Last week we celebrated the 26th lustrum of Stylos with a symposium under the fitting title “zorgen voor morgen”. An excellent panel - made up of Liesbeth van der Pol, Paul Chan, Odette Ex, Lyongo Juliana, Martijn Verhagen and Floris Alkemade - was invited to talk with students about three problems of the future. Pantheon// attended the evening together with around 20 other students.
The Berlage room was set up in a cozy circle of chairs around the panel, and after some introductions Odette Ex kicked off the evening with the problem of Climate. She addressed the topic through a series of ‘eye-openers’, aiming to inspire students to take climate issues seriously as part of a greater search for a new humanity. She urged students to focus on their own life and motivations, and work on themselves while working on solving the issue of Climate. After an inspiring presentation, the question on everybody's mind came from a student in the audience: How do we do this? How can we find the freedom to work on our own process and priorities, in the existing university system?
The panel suggested that courage is needed to address your own goals in university assignments. Starting small, and looking for the edges of possibility. Slowly the conversation began to take a turn. Courage, taking risks in assignments, that all sounds good, but in practice the expectations students face - on a personal and academic level - already cause enough stress. I have yet to meet a student who has a healthy and balanced study schedule, so it’s hard to imagine a world in which risk-taking would be beneficial. Thankfully I was not the only one having this crisis, as the audience began asking increasingly desperate questions. How do we experiment in a university system, where deadlines are about meeting expectations? How do you make time to challenge yourself when your workload is sometimes far over 40 hours?
Perhaps the solution is taking a couple minutes out of your day to be creative, and sketch with watercolor like Liesbeth van der Pol. Or, like Floris Alkemade suggested, it’s in having fun and taking small opportunities where you find them. Whatever answer given to inspire the students, the solution seems to come down to courage; Heldenmoed. Taking control over the future means you have to take control in your own life, where it is not always given. If you feel something is missing in your studies, or you disagree with a professor on how a project can be approached, courage is needed to challenge the regular course of action. Ask yourself: what would I like to be doing differently?
Aside from the responsibilities and problems placed upon our generation, the conversation was also about our opportunities to create a better and more beautiful world. Lyongo Juliana argued for social justice and projects that promote meeting and diverse connections between people. Martijn Verhagen presented better ways to house the elderly, as part of his speech about loneliness. The possibilities to create better, more inclusive architecture seem boundless.
After the symposium concluded, we looked back on the whole conversation. Even though the evening set out to address problems of the future, it seems that the real issue is more about creating environments in which we can start to do things in a different way. It is clear to everyone that we need to deal with Climate, Social Justice and Loneliness, and that solutions can be found and experimented with. But taking the effort to address these issues every time, demanding to approach your assignments in a different way, that is a question of taking agency, taking courage. Try something different in your next project! //
