🏛 Confronting grand challenges
Our spring architecture thesis students demonstrate creativity and determination
When finals, papers, and thesis presentations took priority, we paused production of our final three episodes. But our production team is back at work, editing episode 5 for release next week. Meanwhile, an update on this spring’s master’s thesis projects.
Students envisioned safe schools, healthy new mothers, robust and diverse communities that harvest rainwater, care for LGBTQIA+ youth, and heat with the sun. They honored erased history and reclaimed abused waterfronts. One student created a garden for healing to challenge dehumanizing cancer treatment. Another invited visitors to immerse with a light touch in the sublime landscape of Big Bend National Park. Several projects celebrated our relationship with water: to heal a damaged urban watershed, daylight buried streams, rethink agriculture in a vulnerable coastal area, and integrate water as a delightful amenity in a flood-prone neighborhood. Two projects proposed innovative ways to bring fresh produce into the heart of food deserts.
Over three days, our faculty, invited guests, students, spouses, parents and friends witnessed twenty-two hours of presentations and conversations on a wide range of topics. Project sites ranged from Washington DC to Baltimore to Maryland’s Eastern Shore; traveled further afield to cities like Detroit, New Orleans, New York City and Boulder; and even across the globe to Tbilisi and Cairo.
It was a treat to listen to such a rich variety of narratives about how we got here and what we can collectively do about it. Not that our conversations were all rainbows and unicorns. During a discussion of podcast co-host Vincenza Perla’s project—designing for the future climate, today—one of the guest reviewers said, “Now I’m depressed.” True, it’s not easy to confront the devastation of sea level rise to generations of agriculture and cultural memory. Many of us tend to keep such discussions at arm’s length, whether because we’re not directly affected or to avoid strong emotions like anxiety, grief, or even guilt. We have that luxury.
But the young people in Vincenza’s cohort have used their time in school to prepare to practice in a rapidly changing world, honing the superpower of radical imagination. Her project accepts the continuum of change already in full swing on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, to design resilient farm buildings that support the shift from land-based agriculture (chicken and grain) to water-based aquaculture (oysters, rice and seaweed). I came away from her presentation not depressed, but hopeful.
The presentations were all streamed on our school’s YouTube channel. The Building Hope podcast’s YouTube will feature slides of these projects to accompany our release of episode 6, coming soon.
This all makes me want to go further and visualize, beyond our school, how many newly minted graduates are heading out into the world with similar innovative, visionary ideas. Is it 500? 1,000? 2,000? I went down a rabbit-hole of trying to discover how many architecture master’s degrees will be conferred this year. I’m no statistician; the number is harder to find than I expected. I did learn from the NAAB website that 103 accredited architecture programs in the U.S. offer master’s degrees. So, let’s add 300 to 500 people to our 22 May graduates and the 8 from December, eager to bring their creative skills to bear on society’s grand challenges. They are each Building Hope in their own unique ways.
This project is supported by a Faculty-Student Research Award from the Graduate School, University of Maryland, as well as grants from the University’s Sustainability Fund and the School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation.