It would only be slightly unfair to describe most current environmental design and planning education as educating students about people, buildings, and the environment without the people, the buildings, and the influence of the environment. Environmental design and planning education, the practices, and the professions are recursive. As always, education is to blame and our only hope. Current models of ecology suggest that diversity = survival and complexity = life. An ecology of design might be diversity = creativity. For any design and/or planning solution to be creative, alive, and complex, clarity and depth of expression is required. As stated in his definition of complimentarity, Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, suggested that the richness of shared experience that comes from such solutions can only be achieved through multiple, overlapping, and mutually exclusive points of view - through an emergent collective practice - emergent meaning the greater whole that comes from a networked system.

The School of Architecture and the College of Architecture, Design and Construction at Auburn University is a model of contemporary environmental design and planning practice - segregated, defensive, and unsustainable without subsidy. Our charge and current effort is to contribute to practice through education and example by becoming interdisciplinary, complex, and sustainable. Social and environmental advocacy becomes formally generative. Extended through building as a collective desire to develop community at all scales, our current models of education, aesthetic tendencies, and professional responsibilities will be challenged at every turn. “Students have a tremendous role to play. They are not only the respondents but the creators of awareness. They have always challenged the prevailing opinions and are the catalytic factor in transforming knowledge. It is time that students remembered that schools were set up to challenge the wisdom of the world and its corruption rather then reinforce it,” states architect Daniel Liebeskind.

The School of Architecture at Auburn has a 100 year history of educating architects, landscape architects and planners; and of contributing to the region and the profession through outreach, scholarship and creative work. The school has four allied degree programs: Bachelor of Architecture, Bachelor of Interior Architecture, Master of Landscape Architecture, and Master of Community Planning; and two enters: The Rural Studio and The Center for Architecture and Urban Studies. These programs, their faculty, and students are out to change the way that environmental design and planning is practiced. The first goal is to strengthen the disciplines. There can be no trans-disciplinary collaboration without strong disciplines. The second goal is to leverage these individual programs and centers into an trans-disciplinary network. This network will help prepare students for an increasingly dynamic professional future, facilitate the innovative work of the faculty, and connect to the professions in ways that affirm our interdependence. This work is well underway.

When use value is replaced by market value, work, which is almost always a gift, is replaced by labor, which is always a commodity. Labor is not sustainable. Work is. Work builds community in addition to building something else. Context-based learning combines work with education in a way that empowers students, faculty, and citizens through design and planning endeavors. The “something else” is also important: an environmentally responsive Habitat for Humanity house, a transitional house made from hay bails for people with AIDS, a constructed wetlands that remediates a polluted landscape, a development plan for a small community in northern Alabama, a house for Music Man in Hale County. These are all projects that are going on right now in the School of Architecture. These projects bridge the gap between the university and the community, between the School and the professions, and recall the childhood dreams of climbing great mountains, building tall towers, and changing the world.

Watch out!