Presenting the School’s mid year update to the Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies, I made a simple claim: architecture and the built environment can no longer be taught at the pace of the last decade. Housing sits in crisis, climate is rewriting where and how we build, and AI is collapsing the distance between design and decision. A school that treats any of this as a future problem is already behind.
The update was organised around three questions: what we prioritise, what we have achieved, and where we are going. The priorities were deliberately unglamorous: the wellbeing and success of staff and students, curricula that can change as fast as practice does, research with measurable impact, and a willingness to step up from business as usual. None of them can be delegated to a strategy document.
So we stopped describing the future and started staffing it. Our partners, among them Auckland Council, Auckland Airport, Auckland Transport, Kāinga Ora, Signature Homes, Community Housing Aotearoa, NZIA, NZRAB, Engineering New Zealand, BRANZ, Beca and CIB, bring their hardest problems into our research and our studios, which is exactly where a public university’s research belongs. Industry partnership and community engagement are not an add on to our work; they are how we choose what to work on.
Rankings tell you what a team did, not what it is about to do. Our programmes are highly ranked and our international standing is rising, but the direction matters more than the position. We are building the School into a hub for built environment intelligence, with digital transformation and AI built into how we think rather than sprinkled on top.
Underneath it sits the part that rarely makes the highlight reel: the wellbeing of the people doing the work. A school can only move at the pace of the world if its staff have the time, trust and support to move with it. That, more than any single initiative, is what I asked my colleagues to hold me to.
Context
The note drew on his mid year update on the School of Future Environments to the Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies in 2026, his first year as Head of School. The slides set out the School’s priorities and key initiatives, its successes and highlights, including industry partnership and community engagement with Auckland Council, Auckland Airport, Auckland Transport and Kāinga Ora, its research and international reputation, and its future direction in digital transformation and AI.