Alan Pert
Dr Alan Pert brings a wealth of experience as an architect, a researcher and a teacher to his new role as Director at the Melbourne School of Design.
It's this combination of skills which has led to his belief that architecture as a profession, and consequently the way in which it should be taught, is changing rapidly and becoming far more interdisciplinary.
"One of the great things about architectural education is that it opens your mind to other things. It's really important that education links to research and becomes relevant to practice," he says.
In addition to being an educator, Dr Pert also runs his own award-winning practice — the Northern Office of Research and Design (NORD) — which has offices in Glasgow and London. He is working at the University while still managing his practice and working on a range of architectural projects including the newly opened furniture gallery at London's Victoria and Albert Museum.
"Being a working architect as well as someone who's been involved in academia for a long time, I've seen massive shifts in day-to-day practice. And as architectural practice changes, so too should architectural education," he says.
"A lot of what happens during the creation of a building — what's going on in construction, the difficulty and complexity of delivering buildings, the vulnerability of architecture as a profession in relation to economics — those things were starting to become as or more interesting to me than the process of building itself," he says.
"Each building project is very much an individual case study – the process is fascinating, and there are all sorts of compromises along the way. It's very difficult to teach a student how to do that. Disseminating those processes through teaching is a key thing practitioners should be doing."
Dr Pert says architecture has been taught for a long time as a process of incremental scale.
"First you designed a chair, then a room for a chair, then a house for the room, then a street for the house, and so on, to learn to understand how an object relates to space.
"It's important to understand the fundamentals, but there's a whole host of factors changing the way we work, which means we need to rethink the way teach."
A couple of years ago, Dr Pert started looking for opportunities to grow this teaching agenda and discovered the University of Melbourne's new curriculum structure.
"Suddenly the University was saying: ‘We're not going to do things the way we used to' and I was excited by the possibilities of broadening the conversation around built environment subjects.
"There aren't many institutions in the world with architecture, landscape architecture, property, and planning design all under one roof as the Faculty has here. There's something rich and exciting about having all of these disciplines in the one place. And while it may seem a romantic notion that all these disciplines will work together seamlessly, that is ultimately the challenge: to hone the specific skills required in each discipline while looking for the natural synergies between them."
Dr Pert says the city and the University's interaction with it was also a big part of his decision to come to Melbourne.
"Melbourne keeps being tagged as one of the world's most liveable cities, which was something I was keen to explore. Because when you combine that with the knowledge Melbourne will hit six million people by 2025-2030, you say to yourself: ‘Here is a city which has massive challenges ahead of it'.
"Trying to address the challenges of this growth – transport, infrastructure, health, migration – offers the Faculty lots of opportunities for research, and I think we are well placed to collaborate on these issues.
"Ideas need to be challenged physically, and a brilliant aspect of the academic environment is the testing of new ideas by students. We have a fantastic opportunity to be relevant, and produce graduates and research which is relevant to the place we're in.
"The faculty can inform city planning. Melbourne is facing big challenges and it's going to need some clever physical strategies to make that work."
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