What role should an architecture school play in cultivating these alternatives, and preparing students to think them through?

Mertins: I see schools as an infrastructure that enables both faculty and students to pursue their own agendas - where students can, in fact, develop their own agendas and establish a relationship or orientation to the world of architecture. There are all kinds of political issues out there that resist singular and final solution - but individuals can and should take their own positions. For example, should our graduates work for corporate interests - or for community, environmental, and artistic interests?

Are these necessarily at odds? Those are choices that people will have to make on their own. All along, of course, we're building skills.

We have a very short period of time in which to develop aptitudes on a thousand fronts, spanning the technical and professional to the social and formal. I think our mission is to graduate students who have a rich bundle of abilities, with a critical insight and orientation toward the world, along with a desire to engage that world in a creative ... more.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.