What is cosmopolitanism, being a cosmopolitan individual? How it affects contemporary architectural discourse and pedagogy? Should discourse and pedagogy shift their paradigm or rely on the existing atavistic methods and traditional trajectories to educate cosmopolitan architects? Cosmopolitanism comes from the word cosmos in Greek, which means ‘universe, world, or city, in general sum of everything’. Being cosmopolitan, therefore, pertains to being ‘a worldly citizen’[1], and attaining a global identity as an individual. Thompson and Tambyah outline cosmopolitanism and being cosmopolitan as ‘a cultural orientation’ considerably integrated and suited to ‘the socio-cultural and economic complexities emanating from the accelerating pace of globalization’[2]. Indeed, globalization imbues us a ‘multiple affiliations’ that we ‘possibly value more than our local attachments’[3]. As an inevitable consequence, it means that the global problems affect us, the cosmopolitan society, more than they used to. Stone and Sanderson demystify that ‘rapidly advancing digital practices, evolving expectations, the climate emergency, the need for densification, the necessity for diversification and COVID-19’ are among those newly acquired problems in the 21st century that should be apace responded with delicate perlustrations[4]. Within that sense, they underscore the crucial role/position of the ‘cosmopolitan architecture’ in facing uncertainties and contingencies that these problems bring[5]. Rather than remaining in insensitive placidity, it must come up with either resistive or adaptive solutions since now it has variegated and complex affiliations. Although it seems thorny under cosmopolitanism, architecture should be one of the masterstrokes that would become a panacea. In becoming so, architectural pedagogy and profession should be invigorated and reformulated with contemporary discourse to address cosmopolitan condition, transforming into a more active, flexible, liberal, and integrated entity[6]. Salama calls for a ‘paradigm shift’ in architectural education, from ‘static domain knowledge traditional approach’ with obsolete, outmoded, and parochial doctrines to a more ‘updated, integrated and integrative response’ that effectively engages with the social, economic, and environmental problems[7]. Student-centered learning with interactive dialogic approach, community-based design learning, service learning, experiential learning, critical inquiry-based learning, outcome-based learning, process-oriented design pedagogy, participatory learning, design-build, and live projects[8] are the contemporary pedagogical approaches in design education that probes the conventional and self-aggrandizing methods to foster heuristic understanding. To mediate chasms between the triad of students, academy, and profession, and to increase awareness of the problems, the academy should inculcate these techniques in every strand of education. Besides the pedagogical concerns, architectural education is contingent on the built space and spatial qualities. Indeed, the ingenuity of architecture can prompt an upswing in the quality of education. In the 21st century case, cosmopolitan architecture ineluctably needs to grasp a flexible, adaptive, resilient, and imaginative[9] approach to fulfill the never-ending requirements of ‘an increasingly complex world’[10]. Therefore, architectural space should promote these traits within and between the pedagogical components. The space, to become a fecund ground for education, should correlate with cosmopolitanism’s immanent qualities; cognition, consciousness, action, awareness, dynamism, and flexibility. It should embark upon them, mediate them with architectural discourse and theory, and engender a way of space-making that would earnestly seek to usher the education of a cosmopolitan architect. Unfortunately, the conventional Euclidean spaces are remarkably devoid of the ability to acknowledge these since they instantiate acutely but obliviously the obverse of cosmopolitan conditions; inertness, passiveness, and stagnation. In parallel to pedagogical alterations and shifts, architecture should transform its Cartesian orthodoxy, and instigate new way of cosmopolitan spatiality, prompting users to be vigilant and receptive to the contemporary world by triggering them to be active in the state of limbo. Spuybroek suggests that in Cartesian spaces ‘perception and action are completely separated’[11]. This means that the mind and the body act discretely[12], failing to recognize the situation simultaneously and congruently. To better clarify, the dynamism of the mind and the inertness of the body contradict each other. Consequentially, it causes the deferral of activation and awareness in a certain environment. The brain is, as neuroscientist Andy Clark delineates, ‘a malleable organism’ whose potential is emerged and is fully cultivated ‘through the interaction with the environment’, ‘through physical action and exploration’[13]. One could infer that the cognition and efficacy of humans depend on their interaction and integration with the built environment. A cosmopolitan architect, who has a number of potent and intermingled connections with urban agencies, must cope with the global developments to acquire a consolidated position. Indeed, the urban built environment must avoid tenuous linkages and provide a pedagogical ground for a cosmopolitan architect. The Oblique Function Theory[14] (Image-1) by the eminent figures architect Claude Parent and architect/philosopher Paul Virilio holds effective conceptions and thorough contemplations on how the cosmopolitan architecture of the rapidly changing and ‘increasingly complex world’ could be established. Exhaustively formulated between 1963-1969, under the group of Architecture Principe and eponymous manifestation magazine, the theory postulates how a ‘third urban order’ named ‘oblique’ could be practiced to decry contemporary problems. ‘Gestalt theory – the psychology of form and the phenomenology of perception’[15], as Virilio proclaims, established the theoretical foundation of the work. Oblique discourse offers a new gaze to fill the interstices between the mind and the body, which could lead to the perpetual epiphany of the users. Özdamar propounds that the oblique plane ‘’have a polyvalence spatiality (Image-2) – ‘a form that can be put to different uses without having to undergo changes itself so that a minimal flexibility can still produce an optimal solution’[16]- that evokes emotions and different behaviors and movements of the body’’[17]. It promotes free movement and open-ended activity ‘that mirror the dynamic nature of today’s society’[18]. Revolving around the concepts of kinesthetic and proprioceptive perception, meta-stability, disequilibrium, gravitational awareness, continuity, fluidity, dynamism, disorientation, flexibility, activation, habitable circulation, and potentialism, the function of the oblique elicits a theoretical framework, establishing a springboard for its successors; deconstructivism, folded-topological surfaces, and parametricism, latently paving a way to a ‘cosmopolitan architecture’ which contributes to the engagement with the contemporary problems. Although not clearly indicated, the conception of space under oblique phenomena leads to the acquisition of paraphernalia of the latest pedagogical key concepts such as community, engagement, participation, human-centrism, and heuristics, concomitantly connected to accommodate new pedagogical grounds and understandings under the cosmopolitanism. The oblique architecture ‘accords with the new plane of human consciousness’[19]. It extols ‘a state of mind, which is characterized initially by receptiveness, then by participation, and ultimately by a sense of belonging’[20]. Siddiqui promulgates that this ‘not only describes architecture as a space of inhabitation but also considers space as a didactic tool for architecture’[21], a tool that could be dissected to address the contemporary situation. The cosmopolitan condition has introduced many new discrete urban segments of administration, architecture, engineering, telecommunication, etc., that must compromise with each other in the urban and architectural environment. In pedagogical terms, the cosmopolitan reflections entail the need for a multi-disciplinarity way of education, the creation of a tapestry or a mosaic that enables diversification and manifoldness. However, this could also lead to ‘a melting pot’[22], ceasing the quality of the segments within the whole. Cosmopolitan architecture, within that circumstance, should posit itself in a place where it should be autonomous as a profession as well as non-autonomous to interact and integrate with others. The oblique architecture, deconstructivism, folding and topological surfaces, and parametricism, in general dynamic patterns, within the acknowledgment of the oblique function theory and its potentials, warp ‘social, spatial, structural and aesthetic functions into one continuum’[23] while allowing architecture to represent its autochthonous characteristics. The contemporary pedagogical ground that demands exactly this kind of framework, could grasp the oblique function’s theories and fundamental approaches augmented and developed with contemporary examples, to establish an educational platform for a cosmopolitan architect who has already been amalgamated with the vast complexities. Therefore, the paper aims to unfold the latent oblique trajectory and elucidate how it could become a didactic and pedagogical tool to educate cosmopolitan architects. Dwelling mainly on the contemporary and educational precedents like SANAA’s Rolex Learning Center (Image-3), OMA’s Jussieu Library (Image-4), Diller+Scofidio Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center (Image-5), and Zaha Hadid’s E ON Research Center that palpably use oblique principles, it evinces how the oblique concepts, strategies, and statements could respond to the problems and requirements of cosmopolitanism; which coins in the inexorable emergence of uncertainties, changes, and, indeterminacies. The paper espouses that by being flexible, open-ended, active, and unitary, the oblique provides the execution of eligible conditions for cosmopolitan architectural pedagogy, educating aware individuals with the reciprocal reification of the oblique principles, resulting in a complete embodiment of space and society. Conversely, it dissents flatness in Cartesian architecture and broaches the obstinately preserved flat condition despite the whole architectural transformation and the radical changes in contemporary life. It criticizes the validity of the mundane understanding of anthropometric precepts of the classical era where the human figure is too static for cosmopolitan architectural pedagogy. As Taylor and Zavoleas suggest, it supports the idea that ‘the topologically defined surface bypassed geometric fixity and aesthetic determinism and incited a responsive attitude that formed a connecting system between edifice, dweller, and environment’[24], believing that it is critically essential.
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