Whiting studied architecture, urbanism, and design at a time when the atmosphere at architecture schools was beginning to change significantly. By the beginning of the new millennium, the field was shaped by sharp clashes and black-and-white thinking that divided it into opposing camps - modernists versus postmodernists, supporters of Graves versus Wigley. Schools back then felt like a boxing ring, with two hardline opinions pitted against each other. Those ideological battles have essentially disappeared,” says the graduate of several prestigious American universities. According to her, the climate crisis has pushed other themes to the forefront: sustainability, social benefit, or the resource efficiency of buildings. But that also means that traditional ideological groups in architecture no longer play such a defining role - nor feel so responsible. “There’s a downside: professional debate is weakening, along with the desire to actively shape the world. It’s as if architectural schools today want to address all the problems of the contemporary world,” Whiting adds.

School as a Playground for Experiment

Digitalisation and the COVID-19 pandemic have also contributed to the shift in academic culture, Whiting notes. “Students and faculty spent an entire year at home. We worked remotely, which significantly changed how we operate. The digital environment has affected both us and our students,” she says, pointing to psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has written about the phenomenon of an anxious generation.

“The digital world has made students anxious about voicing ideas, trying new things, and making mistakes, because those mistakes may catch up with you later, such as on social media,” she adds, emphasising that one of the key challenges for educators today is teaching students critical judgement without triggering the formation of factions or fuelling anxiety. Despite all these changes, she remains optimistic. She believes the role of the school has not fundamentally changed.

"The campus should continue to function as a playful environment and a place for experimentation - where students learn critical judgement, try out different positions, change their minds, and evolve. We must keep believing that these people will one day make the world a better place to live,” she says.

The changing times and the absence of binary positions are, in Whiting’s view, an opportunity for students to develop across multiple fields simultaneously and on that basis form their own perspectives. “Education should work as a loop of constant feedback. You test ideas, develop them and test them again. Along the way, a person may change their mind. But that requires something today’s digital generation lacks most: focus and deep work with both text and form.”

“Design touches everything and is shaped by everything”

Whiting sees the future of architectural practice through the lens of what she calls “engaged autonomy”. A graduate should have the freedom and ability to act based on their own decisions and values, while also engaging actively and responsibly with the world around them - without abandoning their ideas and convictions. “A building necessarily has walls and form - the physical shape the architect gives it - but it also exists within a context, and it must reflect the fact that this context can change,” she believes.

She sees architecture, design, urbanism, and landscape architecture as interconnected fields shaped by history, theory, politics, and social issues. An architecture school, she argues, is not a place where students simply learn to design buildings, but a laboratory for thought, experimentation, critical reflection, and active civic engagement. At the Harvard Graduate School of Design, she therefore aims to interlink different programmes and allow students to move between disciplines:

“Disciplinarity, in this sense, is a positive recognition that every field taught at GSD has its own history. This means that faculty and students have a responsibility to understand the context of what they are interested in - and to be able to carry that insight into their future work,” she explains. “This preparation includes recognising that design touches everything and is deeply influenced by everything - by social and economic forces, new materials, new technologies, and many other factors,” she adds. A combination of deep contextual understanding, critical thinking, and the courage to explore new paths, she believes, can produce a generation of architects capable not only of reflecting the world but also of changing it. “We must give students the freedom to create, but also a sense of responsibility for the world they are entering,” Whiting concludes.