Individual Actions in Collective Processes and Forms: Collaboration for Change Across Education, Practice and Public Debate?

The diversity of UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) unfolds a series of intertwined environmental, social, and economic imbalances calling upon us to succeed in activating our individual competences and perspectives in partnerships for change. This argumentative essay serves as a mutual selfreflection towards this end, aimed at supporting the identification of resourceful individual action in partnerships across each of our respective fields of action; in architectural education, practice, and public debate. Motivated by a re-reading of Maki’s investigations in collective form (Nurturing dreams— collected essays on architecture and the city, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008 [1964]), the paper identifies a correspondence between the multidimensional challenges reflected in the SDG’s and Maki’s call for collective forms of architecture. Consequently, the paper scrutinizes collective processes for collective
forms by proposing a translation from ‘form’ to ‘process’ in Maki’s original definition of collective form. Doing so, we can observe that investigation into the collective process is important because it forces us to reexamine the entire theory and vocabulary of architecture, the one of single authorship {(Maki 2008 [1964], p. 57) translated by the authors}. Hence, through translation we uncover a critical linkage between the current quest for accommodation of plural competences within the architectural process and the changes that architecture must necessarily undergo as a physical form to support viable change of the built environment. In conclusion, the paper discusses the implications hereof for our actions in each of our individual contexts.