The 10,000ft2 learning universe for children aged three to nine is located in WeWork’s HQ in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The school environment is designed to embed the values of a new conscious approach to education. The opening of WeGrow happens just as BIG completes Glasir College merging three individual schools in Faroe Islands, and plans for the opening of the Isenberg School of Management extension at the University of Massachusetts next Spring 2019.

“WeGrow was created to unleash the creative potential of all generations through design. With this first location in New York City, we have created a space to facilitate and accommodate WeGrow’s transformative approach to learning because as life evolves, so should the framework in which we live in. Children realize they have agency and when design is less prescriptive and more intuitive – we don’t have to tell kids how to use the space and every interpretation of how they use the space is good.” Bjarke Ingels, Founding Partner & Creative Director, BIG; Chief Architect, WeWork.

WeGrow is designed for learning to be a transformational and holistic experience. A field of super-elliptic objects with a variety of functions allow children to move freely throughout the day and to learn from the environment around them and each other. The learning landscape encourages collaboration by emphasizing transparent and communal spaces, which comprise more than half of the school: four classrooms, flexible workshops, community space, multi-purpose studio, art studio, music room and other playscapes support the energy of creation and togetherness.

“WeGrow is committed to elevating the world’s collective consciousness. We believe we are all students of life for life, and that the very purpose of life is to be in a constant state of personal growth. Through a curriculum that focuses equally on mind, body and soul, we help students identify their superpowers and discover how to use them to help others.” Rebekah Neumann, Founder & CEO, WeGrow; Founding Partner & Chief Brand Officer, WeWork.

Most of the partitions inside the school are shelves raised to the level of the child, allowing natural light to reach deep inside the building. Three different shelving levels for each age group curve occasionally to create various activity pockets and give a feeling of comfort, safety and community, while allowing teachers to have full perspective of the space at all times. Above, acoustic clouds made of felt reflect the different patterns in nature – fingerprint, coral, landscape and moon – and illuminate with Ketra bulbs that shift in color and intensity based on the time of day.

Each learning station within WeGrow includes furniture with details and materials carefully designed by BIG to optimize the educational environment: modular classrooms promote movement and collaboration, puzzle tables and chairs manufactured by Bednark Studio come in kid and parent sizes to offer equal perspectives, and the vertical garden with tiles made in Switzerland by Laufen are pockets to lavender, sweet violets, chocolate mint and others depending on shade exposure.

Nature’s qualities are often borrowed throughout WeGrow to create a calm setting for a more focused study: the mushroom shelves, magic meadow with soft pebbles and reading hives that form an immersive library shape an organic learning environment.

Teachers and parents share the lobby with the children, where a playful felt nook forms from the smooth cut out in the walls to serve as a flexible work, meet and waiting area. Children can join in the brain puzzle, an all-felt lounge that can be taken apart for playing and learning. From the lobby to the classrooms, WeGrow is lit by Gople Lamp and Alphabet of Light – flexible lighting systems designed by BIG Ideas and manufactured by Artemide to create ambience effects that form comfortable, natural lighting throughout the school day.

Playful and transparent, yet homelike and structured, WeGrow nurtures the child’s education through introspection, exploration and discovery.

FACTS

CLIENT: WeWork

COLLABORATORS: WeWork, Environetics Group Inc., Cosentini Associates, William Vitacco Associates Ltd., Digifabshop, Bednark Studio, LAUFEN, Ketra, Febrik

LOCATION: New York, USA

SIZE: 10,000ft² / 930m²

BIG – BJARKE INGELS GROUP

Partners-in-Charge: Bjarke Ingels, Daniel Sundlin, Beat Schenk
Project Leader: Otilia Pupezeanu
Project Architect: Jeremy Babel

Team: Bart Ramakers, Douglass Alligood, Erik Berg Kreider, Evan Saarinen, Fabian Lorenz, Filip Milovanovic, Florencia Kratsman, Francesca Portesine, Il Hwan Kim, Jakob Lange, Ji Young Yoon, Kristoffer Negendahl, Josiah Poland, Megan Ng, Mengzhu Jiang, Ryan Yang, Stephen Kwok, Terrence Chew, Tore Banke, Tracy Sodder

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This week’s interview is with Odile Decq, founder of Studio Odile Decq in Paris and dean of the private architecture university Confluence Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Architecture in Paris, France.

Odile has been working as an architect and urban planner for almost 40 years. The Banque Populaire de l’Ouest in Rennes, won in 1988, marked her breakthrough and earned her (and her partner Benoît Cornette) eight awards. Many remarkable project followed, to name but a few: Le Cargo, Paris; Fangshan Museum, Nanjing; MACRO, Rome; FRAC Bretagne, Rennes, and Phantom: Opéra Garnier’s restaurant, Paris.

In addition, Odile has been teaching architecture for the past 25 years, first at the Bartlett in London and then in Paris at the École Spéciale d’Architecture (ESA), were she was director from 2007 to 2012. Her teaching commitment ratified by the opening of her own school in Lyon, France: the Confluence Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Architecture.

When the school was launched in 2014 Odile wrote:

We believe that today it is fundamental to totally rethink architectural education. […] Architecture must no longer be reduced to a professional or specialized education: it is a discipline that opens to the world, to a way of seeing the world and a capacity to act in the world. Architecture today needs to have a more humanist ambition.

It’s quite obvious, that Archipreneur wanted to speak with her! So we did, we spoke about the problem in architecture education, architecture thinking, the role of architecture in the world, and her visions for her school.

Enjoy the interview!

Back in 1978, do you still remember why you opened your own studio instead of working for a boss?

First of all, during my studies I had been starting a kind of interior design office, started on my 3^rd year. Architecture schools in France were quite unstructured and more experimental; especially the one where I was which later became La Villette. I was thinking of not doing internships, but to start working in real conditions instead through people and relatives I knew.

After receiving my diploma, the possibilities to work were quite few due to the bad economy in building after the first oil crisis. So, naturally I continued to work, on my own, established as an independent architect. My chance was my diploma in Urbanism which opened for me some work studies for small cities, allowing me to survive.

You created so many amazing buildings! Could you name one project, that was important for your career and why?

The first important buildings in my career are the two buildings for the Banque Populaire de l’Ouest close to Rennes that I won at the beginning of 1988, 10 years after my diploma. These buildings received immediately many international awards before any French ones, were widely published and made my office known all over the world. This building was experimental in many ways, glass façades done for the first time with suspended double glass (with Peter Rice), a steel structure for an office building (first time in France), and an experimental long lobby entrance.

You launched the Confluence Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Architecture in Lyon in 2014. What made your decision?

I decided to start a new school of architecture the evening when I resigned from my position as director of my former school. It was like a challenge launched when drinking with friends who were telling me that I shouldn’t stop doing what I had done for that school! I.e. opening it to an international level, creating a workshop, organizing end of semester exhibitions of student work opened to the public, renovating the building etc.

More specifically, I deeply wanted to push forward changing the way architecture education was established all over the world. I knew and still know how it is as I am travelling every month to give lectures in schools that I visit and understand that the academic conditions have trapped education in rigid frames that some wanted to evolve, but not many were in the conditions to be able to do it.

What is the problem with architecture education today?

Architecture education today is mainly oriented in teaching how to design and build buildings. It may seem paradoxical to say that, but it is a very narrow minded thinking on what is architecture. Students leaving most of the schools today are only trained to go working into architectural offices. Moreover, half of the students are women, nearly 60%, and they work for less money in offices (between 25 and 30% less), they seldom register in the professional organizations (less than 30%), and never become the head of their own office (less than 10%).

That means that half of the students disappears or become employed workers in offices. What is the future that we provide for them? Is this what they expected when doing their studies when most of the time they were very good students?

When reading most of the enquiries done on the new young generation, more than half of them do not want to be employees, they want to work for themselves. These two questions must give objectives for educators today: to help students being self-confident in themselves in order to become entrepreneurs, to give students the skills to open the way of practicing architecture and to give them enough autonomy to decide who they want to become and how they want to build their own life.

You said: “Architects needs to become more entrepreneurial”. We think so too! Can you elaborate on that?

Architecture is more a discipline and a culture than only a profession. This is a unique way of thinking the world and acting in it. Facing very complex questions that implicate most of the disciplines such as law, art, anthropology, philosophy, design, geography, sociology, technics, etc. We are trained to make synthesis with all of them together in order to create a diagnosis from which we then need to do a proposal that has to be efficient at every scale from the littlest one to the biggest one. This uniqueness is for me the definition of “Architecture Thinking”.

We need to reinstate the pride of being educated in architecture and the role of the architect for the world. Due to all of that, students need to be prepared and trained to decide how to apply their uniqueness and this is not only by designing and building buildings. Training as entrepreneurs they will be able to act and help the world.

Confluence has five thematic fields that are part of the education: Neurosciences, New technologies, Social action, Visual Art, and Physics. Why these five?

These thematic fields are the principals and this is because their concern is the human being. I strongly believe that architectural studies need to be re-orientated toward more humanistic questions, to me more integrated in the prospective visions about our future way of living. This is why we need to rethink this thematic and more.

Are business and entrepreneurship courses part of the curriculum?

Being an entrepreneur or having an entrepreneurial attitude is not studying business! This is not a discipline that they learn, even if we have some seminars driven by people who built their own careers and could be seen by students as role models. This is more an attitude that they get through autonomy and responsibility. Instead of asking them to do, they are put in conditions to decide how to behave and how to manage.

Do you have any advice for archipreneurs who are interested in starting their own business?

Always believe it is possible. You need to have a bit of talent but more determination. Be involved, take strong positions, take risks and don’t be afraid of failing. We learn from failures more than successes.

“Taking risks – collaborating – making mistakes – learning form one’s mistakes – persevering – discovering new concepts and succeeding”

This is one of the slogans of the school.

How do you see the future of the architectural profession? In which areas (outside of traditional practice) can you see major opportunities for up and coming developers and architects?

The conditions of the world and the society today are the optimal conditions for the future; this saying seems very provocative. But we are in the 21st century and not in the 20^th anymore, so we can’t continue to drive the world the same way. This is a great opportunity for new directions, new ways of thinking and acting. Architecture will not escape that transformation and this is the duty of the new generation, the one graduating in the 21^st century and living in it. Their task is to invent the century, to create it by deciding which life they want to have. This is not being developers and architects only. I trust in the new young generation to surprise us!

About Odile Decq

Odile Decq is a French architect and urban planner. International renown came in 1990 with her first major commission: La Banque Populaire de l’Ouest in Rennes. Since then, she has been faithful to her fighting attitude while diversifying and radicalizing her research. Being awarded The Golden Lion of Architecture during the Venice Biennale in 1996 acknowledged her early and unusual career. Other than just a style, an attitude or a process, Odile Decq’s work materializes a complete universe that embraces urban planning, architecture, design and art. Her multidisciplinary approach was recently recognized with the Prix Femme Architecte in 2013 and the Jane Drew Prize in 2016.

Her most recent projects include: Le Cargo [Paris, 2016]; La Résidence Saint-Ange [Seyssins, 2015]; Fangshan Museum [Nanjing, 2015]; GL Events Headquarters [Lyon, 2014]; MACRO [Rome, 2010]; FRAC Bretagne [Rennes, 2012] and Phantom: Opéra Garnier’s restaurant [Paris, 2011].

Odile Decq has been teaching architecture for the past 25 years, a commitment ratified by the opening in 2014 of her own school in Lyon, France: the Confluence Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Architecture.

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There is a reason why the term “architecture” is no longer only associated with designing and building physical spaces. The architecture of applications, websites, software and networks all illustrate the manifold nature of what it means to practice architecture today.

Architecture has broadened as a field, merging various disciplines, technologies and products. This expansion requires a new educational model to teach students how to innovate and compete in an industry that is increasingly outward facing.

When we say there is a gap between academia and practice, we don’t only mean that architecture schools are failing to prepare students for entering the workforce. The bigger problem seems to be that, while schools may teach students to be innovative in terms of design, there is an overwhelming lack of similarly pioneering content for the business side of architecture.

This disconnect becomes even more alarming when we compare the industry 10 years ago with the industry today, where entrepreneurship has emerged as the most compelling economic force the world has experienced in the last decades.

It is true that architectural education needs to strike a balance between the theoretical and practical aspects of the profession. But more importantly, architectural courses need to teach students to take a proactive role in building their careers.

RIBA’s recent research found that 80 percent of UK-based employers and 75 percent of students think that architectural schools fail to provide students with the practical tools necessary to enter the workforce. In June 2014, RIBA Appointments carried out two complementary surveys.

One was sent to employers in the architectural industry and the other to architectural students and recent graduates. The surveys show that over 80 percent of employers and 74 percent of students think that architectural schools put theoretical knowledge above practical capability.

More than 50 percent of employers and students think that architectural course content doesn’t accurately reflect the field of architecture today.

Even more importantly, architecture degrees also appear to overlook the teaching of soft (transferable) skills. Over 50 percent of employers feel that students/graduates lack the soft skills needed to practice architecture. The profession’s age distribution is at its peak between the ages of 40 and 44, with only one third of the profession being younger than 40.

This proves that architecture schools are failing to connect architecture with entrepreneurship because older staff members are more likely to stick to conventional approaches in their careers. In addition, the age distribution means that existing businesses tend to operate by way of old models, which often fail to adjust to global trends.

Marketing, management, finance and business plan development are some of the concepts that students need to be familiar with in order to find their own, individual and perhaps unconventional ways of engaging with design. Preparing students for an entrepreneurial career and equipping them with the necessary skills and competencies to compete in a rapidly changing economy is a must.

Teaching the same methods and approaches to architecture will generate graduates armed with tools that are already outdated by the time they enter the workplace. Teaching enterprise-oriented professional development in architecture will bring forth a generation of out-of-the-box thinkers and job creators.

“Educationists should build the capacities of the spirit of inquiry, creativity, entrepreneurial and moral leadership among students and become their role model.”  P. J. Abdul Kalam

An encouraging example of entrepreneurial thinking in schools is the Penn State sponsored business accelerator program, Lion Launch Pad (LionLP), which aims to help student entrepreneurs realize their innovative projects and transform service concepts into viable startups.

Students Aaron Wertman and Josh Kesler were selected to design the program so that they could develop Apparatus X, an adaptable tool trailer that doubles up as a micro-living unit. The team behind Apparatus X plans to take the trailer to New Orleans, where it will help with the recovery efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Another student, Mike Zaengle, designed a project that simulates self-contained ecosystems, to allow people to grow food almost anywhere. The project, called GreenTowers, includes various products that help cultivate urban farming, including tables with aquaponic gardens.

Kevin Pu, a 22-year-old student at Ryerson, is making a splash in the Canadian architecture industry with his research into augmented reality. His Augmented Reality in Development Design (ARIDD) is a piece of software that creates live interactive building models in real time and can be used on an iPad.

Using computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data, users can create and simulate designs in real-world environments. Although there are several examples of this technology being developed by startups all over the world, the interesting angle in this story is that Pu has entered the industry while still a student.

It is important that architects no longer frame their professional identity through the buildings that they design. Venturing from these conventional notions of architecture requires a level of initiative and preparedness to confront uncertainty and obstacles.

The profession in general needs to learn to become more entrepreneurial in its approach and so expand its opportunities beyond the confines of the industry. Lateral thinking and problem solving are soft skills that are considered the innate marks of architects, but these need to be nurtured in order to effectively combine design with entrepreneurship.

It is high time for architecture schools to incorporate lessons into their programs that focus on recognizing opportunities, testing feasibility, analyzing the competition and developing effective business plans.

Designing apps and software, learning about areas peripheral to the discipline of architecture, and understanding how to develop unique designs by him or herself are some of the many ways a student can take advantage of unexplored opportunities within the A/E/C industry. If these skills were to be taught at school, they would empower students to become archipreneurs.

How do you think architecture degrees and programs can be improved to facilitate a more entrepreneurial mindset in students?

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