AR / Nasrin Seraji / Schools of Thought:

From Earth. Merely a child in the swinging 60’s, my 12^th birthday was only six months after the Eagle landed on the moon. It was July 1969, we had arrived in Esfahan from the USA and my grandfather had bought a television to greet us and let us watch the landing on the moon broadcasted live. We were back from the land of soap operas and TV watchers and Iran was still a country connected to the outside world. That summer is still vividly in my mind, and from then on mankind had the possibility to observe the Earth from afar, the perfect meaning of critical distance. But did we? Not really, as we continued to use and abuse its resources and this in spite of the architecture discipline’s many critical views on Earth. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue had published the first image of Earth in space[1]. Many years later, in 2005, Steve Jobs would refer to the catalogue and compare it to the Google search engine in his commencement speech at Stanford. Science more than ever became a commodity and critical thinking and good design started to serve the technology industry, to the point of addiction.

As architects we were and are guilty and as human beings we were and still are too gullible. Governments and governance has pushed the one and only planet earth to a point of no return. However, the world still believes that all will be OK after 2050 and that technology, AI, AR etc… will save us. The profession and the discipline of architecture are still imagining how one should build in 2050 and beyond. We need the likes of Reyner Banham and Manplan[2] to review the conditions of architectural engagement in our societies. Perhaps we need to stop building and attend to all that we have built in the 20^th century. This is why we urgently need to look critically and analytically redesign how we practice and how we teach architecture now that we are more and more faced with material and resource scarcity.

Return to the future. Before the moon landing, Paris and France were on fire. May 1968, “sous les pavés, la plage” or “under the paving stones, the beach”: the slogan was the promise of another, bright future. The slogan never made it to the list of many beautiful posters that the Beaux-Arts students had made to demonstrate their solidarity toward what were to become the archetype of protests in the world. The ‘68 movement contributed to a revolution in the education of architecture in many ways. In France, it separated the Arts from architecture definitively: architecture became autonomous and was no longer part of the Beaux arts. André Malraux, the minister of Culture, created by decree five new schools –Unités Pédagogiques, or pedagogical units– in Paris and thirteen others in the provinces.

In Germany the revolution had happened following WW1. Gropius had invented the Bauhaus integrating all the Arts, the Bauhaus, and its novel curriculum enabled architecture (Bau und Entwurf) to join the fine arts and were integrated fully as a new constellation.

Most of the radical architects and artists of the Bauhaus had fled Nazi Germany before WWII and settled in the United States of America. They were contributing to new educational institutions such as Black Mountain College and Illinois Institute of Technology. Gropius had settled in at Harvard. Mies van der Rohe directed the IIT for twenty years 1938–1958 and branded Chicago with his architectural and pedagogical legacy.

The 68’ events reinforced what had already been initiated earlier in the mid 60’s as a series of speculative and alternative practices where the bourgeois life style was under criticism and scrutiny, politically activating architecture as a catalyst for change and empowering the public as its main instigators. Collaborative practices such as Super Studio and Archizoom (1966-in Italy), Haus-Rucker-Co (1967-in Austria), and others generated a conscientious relationship between architecture and society. Though the ghost of these movements could be traced to groups such as the Situationnist International, their refreshing political activism opened a new chapter in architectural education.

Hans Hollein, an Austrian architect, thinker, educator and even according to Wikipedia “a key figure of postmodern architecture”, was one of the most influential Viennese architects; in the 60’s and thereafter. His famous “Alles ist Architektur” enabled architecture to be freed of its commonly understood meaning as “the art of building”. Hollein wrote that “Everything is architecture” in the Bau magazine in 1968, for which he was the editor from 1964 to 1970. Through his liminal text, he asserted that the limited and traditional definitions of architecture had lost their validity. He articulated that “architecture is a medium of communication, architecture is cultic, that it is a symbol, a sign and an expression”, and that “architecture is determination, establishment of space, environment and architecture is control of bodily heat–protective shelter …”.[3] It was to be quite some time before his revolution could be implemented in his native city. Hollein became the head of the department of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (Angewandte) between 1995–1999. That same year I was appointed the Professor and Head of one of the Meisterschule at another, rival, architecture school in Vienna, the Academy of Fine arts, where Hollein had studied architecture before going to the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1959 and
finally in 1960 to Berkeley, where architecture, landscape, and planning were integrated under the umbrella of the freshly established College of Environmental Design.

The Seismograph. In early 1996 I received a fax – not much Internet then – from the director of the 1996 Venice Biennale: Mr. Hans Hollein was inviting me and my office to take part in what was to be his theme for this session, “Sensing the future: The Architect as Seismograph” [4]. A crisis meeting was organized in the office, what were we to do? The office was small (though we were moving up the ladder), comprising myself and three young architects. We had lost a few competitions, and specifically a great one: The Bremen Philharmonic (1995). We couldn’t have won against Daniel Libeskind (1^st Prize) [ 2 ] neither Günter Behnisch (second prize ex-æquo with us), nor Fumihiko Maki who were amongst the ten architects invited to compete. Libeskind was not going to build his winning entry any way as he had left Germany and his Holocaust museum project and gone back to the USA due to disagreements with his museum clients. So Hollein was spot on to have said, that “Architecture is a medium of communication”, some thirty years before.

How could we afford to go to Venice? We were supposed to put up an exhibition and pay for everything, as it was clearly stated in the invitation letter that there was no financial aid, nor fees from the Biennale organisation. Most importantly, what were we to show as a response to the theme? We had neither the notoriety of the big-name architects, nor did we have the infrastructure to support our participation.

Before responding, and as we were in an euphoric state of total disbelief, we started to do some research to understand why Hollein had invited my office. I didn’t know him personally and the only project that I had to my name was the Temporary American Centre in Paris built in 1990, deconstructed in 1992 and it had been published in 105 journals. It was perhaps the shortest-lived building of its time [ 3 ]. Herbert Muschamp[5] thought that Zaha Hadid had designed it, and he had labelled it as the best “deconstructivist” work of its time. Most importantly the Temporary American Centre Competition was the project that made me into an architect and a teacher.

Or was it because the Academy of Fine Arts had chosen me over Zaha Hadid to be its next Professor of architectural design, and the head of one of the two Meisterschule for Architecture previously held by the famous Gustav Peichl?[6] I would also be the first woman professor in the history of the two art academies in Vienna (Fine arts and Applied arts). Soon we realized that there were no sound answers and no point in speculating, and we decided to go ahead and present the Bremen Philharmonic project that was very much about sensing the future of listening to music [ 4 ]. Music was being privatized and we were still interested in the collective idea of listening. Spotify was not invented yet, and personal smartphones were years away, however, the first versions of MP3 and I‑pods were changing the modes of listening to music. A philharmonic hall of the 21^st century had to be able to allow individual listening in a collective setting.

PoMo 80’s. In 1983 I had graduated from the Architectural Association and celebrated by going to the biggest concert by David Bowie in Milton Keynes, one of the first New Towns on the periphery of London. A precursor experience of the act of collective listening to that of our imagined one when designing the Bremen Philharmonic competition twelve years later in 1995.

Charles Jencks had largely occupied the scene of architectural history and theory in England since long and was pushing the discipline to look at history as a way of going beyond Modernism. He had become the authority on post-modern theories in architecture with his book The language of post-Modern architecture (1977) which gave every student and architect the main clues of what is to be considered postmodern or not. Incidentally Le Corbusier had already highlighted the value of understanding history and classical architecture through his famous dictum of “listen to me, I who have seen Athens”. So Philip Johnson’s famous phrase “you cannot not know history” was perhaps already a post-modern way of citing the grandfather of Modernism. Both in architectural practice and education Le Corbusier and the modern movement were under attack as the proponents of impossible ideals and soulless architecture, as well as being the main reason for the standardization, boredom, sameness and the whiteness of our living environments. Jencks was responsible for a dark period of formal understanding of history in the most literal sense. Architects in America went on a crusade to re-discover Rome, Athens and the architectural orders. Buildings were ornamented with signs and symbols, as if “Ornament and Crime”[7] had never been written. So many new buildings were adorned by columns and pediments as if we could rebuild history through veneer and collage. in January 1979, The AT&T building by Philipp Johnson had even made it to the cover of Time Magazine. Architecture seemed more important than the dismantling of a civilization: Philip Johnson and the AT&T[8] were larger than life and more important than the violence that was ravaging Iran at the time. [ 5 ]

If Modernism was not a style but a cause, as Anatole Kopp[9] had suggested, then Post-modernism was diametrically the opposite: from inception it became a distinctive style. All architects of a certain generation and all around the world had their PoMo period, just like the blue period of Picasso and the white period of Modernism. Michael Graves, Charles Moore, James Stirling, Arata Isozaki, Aldo Rossi (the intellect of the City), Adolfo Natalini (Superstudio veteran) and of course several main figures of American architecture who were also involved in education such as Robert A.M Stern, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Peter Eisenman.

Some of these architects continued to design with total conviction as intellectuals and academics first and as commercial practitioners later. Architecture had entered a period of familiarity. The clients liked Doric columns and broken pediments: they had seen them (somewhere) before, they were comforting. Architecture was not an abstract idea anymore. The clients knew what they were in for and what they were paying for. The fake had value, marble and stone didn’t need to be solid blocks: they could be veneers.

Orders, elements, fragments and tik-tiks. All this heavy, serious and weighty architecture needed to be counterbalanced by the thesis of a younger generation that would resist history and was a defender of what we now know as the deconstructivist period of architecture. Where structure was no longer synonymous with stability, and order was no longer visible in architecture.

Zaha Hadid had won the Hong Kong Peak competition in 1983, the year I received my diploma from the Architectural Association, and the Cardiff Opera house in 1994 when I was in my second year of teaching at the AA. Eleven years had passed between the most significant of Zaha’s projects in relationship to teaching and her practice, none of them built. The drawings of both projects were a new graphic position in movement and dynamic spaces; shedding clear light on Zaha’s passion for Malevich and Suprematist paintings. Zaha was a great painter and she was also an obsessive imaginative person. She used few words but many lines, points and surfaces. Her famous tik-tiks were an invention of another way of saying elements/ fragments without the derogatory meaning of fragmentation in architecture. The Cardiff Opera House project has often been praised by being compared to a much later, built project with a similar program, the Guangzhou Opera House, China. Yet the projects have nothing to do with one another. One (Cardiff) is a subliminal chef d’oeuvre based on Hadid’s understanding of the Russian constructivist ideas of space and the deformation of the idea of Le Corbusier’s ‘promenade architecturale’ into a ‘promenade programmatique’ as the dynamic force of the project. The other (Guangzhou) is a parametric formal game of seemingly complex geometries put together with very poor construction techniques [ 6 ].

The Cardiff Opera house would have celebrated its 30^th birthday this year and the Peak in Hong Kong would have turned 41. Their architect passed away too early but she left a legacy of “function follows form” that was mis-interpreted as form follows form, which is still strongly desired by Chinese and Russian oligarchs and commissioned to what seems to be the ghost of Zaha’s ambitions, the ZHA directed by Patrik Schumacher. ZHA must be the most masterfully constructed parody of Dame Zaha Hadid’s ideals once taught with fervor and insistence at the AA’s diploma Unit 9 after the departure of Rem Koolhaas to New York (Delirious New York had to be researched and written!) and Elia Zenghelis to Athens. With Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp, both men had constituted OMA and were Zaha’s teachers.

The late 70’s, the 80’s and the early 90’s had been for those who had chosen to go to the AA to study or to teach the most challenging and culturally rich years. Its chairman Alvin Boyarsky had instilled a culture of drawing and debate unique to the AA for almost 20 years (1971−1990). As he had said in an interview for the Architectural Review in 1983: “We create a very rich compost for students to develop and grow from and we fight the battle with the drawings on the wall. We’re in pursuit of architecture, we discuss it boldly, we draw it as well as we can and we exhibit it. We are one of the few institutions in the world that keeps its spirit alive.” Drawing was at the center of the debate, everyone was attempting to invent a new language of architecture. This language was not spoken anywhere else except at the AA, everyone was coming to the AA to learn it and to disseminate it around the world. That’s perhaps why Zaha was talking to the world with her drawings and never with words.

The digital 90’s. In 1992 Jeff Kipnis and Bahram Shirdel moved from California to start the Graduate Design Programme at the AA, which led to the establishment of DRL (design Research Lab) founded by Patrik Schumacher and presently directed by Dr. Theodore Spyropoulos. The Information Age was settling in and the first issue of Architectural Design after many years of Andreas Papadakis’ editorship (1977−1992) who had introduced tendencies and ‘isms’ of architecture to the readers and served as the longest chief editor of an architecture Journal, AD with its new director Maggie Toy was turning the page of postmodernism and deconstructivism, and sliding smoothly into the blobosphere.

In the late 1990’s at Princeton, I was teaching a graduate seminar, thesis and a master studio, after Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves’ penultimate master studio: an exercise “in the manner of”, similar to what Venturi and Scott Brown had done many years earlier with their learning from Las Vegas studio at U Penn.

Ralph Lerner was the Dean at Princeton at the time and was very interested in a melange of genres[10]. The place was a hotbed of ideas and debates, a deliberate potpourri of ideologies and convictions.

Very much akin to what Alvin Boyarsky had instilled at the AA in the late 70’s: make opposing ideologies debate in order to create what he called the compost necessary for architecture.

Alvin had created a typology for architectural education and its pedagogy, which was being propagated everywhere: we, as its ambassadors were teaching around the globe. I for one was trying to bring a new way of critical analysis through drawing and designing. We were looking at a series of modern houses (from Richard Neutra to Glenn Murcutt) and were testing their relevance in our time through speculative drawings and diagrams of their central ideas. In my seminar, we were scrutinizing the differences and similarities of Le Corbusier and Rem Koolhaas’s theories of modernism and the city. We were reading SMLXL (RK). and the Œuvre Complete (LC) and drawing their ideas. And all this amongst my colleagues who were re-inventing the wheel, its digital version of course.

The information age, toward an architecture of Parametricism. In the introduction to his edited book The Digital Turn in Architecture-1990–2012[11] Mario Carpo explains that there is a pervasive follow up of Deconstructivism and Postmodernism in digital architecture. He also claims that “Deleuzian, post-modern variability was the cultural framework within which digital technologies were first put to task to design and produce variations (variations in form and variations in series, or mass customization), and in this more general sense the digital turn in architecture can also be seen as a belated vindication of some of the principles of Post-Modern architecture itself: against Modernist standardization, the PoMos had argued for differentiation, variation and choice; almost one generation later, digital technologies provided the most suitable technical means to that end. A philosopher and historian could even argue that, in a typical cultural-technical feedback loop, post-modern culture was the ‘favorable environment’ where digital technologies took root and to which they adapted to finally evolve in the way they did.”[12]

In the same volume, John Frazer’s text: “The Architectural Relevance of Cyberspace (1995)” (then teaching at the AA with Julia Frazer in Diploma Unit 11) announces the emergence of a brave new world : “A new consciousness – a new mode of thinking – is emerging with profound implications for architecture.” Another chapter is dedicated to FOA describing their Yokohama Port terminal at great length as a new newness: “The surface of the ground folds onto itself, forming creases that provide structural strength, like an origami construction. The classical segmentation between building-envelope and load-bearing structure disappears. The use of segmented elements such as columns, walls or floors has been avoided in favor of a move towards a materiality where the differentiation of structural stresses is not determined by coded elements but by singularities within a material continuum, more efficient against earthquake stresses.” [13]

Most of the architects gathered in this volume were concentrated in a few schools around the world and were teaching at a variety of levels: John Fraser, FOA (intermediate school‑2+3^rd year) at the AA, Eisenmann often lecturing at the AA and teaching at Princeton and Yale (later) at the master level, Greg Lynn teaching at UCLA, Jeff Kipnis and Bahram Shirdel at the Graduate school AA.

Since Deleuze’s famous book The Fold had been translated into English (1992), its argument had become the perfect alibi for a new mode of generating form in architecture literally inspired by folds of space[14], movement and time. Tom Conley, professor of French at Harvard University and translator of Deleuze[15], argues that Leibniz’s writings constitute the grounding elements of a Baroque philosophy and of theories for analysing contemporary arts and science[16]. A model for expression in contemporary aesthetics, the concept of the monad is viewed in terms of folds of space, movement, and time. Similarly, the world is interpreted as a body of infinite folds and surfaces that twist and weave through compressed time and space. According to Deleuze, Leibniz also anticipates contemporary views of event and history as multifaceted combinations of signs in motion and of the “modern” subject as nomadic, always in the process of becoming.

Non-standard. In 2004 The centre Pompidou had organized an exhibition entitled “Non-Standard Architecture’. Its curator, Frederic Migayrou would be appointed Chair professor of the Bartlett school of Architecture seven years later. The work and research developed by 12 international architectural teams who were mainly working with digital and computational tools and techniques in their architectural design and practices was showcased in a building that its ancestral idea was the Fun Palace (1961) by Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price[17], the competition for the building had been won in 1971 by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano. The exhibition attempted to evaluate the social, economic and political mutations induced through an increasingly generalized use of non-standard logics in architectural production, design and urban policies. The invited firms were, Asymptote- dECOI Architects- DR_D- Greg Lynn FORM- Kol/Mac Studio- Kovac Architecture- NOX- Objectile- Kas Oosterhuis.nl- R&Sie- Servo and UN studio.

The Chapel of Petits-Augustins. From April 2006 onward, I was directing the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais, a new school of architecture that had been founded in 2001 on the former site of the Beaux-Arts as a collage of two other schools that subsequently disappeared as such. In January of the same year, I had been appointed for the second time the Professor and Head of the Academy of Fine arts in Vienna where I instituted a new curriculum based on Five Research Platforms in 2007.[18] : the perfect dual vantage points to observe and compare the evolutions of architectural education.

At Malaquais, the only area that the entire school was against developing was the domain of digital architecture, and this due to the meagre budget conditions of French public schools. However, I thought that it was important to introduce this branch of research in our school. Christian Girard[19], and Philippe Morel co-founded the Department of Digital Knowledge, the only one of its kind amongst the 20 ENSA in France. After all the philosophical question had started with Derrida and Eisenman many years before and so the digital condition and its knowledge were born with the French theory that was so influential in American architecture schools. In Vienna, at the Academy of Fine Arts the production of architecture was to be looked at in the context of the digital and analogue tools as a dialogue in its dedicated platform directed by Wolfgang Tschapeller, whereas at the Angewandte (The Academy of Applied Arts) architects such as Zaha Hadid, Greg Lynn and Hani Rashid of Asymptote had one after the other replaced Hollein and Coop-Himmelb(l)au of another generation. The digital era was in full swing in schools of architecture but was being used in its very basic capacity (sophisticated renderings) in practices all around the globe. Perspective renderings were being sold as a commodity for seducing clients. The price of a rendered perspective was equal to a month’s salary of a mid-level architect. Drawings were no longer a tool for investigating ideas or articulating a position, they were a commodity with which architects sought to win competitions.

Neo liberal genius or glossy undertaker of Zaha’s legacy. But “He is the defender of Zaha’s legacy”! Who said that? Shortly, after Zaha Hadid’s passing in 2016 Patrick Schumacher brought the whole world against himself by turning all the spotlights on his persona: a young, tall, running shoes wearing, philosopher architect. At the Berlin World Architecture Festival he managed to divide the world of architecture into villains and heroes, with himself a hero in disguise. He damned social housing and argued for privatization of everything from streets to parks etc., in effect he was telling the world of developers and investors that architecture is at their service and that he completely subscribes to the neo liberal world of economical supremacy.

Schumacher’s argument is exemplified in “Parametric Order-21^st Century architectural Order”, a long and repetitive talk he delivered at the GSD Harvard some 11 years ago. According to him, the main reason for parametric architecture and his new order was to rid humanity of repetition, boredom and sameness[20] that Modernism allegedly had installed in our societies. The lecture is based on a very outdated view of architectural history, mansplained as an exclusively white western viewpoint. Listening to the lecture, there is a deep problem of incoherency between Schumacher’s desire to be a contemporary Marxist –understanding the problems of housing in the inner city for “his people” working in ‘his’ office– and suggesting to eradicate social housing and leaving the market to regulate a kind of survival of the fittest scenario. Allowing the creative generation of the up-and-coming neo-liberals to be housed near their workplace to enjoy ‘his’ seemingly differentiated exciting spaces and not be bored when they are watching Netflix in their smooth curvy sofas designed by ZHA.

But society is constantly evolving. As French economist Thomas Piketty has demonstrated in his Capital in the Twenty First Century[21], there is good evidence to believe that functional differentiation does not portray the whole spectrum of today's society and will not do so in the near future either. And so, the belief in autopoiesis might not be that revolutionary after all, because it argues along with functional differentiation, rather than helping practice to deal with our present age urgencies and challenges. On the contrary we could say that the approach is quite conservative, despite the hype and glorifications of ZHA's buildings. As Preston Scott Cohen in the Q+A part of the lecture pointed out, the differences simply reside in the shapes of the plans, never in the spaces nor in the relationship of the body to the spaces, nor in the relationship of the users and the inhabitants of the environment created.

How Soon is Now? Now is 2050. Environmentalism is not another branch of post-modernism, nor was deconstructivism. It has been there since a long time, with its many activists in many forms and shapes in histories and theories of the arts, and architecture, and the sciences. Ruskin, William Morris, Henri David Thoreau, John Muir, Vandana Shiva are traversing time from then to now.

In the USA, Departments of architecture (except Berkeley) were for many years reticent to be part of the Schools of Environmental design or Schools of Engineering. In France the debate has been less about the integration of architecture into the other disciplines as schools of architecture have mostly remained autonomous from the Universities, since their creation after May 68.

The now 20 schools known as National Superior Schools of Architecture (ENSA) under the supervision of different Ministries at different times, to begin with —culture, then public works and infrastructure— and now Culture again. There have been many discussions in recent years for the twenty architecture schools to be attached to and supervised by the ministry of Environment instead, now the Ministry for ecological transition, or even – considering the stakes of the environmental crisis is relationship to architecture – to the office of Prime minister.

In Europe most of the schools of architecture were integrated into universities and continue to be attached to either Engineering schools – as is the case with University College Dublin where I am currently teaching – or to the Arts, like the Academy of Fine Arts where I was teaching between 1996–2001 and 2006–2012. There, the different schools (painting, sculpture, architecture, scenography etc..) joined hands and received university status in1998[22]. The German architecture schools as well as Italian schools have mostly been part of Universities and continue to be a small drop in an ocean of other departments, all be it with an average of minimum 1500 students in the discipline of architecture and urbanism.

If we accept that architecture has lost its assertiveness as a consistent, political, social and collective discipline that encourages equality and prosperity, then it is time to move toward a responsive, responsible and culturally local architecture. The answer is perhaps in the understanding and drawing of the specific environments allowing for new healthy conditions to emerge through extensively damaged environments. But is this even possible in the era of climate change after the global economic ruins of capitalism? We are rapidly entering in the eye of the tornado of climate change and all that which it implicates. We need to urgently question the concept of modernity that led us to this catastrophe. And yes it is possible, if a profound restoration of our educational institutions and universities takes place, if making creates knowledge, builds environments and transforms lives [23], if it becomes meaningful and a ‘process’ of evolution as Ingold postulates, and if research becomes the driving force of our architecture schools. Architectural projects then have to be true research that explores new speculative territories. Projects can no longer be a mere staging of the lures of technology (parametric, now AI and what not), nor a mimicry of what once was the heroic past of our discipline. The teaching of architecture needs to once and for all rid itself of the use of “precedents”, that formal reduction of history to signs. It needs to concentrate on the ‘why’ of things as opposed to the ‘how’ of things, the research that takes risks and is provocative and prospective, research that is, original, innovative, uncomfortable and daring.

I would like to propose that the new ecological paradigm in architectural education and practice is a new form of Environmentalism. This ideology needs to recognise that Architecture is slow, it is about the long term, just like geography, landscape and archaeology, it needs time on its side. Perhaps the only way to make architecture relevant again is through its slowness, the only way to resist the neoliberal pressure of economic urgency is to perhaps rediscover the ‘time’ of our discipline.