Radical Pedagogy: The Bartlett’s Amy Kulper on Empathy and Ethics of Care in Teaching
Professor Amy Kulper, Director of The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Photo by Riley McClenaghan.
By Gail Kutac
Amy Catania Kulper is an architect, theorist, and curator whose teaching and research focus on the intersections of history, theory, and criticism with design. In September 2022, she joined The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL (University College London), as Director and Professor of Architecture. Previously, she was Department Head at RISD Architecture (the Rhode Island School of Design) where she was actively engaged in the project of making architectural pedagogy and practice more accessible, inclusive, and equitable. Kulper’s writings are published in Log, The Journal of Architecture, arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, Candide, The Journal of Architectural Education, and numerous edited volumes.
She has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Architectural Education where she acted as the Design Editor for six years, receiving the ACSA Distinguished Service Award for her work on the journal. In 2019 she was co-chair of the ACSA National Conference, Black Box: Articulating Architecture’s Core in the Post-Digital Era. She co-curated the exhibitions Drawing for the Design Imaginary at the Carnegie-Mellon Museum, and Drawing Attention at the Roca Gallery, London. In her interview with Gail Kutac, Amy talks about reformation at The Bartlett, the focus of her research, and the difference between an education in the UK and the US, advising those just starting their careers to leverage their life experience into their designs.
GK: The school year is in full swing and you just hit the two-year mark as Director of The Bartlett School of Architecture. What are you most focused on for the coming year?
AK: When I joined the school, my first priority was to set up a new model of school governance in order to build a community where decisions are made collectively and transparently. The Shared Governance team now has over sixty colleagues from both academic and professional services, all working together to make empowered decisions about how the school is run. Experienced colleagues are teaming up with early-career academics to bring fresh ideas and energy to the table. Our Research and Design Research Directors provided in-depth mentoring for every colleague on a standard academic contract; our Public Programme Directors launched our new flagship seminar series, CRUNCH; our Communications Director worked with a group of colleagues to make our exhibitions more accessible; and our Exhibitions Director has asked units and research clusters to visualize information about the sustainability of the work they are exhibiting in our shows.
Last year we launched a groundbreaking recruitment campaign, advertising five new positions to attract experts in spatial and climate justice to join the academic staff. This “cluster hiring” involves recruiting multiple faculty members around a shared theme to enhance collaboration and diversity, and marks the first initiative of this kind in architectural higher education in the UK. 265 academics applied from all corners of the world, and after a rigorous selection process, we were delighted to welcome our five successful candidates to UCL for the 2024-25 academic year. While applying for roles within our Just Environments Cluster, our new colleagues also expressed interest in and successfully interviewed for shared governance leadership roles within The Bartlett. Collectively, these extraordinary new colleagues have launched an initiative they are calling the Just Mobile Studio. The initiative aims to consolidate existing expertise across The Bartlett, making inclusive pedagogy that foregrounds climate and spatial justice foundational to the education of architects.
The Bartlett School of Architecture’s Just Environments Cluster (from left): Janina Francois, Mpho Matsipa, Mohamad Hafeda, Thomas Aquilina, and Lidia Gasperoni, with School Director, Amy Kulper. Photo by James Tye.
You've had an impressive career teaching in and leading architecture schools. I'd love to hear more about your origins in the field—why did you study architecture and how did you choose where you studied?
My first foray into architecture was at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York City, which set the bar for my subsequent educational experiences. It was important for me to study in or near a city because I was interested in the entanglements of architecture and urbanism. I sought out schools where there was an explicit synergy between practice and discourse—at the IAUS, this was epitomized in the substantive exchanges between Peter Eisenman and Rosalind Krauss and their respective publications, Oppositions and October. Finally, I looked for universities with strong legacies of historical and theoretical inquiry.
I pursued my M.Arch. degree at the University of Pennsylvania where I was fortunate to learn from historians and theorists like David Leatherbarrow, Marco Frascari, Joseph Rykwert, John Dixon Hunt, and Austrian philosopher and social critic, Ivan Illich. After some time in practice, I pursued my MPhil and PhD at Cambridge University with the Czech philosopher and historian, Dalibor Vesely. At the time, I had a friend doing his PhD at the Royal Holloway with urban geographer Denis Cosgrove, so I traveled to London frequently to hear Cosgrove lecture. Given this proximity to London, I also frequently attended exhibitions at The Bartlett School of Architecture, which initiated my decades-long fascination with and admiration of the school.
“If we want to educate architects who are agile and adaptive . . . we need the pace of change inside the academy to match the pace of demand beyond the walls of the university. ”
How does an architectural education in the UK differ from one in the US?
Architecture is a wonderful example of both a generalist and a specialist subject. The simple act of designing and constructing a wall is simultaneously technical, aesthetic, material, social, and political. It’s across this register of the spectrum of architecture from a generalist to a specialist subject that education in the UK differs from that in the US. In the UK, students specialize in their chosen subjects early through academic qualifications known as the GCSE’s (General Certificate of Secondary Education), subject-based qualifications typically taken at the age 15 or 16, followed by the A-Levels (Advanced Level), which are more in-depth qualifications taken after two years of study at the age of 18. In this sense, the US educational system is more generalist. Students in the US can opt to pursue architectural studies at the master’s level, whereas in the UK, students will all have been specializing in the subject as undergraduates.
I don’t believe that either system advantages or disadvantages students in any way. It has just been interesting for me to have been able to navigate between these two disparate approaches to the education of an architect. Recent initiatives by one of the UK’s accrediting bodies for architectural education, the Architects Registration Board (ARB), aspire to open up multiple pathways to architecture. In the UK, they call this a “widening participation” initiative, and it is something I wholeheartedly support because I believe that the more we teach students of architecture to navigate differences in identity, race, and culture in their educational settings, the more agile and adept they will be in advocating for communities whom they hope to serve as architects.
Staging the diorama materials for Accoutrorama: Rehearsing Racial Violence in America, Chicago Architecture Biennial, November 2023 to February 2024. Photo by PROPS.SUPPLY.
Detail from Accoutrorama: Rehearsing Racial Violence in America, Chicago Architecture Biennial, November 2023 to February 2024. Photo by Alex Breskanu.
In your own work, you explore "the intersections of history, theory, and design." Can you tell us more about that approach?
Since January 6, 2021, I have been engaged in a body of design research related to the Capitol Insurrection with collaborators Lucy Siyao Liu and Matthew Bohne of PROPS. SUPPLY. After being glued to my laptop as I watched the events of that horrifying day unfold, I was struck by how inherently spatial the phenomena were and how the events of that day unleashed certain silenced and suppressed historical narratives about the foundations of American democracy that are tacitly embedded in the built environment of the Capitol Complex. For me, this is a salient example of the intersections of history, theory, and design.
This design research started with an article for the Journal of Architectural Education entitled, “A Day in the Life of the U.S. Capitol Building: January 6, 2021, in Seven Scenes.” Instead of publishing images that extended the insurrectionist’s fifteen minutes of fame, we created images that questioned and critiqued various behaviors on that day. For example, it would be difficult to write about that day without reference to the chilling imagery of a hastily constructed gallows eerily framing the dome of the Capitol building in the distance. The mural on the dome’s interior painted by Constantino Brumidi in 1865 depicts the Apotheosis of Washington, a scene in which George Washington is seen ascending into heaven and becoming a god, surrounded by personifications of war, science, commerce, mechanics, and agriculture. I was struck by how the various accoutrements of these personifications resonated with the accoutrements of the insurrectionists—Union Jack flags, bull horns, nooses, sledgehammers, bear spray, riot shields, etc.
This article inspired a subsequent phase of design research for the Chicago Biennial. Accoutrorama: Rehearsing Racial Violence in America is an installation in the 2023-24 Chicago Biennial, and is a portmanteau of accoutrement and diorama. The work examines the racial violence at the heart of the Capitol Insurrection by looking at the role that architecture and, more broadly, the politics of space played in the events that unfolded that day. The objects in this archive occupy a moment of equipoise—are they mere detritus or are they historic artefacts that will evidence the racial and political significance of the events? While the dioramas evoke the tidiness and safety of a world of our own making, the surreptitious details staging this politics of space, arouse the horror of perennially experiencing racial violence anew in America.
What have been the biggest challenges working in academia? How did you both manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?
For me, the biggest challenges working in academia today are related to the rapid pace of change globally in the built environment and the correspondingly slow pace of change in universities. If we want to educate architects who are agile and adaptive, who can respond to the exigencies of the climate emergency and the global mass migration it will engender, and who can address these unprecedented conditions in the built environment with intelligence, empathy, and an ethos of care, we need the pace of change inside the academy to match the pace of demand beyond the walls of the university.
When I get bogged down by perceived disappointments and setbacks, I simply remember how much is at stake for the built environment in the coming decades and the critical leadership role that architects can play if they are properly educated.
“Never be afraid to leverage your life experience in service to your development as a designer.”
What have you learned in the last six months?
What I have learned in my new context over the past six months is how wonderful it is to be at a school where colleagues and students continue to pioneer what it means to engage in design research, where a spirit of activism and advocacy permeates our shared endeavors, and where the ethos of radical pedagogy propels us into the future. Unlike any other school that I have been a part of, academics at The Bartlett do not silo history and theory and design as separate activities. When I observe design research being practiced by our students, there is a formidable depth of inquiry coupled with a diversity of design outputs, creative practices, and cultural and disciplinary positionings.
Over the past two years, together with our students at The Bartlett, we have worked together to redesign the student representative structure so that we can amplify student voices and increase student leadership over the issues they care most about. Students from our Architecture and Interdisciplinary Studies undergraduate program started an initiative called FoundersKeepers, a systematized circular material hub for the school. In collaboration with the student organization, The Bartlett School of Architecture Society, and The Bartlett Climate Action Network, they have created a space where students can claim unwanted or waste materials to use in their own work. Without the advocacy and activism of our students – Hannah Simon, Harang Seo, Marius Sidaravicius, and Kingsley Luo — the school would not have benefitted from this project.
Amy Kulper and PROPS.SUPPLY, Accoutrorama: Rehearsing Racial Violence in America, Chicago Architecture Biennial, November 2023 to February 2024. Photo by Alex Breskanu.
What is the impact you’d like to have on the world?
When I am at the end of my career, looking back, I would like to be able to say that I made some small contribution to making architectural pedagogy and practice more inclusive. As an educator, I hope to cultivate an understanding of epistemic justice in architectural discourse and practice, fostering equitable relationships across knowledge production, access, and dissemination. Finally, as a feminist educator, I hope that I have modeled empathy and an ethics of care in my teaching and institutional leadership.
Finally, what advice do you have for students who are embarking on an architectural education, or that are deep into one? Would your advice be any different for women?
For the majority of my teaching years in architectural education, I supervised students in their architectural design thesis. Typically, this work develops across a full academic year, and it is an absolute pleasure and privilege because, as an educator, you have a front-row seat to all of the experiences that have shaped your students as designers.
My advice to architecture students is simple: never be afraid to leverage your life experience in service to your development as a designer. Too often in my experience, students try to “fit in” to the discipline by suppressing the very things—identity, race, culture—that have shaped them into the sensitive and attuned designers they are. For women, my advice would be exactly the same: to understand how to leverage the uniqueness of your perspective from within your designs.