Beginning July 1, the USC School of Architecture will have a new dean: Milton Curry, now associate dean for academic affairs and strategic initiatives at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. (He replaces Qingyun Ma, who appeared last week in this space alongside outgoing UCLA architecture chair Hitoshi Abe.) Curry, 52, is the first African American to hold the USC post. This interview, conducted by phone, has been edited and condensed
....
Your work has been very much grounded in that point of view, and you’ve launched two journals over the course of your career (most recently one called CriticalProductive). What’s your sense of the USC architecture school’s willingness to embrace theory more actively than it has?
When you think about diversity and globalization and urbanization, you can’t do it without a theoretical underpinning. You just can’t. And I think that what we’re seeing in the discipline at large is the limit conditions of thinking a-theoretically about urbanism, about inequality, about what we should do about environmental challenges and sustainability. We’ve got to address it through a theoretical lens. Urbanization — if we’re not going to talk about neoliberalism and the extraction of resources from underrepresented communities, whether it be from the citizens of Detroit or other places, we’re not going to solve those issues. That’s the kind of complexity that I think we’ve got to build into an architectural education to begin to produce what I call “citizen architects” — architects who are not separate from these conversations but are fully engaged in them.
That strikes me as a major shift in USC’s focus. I find it a refreshing one, but it’s a major shift — talking about theory, about citizen architects, a political and even philosophical question about what an architect might owe the public sphere.
I want to emphasize something, though. I started, with collaboration from faculty, some of [Michigan’s] post-professional degrees in digital technologies and material systems. What I’m saying [about theory] is not incompatible with innovations in the sphere of digital fabrication technology and of professional practice. Theory and practice are not incompatible.
Fair enough. While L.A. is changing quite rapidly — and maybe having a kind of existential crisis about what kind of place it wants to be — the architecture schools in town have been detached from that conversation in a range of ways. Do you see that as something you can address, reconnecting the school with a conversation about the city itself?
Absolutely. Coming from the metropolitan Detroit region and being at the flagship public university in the state and one of the best public universities in the country, I’ve lived a seven-year period of tremendous transformation in the history of Detroit and its civic identity.
....