Exploring architectural education from the resilience perspective: The case of the pandemic experience

There had been numerous disastrous events in the last decades, including natural disasters such as tsunamis, droughts, heatwaves, forest fires, and earthquakes. Moreover, there had been pandemics, economics crisis, social conflicts, poverty, the gradual decrease in world resources, effects of climate change, terrorism, and war. In the midst of this time of conflicts and disasters, resilience capacities of natural and social systems became more relevant than before. Resilience is a concept that emphasizes the ability or capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and prevent its function in the face of shocks, disturbances or while undergoing a change. Nowadays, resilience is utilized by many fields to understand the behavior and attributes of complex systems in the face of disturbances. With the global health crisis, namely the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for architectural education to be flexible and resilient in the face of disturbances has been brought into the focus. Moreover, new tools, ways, and methods were experienced during the "emergency remote learning" that took place to prevent the spread of the virus. It is predicted that positive aspects of emergency remote learning will remain, and higher education would transform. This response of the education system is similar to the adaptive resilience framework. In this manner, the recent pandemic experience provides an observable example of the adaptation process of architectural education in the face of disturbances. To understand and lead the transformation of the architectural education to new conditions, it is crucial to understand and analyze current changes that architectural education goes through. This study adopts resilience perspective and takes the example of the pandemic experience to provide insight into the transformation of architectural education in the face of future challenges. To do this, first, the concept of resilience and the genetic characteristics of the architectural education (curriculum, tools, learning environment and interaction) are discussed. A new understanding of resilience is developed, which is then used as a foundation to explore architectural education from the resilience perspective. After setting the framework, a literature review on architectural education is conducted in order to address the disturbances that education systems went through in relation with their transformations. Finally, the pandemic experience of TOBB ETU Department of Architecture is examined to provide data to develop strategies to increase the resilience of education systems and insights for adapting better to future disturbances.