It’s a Brand New Morning

Greenwich Welcome

Welcome everyone, some of you are new, some think you know the school and I’m new too. I have to say you are entering a new school, one that builds on the achievements of the previous years and augments them with higher ambition, more visibility and higher purpose.

In my opinion the ethos of our school is about being interconnected, interdependent, interdisciplinary.  The world is changing – the boundaries between countries, economies, and ecologies are more nebulous than ever.  Therefore, no longer can it be enough to specialize in just one discipline – although one’s personal rigour and ambition in that discipline should be a pre-requisite.  The demands of a swiftly changing ecological, economic and political climate require an understanding of the world that is acutely aware of the interdependence between buildings and their environment – in all senses of the word.  Responding appropriately to this interdependence is the key to the success or failure of the built environments of the future.

We need tools to help us create a built environment that is responsive rather than obstructive to its users and to the world around it. It should be our job as teachers to encourage this and our obligation as life-long learning students to develop these tools, so that we can go out into the world and help mould it with sympathy and ethical awareness – without being afraid of vision or speculation.  Those of you who are students might be practising for 50 years or more: Deep Future as the Scientists call it.  We must equip you to cope with a future where all eventualities are possible, including the unforeseen.

We must therefore enable students to abandon thinking along one tack. At Greenwich I will encourage both students and staff to embrace the interconnectedness of design, construction and building management, of landscape architecture and graphic design, and to constantly look at new ways of exploring these areas in particular in the face of the impact of Advanced Technology.

The school should be in the forefront of exploration.  In my view a selection of the issues that need to be addressed in the light of the technology of the future will include:  Ethical biotechnology, computer aided manufacture, digital fabrication processes and techniques, mixed and augmented realities, visualisation techniques, (including film, animation and 3D scanning) real-time interaction technologies, bottom-up technologies – all these and others must be brought to bear to create an ethical and sustainable built environment.  High tech but also low tech: the school must experiment with the expedient by all means available.

I have said a great deal about the future, but in its thinking the school must also remember the multi-cultural and socio-political histories of our built environments and the importance of buildings as a reflection of these.

I would foster networking, a sense of shared purpose: the belief that staff, students and their work are central to the development of the university as a whole and the professions it supplies.  Public engagement and research will be encouraged and celebrated.

Architecture and Construction needs to be seen as central to society. This school should be in the forefront of the debate that shapes our society, and I would like to contribute to putting it there in concert with your ambition, preoccupations and hard work. This is vitally important for all our futures.

Professor Neil Spiller

September 2010