2023
Dialectics of Pedagogy
Abstracts
Educating the Pluriversal Practitioner
Keywords: Architectural Education, Architecture Curriculum, Architecture’s Afterlife, Transversal Skills, Pluriversal Practice
The paper explores the imperative need to redefine architectural education in response to societal shifts, climate crises, and the evolution of the architectural field. Efforts to reform architectural education have delved into issues like decolonizing curricula, challenging western-dominated canons, and rethinking the role of architects. However, these efforts often fall short of fundamental change due to imperatives of newness, object-oriented outcomes and entrenched hierarchies. Architectural education historically emphasized knowledge in various fields. While the transversality of the discipline has long been acknowledged and defined in terms of hard skills, the Architecture’s Afterlife research project examined soft skills or behaviours gained during education, such as endurance, critical thinking, determination, and collaboration skills, proving them increasingly vital in contemporary practice. These behaviours are universal, transferable, and adaptable to changing socio-economic conditions and technological advancements. Two are particularly prominent, being defined as most used in practice, albeit being implicitly gained during education: resilience and collaboration. The origin of resilience is questioned, identified as a most useful and needed trait yet gained through the hierarchical dynamics of architectural education, where students learn to navigate power structures, and therefore perpetuate the inherent problems preventing the profession in becoming truly responsible. The processes through which this resilience is gained could be instrumentalized within the liminal phases associated with them and interpreted as an opportunity to shape and instill a meaningful ethical foundation, define the purpose of the discipline, and influence the trajectory of learning in subsequent stages. Collaborative practice is further emphasized as an essential aspect of contemporary architectural education and future operation. The paper discusses how architectural education could evolve to prioritize collaboration, interdisciplinary exchanges, and community engagement, reflecting on historical patterns of spatial practice. While experiments in architectural education challenging traditional methods of learning have occurred throughout history, many have been abandoned or assimilated into conventional teaching practices. The challenge lies in addressing not only the content and processes but also the hidden power dynamics within education. Renewed calls for reforming architectural education emphasize the need for educating a profession that acknowledges relationality and the necessity of operating with both rational and emotional skills catering to an interconnected world. This was a prominent topic of the 18th Architecture Biennale in Venice, affirminig a shift in what is understood as architectural practice. Works engaging with marginalized communities and addressing issues of peripheral and indigenous spatial practices implied a decolonization of curricula, spotlighting education as the medium of future change. The present dominance of small architectural practices also reflected a shift in mode of operating in the field and underscored the importance of educating future architects to navigate diverse roles and responsibilities. Redefining architectural education for redefined practice involves expanding the concept of transversality to include both knowledge and behaviors. Soft, emotional skills, such as resilience and collaboration, are essential for meaningful architectural engagement. Architectural education should use the potency of its liminality to direct students toward becoming agents of change, fostering inclusivity, diversity, and interdisciplinary collaboration, challenging traditional power dynamics and embracing evolving challenges for a redefined and expanded practice.
Schools of Thought:
From “Alles ist Architektur” (Everything is Architecture) to Environmentalism, Passing by Parametricism.
Keywords: Discipline, Architecture, Assertive, Time, Slow
From “Alles ist Architektur”: Toward Environmentalism, Leaving Behind ‘Parametricism’ argues that the only way toward a new ecological paradigm is Environmentalism.
Reality is the only source of imagination, abstraction seems to be a notion of the past, and if this is the case, how can architectural curriculums of the post climate crisis era break the continuity of a tradition practiced and upheld in architectural schools around the globe for more than fifty years?
The paper maps the changes in curricula and the armature of architectural education and its traces in architectural practice from 1968 to the present; passing by giants such as Alvin Boyarsky at the AA, John Hejduk at Cooper Union, the Duo of Colin Rowe and Oswald Matthias Ungers at Cornell University, Hans Hollein and Woolf Prix at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and Bernard Huet in Paris as well as myself at the Academy of Fine Arts In Vienna. The paper will demonstrate how they ignited the post Beaux-Arts architectural education and how they each designed a new model that has inspired many schools to date. The singular figure of Giancarlo de Carlo as the only activist architect-educator will be an equaliser, a gage, and allow for comparison as well as the test for the relevance of history, sociology and political engagement and activism in architectural education. He is also an architect whose work and writings are of extreme actuality today, since even the Pritzker Family (an institution and an indicator) has diverted its attention to socially conscious and environmentally sensible architecture.
Humour, Wit and Resolution:
Give Me the Details!
Keywords: Details, Material Culture, Scarcity, Ingenuity, Idiosyncrasy, Humor
There is a saying in Argentina, in response to a sticky situation with no logical or apparent solution, that the ad-hoc, short term solution is atado con alambre: “fixed with wire”. This everyday cultural practice, employed by architects and non-architects to describe all kinds of situations, derives from the tradition of working with what is at hand, adopting provisional solutions, and moving forward with whatever means possible. To solve a predicament with ‘wire’ is to keep it working for another day, and when that day comes, a better solution will present itself. Sometimes, that day never comes. But simultaneously, each act of resolution is characterized by a personal touch of creativity and a surplus sense of pride and effectiveness. Often, these fabrications are culturally recognized as humorous due to their graceful execution and unconventional pragmatism. Such practices, highly present in self-built domestic constructions, are not unique to Argentina. All across the globe, details of this form of ingenuity populate urban and suburban built environments, offering not just solutions, but character and unmapped cases of practical wisdom. Similarly, formalized architecture design practices are often faced with economical and logistics constraints that contribute to an attitude towards thinking astutely in order to get the most out of the least. “Poor architecture” as Lina Bo Bardi explained in 1984, is not about poverty, but about the capacity to express the maximum through minor means.
Building details contain valuable data to assess social, cultural and material matters concerning built environments. Forty years have passed since architect and educator, Marco Frascari published the influential essay, “The Tell-The-Tale Detail”, in which he argued that details are generators of architectural knowledge through the mirrored activities of construing and constructing. Frascari positioned the role of details as producers of architectural theories and practices, able to demonstrate meaning and narratives of cultural significance. Beginning from Frascari’s notion of the detail that ‘tells the tale’ and Bernand Rudofsky’s valorisation of the informal built environment, this paper examines five critical case studies in different locations in South America and Europe to expose theories and practices that building details produce in a context of global crises. The paper further discusses pedadogies of ad-hoc production and informal making as key for updating academic notions of aesthetics that emerge through cultures of repair. Focusing on both professional and non-professional building activity, the paper will expand and update the conventional understanding of building details by visualizing the formal and informal knowledge production that operates within them through ingenuity and humour. Interview fragments with architects that practice and teach will be included in the essay.
Lantern Field and Contested Cultural Identity:
Museum Installation as a Platform for Education, Practice, and Criticism
Keywords: Installation art, design build, Asian American identity, curatorial practice.
What can practice of architecture bring to education of an architect? Design-build projects, in which students working alongside faculty and community-based clients, design and construct a building, pavilion, or an art installation, has become a commonly integral part of architecture school curriculum.[1] Also called live projects, these often serve as a vehicle for both service and pedagogy.[2] Besides imparting knowledge in construction details, fabrication, managing of client expectations, and negotiating the complex budgetary and legal constraints of the professional world, how can design build project challenge pedagogical conventions, or ask cultural questions that become unearthed during community engagement? Reflecting upon Lantern Field (2013), an art installation by faculty and students of Virginia Tech for the Smithsonian Institution, affords critical examination of an impermanent design-built project as a form of pedagogy and practice. Situated in a museum charged with a contested history of Asian identity in the West, a transdisciplinary team of students and faculty created an art installation that applied discoveries from architecture, music, and computer engineering. The project educated both the students and the public about Japanese culture by interpreting the traditions of lantern festivals and craft in Japan. It did so in a distinctly American context, in a space of Western gaze, thus raising questions of Japanese American identity. Lastly, it brought together architectural practice, public engagement, education, and curation, using museum as a public platform.
Lantern Field, led by Japanese-born architect and educator Aki Ishida, was designed over the spring semester of 2013 and installed on April 6, 2023 during the National Cherry Blossom Festival in the courtyard of the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery in Washington, DC, a part of the National Museum of Asian Art. Lantern Field involved public participation on two levels: in making of the lanterns and in activating the light and sound once the lanterns were installed. During a day-long public workshop in the Freer courtyard, the museums visitors folded the mulberry paper lanterns under the guidance of design team. The field of lanterns grew over the course of the day as they amassed on the bamboo frame suspended beneath the vaulted ceiling of the loggia facing the courtyard.
The surfaces of both the folded papers and the ceiling captured the mutable brightness and hues of natural light during the day and electric light at night. As people walked under the lanterns, the sensors detected their presence and activated the gradual shift in light, which oscillated between white and deep magenta, and the sound of bamboo chimes, which intensified the longer people lingered. The multisensory artwork coalesced expertise and ideas that could only result with a transdisciplinary team.
While Lantern Field is rooted in traditional Japanese craft and rituals, traditions are interpreted liberally for a present-day context outside of Japan. Lantern Field is situated not in wooden shrines or Kyoto row-houses but in the National Mall, in a marble Italian Renaissance courtyard building designed by the American architect Charles Platt. The Freer Gallery (1932) houses artifacts collected by the American industrialist Charles Lang Freer and includes the Peacock Room, an exemplar of Japonisme, by James McNeill Whistler and Thomas Jeckyll. In Lantern Field, Ishida, who was raised in Japan, helped to mitigate the problems of cultural appropriation[3] that can often result from Asian cultural events held in the West. She served as a cultural interpreter for the team to whom the rituals and artifacts were less familiar.
Lantern Field was decidedly an educational experience through curation of an interactive, ephemeral artwork made with public participation. Notably, the project was initially proposed to the education department of the museum, then subsequently reviewed and supported by the Asian art curators. It interrogates the role of curatorial practice to engage a group of faculty and students for a collective learning experience.
By applying practice to education, architect-educators create platforms in which to ask indeterminate technical, cultural, and socio political questions around an array of issues: combining traditions with digital technology; notion of impermanence rooted in Buddhist and Shintoist thoughts; Asian American identity outside of Asia; problems of Japonisme and the western gaze through which art was created and collected.[4]
A design build project can raise pedagogical questions that challenge conventions and cultural assumptions and prepare architects who not only are equipped with technical and practical skills gained from a live project, but also to think critically about the socio-political contexts in which architects design today and in the future.
-
1
Hayes, Richard W. The Yale Building Project: The First 40 Years. New Haven, Conn.: Yale School of Architecture, 2007.
-
2
Harriss, Harriet, and Lynnette Widder. Architecture Live Projects: Pedagogy Into Practice. First edition. Oxon: Routledge, 2014.
-
3
Murai, Noriko, and Alan Chong. Inventing Asia: American Perspectives Around 1900. Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2014.
-
4
Ono, Ayako. Japonisme in Britain: Whistler, Menpes, henry, Hornel and nineteenth-century Japan. Andover: Routledge, 2003.
O Architecture, Where Art Thou?
A New Episode of the Never-Ending (and Fertile) Love Story Between Architecture and Context
Keywords: Context, Site, Physical Presence, Survey, Built Environment.
Is Architecture still alive?
Yes, Architecture is alive, and it exists in context! To rediscover the beating heart of architecture it is imperative to understand the contextual milieu within which it exists.
Architecture and context have always had an intimate relationship with intricate plots, where cultural, political, economic and technical demands inseparably merge.
Context is an unfinished choral text from which architecture takes meaning and energy. In turn, Architecture contributes its own “episodes” to the contextual narrative. Context is like a cloud, whose precise form develops from a previous form at a given moment and is doomed to fade and transform within the imminent future, thus leading to a continuous evolution.
Understanding the dialectical relationship between the structure of the context and the formal structure of architecture is a pressing, necessary question to revive architecture and make it fertile again.
Architecture, its transdisciplinary role saved by the shelter of context, in turn graciously sets context as the focus of its own interests. Architectural design uses the built environment as a quarry of data to inform future projects, both from a conceptual and a physical point of view.
Understandably, the most physical component of context is the environment, both built and natural.
Today, more than ever, the built environment asks for sensitized design and the multifaceted character of architecture. Architects, as professionals, should be able to consciously read, interpret and fix. Architects are needed for their learned capacity to envision, thus pairing—entwining—theory and practice. In other words, they are needed to promote concepts and ideas that can help the built environment evolve toward an accessible and enjoyable place where life can happen.
The built environment is and will be the target of architecture, whether we speak of the natural expression of the rural environment brutalized by intensive exploitation, or the urban environment traumatized by a century of economic speculation.
Architects can continuously reshape their ability to read the built environment as an opportunity to contribute a verse to its narrative plot. Under these conditions, reading, understanding and interpreting the built environment become critical design tools.
There are multifarious tools used to read the built environment. They range from the analogical and traditional to the most advanced and digitally precise. All of these instruments are necessary for a correct understanding of the project. Yet, they are not enough. The fundamental tool for reading the built environment is physical—haptic—experience.
Teaching one to read the contextual narrative means promoting the importance of the contextual experience, to become a user of architecture and to be able to impart a language of architecture and as such, fiction is perhaps the most acute means to infiltrate mass media culture and the dominance of the ephemeral image. Architectural design is, in and of itself, a form of fiction. Teaching students to appreciate the built environment and to speak of architecture through its lexicon of words and drawings is the first important step toward a new awareness.
This paper will explore unique methods and strategies in the form of unconventional design studio assignments and exercises that focus on the vital importance of context, and in so doing teach the public what architects can do for them.
FRANCOPiSANiARCHiTETTO – Via del Casone 3r, 50124 FIRENZE, franco@francopisani
The Transforming Body as a Spatial Instrument
Keywords: Freedom, transforming body, transmedial knowledge.
In a world in which we critically challenge previous linearities, inherent to dominant hierarchical power structures only to reveal a world which is fundamentally unstable, the multiplicity and ambiguity of knowledge construction ought to be acknowledged. This paper comments on a studio environment cultivating an open-ended approach to learning and thinking allowing students in architecture together with teachers and practitioners to engage in a collaborative process of co-creating knowledge. Such acts of co-creation cut through various disciplines such as film, theatre, sculpture and architecture for nothing exists in isolation. This is seen as an important mode for students to critique their socio-cultural context and thus actively engage in autoethnographic research. Here we like to emphasize the importance of transmedial knowledge construction, incorporating multiple modes of representation and diverse media as part of personal learning experience.
With this paper various moments in studio teaching are looked at in which both body and space are allowed to change collaboratively allowing the practice of space-making (as in architecture) to be experienced through qualities of ongoing transformation and adaptation. In doing so, we acknowledge the hybridity and complexity of knowledge construction. When bodies and space interact, they make interestingly vague, previous boundaries, preceding binaries and nurture continuous interplay between the self as an agent and an external world (holding multiple other agents) as context. Such didactic interplay is aimed at supporting students to conduct spatial analysis and critically examine their biases and grow new insights into diverse perspectives and experiences that shape our world.
To gently position a studio culture towards an understanding that the body is to be recognized as an active agent in the production of space thus negating the notion for such bodies to ever be passive recipients of spatial experiences. For bodies and space are combined in dynamic and reciprocal relationships of mutual and continues change. If so, such bodies learn in an equally dynamic and reciprocal ecology where abstract cognitive processes are allowed to sprout from moments of bodily experience and vice versa; various cognitive irruptions give rise to a manifold of sensuous experiences. Projects born out of this studio culture are non-static, inquisitive, they challenge stereotypes, amplify marginalized voices to create spaces that resonate.
The following comments on a number of studio projects to illustrate some of the above mentioned. These serve as a general introduction for the full paper would unravel these projects more also through the voice of the students. Works take place at the Master of Interior Architecture Research and Design at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam.
Mind the Gap
Keywords: Pedagogy, practice, curriculum, design, studio, community, inclusivity.
Liminality, within the field of cultural anthropology, is described as a liberating, albeit disorienting, threshold wherein participants in a rite of passage are released into a temporary space of formative ambiguity. Senses heightened by the rupture of the routines of the status quo force a period of creative awareness and lucidity. Previously recognized hierarchies and associations are suspended, and an anti-structure known as communitas takes shape. Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito draws a distinction between what he considers common misconceptions of “community” as a homogenous group of people defending shared territory and history, and the unstructured, and more amorphous “communitas,” suggesting we have been defining the former all wrong: “Community isn’t a property, nor is it a territory to be separated and defended…rather it is a void, a debt, a gift to the other that also reminds us of our constitutive alterity with respect to ourselves.” The void, for Esposito, is configured as a call to duty, a charge, or a “donation of a grace.”
Such is the state of the perceived void or “gap” in our discipline.
Like the initiate in a rite of passage, the student of architecture stands at the threshold between an immediate past and a pending future wherein new, disruptive rituals are born, and one’s identity and sense of community are redefined. The oft stated and debated “gap” between the academy and the practice of architecture is usually seen as a problem, an assumption that we require a completely comfortable and seamless transition to a fixed and pre-ordained definition of the profession. A gap, however, may suggest either something fractured or and an aperture. One, a fissure in need of mending; the other, an opportunity.
The concerns of both entities, academic and professional, reside in the generational, technological and cultural evolution of teaching, research, and practice. Recent trends to professionalize architecture curricula are seen in the NCARB’s iPal curricular path to registration wherein one’s architectural education is paired with a simultaneous dive into professional practice and the registration exam. However, we posit that the bridging of the gap resides less in “teaching them how to make working drawings” than in the reality of an evolving professional census, and the boundless possibilities offered by a plastic, malleable curricular logic that collapses the liminal into a fluid condition of education and practice.
Recent graduates came of age and are confronted with heretofore unseen existential global threats coupled with a reshuffling of social order. Their interests and demands will shape the profession moving forward. As the discipline is less male, less white, and less monolithic, hierarchies and assumptions will unravel. As we call for a world of heightened inclusivity and expanded communitas, we will explore architectural education as a critical rite of passage, celebrating its role in fostering skepticism and the unconstrained interrogation of the status quo.
-
1
Esposito, Roberto. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Stanford University
-
2
Turner, Victor. "Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology". Rice Institute Pamphlet — Rice University Studies, July 1974.
-
3
"liminal", Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. OED Online Oxford 23, 2007.
A Case Study on Hidden Curriculums in the Architectural Studio
Keywords: Classism, Curriculum, Pedagogy, Practice, New Subjects.
In 1980, Jean Anyon, a researcher in education and policy, presented a theory central to this article. It lies at the intersection of education and classism called “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work,” where Anyon states that public schools in complex industrial societies make available different types of educational experiences to students in different social classes, which has a direct impact on the type and structure of “work” that students experience in the classroom and beyond.1 The curriculums Anyon identified were categorized as working class, middle class, affluent professional class, and executive elite. By borrowing these descriptions, an argument emerges that architectural education relies too much on producing industry-ready graduates and not enough on providing them with the skillsets to interrogate our discipline’s entanglements with political and economic structures.
This article will begin by unpacking these curricular models and then comparing architectural education to a working class which is intrinsically tied to "practical" education models and prioritizes regiment, docility, and obedience in students to prepare them for routine and mechanical-based work, like that of a “trade” or “field” worker who is unfamiliar with the larger process. This will frame that schools that see architectural education as “vocational training” shape students based on their social or economic status, thus conditioning them for the social inequity they may find in the profession. The methodology in these design studios begins with tracing and researching the human and environmental subjects shaped by the building students will eventually design to inform new typological imaginations. Ultimately, this article is critical of the studio model as a way to educate architects, which continues to filter and privilege students with certain natural abilities or the right “pedigree” for a professional career.2 Instead, the theories and case studies discussed point to a counter model that centers the design studio as a liberating experience, fosters new knowledge, and leverages new social, political, and cultural perspectives to uncover new modes of practice. 3
These case studies were taught at one of the most affordable institutions in the United States, in a region with low education rates and high levels of unemployment and poverty. Most of the students participating in this study are first-generation students with mixed-status families in communities that need the agency of an equitably built environment. They have experienced the marginalization that Anyon described in the “working-class” curriculum and are guided through
a new spatial format, structure, and content that begin to dismantle the hidden curriculums they experienced in their education to date. Focusing on subjects first, we position the architect as “socially invested” in issues beyond form and aesthetics instead of “their design” or following the whims of formal trends. While producing high-caliber work is an essential outcome of every studio, it is not the only measure of success, as ethical reasoning and empathy outcomes are as critical as coherent arguments and technically sound work. Thus, combining the working-class curriculum with the intellectual rigor to expand the traditional scope to include broader social, environmental, and political issues, thus encouraging their values in their future practice.
-
1
Jean Anyon, “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work,” The Journal of Education 162, no. 1 (1980): 67–92. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42741976.
-
2
Garry Stevens, “Struggle in the Studio: A Bourdivin Look at Architectural Pedagogy,” Journal of Architectural Education 49:2 (1995): 105–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/1425401
-
3
Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York City: Random House, 2006).
Wright’s Influence in Architecture Schools:
An Overlooked Organic Legacy in American Architectural Education
Keywords: Regionalism, Pedagogy, Organic, Place, Structure
An essay examining the influence of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright on architectural education in the US, which has been downplayed, overlooked, or edited out of the existing histories. Part of this is due to Wright’s own attitude towards formal university architectural education, which varied from ambivalence to outright hostility. It will also be shown that examples of Wright’s influence in US architecture schools have tended to be centered on universities in the American South headed by Wright-inspired architects, including University of Arkansas (E. Fay Jones), University of Oklahoma (Bruce Goff), and in particular the University of Texas at Austin, where Harwell Hamilton Harris briefly headed a faculty that included Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzsky, John Hejduk, Werner Seligmann, and Bernard Hoesli. Hoesli would continue his deployment of Wright’s works in the teaching of architecture during his many years at the ETH in Zürich. As a case study, the essay focuses on the School of Design at North Carolina State University, headed by Henry Kamphoefner from 1948-1973, where the school’s pedagogy engaged John Dewey’s principle of “learning by making;” faculty member Lewis Mumford’s principle of regionally appropriate architecture; and several of Wright’s principles, including the idea that his buildings are generated from a structural idea—this leading to the hiring of a number structural engineers to the faculty (Felix Candela, Horacio Caminos, and Eduardo Torroja) and faculty members whose work may best be characterized as structurally-inspired (Matthew Nowicki and Eduardo Catalano). Kamphoefner also established one of the very first Visiting Critics programs in the US, bringing figures such as Buckminster Fuller, Louis I. Kahn, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright to lecture and teach short courses at the school. Wright lectured to the largest audience of his entire life at the School of Design in Raleigh in May 1950. Following Wright’s death in 1959, his influence on the School of Design continued with the hiring of the architect Harwell Hamilton Harris, former dean at University of Texas at Austin, who taught at the school and practiced in Raleigh for the rest of his life. In contradistinction to the vast majority of US architecture schools, the pedagogy of the School of Design emphasized a Socratic studio pedagogy involving individual interpretations of shared ordering principles; learning by making, wherein both the evaluation and evolution of a concept involves its embodiment in the made; an emphasis on thinking and making, where theory comes from practice, and not the other way around; the engagement of multiple sources of inspiration, including natural geometries, structural analysis and architectural history; the support of each student’s individual intuitive interpretations of the program; the evaluation of the experiential qualities of designs, as well as their appropriateness; all culminating in place-specific, regionally, materially, socially, culturally and ecologically appropriate and sustainable designs that were understood to be an integral part of, and contribution to, a larger disciplinary history. It is argued that today such an approach as that developed at the School of Design in the period examined here may serve as a model for contemporary architectural education in search of the appropriate.