„Miért kéne reformálni, ha a fizika törvényei nem változnak?!” — interview on architecture education

In the summer of 2020, doctoral candidate Júlia Pokol sat down with Adam for a long conversation about architecture education, published in Építészfórum in May 2021. The occasion was Adam’s earlier guest lecture in the BME doctoral school’s design-methodology course at the invitation of Balázs Mihály, which he had closed with an offer: “if anyone wants change in the current system, feel free to contact me.”

Adam recounts his path — four years at the Budapest University of Technology, then Erasmus to Stockholm, where he stayed to take his diploma — and contrasts the two cultures: at home, talent was treated as a given trait; in Stockholm, students were judged as hard-working or not, echoing Carol Dweck’s Mindset — most masters earn their results through enormous amounts of work. He describes the Hungarian training of the time as clouded by prejudice, while in Sweden he worked with brilliant female teachers, curators and classmates; creative work is group work, and a cohort half full of self-doubt cannot inspire. He tells how Kitchen Budapest countered the university’s worst message (“you must do it alone, otherwise you cheat”) with a simple rule: a project only gets support if at least two people want to build it.

The title quotes an instructor’s reaction to curriculum-reform discussions — “Why reform, if the laws of physics don’t change?!” — which Adam takes as exactly the closed attitude that blocks renewal. He argues for flipped classrooms, for keeping a healthy half-and-half balance of online and in-person learning, for daring to make mistakes (his children draw on iPads because Undo makes them braver experimenters), and for lifelong, interest-driven learning as practised at Budapest School — an entity independent of Prezi, built by Péter Halácsy and partners. He also traces Prezi’s origins from a folded paper model through the website made with Péter Sándor Nagy for Enric Miralles’ office to a cave-projection performance in Helsinki, and closes with what he sees as the profession’s task: making architecture that is beautiful and environmentally efficient, because if beauty and culture are cut off the house for the sake of the metrics, “we will have nothing left to live for.”

Summarized in English from the Hungarian original.