The founding graduate class will start in January 2014. The school will limit admissions to 36 students, globally as this will be a self-directed professional graduate program of study.
The following graph shows the program’s structure :
We are happy to announce we are now accepting applicants for the school’s founding class.
Integrated School of Building -InSB- is the first tuition-free Higher Education and accessible Professional Education model in Chicago.
Located in the City’s Loop, an InSB experience will be enriching, of experimentation, and will prepare students to not just perform but to thrive in their careers in AEC -Architecture, Engineering, and Construction.
The founding class will start early in 2014. The school will admit up to 18 students for our Undergraduate program. The following graph shows the program’s structure.
In 2013, we launch our first Public Interest Design Studio (PIDS) led by Architect, Activist, and InSB Advisory Board member Katherine Darnstadt.
The studio offers the next generation of socially-minded designers the chance to use their talent and creativity with, by and for social impact.
A call is out for a Chicago Community Partner; we seek a Not-For-Profit organization in the city that will benefit from working side by side with the studio, its leaders, and InSB, to bring their project from concept to reality.
If the aid industry was a country, it would today represent the fifth world economy. Immediate relief, developing work and post-disaster reconstruction has an annual overturn of 120 billion dollars, with an expected growth towards 150 billion in the coming years. This charitable industry has become very big business.
Former World Bank and world economist William Easterly shows in his book ‘The White Man’s Burden’, that the countries which received the most aid in the last 50 years, show negative economic growth today. Dambisa Moyo writes in ‘Dead Aid’ that the Sub-Saharan African countries have received 300 billion dollars since the 1970’s, but are still among the poorest in the world. This as opposed to countries that received relatively few and mainly ‘did it themselves’. Some of them are now world economies or on the rise, such as China, Japan, India, Turkey and Brazil.
It is estimated that the overall efficiency of this industry lies around 10 to 15 percent. So what happens with the majority of the money, where does it go? A vast amount goes directly to governments, often regimes with reputations of corruption and conflict. A lot of money is wasted on mismanagement caused by insufficient knowledge of what is really needed. But mostly we simply don’t know (or do not want to tell) where exactly it all went. Since 1946 the World Bank, the world’s largest donor, has roughly spent 500.000.000.000 dollars on developing aid. It was publicly reported that in the period 2000-2005 they had only evaluated 2 percent of all their executed projects. Transparency and accountability seem to be absent at most mayor organizations. Try that at your own job!
As money attracts people, this lucrative business has grown explosively in the last 30 years. After the tsunami reconstruction effort in Sri Lanka, where around 1.500 national and international organizations were present, a thick evaluation report concluded: ‘The same amount of work could have been done with a third of the expats, half of the organizations and half of the money’. The international community actually agreed with this and promised change. Five years later we see between 12.000 and 15.000 organizations running around in Haiti.
Lately the market is being flooded with a boom of so-called Mongo’s, which stands for My Own NGO. People that are fed up with the inefficiency and wastage, people that feel they can do better, spontaneously driven to save humanity out of the goodness of their hearts. And yes, they work very local and very direct, but the local knowledge is insufficient and their feedback is low. After the 2004 tsunami 60.000 Mongo’s registered worldwide, and in 2008 in the US alone over 150.000 Mongo’s were registered. Such additional armies of do-gooders can easily block the logistic system, as we now see in Haiti. Two years after the earthquake only 2 percent of houses has been rebuilt, mainly due to a traffic jam of aid.
If we look at the general picture, it seems safe to assume that something is going terribly wrong, that things are way out of proportion. I must be honest, I am just a simple architect, so I really would not know how to tackle problems of this magnitude. But it would already be a great step if we could at least acknowledge that this industry is out of control and that this is not the way to continue. The time has come to start educating a next generation of world improvers. Preferably not dictated from the top, but starting at the bottom; for and with the people it is all meant for! A category that was not even mentioned yet in this piece…
- Martijn Schildkamp / Advisory Board Member + Faculty
InSB has coined a phrase :
Integration, at many levels, is what will take the current obsolete Higher Education model into the next century’s learning. It will cultivate the minds, and drive the innovations, of the new, more demanding and more proactive, faster-paced students across every field.
The current model remains mostly distanced from professions -with exceptions like medicine-, and this “space” of disconnect is always a missed opportunity for propelling that particular industry forward.
Unfortunately, what seems to be a fact is that the current model is in place for academics to cultivate more academics. Not many are looking beyond the walls of the institution.
We, at InSB, are industry specific. We live in AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) but if we, and others, begin to truly integrate education with fulfilling practical experiences, and students with professionals and professional firms, and all of the above within a context (with the cities and communities) we may just begin to see a drastic transformation, and we will see innovation in overdrive.
We each want to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, and it is human nature to feel the need to make a difference. It is the only thing that is truly fulfilling.
We will see significant improvements across every industry when new models of Higher Ed are in place, and not to be self-servant, but instead to provide its students with these opportunities.
We need to create a space, especially at the graduate level, where students are truly integrated with their passions and aspirations.
Will you join us?… For a new (better) Higher Ed!
