“Everything,” as one of our own predecessors said, “is architecture.” He printed these words on a beautiful, optimistic, half-toned blue sky. We too believe this: That architecture can be many things for the world, and that it can (should) learn many things from the world. At the I oA we make proposals for buildings, yes. But we also (simultaneously) make projects about space, form, ecologies, media, environments and more. And through these choices we propose ways of organizing and structuring the world. Most of all at the I oA, we make ideas about architecture.

In order to make architecture we need to be alive to the world around us, to be open yet critically engaged. To help us figure out what architecture might be, we can recall our applied arts origins, where design is figured as a creative practice positioned between the practical and the disciplinary, between the technical and the cultural, between ideas and things in the world. Making architecture is, always and inevitably, a way of proposing alternative ideas of how we might live. Architecture as a cultural act. Architecture as a social act. Architecture as a political act. The things we make are both propositions and arguments. Material and labor are intertwined with politics. History is a provocation for potential futures. Theory is a way of engaging with the world, design is a declaration of the world as it could be.

The Institute is a platform for discourse through things, words, and images that asks: What has architecture been? What might it become? And what could it be now?

Sam Jacob

I oA Dean