Architectural education is on the edge of a fundamental transformation — and the field has not yet agreed on what comes next.
For decades, the relationship between academia and practice followed a familiar logic: universities produced knowledge and graduates, and industry absorbed them. Research informed practice, occasionally. Practice informed curricula, slowly. The boundary between the two was permeable, but it was real. That boundary is now dissolving — and AI is accelerating the process in ways that cannot be managed by incremental reform.
Across the CAAD community, a new kind of organization is emerging in response. Some research groups have spun out into independent ventures, carrying academic rigor into the marketplace. Others operate simultaneously inside universities and industry, refusing to choose between intellectual depth and real-world impact. Still others have built companies that function more like research labs — treating universities as genuine partners in the pursuit of architectural innovation rather than sources of cheap talent.
These hybrid models are not anomalies. They are early signals of a structural shift in how architectural knowledge is produced, validated, and applied. They raise questions that no single institution can answer alone: Who trains the next generation of computational designers when the most capable practitioners are building startups? What is a research degree worth in a field where AI can prototype faster than a dissertation cycle? And how do we preserve the critical, speculative dimensions of architectural thinking when the pressure to deploy is relentless?
This session brings together teams — from Taiwan and across the globe — who are navigating these questions from the inside. Their experiences will not resolve the revolution underway in architectural education. But they may help us see it more clearly — and begin to shape it with intention, rather than simply inherit its consequences.
AI is dissolving the boundary between academic research and architectural practice — and in its place, new organizational models are emerging. This session focuses on three:
Three Taiwan-based teams are invited to share their experiences.
You are invited to join the sharing and dialogue in two ways: