Orrery/Constellation

<p>The Global Free Unit is a constellation for learning and research. It is born out of a desire to enable architecture students to address some of the most pressing global challenges we face: scarcity of resources, inequality, climate change, migration and social division, through research, live projects and collaborations.</p> <p>We, the Global Free Unit, are responding to an industry culture that is too often self referential, in thrall to mediated values reinforced by media and notions of fame.</p> <p>Instead, we are establishing a new path for education that offers a unique opportunity to redefine future practice by connecting education to actions and to the personal history, experience and ethical position of participants. This is delivered within a global constellation of academic partners and ‘Classrooms’ that are located in hot-spots of rapid change or necessity.</p> <p>At the heart of the GFU is the core intent to radically reframe notions of value. Current educational structures prioritises competition, individualism and self-interest, which is then mirrored in practice. We are brokering a realignment of values by placing emphasis on a student’s own principles and life experience.</p> <p>Centred on a critical understanding of the terms ‘global’ and ‘freedom’, the GFU puts forward a new agenda for architectural education in the 21st century. As active citizens and emerging practitioners, students do not follow a classic academic course, but are embedded in live project Classrooms, which are based in a variety of contexts ranging from refugee camps to abandoned inner-city sites, prisons, demilitarised zones, migration centres and depopulating rural communities.</p>