The Architect and The Social

Peter Prangnell was an influential architect and educator who taught at the Architectural Association in London, Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Toronto, among other institutions. Following a groundbreaking reform of the first-year studio at Columbia University, developed in collaboration with Ray Lifchez, Prangnell was invited in 1967 to reform the five-year professional Bachelor of Architecture degree at the University of Toronto.

Emerging from the political and cultural ferment of the late 1960s and inspired by radical thinkers such as Ivan Illich and Aldo van Eyck, what came to be known as the New Program represented a decisive break from conventional professional training. Rather than privileging stylistic mastery or technical proficiency, the curriculum was organized around five year-long “core problems” that framed architecture as a cultural, ethical, and social practice. Architecture was taught not as an autonomous discipline, but as a form of situated knowledge shaped by everyday life, institutions, and power relations.

Although the New Program attracted strong student engagement and critical attention, it eventually proved unsustainable within a contradictory administrative and educational framework—one that sought to deprofessionalize undergraduate education at the same time that the discipline withdrew from architecture’s social and political commitments. Edited by Roberto Damiani, this volume revisits the New Program fifty years later through writings by and interviews with Prangnell, alongside contributions from colleagues, former students, and emerging scholars. Together, these voices reframe a pedagogical experiment that challenged disciplinary boundaries and insisted on architecture’s social agency—an influential yet largely marginalized legacy whose unresolved questions continue to confront architectural education today.

Roberto Damiani is a designer, curator, and scholar whose work investigates the intellectual discourses and spatial manifestations of the public and the common in architecture and urbanism through an approach that brings together history, theory, and design perspectives. 

Damiani’s interest in the public is the most evident in the recent book he edited The Architect and the Public: On George Baird's Contribution to Architecture (Quodlibet, 2020) which gathers multiple voices on the Canadian architect and Daniels Professor Emeritus George Baird’s theoretical work and teaching. The volume was awarded a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. 

Damiani holds a Ph.D. in History and Theory of Urbanism from the University of Pescara with a dissertation on Aldo Rossi's, Colin Rowe's, and Oswald M. Ungers's contribution to the teaching and practice of modern urban design. Some excerpts of his doctoral research have been exhibited at the 14^th Venice Architecture Biennale and will be published in the forthcoming volumes Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, 2022) and Histories of Architecture Education in the United States (Routledge, 2022). Other shorter writings on the teaching and practice of urbanism have appeared in the journals JAE, OASE, Scapegoat, and San Rocco.  

Damiani’s design work on contemporary public space has been recognized in the international competition Toronto: Middle City Passages, 2015 and the exhibitions Call to Order (2015) at the University of Miami and Unfolding Pavilion (2018) in Venice and published in the Bauhaus’s journal Horizonte. In Toronto, he is the organizer and curator of Italy under Construction, a series of public lectures and exhibitions on contemporary architecture in Italy sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto (iuctoronto.it).

Damiani held teaching and research positions at Cornell University, the University of Waterloo, and the Daniels Faculty, where he is now teaching in the undergraduate and graduate programs.