Promotion: Shanghai‘s Tongji University is celebrating the 70th anniversary of its College of Architecture and Urban Planning with the Global Dean’s Forum, a day-long event bringing together 11 major architecture schools from around the world.
Held on 15 December 2022, the event’s theme is focused on “Design Education in a Transformational World”. The event is being streamed online and will feature 11 deans and university heads of department as speakers.
This includes Sarah Whiting of Harvard Graduate School of Design, Deborah Berke of Yale University, Andrés Jaque of Columbia University, Renee Chow of Berkeley University, Andrea Campioli of the Polytechnic University of Milan, Benno Albrecht of the Iuav University of Venice, and Helen Woolley of the University of Sheffield among others.
Representing schools from Asia, Europe and North and South America between them, the speakers will share their perspectives on the future of higher education in architecture.
“In the context of the post-epidemic era, the Global Dean’s Forum encourages us to think about what we can bring to the city as architects, planners and landscape designers,” said CAUP.
The event is the second Global Dean’s Forum convened by the College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP), and is demonstrative of the school’s dedication to openness and international engagement.
This approach has been reinforced under the college’s new dean Li Xiang Ning and new architecture department chair, architect and Neri&Hu co-founder Rossana Hu, who took up the post in December 2021 and has aimed to bring in international educators for exchange, understanding and community.
Under her leadership, the school has introduced a new course on Architectural Analysis and Theoretical Reflections by visiting professor Stan Fung, which will inject new energy into the design theory programme.
Hu has also begun a lecture series that she mainly teaches herself and which is run in conjunction with the seminar course The Interdependence of Theory, Practice and Criticism in Architecture.
Further appointments of foreign scholars and contemporary design critics are set to come at the beginning of next year.
Based in a Bauhaus-influenced building on the Tongji campus, CAUP was founded in 1952 on a foundation of historic ties with Germany and an orientation towards European modernism, with founding professors coming from leading design schools internationally.
It went on to become the first architecture school in China to offer a masters programme in 1965, a doctoral programme in 1981 and a postdoctoral programme in 1988, as well as running the first urban planning, landscape and historic building protection engineering programmes.
While having an international outlook, the school is also deeply rooted in its Shanghai home and has influenced the changing landscape of both the city and China as a whole.
Alumni and professors of the university have been involved in the Shanghai 2010 World Expo, and a number of landmark cultural buildings including the Long Museum by Atelier Deshaus, the Shanghai Xuhui Westbund Riverside Tourist Center by Yuan Feng and the New Shanghai Theatre by Neri&Hu, and the renewal of the public riverside space along Shanghai’s Huangpu River.
Alumni also have participated in the creation of infrastructure for the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics, the reconstruction after the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, and a revitalisation of rural areas by alumni Wang Shu, China’s first Pritzker Prize winner.
“In the past seven decades, as a college rooted in Shanghai, Shanghai’s urbanisation process and urban culture have nourished the development of CAUP, whose practice and research have in turn revitalised the city,” said the dean of CAUP, Li Xiang Ning.
In addition to the Global Dean’s Forum and the new lecture series and courses, the school’s 70th anniversary celebrations will include symposiums, exhibitions and publications.
Among the CAUP’s offerings for local and foreign students is a double-degree programme in conjunction with 17 major architecture schools around the world, including the Polytechnic University of Milan, Georgia Institute of Technology, TU Wien and the Technical University of Berlin.
The school is now also starting to recruit post-doctoral researchers from abroad.
To watch the Global Dean’s Forum, join the Zoom meeting link.
For more information, visit the CAUP website.
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