to any collective reality.
Euphoria, 2019-
So, what next? Fukuyama in 1989, argues that there is no real opposition for political liberalism. Religion and nationalism can appeal only to some of liberalism’s contradictions or gaps: spiritual vacuity in the first case, racial and ethnical consciousness in the latter.
However, the passage of time -even that of just 30 years- under an ideological regime that is not challenged by any credible suitors erodes the very consciousness and the culture that made it possible. After the demise of any strong opposition, the fall of the wall, and end of the cold war, there came the last 30 years of economic liberalism, consumerism and growth all in turn responsible for the global challenges of climate change, material depletion (should I go on?). Only now, the omnipotence of liberalism has apparently paralysed our reflexes: how are we supposed to escape where we are supposed to be?
Contrary to McEwan’s character, the Euphoria protagonist takes it a step further: he speaks of a need for a new spirituality, he speaks of poetry, he imagines the existence of a value and/or belief so transcendental that it can become a new god. But this search ‘within’ he is describing is far different from any individualistic liberalist soul searching endeavor that is created with the sole intent to be commodified, or is commodified regardless of its original intention anyway. I think what he is calling for identifies with Nicolescu’s call to find the spiritual dimension of democracy as what bridges technoscience with religion. Or the missing link Morin believes that exists between science and philosophy towards a sociological metamorphosis, ‘the birth of society-world at a global scale.’
References
Nicolescu, B., 2010. METHODOLOGY OF TRANSDISCIPLINARITY – LEVELS OF REALITY, LOGIC OF THE INCLUDED MIDDLE AND COMPLEXITY. In Transdisciplinary Journal of Engineering & Science Vol: 1, No:1, (December, 2010), pp.19-38
Morin, E. (2006). Restricted Complexity, General Complexity. Presented at the colloquium “Intelligence de la complexite: epistemologie et pragmatique”, Cerisy-La-Salle, France, June 26th, 2005. Translated from French by Carlos Gershenson.
What has happened from the passage from heavy to light capitalism is the dissipation of invisible ‘politburos’ capable of ‘absolutizing’ the values (…) of the goals worth pursuing (…) the question of objectives is once more thrown wide open and bound to become the cause of endless agony and much hesitation, to sap confidence and generate the unnerving feeling of unmitigated uncertainty and therefore also the state of perpetual anxiety (…) not knowing the ends instead of not knowing the means (…) it’s rather the question which of the many floating, seductive ends ‘within reach’ offer priority -given the quantity of means in possession and the meagre chances of their lasting usefulness (…) most of human life and most of human lives will be spent agonizing about the choice of goals (…) Contrary to its predecessor, light capitalism is bound to be value-obsessed (…) the world becomes an infinite collection of possibilities (…) everything now is down to the individual: it’s up to them to find what they are capable of doing, to stretch that capacity to the outmost, and to pick the ends to which that capacity could be applied best, -that is to the greatest conceivable satisfaction (…) the most taxing and irritating challenge people confront in this context is establishing priorities
Bauman, Zygmunt, 1925-2017. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Cambridge, UK : Malden, MA :Polity Press ; Blackwell
Excerpts from: Nicolescu, Β. (1997). The Transdisciplinary Evolution of Learning. In Proceedings of the International Congress on What University for Tomorrow? Towards a Transdisciplinary Evolution of the University, Locarno, 30 April-2 May 1997, 1-11. http://www.learndev.org/dl/nicolescu_f.pdf
Learning to know: training in the methods; capable of establishing bridges between disciplines and between disciplines, meanings and interior capacities/ transdisciplinarity is a complement to the disciplinary approach as it will mean the emergence of continually connected human beings (…) endowed with a permanent flexibility.
Learning to do: acquiring a profession/ transdisciplinarity helps break the specialization by encouraging the creation of a flexible internal core that can provide access to another occupation if needed; learning to do becomes and apprenticeship in creativity (…) The transdisciplinary approach is based on the equilibrium between the exterior person and the interior person.
Learning to live together with: this is not just about tolerating but accepting that in each human being there is a sacred, intangible core/ The transcultural, transreligious, transpolitical and transnational attitude permits us to better understand our own culture, to better defend our national interests, to better respect our own religious or political convictions. Just as in all other areas of nature and knowledge, open unity and complex plurality are not antagonistic.
Learning to be: discovering the harmony or disharmony between our individual and social life/ transdisciplinarity and transpersonal relations help us shape ourselves.
Excerpts from: Embracing the Rhizome: Transdisciplinary Learning for Innovative Problem Solving by Thorsten Philipp and Tobias Schmohl. Text available here
Transdisciplinary Learning:
it presupposes a systemic change: reduce teachers’ control; activate participation and co-creation; embrace failures; dismantle hierarchies and extend to collective responsibility; establish reflective practices; feedback literacy;
it is fundamentally about social change/ societal transformation for a fair future;
it resists the ‘tree’ metaphor in favor of the ‘tufted root’ (Deleuze & Guattari)
it is a research alliance between diverse but equal actors where science becomes a cooperative-egalitarian network-based process; and therefore, it emphasizes the significance of successful communication between the academic community and various societal sectors;
it is plural in nature as it refers to heterogeneous actors, multiple knowledge-based resources and their applicability;
it acknowledges the multifaceted nature of action and problems, which frequently exist independently, without any mutual relation;
it promotes the integration of knowledge from practical and embodied experiences;
it promotes a ‘new production of knowledge’ (MODE 2);
it promotes looking for solutions that are beyond conventional wisdom;
it requires unilateral, dialogical feedback;
it can require: storytelling, data literacy, research-based education, participatory action research; engaged learning (=students as citizens and as entrepreneurs)
it embeds substantial learning opportunities in formats like: living labs, real-world labs, science shops or student-organized teaching;
it includes creative practices such as: scrum, design thinking;, hackathons and CBL, case studies;
it may be open to accusations of solutionism or to being branded as tendentious commissioned research due to its emphasis on quick, usable solutions to problems.
Excerpts from the paper: Making a Beam Social: In Search of a Localized Production Paradigm by Xan Browne, Olga Popovic Larsen, and Will Bradley. Full paper available here: https://papers.uia2023cph.org/P2/3635.pdf
(…) making a beam social investigates hyperlocal production of structural building components, utilizing discarded timber elements as feedstock. Recognizing the cultural value of waste streams, the project investigates a continued correspondence with found timber artefacts, with an aim to maintain their enrolment in the social lives of human beings (…) What we are inheriting then is in away a hybrid, a post-object, that’s formed by a combination of a previous application, and wood’s capacity to morph in response to its environment.
Thanks to a colleague of mine, today I was introduced to this platform and I could not help but sharing. I imagine I will be spending a lot of time visiting the different pages, but this is such a great overview of discourses of interpreting learning and those of influencing learning, in parallel with key metaphors for teaching and education, and learning and learners. A lot of food for thought.
Notes from: Karen Gravett, Carol A. Taylor & Nikki Fairchild (21 Oct 2021): Pedagogies of mattering: re-conceptualising relational pedagogies in higher education, Teaching in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2021.1989580
Origins of PEDAGOGIES OF MATTERING (PofM): POSTHUMAN THEORY (PT) | ethnographic, observing, noticing stance towards practice (…) in PT, the knowing subject does not stand apart from the world to observe, describe, measure and know it, they are part of the assemblage (…) ethical consideration begin to apply with regards to who matters and what counts (…) response-ability and pedagogy are relational processes rendered capable of bringing social transformation – Haraway (…) intra-action & agential cuts– Barad (…) affirmative ethics – Braidotti: orienting to practices that are non-competitive and RELATIONAL PEDAGOGIES (RP) | meaningful relationships as fundamental to effective learning (…) working with students as partners
CHARACTERISTICS OF PEDAGOGIES OF MATTERING (PofM) | 1. focus on relationships-connections-care as opposed to uncaring neo-liberal, competitive and individualistic HE systems (…) 2. oppose cognitivist and humanist educational traditions that fail to acknowledge how human relationships are entangled within the contexts they occur or what the impact of objects, bodies and materialities on learning is (…) 3. draw on posthuman, feminist materialist theory that situate humans in relation to other humans and non-humans (…) 4. recast being, knowing and doing in HE (….)”they enable us to notice the impact of a broader range of actors upon learning and teaching and tune into objects, bodies and spaces that constitute the material mattering of learning and teaching as an in-situ practice of relationality”
IMPLICATIONS PEDAGOGIES OF MATTERING (PofM) ON CURRICULUM: it encourages educators to think in new ways about the socio-material construction of the curriculum (…) indeterminacy, disequilibrium, lived experience (…) it becomes “a construction of the individual in relation to educative moments”(…) students co-design content,curate their reading lists, (…) | ON TEACHING AND LEARNING: objects and bodies collide (…) classroom relations materialize power (…) [accept that] learning and teaching intra-actions do not always produce predictable results | ON ASSESSMENT: “assessment as a more open-ended, material practice that pays better attention to the situated particularities of students’ learning journeys and takes better care of their developing subjectivities as learners”(…) two notions are important here: it is not something that is done to students; disperse it throughout (not at the end).
The term challenges the notion that University education only lasts as long as a degree (…) it ‘opens’ the possibility to former students (alumni) to return to university for a ‘mid-career loop’ (…) the model also pertains to enhance diversity as young learners come in contact with older ones (…) it also allows for flexibility when alternating between academic study and practical experience via internships (…)
The traditional model of 4 or 3+2 years of education is now being considered as irrelevant. Universities in UK are thinking of introducing programs with micocredentials; others, are looking into technology to enhance different types of engagement which in turn puts pressure on learning design (as in “the planning, preparation, thought-work and formation of a blueprint of the teaching & learning experience prior to running an educational experience”). The graph below shows what should be the points of focus in designing for LLL.
Organization model for learning design | Image available here
Authors discuss the research gap between materiality and governance and in particular, how materiality has shaped patterns of actors and institutions, power and knowledge while existing policies are unable to grasp the complexity of materials’ governance. New materialism, the non-human factors, are pushed into the spotlight however, there is only consensus about the fact that materials matter probably because scholars interested in materials are less likely to be interested in politics, policies and administration. Material worlds and social worlds interconnection remain uncharted (…) authors make a conceptual distinction between environment and discourse to start mapping the ways these can be entangled (…) they further identify a number of frameworks to understand materiality (…) Marx: material conditions are crucial to societies survival; Foucault: he problematized the relation between power and materiality, planning for control; Lacan/Zizek: imaginary and symbolic functions are never adequate to grasp the agency and resistance of the material Real; Deleuze: reality is not describing materiality, it is materiality, yet, as with Lacan, the measure of materiality in what appears as real (including what appears as material) can never be fully ascertained; Socio-ecological systems: the basic idea of social-ecological systems with a history of mutual adaptations between the social and the ecological which are only partly predictable and governable, helps to grasp societies’ dependence on their material environment; Social systems theory: it help us to understand that the agency of materiality is relational and cannot be assumed a-priory to any relation; New materialism: Matter as forces and forms, there are various forces and presences of the material in the social and hence the political; Actor/Network theory: there is no material agency outside of the relations in which agency takes shape and affordances only exists as an ascription by an observer. Authors distinguish between human-made, natural and hybrid material dependencies, positive or negative.
A mapping of material dependencies in environmental governance can render visible material factors, in past and present, which are often not accounted for, and which shape the responses to environmental change and the possibilities to work towards sustainability transitions
Kristof Van Assche, Martijn Duineveld, Raoul Beunen, Vladislav Valentinov & Monica Gruezmacher (2022) Material dependencies: hidden underpinnings of sustainability transitions, Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 24:3, 281-296, DOI:10.1080/1523908X.2022.2049715
From SOM Foundation website: This research brings together agrowaste upcycling, phytoremediation systems, and circular material life cycle design at Yale’s Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (CEA) with circular textile companies Global Mamas in Ghana (partner since 2011) and Ecolibri in Guatemala (partner since 2004). The aim is to develop architectural systems with the diverse material outputs of sister cropping farming practices.
Products of this research were exhibited in a 2022 installation in Hasselt Belgium, entitled Grounds for Return.
connecting data to information to knowledge 