Athletes in academia - Maria Jose Orihuela - hct

Athletes in Academia: A Theory on Architecture Education

Athletes in Academia: A Theory on Architecture Education

MA History & Critical Thinking

Architectural Association School of Architecture

María José Orihuela

September 2014

Athletes in Academia: A Theory on Architecture Education The variety and disparity of theories intended to shape the architect’s

education is particularly apparent in the description of the basic design

problem. With John F. Harbeson’s The Study of Architectural Design (1926) as main reference, those first-year exercises will open up a

series of questions, namely, why theories on education are produced,

what are they symptomatic of, and how do they operate in the realm of the architecture school. The central hypothesis presented argues for the irrelevance of the acquirement of skills or dry knowledge; as

what educational theories primarily deliver is a sense of what does it mean to be an architect; that is, their significance ultimately relies in the ways in which they construct identity.

5

I. Troubles at school

9

Controversy Takes the Form of a Hyphen

Theory and the Question How to Teach?

II. Athletes in Academia

23

Prendre Parti, Faire Partie: Warming up American Strategies: Playing vs. Training The Psychology of Success The Last Leap: Competition or Correlation

III. Constructions of a Name

45

Beaux-Arts to the Masses

We are not French and This is not Paris The Name of Those who Build

Appendices 53 List of Illustrations 79 Reference List 83

7

I. Troubles at school

Controversy Takes the Form of a Hyphen It all started with a roll of microfilm, out of a black and yellow cardboard box, somewhere in the archives of a library. Involuntarily, but consciously, I was transported to the last—and only—time I had seen one of those in

operation: in the projection room of an old-fashioned cinema. It was around nine o’clock, six years ago. At least four of those large analog machines were

working simultaneously from behind the Friday crowd towards the pristine

widescreen. One precise ray of white light, cast upon the 35mm roll, made the magical trick we call cinema happen, translating the discrete images on the strip into one large, apparent continuum.

It is perhaps the fragility of the microfilm, or maybe the number of apparatuses needed to mediate our experience of it, which makes each of the encounters with this kind of material so seemingly unique, poetic and ephemeral. As if

the spatial leap of the image—from the millimetric roll, to the large cinema screen—somehow reflected that leap in time that takes place at the sight of a nineteenth century book through the lens of a microfilm reader. The content

of the roll in question was a mixture of articles and short dissertations from the 1850s, all arranged in alphabetical order according to the last

names of the authors, but completely regardless of their subject matter.

The assemblage resulted quite uncanny, especially considering that most

libraries nowadays are organized in a way such that those adjacent oddities cannot possibly happen. One does not normally come across methodologies on ‘The Making of a Violinist,’ or a theological commentary on the epistolary

amonestation of St. Paul to the Corinthians, when looking for an essay on architecture education. Such a thing occurred in the present document,

increasing the theatricality of the moment in which the pursued text was rolled into the screen, appearing under a pompous rubric: ‘On Architectural Education: A Prize Essay of the Royal Institute of British Architects.’

Dating back to 1853, the most remarkable detail of the essay was a short

stroke; a hyphen between the words art and profession, intentionally

placed in between, in order to signify a field of ambiguities when it comes to defining architecture. Thus, every time the word architecture appears in the text, it is referred to as an ‘Art-profession,’ as if alluding to a commonly

accepted controversy, or to an unresolved uncertainty.1 The author, Sir James T. Knowles (1831-1908), does not aim to unfold this particular controversy,

but focuses on two other problematic aspects of his time: the decline of the

status of the architect, and the vital importance of a reform within the field of architecture. At the time, the young RIBA (founded in 1834) was both seeking

a more solid position as an institution of architects—for architects—and 9

1 Which ultimately led to the 1891 ‘Profession or Art’ controversy.

The ‘Art’ party, was supported by the Art Workers Guild, which counted with the sympathy of the students of the Architectural Association. The later simultaneously satirized the RIBA, which was the main advocate of the “Profession” party. It is clear from our current perspective who won the controversy and who disappeared. As a witness and a further elaboration on this frictions, cf. Norman Shaw, R. and Jackson, T. G. eds. 1892.

Architecture, a Profession or an Art: Thirteen Short Essays on the qualifications and Training of Architects, London: Murray.

Figure 1. Controversies in the designation of Architecture, in James T. Knowles’ 1853 essay On Architectural Education.

fighting for the presence and acceptance of its voice within society. Such a

voice would finally validate fundamental decisions, like who was to be called

an architect, and what did this exactly mean at that moment in time. One of the main preoccupations involved was the prevention of the “scandalous

appropriation” of the word architect from carpenters, builders, and other undertakers. The supporters of the RIBA saw in the institutionalization of the profession the cure to its several maladies, including, perhaps, a new

professional condition for it, closer to the privileged status of other fields,

such as medicine or law. Knowles portrays the internal perception of this situation in a dramatic, and rather victimizing way, when he alludes to the state of architecture:

This great Profession has lost her high place among men. (…) her

priests no longer walk with reverence. We are told that they are false priests now to a false goddess, that their learning is a sham, and their power not even a name.2

Quoting Goethe—who placed the fate of a nation in the hands of its young men—Knowles faced this grim scenario calling for a reform of “our Art-

profession,” arguing that such reform ought to start from education. Youth

is plastic, he contended, and it is, therefore, the best period to target when considering a revolution.

Having been commissioned by the RIBA, Knowles’ position towards the very expected professional and educational reform is obviously pro-institution,

as revealed by his concern with who is going to manage it, and how. The interest of looking at Knowles’ contribution in regard of our subject matter is partly due to his role in the process of institutionalization of architectural

education; but mainly to the clear link he draws between a conflict in the discipline and the requirement of an educational reform. The present study

considers that the inquiry into what it is that can be taught—or learnt— together with the investigation of the role of theory within architecture schools, are necessarily encompassed by a broader questioning of: the institutionalization of the profession and of its education, the relevance of the voice of academia, and the state of the profession in its context.

Institutionalization of education posed then one substantial problem: that

once the institution was created, and its prerogatives commonly accepted, it naturally triggered a progressive diminishment, and an almost total erasure

of any other form of non-institutional procedure towards the same end:

being recognized as an architect. Indeed, after the period from 1900 to 1914, the former tradition of pupillage in Britain3 began a rapid decline towards its obsolescence as a form of professional authorization. Thus, architects

outside the institutionalized system tended to disappear, as the risk grew of becoming strangers to their accredited colleagues (or even worse, to society as a whole, including their own clients). Institutionalization implied too that

the definition of what an architect is, and of what he ought to do, becomes to

a certain extent an institutional decision. As a consequence, this definition can be part of a project, meaning that—potentially—it can be designed. It

is worth reconsidering the previous situation, before the institutions had a voice and the discipline was acquired by apprenticeship or pupillage, as this 11

2 Knowles, James T. Jr. 1853.

On Architectural Education: A Prize Essay of the Royal Institute of British Architects. London: Thomas Bosworth, p.3 3 The demarcation of the period, as the one in which most existing institutions for architecture education in Great Britain were formed is owed to Powers, A. 1993. ‘Arts and Crafts to Monumental Classic: the Institutionalisation of Architectural Education, 1900 to 1914.’ In: Bingham, N. ed. The Education of the architect: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Symposium of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1993, p.34 4 In the sixteenth century a statute was created in England in order to regulate this period of apprenticeship. Other countries, like the United States, did not adopt a regulation per se, but had a popular convention of a minimum of seven years of apprenticeship. cf. Upton, D. 2012. Defining the Profession.

In: Ockman, J. ed. Architecture School: Three Centuries Educating Architects in North America, p.36ff

Figure 2. Folded paper construction, zig-zag folding. Josef Albers’ Vorkurs (preliminary course) at Black Mountain College, ca. 1937–47.

Figure 3. Study for ‘A Semi-Circular Portico’ Analytique or Order Problem at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York. ca. 1921.

will offer a framework to rethink what today seems an inevitable assumption.

Indeed, without institutions, the image of the architect would be constructed

in a very different way; or perhaps it would not be constructed at all. The figure of the architect, before the introduction of regulated higher education, was blurred and fluid: it had a range of distinct historical references, but

no official requirements as such—other than having had an architect as

a master.4 In the system of pupillage the time spent in the atelier was the ultimate guarantee that the disciple had become so imbued of what the work

of the architect involved that he was entitled to receive that name himself.5 This authorization system becomes problematized in the institutionalized educational model, as a choice on what to teach must be officially made, and then stated, and defended, even if it means necessarily a renouncement

4 In the sixteenth century a statute was created in England in order to regulate this period of apprenticeship. Other countries, like the United States, did not adopt a regulation per se, but had a popular convention of a minimum of seven years of apprenticeship. cf. Upton, D. 2012. Defining the Profession.

In: Ockman, J. ed. Architecture School: Three Centuries Educating Architects in North America, p.36ff

of many alternative, but also relevant subjects. A longer look at the word

5 As far as possible, the language employed in this essay is gender neutral.

call a discipline existed.6 As early as 1881, the Czech architect Leopold Eidlitz

6 cf. Vitruvius, 1914, p.11 “For an architect ought not to be and cannot be such a philologian as was Aristarchus, although not illiterate; nor a musician like Aristoxenus, though not absolutely ignorant of music; nor a painter like Apelles, though not unskilful in drawing; nor a sculptor such as was Myron or Polyclitus, though not unacquainted with the plastic art; nor again a physician like Hippocrates, though not ignorant in medicine; nor in the other sciences need he excel in each, though he should not be unskilful in them.”

institution reveals the problem: it makes necessary to establish, to institute what has always been a subject of discrepancy, even before anything we can depicted this overwhelming panorama of possibilities as follows:

If the student of architecture could master the mathematical and scientific branches (…), make himself proficient in drawing, attend an academy of architecture, and then become in succession a good carpenter, mason, stone-cutter, painter, sculptor, and decorator— no doubt such a student would be eminently well prepared for professional life, and produce marvels of architectural art.7

In order to interpret the choice made by one school of architecture in particular within this generosity of relevant subjects, we could refer to L.

Veysey, who grouped the emerging universities of North America (not

referring solely to architecture departments, or schools, but more generally

to higher education) into three distinct approaches: those offering practical

preparation; those focused on “pure” scientific research; and finally the

7 Eidlitz, L. 1881. The Nature and Function of Art, More Especially of Architecture. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, p.479

ones based on the liberal, humanistic or cultural model of instruction.8

8 Notions of ‘utility,’ ‘research’ or ‘liberal culture’ cf. Veysey, L. R. 1965. The Emergence of the American University. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

architecture be educated in some mechanical workshop, in an art studio

9 Eidlitz, 1881, p.479

of those options were always bonded to the know-how of one country in

10 cf. Lewis, M. J. 2012.

1860-1920: The Battle between Polytechnic and Beaux-Arts in the American University. In: Ockman, p.68

This general classification directly relates to the question posed by Eidlitz

(going back to the context of architectural training): “Shall the pupil of

or in a polytechnical school?”9 It is interesting to contrast this array of

choices from the North American perspective, as there, the qualities of one particular: they would talk of the French system of the École des Beaux-

Arts, or the German polytechnical model, for instance. Those were the two distinct forms in which formal architecture education arrived to the United States, which created what it did not exist before: an academic architectural

culture.10 Besides, the fact that those two forms were labelled with the name of a country accentuated the debate on the different options for architectural education, and made more conscious the choice between them.

The attempt of Eidlitz to organize schools of architecture into branches or

families—besides being a discursive formation, in the Foucauldian sense—

can be assessed as more or less accurate, or useful; but in fact, it reveals how

11

the differences of scope between pedagogies can reach such levels that serious 13

11 “Dans le cas où on pourrait décrire, entre un certain nombre d’énonces, un pareil système de dispersion, dans le cas où entre les objets, les types d’énonciation, les concepts, les choix thématiques, on pourrait définir une régularité (un ordre, des corrélations, des positions et des fonctionnements, des transformations), on dira, par convention, qu’on a affaire à une formation discursive.” Foucault, M. 1969. L’archéologie du savoir.

Paris: Gallimard, p.53

doubts on the nature of the training become legitimate. This uncertainty

is real not only for potential architects looking for options regarding their education, but it also has an effect on the more general notion of the social

role of the architect. We could picture the embodiment of this hesitation, as

it were, by placing on the same table the work of two first-year students of

famously antagonistic models of training. Figures 2, 3 Both students—who

might not be so far in space or in time from each other—will continue their education in directions as different as it is imaginable from the illustration,

and after some years, they will receive the same name and acquire the

same right to be called an architect. If we accepted the validity of this right, it would be mandatory to attempt to offer a theoretical frame connecting

both. Hence, one hypothesis proposes that the exercises undertaken at school cannot possibly constitute the kernel of any architectural education

in themselves: they are basically means to convey something else, mainly an idea of the figure of the architect at one particular moment. If this is true,

the discipline of architecture would have the mysterious quality of being

transmitted by means of radically opposed approaches. Even further, those apparently different conceptions of how architecture should be taught at schools are working in the same manner, even if through different means.

Without willing to exhaust—if possible—this subject at the moment, we observe in the images that the direct experience of materiality present in

the first of the examples shown is obviously unimportant for that other

training that is focused so intensively on the acquirement of rendering skills

and compositional techniques. The exercise that is called fundamental at one

school, is legitimately ignored by the other. As suggested before, there must be a common ground, and a shared language in which they can establish a

dialogue on equivalent terms. The inquiry into this common ground is one of the main objectives of this dissertation.

12 The idea of discipline here, follows the definition of H. Pai, who defines it as “an acknowledgement of a body of skill, knowledge and experience that enables architects to perform something very valuable that those without it cannot—that is, they are able to design buildings.” Pai, H. 2002.

The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity in America. Cambridge, Ma.: The MIT Press, p.4 13 One of the goals of the compilation of publications on architecture education (in English language) included in the Appendix is to serve as some sort of thermometer or index of those turbulences and debates here addressed.

Inside and outside academia, the question of how the discipline12 can be better acquired, is present with unequal intensity, but with a remarkable persistency, and—as shown by James Knowles’s essay—often bonded to a turbulence coming from its wider context.13 While some schools have valued

the skills of craftsmanship, and the direct experience of the materiality of the construction process, others have chosen to codify this understanding, to the point of asserting that knowledge of the discipline can be contained almost

in its totality inside a book—an object that would subsequently become the

ultimate learning tool. Another view has stressed the artistic character of architecture and its reliance on the development of taste, as a solid argument to hold in favour of the autonomy of the discipline.

Whether the stress is to be placed on some particular skills, or on experience, taste, culture, knowledge, or rather on all of the above, is the object of endless disciplinary discussions and—sometimes—of a theory.

14

Theory and the Question How to Teach?

We must venture on quicksands where the fundamentals have always been, and still are, in a turmoil of conflicting theses.

Paul Cret

There is an area of uncertainty that appears whenever educational theories have to address fields that are to some extent creative. Falling into the

category of methodological is an intrinsic risk of any attempt to provide a

blueprint—or theoretical account—of a particular approach to the design process, especially in the case of texts that are aimed towards their direct

application in one school of architecture. Holding a delicate balance between preserving the poetry of the learning process and keeping the text useful,

concise and practical, the value of these theories is bond to their intention of putting into words some form of portrait of the spirit of the discipline.

The theories addressed in this inquiry are only those which have a practical

aim: they were written in order to be impressed, applied, in one school at a given moment in time, and whose main readers are the students, the

professors, or both. Very frequently, within those texts, there is a desire to avoid ‘killing’ the design process with an excessively deterministic approach,

so the ambiguities of speech must run in parallel to those of the design development. This allows some degree of flexibility within the structure provided, as well as space for intuition and innovation.

At a first glance, the educational theories behind the Beaux-Arts system could

seem somewhat self-referential, in the sense that their allusion and reliance

on a well-grounded tradition is stronger than their active engagement with the broader picture of their contemporary scenario. In this regard, there are

many other theories which are much more explicit and explosive about their political position; have stronger revolutionary aims; or display a greater propension for subversive purposes: we could mention places like Italy in

the 1970s, or examples driven from many radical pedagogical experiments held in push-the-boundary schools around the world.14 However, the aim of

this study is not to point out singular inspirational events or experiments, but to inquire into the previously mentioned shared ground that will enlighten the study of any kind of pedagogy and the ways in which they all

operate in order to propose a contemporary reading. Even if the description

of the design process within different theories are at odds, we will analyze

one of those theories in order to explore how the text works as a mechanism which portrays the figure of the architect in one very particular way, showing like this an inherent positioning. The present analysis will investigate in

particular the account of the first year ‘basic’ design exercise. Arguably, it is through the sometimes mundane words explaining the design process that theories ultimately construct a particular idea of what the architect is. In

this sense, the more detailed and recipe-like the text on the program during school years is, the more intriguing it will be to abstract the nature of the

architect portrayed throughout it. That is the case in the work of John F. Harbeson (1888-1986), an architect educated in the United States under the Beaux-Arts system who, after some years of practicing and teaching there, 15

14 As those thoroughly mapped out by the research project lead

by Beatriz Colomina in Princeton University: ‘Radical Pedagogies,’ currently exhibited in the Venice Biennale 2014.

Figure 4. Front Cover of ‘Pencil Points: A Journal for the Drafting Room’ December 1921, where the last of the twelve articles

by John F. Harbeson on The Study of Architectural Design was published.

Figure 5. ‘Composing the Sheet.’ Layout of the sixth article of John F. Harbeson in Pencil Points in 1921, pp.22-23. The layout and content of the first twelve chapters of the book of 1926 is identical to those of the articles, with the sole exception of the heading of the page, that reads ‘Pencil Points’ in the magazine, whereas in the book the headings show the title of the book (left) and that of the chapter (right).

undertook what nobody had attempted before: to write down and explain the principles and procedures of the French Beaux-Arts system, making it

available both to American students and professors, in their own language.

The French system had been present in North America for many years

already, successfully established in many schools across the country and in Canada. When Harbeson decided around 1921 to undertake the task of

writing, he had a twofold aim: on the one hand to provide an idea of the direction of the training, especially to young students, and also to suggest

future developments for the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design of New York (and

for other institutions alike) that could still be instilled from the French savoir faire.

The post-World War context provides a framework for the first of Harbeson’s concerns: that during the conflict, service leaves created a generational

gap, leaving new fellows without their mentors; their ‘older brothers.’

This absence was diagnosed by the American educator as the loss of one of the backbones of architectural training. Indeed, the collaboration among students had the form of a constant trade in architecture schools, where

young main-d’œuvre—handy for long and laborious tasks such as passing

to ink or rendering—was exchanged for general mentorship and criticism

from les anciens (the older students). This practice, originally from France, received the politically incorrect name of niggering. Besides, Harbeson’s desire to incorporate further virtues from the French system, suggests a twofold interpretation. On the one hand, there is a mysticism implied in the

appraisal of a mode of teaching that he could only recreate through the study of prints and books, and from the priceless teaching of Paul Cret. Not only

Cret had been trained in Lyon and Paris, but he was also “that rara avis, a superbly gifted artist who was also a born teacher.”15 On the other hand, the author shows a critical reading of the interpretation that was going on

in America, as he does not aim to overtake the French system, nor to make it any better, but he believes American schools would improve if they were even more faithful to it.16 Thus, he begins to write a series of articles in the journal ‘Pencil Points,’ which five years later he will complete and publish in

the form of a book: The Study of Architectural Design: With Special Reference

to the Program of the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design. Its publication made him the main American historian on the Beaux-Arts system.17 The fact that

a revised edition and a second revised edition were published in the same and then in the following year (1927), gives an idea of his immediate spread, which made the book to be out of print for a very long time until its recent

re-edition in 2008. In the choice of the book format, Harbeson relates to a

phenomenon that had been very strong in North America during the second half of the nineteenth century: the tradition of self-education through books.

Apprentices, whether they were already complementing their training

in the atelier with the emerging ‘night schools’ or not, looked for further references on building techniques, drawing and exemplary material through literature. The explosion of printed matter that took place around that time

provoked a mass-circulation that was “absorbed and consumed by a new kind of reading audience: an educated, urban middle class eager for cultural

identity.”18 Interestingly, Harbeson’s work falls equidistant from the two

main genres of architectural books of the time: the catalogue and the advice 17

15 Lewis, M. J. 2012. 1860-1920: The Battle between Polytechnic and Beaux-Arts in the American University. In: Ockman, p.81 16 Harbeson invested in the idea that the growing demand for a governmental department of fine arts would end in the creation of a national school, like the one in France, (École des Beaux-Arts) founded in times of Louis XIV (1671).

17 Blatteau, J. and Tatman, S. L. 2008. Introduction In: Harbeson, J. F. The Study of Architectural Design: With Special Reference to the Program of the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, xiv 18 cf. Pai, 2002, p.13f. The context of this phenomenon signaling its coincidence with new developments in technology and changes in the building industry, which fostered a radical change in the way printed discourse was produced and distributed.

Three factors are signaled: “the building of a vast railroad system, favorable legislations on postal rates, and innovations in technical processes.” Further, he classifies this newly-available literature into two genres: the ‘advice’ book and the catalogue. Interestingly, within this differentiation, Harbeson’s work, with his extended illustration of the guidelines he provides, would be situated in a balanced in between.

Figure 6. An example of the ‘advice book’ that circulated in North America: House and Home: A Manual and Text-Book of Practical House Planning, by Greta Gray (1923). Gray, a graduate of MIT and Columbia University, published a book that showed a solid understanding of construction, circulation and services, where she suggested innovations at every scale in a book that was addressed mainly to the housewife.

Figure 7. The Mercato Nuovo, Florence, Loggia of the Piccolomini, Siena, Elevation of the Pandolfini Palace, Florence: Excerpts from Architecture Toscane. In: Harbeson, 1927, pp.110-1

book. Both a catalogue of exemplary work (built or not) and a guide full

of recommendations for students and teachers; The Study of Architectural Design offers a thorough descriptive explanation of the design process, as it is ought to be done in the Beaux-Arts system.

In the book, design principles are attacked from within, in the sense that

there is little pure theorization as such: the writing is concentrated in its

usefulness, and design problems are presented in a very practical way. The general structure follows what we could call a stairway-like pedagogical principle, meaning that problems are carefully distributed in separate, well

defined stages, as successive steps gradually growing in complexity. In the Beaux-Arts system this principle is followed in a very literal sense, since

scale seems to be the most determinant factor when it comes to classify the intricacy of a problem. Bluntly: the bigger the problem, the more difficult it is considered.19 Like this, he commences with the basic problem: the analytique,

which is an exercise that proposes to examine in detail—and design—a somewhat complex architectural element, such as a doorway, a balustrade, a window with a balcony or sometimes a small pavilion. Subsequently

(when the analytique is mastered) the student is ready to attempt the next step, or ‘Class B’ problem, with slightly larger design projects, such as a

small museum, or an Hôtel de Ville. ‘Class A’ problems continue this growth

in scale, and range from bridges to tennis clubs, including pantheons and monumental architecture. Figures 8-11 At the top of the evolving process is

the Prize problem, the one that will open the door to the maximum honour: the Paris Prize, which is the American equivalent to the French Prix de Rome.

Regarding duration, there are no official requirements on how much time

should the student dedicate to each stage: progress is based on the number of successful mentions, or in the best case, winning entries, achieved among the

various competitions scattered through the year. The general organization of

the studies at the Institute follows certain criteria that is present in each of the design problems described, from the analytique to the Prize Problem.

As the analytique is more focused on the study of the elements rather than on design; the ‘Class B’ problem is to be considered the basis of the design

pyramid, which will provide a generous entry point in order to address the role of John Harbeson’s text within the Institute of Design in New York.

One of the main hypothesis presented argues for a particular understanding

of the way in which schools of architecture operate through educational theories, arguing that the emphasis is to be placed neither upon the number of skills the students are meant to acquire, nor on the notions they

possibly obtain from specific areas of knowledge; but primarily upon the definition, and conveyance of a sense of what does it mean to be an architect.

Consequently, theories on education would mainly work towards the

construction of the identity of the architect, regardless of how much of their actual content is dedicated to a detailed description of the content of each course, to the desired hierarchy of the Institution, or the particular goals of

each design exercise. The thoroughness of Harbeson’s description, together with the uniqueness of the architect he portrays through the text, will

provide an intriguing example for the unfolding of such an identity, which entails multiple facets, like an awareness of how does the architect live, 19

19 The title of two of the programs will very simply and clearly illustrate this: ‘A small memorial art library and museum’ would be a ‘Class B’ problem, whereas ‘City Hall forming the head of a great inland city’ would be a Price problem.

Figure 8. Arrangement of architectural fragments by Piranesi, used as an example of a good Analytique exercise. In: Ibid, p.45

Figure 9. Class B Problem, ‘A Small Memorial Art Library and Museum. Ibid, p.73

Figure 10. Class A Problem, ‘A Bridge,’ 1st Medal, Beaux-Arts Institute of Design. Ibid, p.231

Figure 11. Plan of the Winning Design of the Paris Prize, 1920. Ibid, p.290

how does he appear and how is he recognized.20 Historically, theories on education have been powerful among the forces shaping this identity from within the discipline, and they have introduced images of the architect that challenged prevailing conceptions. From this perspective, the study of one of

these theories will trigger an inquiry about the specific methods employed to construct identity, and the ways in which they react to the diversity of

requirements, struggles, and desires coming from the wider context. Thus, they will generate in themselves a reading of their social, political, cultural and economic circumstances, which can be potentially brought to an interpretation of the current contemporary scenario.

21

20 Recognition is inseparable from the construction of identity: cf. Calhoun, C. ed. 1994.

Social Theory and the Politics of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell, p.10 “Self-knowledge—always a construction, no matter how much it feels like a discovery—is never altogether separable from claims to be known in specific ways by others.”

Figure 12. Example of a ‘composed’ sheet, showing the integration of plan and elevation at a small scale, with details at a larger scale. Ibid, p.36

I. Atheletes in Academia

The medals go to the men who win the sprint, who top the highest bar in the pole vault, who keep a fast, even pace for miles in the distance race, and have something left for the final sprint to the tape.21 J. F. Harbeson

Repetition and competition are the two pedagogical pillars of Harbeson’s interpretation of the French system of design. In a strictly pragmatic

approach to the book, it could be said that he confines himself to giving bare

practical guidance to students, as there is very little concession to elaborate enouncements, baroque language, or poetic wandering. Even the historical

frame he provides of the origin of this system, in the Académie Royale d’Architecture of Paris, is surprisingly succinct, especially considering the

usual (yet superficial) association of academicism with a serious veneration for historical precedent. Adjectives are scarce as well, mainly present to

qualify the plates presented as examples, employing redoubled emphasis on the appraisal of work coming from France. Besides, the richness of detail

in the explanation of the design problem beautifully encompasses the exuberance of the graphic content. Doing this, Harbeson aims to captivate the eye’s attention, believing that it is possible to educate it through a

rationalized process. The role of the text is to make the images available to the eye; more easily disclosable; once its tricks are revealed, they can be

successfully repeated and pushed forward. For instance, he reinforces the intuitive approach one could make to those subtle integrations of floorplan and section within the plate of a facade, arguing that the correct arrangement

is a mastery that can be acquired, as “the important thing is to make the eye see the mistakes, the faults, in one’s drawing; if a fault is understood it can be conquered.”22 Figure 12 It is not only a rationalized conception of training

that lies behind this understanding, but also the conviction that anything can

be achieved, if enough effort is invested. This belief is imbued everywhere in

the text, appealing to the students’ ambitions, fostering their thirst for new, higher and more glorious goals.

With a rigorous approach, the book lays out the phases of an education following the Beaux-Arts method. In treating each of them in turn, Harbeson

finds an occasion to discuss the differences between those stages, the manners of composing a sheet, the strategy to follow when laying out a

schedule, rendering techniques, and recommended sources for reference. By presenting the aspects of this savoir faire with such a heavy reliance on the

twofold mechanism aforementioned—repetition and competition—the text implies Harbeson’s very particular conception of the figure of the architect.

Even if appealing to a background of learned Frenchness, this figure seems tailored in a very precise way for North American logics. These two aspects 23

21 Harbeson, J. F. 1927. The Study of Architectural Design: With Special Reference to the Program of the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design. New York: The Pencil Points Press, p.289 22 Ibid, p.48

of The Study of Architectural Design, will be unfolded from a perspective

that considers repetition as the genuine activity of the athlete, for whom zealous reiteration is the road to achieve higher goals. Competition makes the measurement of these goals possible; the athlete’s desire for the finish line is very much alike the eagerness of the Beaux-Arts architect towards the Paris Prix.

Prendre Parti, Faire une Partie: Warming up Parti: n. m.; scheme, idea, intention.

Repetition, repetition, repetition. Just as the layers of wash overlap and

complement the previous ones in order to compose a watercolour, the exercise of repetition is seen as an incessant growth: the same operations, give always a better result after various rounds of rehearsal, of reiteration, of training. This ubiquitous mechanism operates on three different levels in

The Study of Architectural Design. First, in the structure given to the design process itself, where reiterative strategies are recommended, like revisiting

the study of documents and built examples of the type of edifice at stake (for instance, a library), and providing “as many solutions as possible” for a given problem. Solving a design problem in the Beaux-Arts way entails following

a structure of steps, in which reiteration is present: study of the program,

proposal of multiple design options, critical revision of them, choosing of one, presentation of the esquisse, second study the problem, passing to ink,

rendering, final submission. Secondly, repetition is present on the level of what could be called the superstructure, or the overall organization of the

years of study at the Institute. As a totality, they constitute a declaration of reliance on the pedagogical virtues of repetition, as ‘Class B,’ ‘Class A,’ Sketch

and Prize Problems are so fundamentally alike that they are in themselves

repetitions of a very similar procedure, increasing only in complexity and scale. Finally, it could be said that the book itself dwells on repetition, as it is a tool for insisting—for repeating—what is said out loud within the physical

reality of the walls of the Institute of Design. In this regard, Harbeson’s

opening words in the preface state one of the inquietudes that drove him to undertake this task: his finding that there were many things in teaching

architectural design that he had to “say over and over again to each student

before they would finally ‘sink in’ to his consciousness and become part of his mental processes.”23 Going over an action again and again enables selfcriticism, and offers a sense for routine processes. In the words of a great

violinist “the better your technique, the longer can you rehearse without becoming bored.”24 Of these three levels in which repetition operates, I will

focus on the level of design: the exercise of taking the esquisse; if design is

indeed the core question of architectural pedagogy, the esquisse is, without doubt, the kernel of this method in particular.

23 Ibid, v 24 Stern, I. quoted in: Sennett, R. 2008. The Craftsman. London: Penguin Books, pp.37-38

Prendre parti is the key for a successful esquisse. To glimpse the centrality

of this operation within the pedagogy, it must be taken into account that the exercise of taking the parti is one of unity: of the integration of parts into a

whole, very far from a merely aesthetic, cold-hearted collage of architectural elements around an axis of symmetry. Parti is a design decision and thus 24

it deals with the whole; it is a personal position taken towards a design problem. But before taking a position, one must set the field of options, and this is done following a series of steps that are carefully, thoroughly, almost

meticulously described by Harbeson. I will unfurl this description through the elementary design problem: the ‘Class B’ problem, that is given as an example in the book:

PROGRAM CLASS “B” PROJET

The Committee on Architecture proposes as a subject for this competition: “A SMALL MEMORIAL ART LIBRARY AND MUSEUM”

A patron of art in a small city has left to the community

a sufficient sum to build a memorial to house his library of books on art and architecture, and for the exhibition of his small but valuable collection of paintings, sculpture and examples of the minor arts. This building, while a memorial to the donor, is to be free to the public, especially to students.

The land on which this building is to be built is 120 x 180

feet with the short side facing an important street. Less important streets surround it on the other three sides.

The ground floor will contain:

A vestibule, with a curator’s room and a room for the

superintendent.

A staircase or staircases leading to the floor above.

The library suitably fitted with large reading tables and

with shelves for the accommodation of large and bulky volumes.

This large room may extend through two floors and be lighted from the top. It should have an area of 2,000 square feet.

The galleries for the exhibition of sculpture and the minor

arts. These galleries should be lighted from one side only and should have a total area of approximately 3,000 square feet.

The second floor will contain:

The galleries for the exposition of paintings, tapestries and other things of that nature. These galleries should have top light. Their area is not determined, but should be as great as it is consistent with the design. (…) Required for the esquisse: plan, elevation, and section at the scale of 16 feet equal one inch. Required for the Projet Rendu: plan and section at scale 16 feet equal one inch, elevation at scale 8 feet equal one inch.25 Given this piece of text, the student undertaking the ‘Class B’ problem is asked

to respond with another text of his own making, where he should list the 25

25 Harbeson, 1927, p.77

Figure 13. Areas and relations to consider in a Class B Problem. Ibid, p.75

Figure 14. Diagrammatic proposals for the solution of the Class B Problem. Ibid, p.76

requirements involved—not only those that are explicitly expressed, but also notes on the character of the building, and notions obtained from knowledge

of similar cases, or his own views and experiences. Experience-wise, visiting

a similar building close to hand is highly recommended by Harbeson, who stresses that they should pay specific attention to the way it works. This

might sound intriguing, as it is not a concern about function what has been

commonly associated to the Beaux-Arts or academic approach. Even more, the step that follows deserves to be called a diagram, which is a graphic

strategy often regarded as an innovation of the functionalist approach: Figure

13 In the image, there is a scheme of the areas of the project—differentiated because of their function, specifically—which are connected through lines looking for the ways in which it will work better. This operation, inasmuch as it announces modern concerns on function, relates to the reading of Alan

Colquhoun of the academic tradition, who referred to it as “the beginning

of a revolution rather than the end of a period of decline.”26 Going back to the ‘Class B’ problem, a rereading of the program is recommended (again,

repetition), followed by the next “logical” step: to provide as many solutions as possible to the problem posed, all the while knowing that only one will be chosen to represent the parti taken. Figure 14, 15 It is no coincidence that

the example chosen by Harbeson to illustrate this stage takes up an esquisse

that resulted from the development of the last of the design options initially proposed. In the choice of the last design it is implied an understanding of

the increasing value of each proposal through repetition, as every solution

is regarded as a slight improvement from the previous ones, just as every exercise of the athlete, drives him closer to achieving his goal.

The insistence on effort and repetition in this method has frequently been criticised by other pedagogies that value freshness and spontaneity above everything else. Admittedly, the quality of being spontaneous is not a value

per se in this system, at least after the commitment to an esquisse. However, this does not mean that creativity is hindered, burdened, or killed. On the contrary, it regards constraints as the necessary challenge needed by the

creative mind in order to awaken its ingenuity, which will find a way to push forward design conventions. Innovation is seen not as something capricious that emerges from the void, or from the inscrutable mechanisms of the mind of the genius, but as an attainable, rational consequence of the work

of the architect. In this sense, it echoes a later reading of the notion of type, advanced by Rafael Moneo, which is also rooted in an understanding of the

uniqueness of the architectural object: it is “not only described by types, but also produced through them.” In this respect, the architect “is initially

trapped by the type because it is the way he knows. Later, he can act on it; he can destroy it, transform it, respect it.”27 Harbeson’s writing reflects a desire for all these things to happen, as he does not consider the system of

composition to be a closed one at all. On the contrary, he believes that the

so-called rigidity of the procedure will serve to clearly distinguish a great

26 Colquhoun, A. 1985.

‘The Modern Movement in Architecture,’ Essays in Architectural Criticism.

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, p.25

Going back to the design process of the ‘Class B’ problem, the choice of

27 Moneo, R. 1978. ‘On Typology’ in Oppositions n.13, September, p.23

architect from an average one, because he will be the one who will know how to overcome convention and make the discipline move forward.

parti ought to be expressed by the means of the esquisse, and presented to 27

Figure 15. Tracing paper showing a number of different ideas for a single problem in the Analytique. Ibid, p.8

Figure 16. Esquisse made from the last design proposal shown in Figure 15. Ibid, p.9

the jury of the Beaux-Arts Institute in New York. With students across the

country entering the same competition, and being evaluated by the same jury, American architecture education for the first time assumed a national

character.28 Once the esquisse was approved, a copy was meant to be archived in the Institute, which was an irrevocable moment: as the design must remain

faithful to what was presented, only adjusting in proportion, and gaining in precision, but never in content: never in parti. Figure 16.

From the point of view of the design pedagogy, the exercise of taking parti is the core of this particular teaching approach, and is undeniably one of its

most distinguished virtues, as it mirrors the engaged positioning and the quickness of decisions that are demanded of the architect as a professional.

Famously, Colin Rowe inherited this point—the parti—from the French system, and insisted on it through his many years of renowned teaching

across the US, leaving a significant legacy behind him at Cornell University,

and also at the University of Texas. Paradoxically, he would heatedly defend this concept against the arguments of another architect who had also been exposed to the French system through Paul Cret’s teaching at Penn (like John

Harbeson before him). This architect was Louis Kahn, to whom he addresses an intense and expressive letter on February 1956:

You deplored COMPOSITION because it appeared to be no more than a manipulation of forms for the sake of effect. You wanted to GROW a building, and I, I think, suggested that I wanted to COMPOSE it.

Or at least I was very emphatic about the PARTI. I still am; but I do wish that I had had the time to explain (…) that the composition of which I was speaking was the result of a process of dialectic, and not of an irrelevant fantasy or purely arbitrary choice.”29

The enthusiasm employed by Harbeson to recommend the exercise of the esquisse to his students (even if they could not complete the problem

because of lack of time, for instance) is better understood if considered as

a means to practise and improve the ability to develop a strategy. Taking

the esquisse means to accept the design problem only until the moment at which taking a parti is demanded; that is to say, until the decision on one’s

position has to come to light. It must be remembered here that positioning is always a strategic act, and therefore a political act. In a curiously similar

fashion, Harbeson took advantage of any suitable occasion to suggest to his friends another exercise of strategy (even though this one cannot be said to be strictly architectural): the chessboard problem. It can be found in letters

to his acquaintances, graciously (uncannily) integrated within completely

unrelated scenarios, such as a nativity scene. Figure 17 Doubtlessly, the result is a rather bizarre composition, yet it reflects an approach that

certainly shares some of the roots of his understanding of design teaching.

Faire une partie, to have a game (in this case a chess game) requires to elaborate a strategy, just as prendre parti is a tactical exercise as well. In

the image, we read “mate in two,” which is to say ‘to reach the end of the game in a given number of moves,’ which is in turn, exactly what the student

is expected to do with a design problem: to find the solution to a design problem following an established number of steps. As it is widely known, 29

28 Lewis, 2012. In: Ockman, p.84 29 Rowe, C. letter to Louis Kahn, 7th of February, 1956, unpublished typescript, Colin Rowe library, Charles-Moore Foundation, Austin/Texas. In: Schnoor, C. 2011. ‘Colin Rowe: Space as well-composed illusion,’ Journal of Art Historiography, Nº 5: December 2011, p.5

Figure 17. Christmas carol with chess problem, designed by John F. Harbeson, ca. 1930

chess problems, even in a limited number of moves, do not necessarily have

a unique solution. Chess is a marvelous example of the infinite variety of possibilities that can be conceived inside a strict set of rules, and of how the

mastery, the internalization, of those rules, can result in the best exhibition of ability, skill or expertise.

In this fashion, esquisses are recommended as a form of training, a way of

warming up, a preparation for more complicated problems. Following this reading, the tone of The Study of Architectural Design can be seen as an echo

of the voice of the educator, whose manner of expression takes on tones of a coach or a trainer. In this vein, the use of italics stresses some parts of the

text, in such a way that they seem to resonate with the words said (again and again) in the classroom:

(The critic) wants to develop your ideas, not his own (…) Develop your ideas as much as possible before you place your work before

him. You will be better able to make use of his criticism and you will develop your own initiative. (…)

In the development of a problem, the elements indicated in the

esquisse (rooms or open spaces in plan, motives in elevation),

may be changed considerably in proportion, but no such elements may be left out, and none may be added.30

From the perspective that considers the role of theory in the frame of the architecture school, the excerpts above are not only providing practical,

utilitarian guidance, but, to some extent, they are also building a particular interpretation of what an architect is. While discussing the features that

this interpretation presents, it is essential to connect them to their social, political, and economic circumstances and to consider how natural it would seem to place the construction of an identity in the context of an identity

crisis. Educational theories venture an understanding of the figure of the

architect, and offer a unique point of view from which to assess the state of

the discipline at one particular moment, and to track the way it reacted and repositioned itself within the existing turmoils.31 It is precisely in this context

of crisis when there would likely be a more pungent need for educational

theories, plus, they provide such moments in which theories are inclined to become powerful and achieve a consolidated state within the discipline.

American Strategies: Playing vs. Training

Life is everything but academic.

Josef Albers

The period in between the wars was obviously one of critical questions. In

America, there was a mandatory reconsideration of positions towards the rest of the world, towards Europe especially and the contemporary scenario

of changing global orders also offered an opportunity for this. Some of these questions could be imagined like this: is it, after all, possible to continue

looking at what Europe does? Can we still appraise and learn from their old institutions as if nothing had happened? …As if architecture and culture 31

30 Harbeson, 1927, pp.17, 78 31 cf. “We must venture on quicksands where the fundamentals have always been, and still are, in a turmoil of conflicting theses.” Cret, P.P. 1938. A Recent Aspect of an Old Conflict. In: White, T. B. ed. 1973.

Paul Philippe Cret, Architect and Teacher, p.83

Figure 18. The primitive man combined in one person hunter, craftsman, builder, physician, etc.; today we concern ourselves only with one definite occupation, leaving unused all other faculties. Moholy-Nagy, L. 1975. The New Vision: Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design, Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, p.10

could pertain to some mysterious separate, invulnerable realm? Certainly,

for a man like John Harbeson, who had been educated by a first-class French

professor—Paul Cret—and who considered the Beaux-Arts system to have attained a degree of universality, the answer was yes. Yes, it was possible to continue teaching architecture in the way it had started in Paris, centuries ago, and in the way it had reached North America much before the war.

Within this critical scenario, right in 1921, John Harbeson succeeds in

creating a strong connection to reinforce the migration process of the BeauxArts system into the American context, by alluding to some very precise features of their spirit and character. One of the these was deeply imbued

in that young American spirit: the principle that Ralph Waldo Emerson had utilized in the opening of his essay ‘Self Reliance’ (1841), which was later transformed into something very close to a slogan: Ne te quæsiveris extra

Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man, Commands all light, all influence, all fate; Nothing to him falls too early or too late.

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.32 These words condense one of the backbones of the culture of effort, which

dictates that everything is available to the person who is eager to take

the pains—a foundational statement in the achievement of the so-called American dream. From this standpoint, everything needed for growth and

success is already inside oneself: the only missing ingredient is will power to persevere along the way. Harbeson bases his interpretation of the Beaux-

Arts pedagogy partially on this principle: the student truly willing to succeed will succeed, and the book comes to support and ease those earnest students.

Paradoxically, “do not seek for things outside of yourself” was ingrained in

the basis of a radically opposed approach to design pedagogy, which began

to permeate to the United States shortly after the publication of The Study

of Architectural Design. The same statement was also interpreted as a call for a more balanced and complete man: one who does not concern himself

exclusively with one single definite occupation, hence, who does not leave any of his faculties out of operation. The man described received the name

of the primitive man: a model of a pre-division of labour understanding of the production system, and the archetype of an allegedly new pedagogical

approach. Explicitly contemptuous of the postulates preached by the French

academy, the ‘new vision’ criticised any disregard for the complete man,

arguing that many aspects of the figure of the architect were left outside of academia, such as the development of the ‘tactical instinct.’ Figure 18 represents the holistic world of the primitive man and his skills. It is part of the preliminaries of The New Vision: Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design,

Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (New York, 1930), which was first published in English eight years before the arrival of its author, László 33

32 “Do not seek for things outside of yourself” cf. Emerson, R. W. 2013. Self-Reliance and Other Essays. New York: Dover Publications, p.19

Figure 19. Paul Klee, Children’s Playground, 1937.

Moholy-Nagy, to America, and reedited just after the foundation of The New Bauhaus in Chicago. These two American publications were an adaptation

of a previous book, Von Material zu Architektur (München, 1928)33, and are a materialized account of a migration process from Europe to the United States that, on this occasion, was fulfilled by the same author of the original

theory. The new editions had a threefold aim: first, to spread the principles of a new understanding of design and design pedagogy; second, to universalize

them, treating the content as a presentation of fundamentals, and offering

a conceptualization of the idea of the designer which was detached from any geographical location (like the allusion to the universal reference of the

primitive man). In the third place, they wanted to sell, as it were, the idea that the school that had been founded in Chicago was a new Bauhaus, with the consequent improvement and advancement from what had taken place

in the old continent. Just as in the theoretical foundations of Harbeson’s book, it is observed in this other approach a solid reliance on the creative

capacities of every person. Thus, “everyone is talented. Every healthy man

has a deep capacity for bringing to development the creative energies found in his nature, if he is deeply interested in his work,”34 and a proof for this could be found in the work of children and of primitive peoples.

In The New Vision, there was no manifest bond to the European contemporary

reality; no intention to continue looking to the continent, as Harbeson had.

The metaphor of the primitive man (or of the child, as both are equally present) works as a mechanism of identity construction, following a parallel

logic to that of the athlete in Harbeson, inasmuch as it is implemented through

the operations undertaken in the design exercise: an identity primarily

constructed by doing. If the idea of the architect as an athlete dwells partially in repetition and competition, the caveman/child has other characteristic acts, as the basic design problem in Moholy-Nagy’s book portrays. But let

us picture this dichotomy between the caveman and the child, as illustrated

by Paul Klee in the drawing “Children’s Playground.” Figure 19 In their

convinced randomness, the graphic strokes sit in the thin line that separates the kid’s world of serious play, from the plastic references of the primitive.

In that thin line is where I would like to situate the identity of the architect

portrayed in Moholy-Nagy’s book. I will briefly open up the construction of identity in this pedagogical theory with a twofold aim: to explore another

viewpoint on the aforementioned question on what kind of education should the student receive35; and secondly, to connect through another text the operations undertaken in the basic exercise with the understanding of the architect lying behind them, which shows a critical contestation to critical aspects of its context.

In the Bauhaus of Chicago, the basic design exercise was part of a preliminary course or Vorkurs. As described in the book, the first of them is the ‘tactile table’: a sensory training in which the student should collect a series of

samples of materials, explore and rethink his perceptual relationship to them (with emphasis on the sense of touch), and arrange them in a composition.

It must be remembered that whoever collects and arranges is unmistakably

creating a narrative: a collector is also a curator, and the objects, statements, elements, that make it into the collection become meaningful parts of that 35

33 Which was the number 14 of the series of the ‘Bauhaus Books,’ each of them reflecting the teaching techniques of its corresponding author, a professor of the Bauhaus.

34 Moholy-Nagy, L. 1975. The New Vision: Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design, Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.

Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, p.15 35 Expressed by L. Eidlitz as a choice between a training in a mechanical workshop, an art studio, or a polytechnical school.

Figure 20. Tactile Table by Otti Berger. Bauhaus, second semester, 1928. In: Moholy-Nagy, 1975, p.24

Figure 21. Josef Albers and students at Black Mountain College, 1946. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

Figure 22. Matière with pebbles, Black Mountain College. In: Horowitz, F. A and Danilowitz, B. 2006.

Josef Albers: To Open Eyes. The Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale, p.128

story. A good tactile table was meant to be based on a previous idea of the

result (a design), followed on some occasions by a graphic interpretation of it. This basic exercise does not foster a finished product, but an exploratory

process, shown by the images that illustrate it: the presence of the hands, the casual arrangement, and the ignorance of the frontal perspective are

all evidences of an open ended process. The act of collecting also provides another perspective on the compositions done at Black Mountain College, and later at Yale, under Josef Albers, where colour, forms, and their interactions

are explored through arrangement, order operations: an exploration that pursues a rediscovery. Figures 21, 22 He called them matière studies.

Students collected such unsung detritus as automobile parts, broken glass, frayed rope, wood chips, bark, leaves made lacy by decomposition, tin with fingerprints on it. (They) made ‘matière scales’ of materials and fabricated new textures. (…) Finally, they created small assemblages of the materials they’d gathered.36

To find, to arrange, to assemble, to collect: this way of approaching the world around, reveals a disposition to enhance the tactical instinct and to listen, as if those elements had the ability to talk. Albers has a very relevant voice in this debate, as he reacted critically to those professors who provided a written

account of their approaches, thus expecting others to teach in the same way they did. Alvin Boyarsky shared that fear; alluding to the stultifying effect

that would have on students if their professor attempted walking in another man’s shoes. Both of them radically refused to write one theory of this kind themselves. Albers in particular explains his reasons:

I knew an assistant art teacher who had to teach a class parallel to the class of his superior. Thus in the afternoon, he gave his course just as his master conducted it in the morning. Although his master was very successful, the assistant was not. In spite of his applying the same procedure, in spite of his repeating the master word for word.

This is to explain that teaching is primarily not a question of method and technique. It may also explain that my not contributing to that book was not a withholding of private educational secrets.

It is opposition to a dangerous belief that in teaching, imitation and repetition of others are sufficient; a belief which is just as disastrous in teaching art as in practicing art.37

Albers relates to an ubiquitous fear in modern educators: that any form of repetitive learning might have mind-numbing consequences for students.

In this sense, he prefers the process of collection inasmuch as it enhances

38

the sense of discovery, of encounter—objet trouvé—that had already

enchanted avant-garde artists. They had the ability to look at old objects

with new eyes, or in Albers’ words, with open eyes, and more importantly:

to tell the public that the interest was not in the qualities of the object, but in the eyes of the artist.

37

36 Horowitz, F. A. 2006. Albers the Teacher. In: Horowitz, F. A. and Danilowitz, B. Josef Albers: To Open Eyes. The Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale.

London: Phaidon Press, p.127 37 Albers, J. 1939. On Education and Art Education. Speech presented at a teachers’ meeting, Winnetka, Illinois, November 28th. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

38 cf. Sennett, 2008, p.38

For Walter Benjamin those ‘new eyes’ were related to the sort of life given

to objects by children. Drawing a line between the act of collecting, sensorial experience, and children, Benjamin suggests that collectors are people with a tactical instinct.39 He was referring to his particular obsession: the collection of books, arguing that collection is a childlike mode of acquisition,

like touching things or giving them names. The mechanism of repetition discussed in Harbeson’s pedagogy is antithetical to the mechanism of

collection, insofar as as their goals are radically opposed. In repetition, the act of revisiting is done each time with renewed energy and interest,

but with every repetition of the student—proposing one solution after

another to a design problem—other attempts are challenged, as once one is

chosen for the esquisse, all the others are left behind: their value decreases, diminishes, disappears as the parti is taken and the student moves forward into a total commitment with it, as if no other option was ever on the table.

Collection, on the other hand, works with a contrary logic, in which previous objects or attempts are meant to remain very present until the exercise is

stopped: they cannot be left behind, as they are not totally revealed until

further additions to the collection bring new light upon them. Repetition is the activity of the athlete; collection that of the child, or the caveman. While

self-reliance provides both a common ground for the activities of repetition and collection (hence for the figures of the athlete and the primitive man),

and a contextualization for Harbeson and Moholy-Nagy’s approaches, there is one other fundamental quality in the first of these theories that erects a

wall between them: that is to say the crucial place given to the practice of competition.

The Psychology of Success Institutions may be said to function like magnets, attracting the ambitions of men.

Laurence Veysey

When it comes to competition, brotherhood is over: the athlete present in Harbeson’s argument is unambiguously an individual player. Even if through

the school years the student learns from, and offers guidance to, his fellow students (remember the trade of mentorship for niggering) there is no

team that can aspire to join forces towards the Paris Prize, as it has always been regarded as an individual battle, and the promise of its glory meant

exclusively for individual names. An American version of the Prix de Rome, the Paris Prize was a national award that included both a trip to Paris and

an immediate admission to one year at the École des Beaux-Arts. Despite the rigours of the American competition system, this prize never achieved the same status as its predecessor, as shown in the impact the Paris Prize had

on the professional lives of the winners, which cannot be compared to the lifelong prestige of those French architects who went to Rome. Prix-winners from the École left a number of landmarks that were easily recognizable 39 Benjamin, W. 1999.

Illuminations. London: Pimlico, p.64

by the wider public as products of the Beaux-Arts tradition, such as the

Opéra, the Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève, and the New Louvre. Nothing like this happened in North America, where only one of the twenty winners

of the Paris Prize is remembered by an outstanding building: William Van 38

Allen, architect of the Chrysler Building. Undeniably, there is a question of timing involved, as the decay of the grand times of monumental architecture

met North America at a later and more fatal time. As a matter of fact, the

academic tradition of teaching never achieved an independence from style

in its perception by the public, both in Europe and elsewhere. In this sense, the open-mindedness of Harbeson’s approach should be stressed, as he

clearly declares that his teaching method is not limited to the classical style: style to him is an option, a question of character of the building that should be considered and decided individually by each student when addressing

the problem. However, this statement is neither supported by the graphic content of the book, nor by the examples of the design problems provided,

whose grandiose headings, and wording in general, are calling for designs of monumental character. His refusal to fight this question of style more

Figure 23. Normandy American Cemetery & Memorial, North Loggia, 1956. John Harbeson Collection, Athenaeum of Philadelphia.

clearly was fatal for his teaching method, which virtually disappeared from most schools in the United States after the Second World War.If Harbeson

had attempted to marry the method he explained with forms other than

the classical, he would have proved that independence from style he

claimed, and maybe then, it could have transcended as a pedagogy, not as a regurgitation of French forms. What is sure, is that the teaching method would have evolved differently, and not only through such idiosyncratic

interpretations as those of professor Colin Rowe. Deliberately, through his

many years of teaching and practicing as an architect, Harbeson remained attached to the image of the classical, monumental, ornamented tradition of

the French Beaux-Arts, even if it was with a remarkably free understanding

of the rules of those styles. Very possibly, this is caused by a personal dislike for the forms of the new, modern architecture. Figure 23 He reveals this aversion in an interview conceded in the late 1970s, when asked about the design of a War Memorial:40

We didn’t want any of that damned modern stuff. We wanted something that would appeal to the relatives of the dead, people who are not interested in getting the very latest word on sculpture, people from the small towns of America.41

Appealing to the public—being able to speak the same language as they do— had always been a major concern for Harbeson, and one of the reasons why

the book was so challenging an undertaking. As mentioned above, until John

Harbeson no-one had attempted to facilitate to North American audiences a compilation of the ‘secrets’ of the French system. It could seem surprising how late this project is envisaged—having been so long since the École des Beaux-Arts began to permeate into the United States. However, there were

too many reasons why nobody had been keen to carry the weight of such

a task: one of those obstacles was precisely a worry on the reception of the book by Americans, particularly students. In the words of Lloyd Warren:

Mr. Harbeson has certainly ‘doped’ out this subject very well; his ‘dope’ is of the best and it will be of great help to those who study it attentively (…). But in this country we are too fond of ‘dope;’ we love to be instructed how to do things—and the short-cut way too; we would love that mastery of every profession could reach us

39

40 Harbeson succeeded Cret at the American Battle Monuments Commission, and undertook the design and construction of many of these monuments with his firm ‘Harbeson, Hough, Livingston, Larson.’

41 Harbeson, J. F. 1978.

Interview. Quoted: Van Atta, B. 1986. ‘John F. Harbeson, 98, Much-honored Architect,’ 24th December.

through definite progressive steps, mechanically, with a minimum of our own brain work, as we have seen a Ford car assume form through successive additions to an infinitesimal beginning.42 Warren (1868-1922), founder of the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design of New

York,43 and one of the first Americans who obtained his diploma from the

École in Paris,44 is responsible for writing the introduction of Harbeson’s book in 1922. It was possibly then, after the series of twelve articles appeared in ‘Pencil Points’ (one per month), that the idea of assembling them in a

book emerged. While Warren acknowledges both the usefulness and the

need for the work, he cannot ignore the context of American culture and education. Hence he points out one of the risks that is inevitably involved: that of turning the French system into a distributable recipe or, in other

words, of forgetting its spirit and just consuming the dope. It is the peril of repetition: it can be mechanized, making the journey of the student through the school very much like the passage through an assembly line. This could

happen if the student took the book as a shortcut, an easier way towards the

promise of a prize. Warren was not alone in worrying about this: L. Vesely explains that in the emergence of the American University one of the main

goals and concerns was to create an academic culture, which will help to rescue students from their own mistakenly narrow ambitions.45 Certainly, competition is an appealing mechanism, which can accelerate a cultural process, like that of the migration of a centuries old system. Harbeson was

very aware of this, and places competition in a central place from the very

beginning. Competition is imbued in every step of the process, through which it is advisable not to rush, in order to acquire the maximum of ability before

facing the Paris Prize. Thus, the text is a weapon to fight a possible lack of willingness among his students, to allure the desire for excellency, something

necessary in a context where there is not an homogeneous, grounded and solid architecture culture of its own. Specifically, it works in this way through the promotion of competition, and the promise of a prize. Harbeson conveys

this strongly through the book, touching on one very sensitive point deeply imbued in American ideals: the equality of opportunities. In his view, the systematization of architectural education was not only something possible,

and useful, but also the ultimate tool for the student who is willing to succeed.

At the end of the book, he unveils the principles behind his approach in a 42 Warren, L. 1922. Foreword. In: Harbeson, 1927, p.5 43 Originally a fraternity, the Society of Beaux Arts Architects shifted to an educational institution in 1916, cf. Lewis, 2012. In: Ockman, p.84 44 The first one according to Harbeson (though disputed by other authors).

45 cf, Veysey, 1965, p.213 46 Harbeson, 1927, p.289

chapter entitled ‘The Psychology of Success:’

We were all taught when we went to school that all men are born free and equal. However, we soon realized that equality

was lost after birth. Some had wealthy parents; some had relatives or friends with ‘pull,’ and so forth. But in addition to

any such inequalities that result from causes beyond our control, we soon see that inequality of attainment may result from such characteristics as the ability to concentrate, patience, a willingness to work, and many other qualities of the same sort.46

Certainly, his approach is empowered by playing a psychological card.

Harbeson knows how to make his readers react, touching on that point where it is more painful—the feelings stemming from an unfair situation— 40

only to proceed to offer his dope as a powerful means to create a positive version of that inequality, this time one in favour of the student. The

promised advancement is not based on fate, or anything beyond control, on the contrary, it implies that an architect is not a born artist, but someone that

builds up his career, like an athlete. He presents success as a free choice, that relies on effort and on the willingness of the individual, who chooses to move

forward by developing personal skills. Analytique and ‘Class B’ problems are only the first steps initiating a full training in competition, as one must prove

to have mastered them in order to confront more complex design problems.

However, the whole ‘race,’ the whole passage through the school, must be adequately planned: energy must be reserved for the final sprint, and in the

meantime, the preparation shall not be interrupted. Breaking the training could mean that there is not a chance to have the “punch” at the final moment:

The study of design in the atelier is just as gruelling a process as any sport. If you mean to win—if you want to get to the top—keep in training. At the final effort your opportunity may depend on the last ounce of energy you can put into the contest—don’t waste your vitality uselessly before that time.47

The Last Leap: Competition or Correlation The insistence on the appraisal of the individual, on personal effort and

reward—and the fact that the mechanisms of judgement are exerted centrally,

from the Institute of Design, not questioned by those who compete—carries the risk of bringing the system dangerously close to tyranny. If year after year, the awards are to be adjudicated by a jury who does not react to the questioning of students, professors or architects, who does not aim to

engage in critical debates, but regards itself as a source of ‘truth and beauty’, the structure is likely to enter a phase of decay, while the rest of the world evolves. Within unquestionable rules, the progress of the discipline ceases to

be a concern, since the comfort of some kind of establishment has been tacitly accepted. The high expectations Harbeson places upon the best students,

encouraging them to play with the rules of composition, of plan design, and of character of the building, are in sheer contradiction with the unspoken actual limits of the system, given by the rigidity of the monopoly exerted by the Institute of Design. On the one hand, Harbeson makes clear that the

progress of the discipline comes from the propositions of bright individuals, and that his pedagogical approach is not only open to this progress, but also

expecting it. On the other, there is the presence of an editor at the end of that

process, namely the jury, which acts like a filter that would, in the case of a

revolutionary design being presented, definitely bring it to a dead end. This contradiction within the pedagogy was solved in another approach, by the

connection of that dead end with the beginning of the process, an operation baptised by Frederick Kiesler as ‘Design Correlation.’

Frederick J. Kiesler (1890-1965) arrived to the School of Architecture at

Columbia University in 1937 to establish his Laboratory for Design Correlation.

41

47 Ibid, p.289

Figure 24. Diagram of the evolution of a design

by Friedrich Kiesler.

Figure 25. Re-action towards new Standards in Life Activities.

Friedrich Kiesler.

He understood the term ‘correalism’ as the expression of “the dynamics of continual interaction between man and his natural and technological

environments.”48 Architecture schools, as he saw them, were the place where to pursue the advancement of existing ‘design standards, based in science

and acute analysis of human behaviour. The laboratory focused on the

production of furniture and objects of daily use, seeking to improve people’s quality of life. This meant that the work of a designer started from the point

where the previous one had left it—the existing standard—and his task was

to improve it by first analyzing its deficiencies. According to Figure 23, the

identification of inadequacies leads to observation, which leads to discovery and then to invention. The obstacle posed by this invention becomes what should be called ‘the design problem’: the instance that calls for a project. At

Kiesler’s laboratory at Columbia, the first design problem started by making a massive chart, in which he and his students mapped a summarized history of the evolution of libraries with the aim of seeking a new concept for a

school library. Such a thing would entail a whole new school, Kiesler argued, as the idea of a school is in itself based on the idea of its library. Setting in this

way his pedagogical principles, he promoted the idea that design progresses through mutation, in a kind of Darwinian understanding of the evolution of design.49 He invests in the idea that design is a form of research, therefore, that the architect is a researcher, or a scientist.

Like the authors disclosed above, Kiesler is—through his own understanding

of the work that should be done at the architecture school—promoting a

particular position on the nature of the architect and his contribution to society. Again, he does not construct this idea by elaborating a theory on the

scientific character of the designer, or the architect, but primarily through action: through the way in which the design process is undertaken at the Laboratory for Design Correlation. The laboratory was an interwar episode that ran from 1937 to 1941, so it started right at the peak of the crisis of the Beaux-Arts system in the United States. Paul Cret refers to this crucial

moment, recognizing that “any complacency we might have once entertained

about standards and theories of Architecture has been rudely shaken during

the last ten years.”50 He is alluding to the decade of the 1930s, more precisely between 1928 and 1938, and his use of the word standard is remarkable, in that it relates to Kiesler’s own obsession. It is as if Cret was opening the door to assuming that a more flexible understanding of the evolution of design is necessary, one in which the standard is not stagnant, but mutates to

follow an ever-changing society.51 Besides, Cret also adopts a critical position

towards the system of competition, wondering if results were a fair mirror of the quality of the architecture produced, “if prize students, under another

rule left to themselves, might not have found their way ultimately to the top.”52 Within this criticism, the role of Harbeson’s book is at stake, since by

laying out the pedagogy in a systematic way, even if he considers the book to be complementary to school work, he is opening the door to the idea that

a theory of teaching can be contained within a text. If this is true—if a book can contain an educational theory—it can also be distributed, and it can be consumed: it becomes a product.

43

48 Kiesler, F. 1939. ‘On Correalism and Biotechnique: Definition and Test of a New Approach to Building Design.’

In: Architectural Record no.86, September, p.61 49 cf. Wigley, M. 2009. Elastic Pedagogies. In: Architectural Association Lecture Series, 19th November. Transcription included in appendix.

50 Cret, P. P. 1938. A Recent Aspect of an Old Conflict. In: White, T. B. ed. 1973. Paul Philippe Cret, architect and teacher. Philadelphia: The Art Alliance Press, p.83 51 Blatteau and Tatman also refer to the principles taught in Harbeson’s book as “rational, which is to say, they rested on a belief in absolute, universal standards of beauty.” cf. Blatteau, and Tatman, 2008, xii 52 Cret, 1938, p.83

Figure 26. Sol Le Witt, Silk Screen illustrating ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,’ Jorge Luis Borges, 1984. Ficciones. New York: The Limited Editions Club.

III. Constructions of a Name

Beaux-Arts to the Masses The problem of the migration process of the French Beaux-Arts system to the

United States was to some degree one of numbers. Too often it is assumed that one principle that works—in this case a pedagogical system—can be subjected to exponential growth, even more, that growth is in itself a sign of progress: an evidence of great success. There is no doubt that the book

enhanced the spread and fortification of the Beaux-Arts system of teaching in

North America, but it is unclear what the price of this operation was. Perhaps, as suggested above, the book created the illusion that the Beaux-Arts system could be commodified. Thus, the book turned the teaching method into a

commodity. Doping out the system, in Lloyd Warren’s terms, facilitated its consumption, which could take place extensively for the first time. In a

population which exceeded France’s by far, whose growth was vertiginous and heterogeneous, and whose logics had the lightness and quickness typical

of a young nation, the risk of taking the “short-cut way” was significantly higher than that in the old continent. John Harbeson is far from attempting

an argument to justify the scalability of the system exposed in his writing; from his perspective, scaling up is a natural and understandable decision, since he considered the Beaux-Arts system as a somewhat universal method,

and as such, it could be exported and applied virtually everywhere. But, just

as the polis could survive only if the number of citizens remained restricted, the French system could not remain immutable at that scale, while having

only one centre in New York. Idiosyncrasies should have been allowed, to avoid the phenomenon of massification:

Large numbers of people, crowded together, develop an almost irresistible inclination towards despotism, be this despotism of a person or of majority rule. (…) Behaviourism and automatism in human affairs–were precisely those traits which, in Greek selfunderstanding, distinguished the Persian civilization from their own.53

In these circumstances, it is legitimate to refer to the spread of the BeauxArts pedagogy in the United States as a phenomenon of massification, which was certainly eased by the publication of The Study of Architectural Design. Massification led to automatism in the interpretations of the

book, consummating the fear expressed in the foreword for the “short-

cut way”, so cherished in that country. This automatism, or inertia, led to the rigidization of the system, inasmuch as it became unable to react,

evolve or transform upon the criticism it received—or upon the cultural 45

53 Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p.43

54 Behaviourism and automatism are both present in the realm of an increasingly massified society, and they are very likely to exacerbate the poisonous effects that a competitive system may have. The two main mechanisms of Harbeson’s interpretation of the architect—repetition and competition—are present once again in a more recent phenomenon of the professional realm, what has come to be known as star-architecture. The Star-architect system is indeed tailored to a society of masses, as only a few selected ones—among the competitors—are raised above the mass and deciding upon the direction of it. Within this logic, repetition is fundamental, as it is the base for the creation of a recognizable architectural image, which is what it this kind of society demands from a star-architect.

differences it encountered within the context of the schools of architecture

55 Albers, 1939, para.7

architectural design could be done through text and images. Differently, the

that welcomed it.55 One of the worst symptoms of this is yoking pedagogy to particular building styles—those that appear in the images used as examples

throughout the book. Thus, when the notion of style fell into disgrace, the teaching system fell with it. After the Second World War, its presence

within North American schools became nearly nonexistent, with a very few, unremarkable exceptions. The effects that the widespread had on the

pedagogy, were prevented by Albers’s radical rejection to provide a written

account of his teaching method. The German professor made it much more clear that “teaching should be education, which means developing of the will

and of the ability more than the production of knowledge.”55 It must be said that Harbeson shows through his writing that he fundamentally agreed with

this Albers’s statement on what teaching was—developing of the will and of ability—as shown by his construction of the idea of the architect-athlete.

However, Harbeson’s choice of format contradicts the previous statement:

by choosing the book as a means, he cannot help but suggest that the study of teaching of Paul Cret, or of Josef Albers, for instance, arrived to other schools through much more flexible forms: mainly through their own students who remained within the academic world and became teachers as well.

We are not French and This is not Paris

56 Blatteau and Tatman, 2008, xiii 57 White, T. B. Quoted in: Ibid, xiv

It is surprising how there are no major complaints on the background of

the author of The Study of Architectural Design. Sooner or later, it must have become obvious that Harbeson did not study in France himself. It is

probable, but for now not provable, that he never visited the École des BeauxArts in Paris—either before writing the book or after. Paul Cret was his main

source of proximity to the subject, together with the study of reference books and plates, which arrived in greater number than ever, thanks to the quantity of American students and professors that went to Paris to take a

closer look of the Beaux-Arts system. Harbeson reviews some of these books and recommends to his readers several authors—Guadet, Vignola, D’Espouy, Gromort, Letarouilly—in the chapter ‘The Use of Documents,’ regretting

the absence of more built examples of the architecture he appraises so heatedly. But it was mainly thanks to Cret that “the full aesthetic force of

the École des Beaux-Arts came to Philadelphia.”56 His teaching and especially his criticisms must have been mesmerizing, or so it seems from the written

accounts of some of his students, who remember, among other things, the reigning silence in the atelier as Cret moved from table to table until late in the afternoon:

Cret’s criticism was made largely on rolls of tracing paper spread over the student’s problem drawing with a soft pencil and with a minimum of talk… (…) Frequently a half-dozen students would gather around a table where he was criticizing another student’s work, hoping to gather a tidbit that they might apply to their own problem.57

46

However significant, powerful, and valuable the teaching of Paul Cret was,

it simply cannot be assumed that one person could take the full force of the Beaux-Arts into any particular context. What he brought for sure, was

passionate teaching, that must have instilled in Harbeson the desire to share the system of Beaux-Arts with a wider audience throughout North America.

In that sense, it could be said that the book owes more to Paul Cret’s teaching than to the French École des Beaux-Arts as an institution.

Even if the book is disguised under French vocabulary—parti, charrette, analytique, esquisse, poché—and French ornamentation, Harbeson’s

explanation is ultimately devoid of most Frenchness. Within the process

of writing down the principles of a Beaux-Arts pedagogy, the text resulted to be an account of a fundamentally, profoundly American method, which somehow consummated a long-term longing for a genuinely American form

of architectural education. In some sense, Harbeson was like Pierre Menard,

Borges’s fictional character, who had taken the resolution of writing, with his own perspective and his experience, the Spanish masterpiece Don Quixote:

La empresa era de antemano imposible y de todos los medios imposibles para llevarla a término, éste era el menos interesante.

Ser en el siglo veinte un novelista popular del siglo diecisiete le pareció una disminución. Ser, de alguna manera Cervantes y llegar al Quijote le pareció menos arduo –por consiguiente menos interesante– que seguir siendo Pierre Menard y llegar al Quijote, a través de las experiencias de Pierre Menard.58 The undertaking was impossible from the start, and of all the possible means of carrying it out, this one was the least interesting. To be, in the twentieth century, a popular novelist of the seventeenth seemed to him a diminution. To be, in some way, Cervantes and to arrive at Don Quixote seemed to him less arduous—and consequently less interesting—than to continue being Pierre Menard and to arrive at Don Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.59

The Name of Those who Build However freely Harbeson interpreted the architectural pedagogy of the

Beaux-Arts, he did so at a time when it was possible to call the work done at architectural schools in France, ‘French’; in other words when there were

unequivocal signs of French character in the design process of the École,

that it was possible to recognize and admire as such. That was a time when migrations from one school to another were still traceable, when local

identity imbued the know-how of architects in different manners, according to their tradition—whether to build on it, or to react against it—and their own architectural culture. This situation allowed dialogues and multiple transfusions from one place to another. Today, any certainty about what is local in architecture schools is no longer available, since the number

of migrations within pedagogies, methods and curriculums has reached a global level, in which the French are not characterized by being French 47

58 Borges, J. L. 1977. ‘Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote.’

Ficciones. In: Obras Completas 1923-1972. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, p.477 59 Borges, J. L. 1984. Ficciones.

New York: The Limited Editions Club, p.59ff

anymore, but by something else of their own choice, available from a global

array of options, but very frequently led by a small number of schools who inhabit the centre of the debate.

What it is identified as unmistakably French within the system created at

the École and then told by Harbeson is the act of taking a parti. Taking a parti, a position, is a very conscious and political act, and is central to this method. As discussed, it has quite a precise timing: the student is expected

to take a position at a determined moment during the development of his design proposal. It is not possible to move on without presenting that parti

in a sketch, the esquisse, which is done in a few hours on a sheet with a thin black line along the borders, a square drawn to guarantee that nothing is

added or changed from one’s position towards a problem. Just as in the professional life of the architect, decisions are promptly made and, once the main direction is chosen, there is little margin for hesitation. Harbeson

presented the exercise of parti as totally independent from any question of style, emphasizing his understanding of it as a unique virtue of the teaching method, not of the architectural style.

Parti means party, just as in politics there is a Republican, a Democratic Party; one has to be selected by the voter, who does not know which one is going to win, so, selecting a parti for a problem is to take an attitude toward a solution in the hope that a building developed on the lines indicated by it will give the best solution of the problem.60

Taking the parti could bring some new-old perspectives to current design teaching, which moves in very different, maybe opposed logics. Frequently,

the worst imaginable fear of the educator is that of hindering the creativity of the architecture student with one of the following impositive mechanisms:

too much information, or knowledge (the burden of history), too much structure (the demonization of the method), or a too-early positioning (the idealization of discovery at the research stage). Thus, the student is left with

as much freedom as possible, allowing as many changes to the design as his “creative spirit” dictates, too often provoking erratic movements, which have to be disguised with a tailored narrative.

Harbeson’s athlete constitutes a clear position on the identity of the architect

that is established through a text on architectural education. Even if the act of writing a pedagogical book is criticizable from many perspectives, the

truth is that it provides one of the best ways to gain a deep insight from an architecture school, as it was being run during the 1920s. As a position, the theory of the athlete is a perfectly valid one: there is something in its

solidity that can be enlightening for the current debate on education. The

holistic nature of this theory, contrasts with the primacy of the scattered theoretical fragments of today’s schools, that are full of interesting, 60 Cret, P. 1921. Talk on ‘parti’ given at the T-Square Club, Philadelphia, September 22. In: Harbeson, 1927, p.75

challenging, provocative, subversive briefs; but a brief is not a pedagogical

project. However, those fragmented versions of a pedagogy allow processes

of breeding and intertwining to take place within the same school more

easily than with unitarian teaching projects. One clear reference to the 48

approach that is being unfolded here is Alvin Boyarsky’s pedagogical project.

His response to the problematic discussed above—whether or not to write a book on his theory on education—is even more radical. He explains that

he runs away from curriculums, and from any other form of blueprint for an architect’s education, defending the ‘anti-curriculum:’

I’ve always felt that curriculum is a horrific thing. It’s a rigid pattern, it’s done and other people have to carry it out, and

they walk around in each other’s shoes, like dead men. This has

a stuntifying effect on the teachers, and after a while teaching becomes really automatic. It seems to me that the students respond with a low level of energy as a result. The opposite of this

is a kind of anarchy, which I believe in wholeheartedly. The best definition of anarchy is that people are responsible for their own

welfare and their own progress through society and life, with a

minimum of hindrance. I’m an anarchist, in the following sense: you set up a situation which is well serviced and you provide a

platform for teachers that teachers work on their own script, their own activities, propositions, and problems.61

What Alvin set up in London was a field of possibilities, a range of choices.

But through his agenda on design teaching, he is also defending his own position on the idea of what the architect is. If Harbeson’s figure of the athlete

was constructed through the mechanisms of repetition and competition, Alvin Boyarsky puts forward an idea of the architect as someone whose first project is to design the self. Through the choice of design courses, lectures,

events, clubs, meetings, parties he attends, the student at Alvin’s school is ultimately learning to design his own conception of what the architect is.

The anarchical approach, as conceived by Alvin Boyarsky, blurs but does not destroy the idea of a shared common identity among architects, as it

delegates on each individual separately the great majority of decisions towards the construction of this identity. Naturally, it allows and allures

a process of deconstruction and questioning of that identity—of what an architect is—amidst architects themselves. This is an operation that

forcefully relies on a large amount of flexibility within the socially sustained

discourses about who is it possible, appropriate, or valuable to call an architect. It also relies on the power of institutions to confer the name

architect, within an ever diminishing agreement on what this exactly means.

Social flexibility, together with the scarce agreement on what an architect is, are mechanisms that operate towards the deconstruction of an identity. To a

certain degree, it is a battle against language and its typifying effect; against

the stubbornness of words, and their tendency towards determinism. The creation of institutions, it must be remembered, was bound precisely to

the defense of what was signified by the word architect, and to preventing “scandalous appropriations” of the term. That effort of building a name to

differentiate architects from other professions was based on the desire to acquire a clearer identity, whose character can be questioned in many forms,

but in a very particular way through educational theories, which have the tools to reshape it. Having succeeded in the deconstruction of this identity, it might be time to construct it again.

49

61 Boyarsky, A. 1983.

Conversation with Rodrigo Pérez Gómez. Quoted: Boyarsky, N. 1996 ‘Ideal Practice: Architecture and Education’ In: Symposium, 20th of June, Architectural Association School of Architecture.

APPENDICES

Appendixes

1 2

List of Publications on Architecture Education

Lectures Transcribed for the purpose of this research

55

Academicism Lives On

59

Ideal Practice: Architecture and Education

71

Elastic Pedagogies

53

63

55

56

[Key]

57

Academicism Lives On Alvin Boyarsky, Caroline Tisdall, Peter Cook, Kenneth Frampton, (Leon Krier) Date Running time Abstract

29/11/1976 108 mins

Alvin Boyarsky on the International Institute of Design, the

‘academy’, architectural education, and his own programme for the AA that

puts him outside of the academic fold. Caroline Tisdall on power structures, the resignation of the 1970s, and an educational model communicable to a wider

community concerned with issues not disciplines. Peter Cook on containers. Q &

A chaired by Cook, featuring Boyarsky, Tisdall and Kenneth Frampton answering lengthy responses from the audience.

Transcription

ALVIN BOYARSKY: I have a certain disgust for the contemporary academic situation.

The existing institutions, while acting as repositories for fantastic resources–

people, equipment, money, and experience–they also have various harms, such

as the isolation of the institution and of the people within. Besides, the difficulty

of making any expense that has not been previously budgeted, makes impossible, or too costly, to propose something for the day after; something you might have

thought of the day before. This kind of angst came during my period in Chicago, just after 1968, when I received a travel grant. At that moment, it seemed clear

that the academic institutions in society were about to transform; somewhat they did–what is unclear to me is to what effect. At that moment, around 1969-1970

architecture schools in France, for instance, revealed that the Beaux-Arts system

had disintegrated, and they were all starting newly without any tradition. In Italy

the situation was even worse, were Universities had been opened up for everybody who wanted to come; for instance, now (1976), the school of architecture in Rome

has around 20.000 students, Florence 7000 or 8000, Turin has over 2000 students, and architecture diplomas have become liberal-arts degrees. Some schools in

Germany or Switzerland, while being highly organized and well founded, have

the same malaise that it is noticeable in the United States; that people turn up in academic quarrels and become isolated from each other, waiting for the outside world–whatever that might be. In Vienna, a lot of activity, noise, and ideas were

being provocated, similarly in Japan. In retrospect, what I tried at that moment was to set up an institution, the International Institute of Design, which would offer

a platform for people to talk, to come into a sort of a marketplace for ideas, and for a brief period of time (six weeks). Possibly, through the contacts they make,

and through the information it would be there available, and the problems they

would be introduced to; those coming would probably have enough material for some time to work on, and operate with outside their own practice or academic institution. What was also required was a mixing of problems; of very local

problems, with those typical for many countries of the world at any one time. For

instance, the issue of the redundancy along waterfronts and international harbours of the cities, which is a conversation which is equally truth for Rotterdam, as it

was for New York or Chicago, Liverpool or London, would be able to develop some

comparatives and conversations. Or problems regarding developing countries. This

was essentially anti-institutional, anti-academic, it was an attempt to find a possible 59

substitute for everyone’s education. All those people, like West-coast Americans

that were trying to drop out and develop an alternative society; or those in the arts

avant garde movements, might be given a platform to raise this issues and might be given the opportunity to meet each other. This institution would be self-financed, costing practically nothing, which could seem some kind of dream, but it actually worked; it is how utopian socialist European institutions are organized. In the

anglo-saxon countries, Britain or the United States, it was possible to get funds for

architects to finance not the institution, but the modest fee of the former, so people could come. It was also possible to use, shamelessly, the resources of the city,

which I did in London: the ACA, the Bartlett, the AA would provide their facilities, libraries, rooms, typewriters. It was actually possible to move in, for six weeks,

several hundred people and use unused situations in the city: all that became the modus operandi. It was also possible to get funds to do research projects.

Above all, it was not a novel idea, but the novelty was that it worked fabulously

well, and when I was invited in 1971 to pick up the chairmanship at the AA, I had to make a very difficult decision. The institution at that moment was supported by 30 countries, with almost 90 sponsors, built up with tradition and style, and

it was getting ready to become something more than a six-week a year thing. The idea I had about the AA was that there had to be someplace in England where

architecture, problems of the city and the general culture of architecture could be opened up. Basically, the idea was to incorporate the place, its history and

traditions, into a wider framework, and to give the teachers the sufficient space, budget and support. Students, thus would be able to put together their own

education, through the series of activities, of units they were participating in.

Those units being able to engage in the outside world with their subjects of study.

This self-operating system would allow people like myself to fade out. Society, in

Britain at this point, shows very little signs of optimism; and I am being optimistic.

I don’t see the present period as one that is begging for that tough curriculum,

or method of teaching like the one the Beaux-Arts academy in Paris at the end of

the nineteenth century was promoting. I think the quest now and over the last 15 years, what to do which is appropriate and how to anticipate it, not to get in the

way of young people, through forcing them through a method on their education,

but to use the sensibilities of dozens of people to allow the situation to shape itself and form itself.

CAROLINE TISDALL: What I see in the 1970s reflects more a period of resignation rather than intense activity, as others have claimed. Education at the moment is

under a power structure which is moving towards bigger and bigger units, this is

reflected in British industry, also in the units of higher education and polytechnics, but in secondary and even primary education as well. The bigger the structure,

the less possible it seems to evoke any change. If we are talking about alternatives to the academy, then we have to tackle the issue of who pays for it, who is it for: is it any kind of activity or particularly art activity. We have talked about expanding

disciplines, but we also have the problem of specialization, which many times allow the funding, but at the same time close the institutions from the rest of the world.

How can we extend the activity of the institution to the rest of society, how can we communicate it and in which forms? None of our educational institutions give us the tools with which to work.

PETER COOK: What strikes me about one traditional aspect of the institution of 60

an academy is that it presents a framework which is necessarily abstracted, and

therefore is a container that we fill up with liquids. What intrigues me about the academic tradition is not only the intellectual, or political nature of it, but the

notion of it as a mechanism. What intrigues me is that there is a new feel from

the youngest students coming. There is a need of a discussion about the nature of art magazines, not substantially different from a discussion of the instruments of

teaching. The structure, sometimes is perverted, sometimes elevated, by personal charisma. Certain individuals at certain periods of time have been able to leap

from the pedantry of the situation; there is the problem of being too correct, too pragmatic, too exact on the point. Academicism had marvelous instruments for

accommodating leap situations—I hope that I am not defending it too much. We would like to hear about the models of this alternative institution.

CT: The models are in three levels. First of all, a research level, whose function is

certainly to get funding for a specific body. The process of that research is open. The 70s is intense in an introspective way, much more collective. That area of research has to be of a high academic level and has to interact with the workshop areas, so the practical and the theoretical influence each other, and they are a way of discovering new ways of disseminating information.

KENNETH FRAMPTON: I think there is an unspoken element in this conversation:

one of the problems that struck the Western world, I think is that we have a society that has been conditioned by the media. Since the World War II, it is expected from

every building to stand in the name of progress and in the process of consumption.

The welfare state was supposed to see a redistribution of wealth, and maintaining

that condition. When you start to analyze this problem, all sorts of other problems start. It is painful to put it bluntly. For example, the academy is involved with the question of the guilds, the issue of the division of labour. The problem of the art

schools, the question of contact with the society is the same that it was in Ruskin’s time.

LEON KRIER: Schools and academies are in themselves the instruments that

perpetuate the alienation between knowledge and doing, between the head and the hand. (Recording incomplete).

61

Elastic Pedagogies Mark Wigley and Brett Steele, roundtable discussion moderated by Mark Cousins.

Series

AA Lecture Series Autumn 2009

Abstract

This roundtable discussion looks at architectural education

Date Running time

19/11/2009 45 mins

today and the challenges facing schools and public institutions in the context of contemporary and urban culture. Mark Wigley is Dean of Columbia University

Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He is a founding editor of Volume magazine,with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Bouman. Brett Steele is Director of the AA School.

Transcription

Mark Cousins introduces Mark Wigley, from Columbia University and Brett Steele.

The main aim of the table is to pose the question of where architecture education is at the moment.

MARK WIGLEY: The room where we are, the AA Lecture Hall, is a key weapon in stupidity reduction, because the audiences of this room have seen it all before,

many times. This room has a strategic role to play in filtering and clarifying the

capacity of discourse. The other room like this is in NY. There is an obvious link

between the two schools (AA and GSAPP), which comes from the fact that Bernard Tschumi took a lot of the generic material of this school, that he had learnt from Alvin Boyarsky in this school. He refers to the fact that there are more than one

million of architects in the world, and almost all of them are are all being trained in such a way that they are almost guaranteed that they would have no significant

impact on the built environment or on the intellectual environment surrounding

them. If the architect is an intellectual, someone that makes not buildings but ideas about buildings, the primary responsibility is stupidity reduction. The inadequacy of schools in this task makes us address this issue of architecture education. The

technology that has been developed in New York with this end it is not sufficient: it is necessary to go beyond that, and probably in a conjoint effort with the AA. The building of GSAPP, is Neoclassical, symmetrical: what it tells to the world is:

everything is ok, everything is certain, it is well controlled. The technology of

Columbia was invented by William Ware, a New York architect, trained in Paris, in

the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts system. He is responsible for the idea that you could have architecture schools inside university. The way he could do it was through

photographs from all over the world that could be taken inside university, where to analyze them. The only people who disliked the idea of architecture being inside

that university were the architects of that building, so they put them up in the attic space, which means not quite inside MIT and not outside either. The main

argument of William Ware was that architecture was an unexplored territory, so the main goal of the school was to do the research necessary to produce a library that

will then communicate the wisdom of the field. The studio spaces connect directly

to the library, on the drawing boards are images that will maybe become part of the library. When the school of architecture starts in Columbia, in 1881, there are two students only. For some huge mistake, the school got separated from plumbing, 63

maybe because everybody understands that plumbing is fundamental to the organization of the building and that architects are the experts in the non-

fundamental aspect of buildings. I read as a huge insecurity the fact that the spaces are claimed by the means of being occupied by cubicles, and bits and pieces of

architecture are on the walls, like a dog that territorializes by peeing in the corners.

This fragments of architecture are creating a hyper protected laboratory

environment, where they are defending themselves by the plaster clusters. To chose to be an architect means to get some kind of infection for which there is no cure,

and therefore to spend your life arguing with other architects about the possibility that there is such a thing called architecture and if it speaks or not about the

highest aspirations of society. So it is an extraordinarily romantic field, and the romance is based in the studio. Then, they moved uptown to the new campus,

there, the studio space there gets larger, as the confidence in the field grows and

similarly the library is here not directly connected to the studio space. The studio

becomes an isolated space to creativity and there are other spaces for research. In the main library there is also a space dedicated to architecture. So the reference

library, quiet, well organized, dignified is in growing contrast to the studio space, some kind of bedroom where people are multitasking in a very electronic

environment. The purpose of the school is to network architects together, so they

can speak to each other as if in some kind of stock exchange of ideas. William Ware

is basically saying that the school is a research unit. To maximize the capacity of the school as a research unit you need parallel processes, so not only architecture, but urban planning, urban design, historic preservation, real estate development, critical, curatorial and conceptual studies. Within this programmes there is a number of unprecedented parallel tracks going on, among which there is an

ongoing exchange. That does not constitute yet a school of architecture, then you

need cross programs between the programs. So, the idea of an architecture school as a place where there is people learning how to make buildings, expands to be

anybody who has an interest in the future of the built environment, then expands to this much wider field. In the 1930s, Friedrich Kiesler started his laboratory for

design correlation for Columbia University, doing a massive chart, which is actually summarizing the history of the evolution of libraries. Students are working for a new concept for a library, not just a project in the school, but one that would

imagine a whole new school, because if the school is based in the library, new

library means new school. For Kiesler, design progresses through mutation, in a

kind of Darwinian understanding of the evolution of design. He is investing in the idea that design is a form of research, through a kind of calculated mutation. This

was also directly linked to his work on new concepts of vision and ultimately gave birth to his famous out of the time gallery, that is to say, a total confusion between architecture, research, exhibition, production, ideas and so on. That model has

become a kind of default model in the school for its wide range of labs, in which

what it means to be educated, what it means to create, to publish, to broadcast, all

of these are collapsed into a single entity. But this is still not enough, it is necessary to go wider, to go between schools, through issues of sustainability, issues like that of the stupidity of the building industry, or for instance the issue of data

visualization, arguing that the architecture of the future is an architecture of

visualizations. Although the bandwidth is getting wider, I insist that it is still not

enough to constitute an architecture school. So, there is a limit to this model, there

is a limit to the idea of the nuclear reactor, where you bring the base mines from 65 different countries and force them into an incredibly dense, viral exchange in an 64

open source mode, then they explode into the world and do damage, that model,

even if it is the maximum that one can do within the university, is inadequate in a moment in time where more than 50% of the new buildings are being built in

China, in a moment of time in which cities can go from half a million to ten million in five years. Essentially, the capacity of the university is totally inadequate to the

questions that are raised, so we have to invent a new system, which is the studio X system, which is the inverse: taking the most fragile space of the university and placing it back out around the landscape. Studio X is a gallery, a live interface, a

lecture space, a work space. This was implemented in a number of cities, starting from New York to Beijing, Aman, Rio, etc. In his view, the way a teenager absorbs multiple ways of information in real time is identical to the way the most of

advanced scientists and the most advanced people operate in a real time, open

source mode. Wigley argues that it is a very interesting moment, he is struck by the

fact that Brett has brought all the AA back into one spot, where you have something like the reassembling of the mechanical infrastructure of our field, as in Columbia,

when you get through the front door, you get all the input, output facilities: lecture hall, gallery, store, administration, library, etc, and you have to go up and away to

find the studio spaces, just as in Columbia. All of the input, output spaces have to do with confidence. The trick would be, to face the fact that in today’s world, data is

accumulating much more quickly that what can be stored, which means data is not

even data. We need to start imagining our schools as real time, processing stations, so we can no longer simply divide input, output functions in the school, from the

processing part, which means maybe, we could maximize two kind of contradictory modes: one is the nuclear reactor mode, which is the traditional mode for example

at Columbia, which is, fragile studio spaces in which any idea can be taken seriously, surrounded by a sort of fortyfied system of input and output. But also the opposite: the deterritorialized network, in which the fragile studio spaces are distributed

around the world, and all of the mechanical infrastructure is inside the studio, not

outside. If we maximize these two models, at least we would be able to say we have pretty much taken the available pedagogical infrastructure and run it to his

maximum. It is very interesting to see how one can produce a dance between an

insulated space of creativity, as reflected in the AA building and in Columbia, and a totally non-insulated, fragile, risk-welcoming kind of environment, distributed around the world in which the question would be, in which way would a

deterritorialized network, able to respond in an incredibly agile way, in which way would that change the architecture of the school. I find that Brett and I have a very

similar understanding of this question and the experiments that can be done in this area.

BRETT STEELE: There is an interesting correlation between New York and London, in an age when everyone is talking about disperse fields, ambient, noise, global infrastructures‌ The title of this conversation (Elastic Pedagogies) should be

attributed to Mark Wigley. I am not entirely comfortable with elasticity, or the kind of constant deformation of things, in an era of rampant formalism in architecture, but it is just the right term to talk about pedagogies and how they reconfigure

or refigure. I will present a series of examples of architecture culture in a frame of a 100-year period and sketch the life and death of what I call the modern

architecture school, which starts with Henry van de Velde’s writings about the need for a new kind of school. In 1909, his Academy of Mechanical craftwork was the

first attempt he made to create a pedagogy that made sense with the industrialized 65

world. Architecture culture is currently going through the greatest wave of

industrialization that it has experienced in a century. It is not the industrialization of materials (the force at the beginning of last century), but today’s reality is one

in which architectural culture itself is being industrialized. The twentieth century is about the professionalization of architectural knowledge, one that has affected

architecture schools as well and on top of that, the industrialization of other layers

such as histories and theories as an activity, not just professional practice, and most interestingly, for the first time ever, the industrialization of tools that architects

use to think about architecture. This new situation puts into question whether a model derived from a century ago is still adequate for the kind of challenges we all face today. Examples of institutions being challenged more poignantly right now are the american newspaper, the dramatic drop of the New York Times in

the stock market is a signal of the need of a transformation. There are five points towards an elastic architecture. First, I am within the descendants of a tradition that comes from Walter Gropius, the head of the Modern architecture school,

who stole his principles from Henry Van de Velde. One of the interesting things

about the Bauhaus is that it lived such a short period: it worked with Gropius for seven years before the students voted to throw him out in 1926. It is interesting to see how quickly that school became a sort of tourist destination for Modern

Architecture, it can be read in the diaries of Ise Gropius that they were sometimes so many visitors the students can’t work, hallways are crowded, names like

Hilberseimer and Mies are mentioned among those passing through the hallways;

so it becomes an example of this idea of the school being more an airport, a portal, than a destination that is inhabited. The transformation of Harvard can tell this

same story through the conversion of Robinson Hall, which was built as a copy of the École des Beaux-Arts’s sculpture gallery, to the 1970s communication space

where architects don’t stare at dead rocks to understand the principles of building, but simply convert it into an inhabited space in which the constant exchange of information between them becomes a new model to guide this industrialized

architectural activity. Point 2: Studios, like computers, are increasingly invisible.

The site of experimentation goes far beyond the literal building and it is quite

apparent in the physical transformation of schools. Point 3: schools have become the core technology of architectural culture. Technology is the sense that it is the way in which we organize ourselves as a form of work, that communication is in itself a technological project. Technology isn’t just the hardware, technology is

exhibiting a work within a space that orders and organizes learning and teaching.

Technology is the machine, the IIT, that Mies builds to produce more ‘Mieses’ to

the point that when he takes a picture of the studio tells the students how to pose

for it. Around that time Andy Warhols sees the factory not as a place of production but a place of atmosphere and experience. He takes that as the artistic project in

the studio, famously hires a group of people to do the paintings so he could make

the setting that worked so well for a few years in NY, he choreographed that place of meeting and created that critical mass that could turn the world of art upside

down. We live in an era where the more interesting technologies are the disruptors, those that disrupt other technologies or other forms of organization and learning.

The mobile phone reconfigures the space not just of cities but of the entire world.

Point 4: an architectural school is better as a prototype, than a building type.

Schools did emerge, like most social institutions, in Europe in the eighteenth-

nineteenth century as another modern building type, alongside museums, hospitals etc, the school itself was another kid of type. As they evolve, they become spaces 66

defined by their ad hoc assembled character. The experimental or prototyping sensibility, building one to one, is one of the things that in a school like the AA

become fundamental in order to reject the idea of a curriculum being the primary organization or structure of the school. Point 5: schools made audiences, not

architects. The mistakes many schools make is that they focus too closely on a

definition of themselves in relation to the production of an individual architect, but the question is what condition do you create for students to be evolved in a way

we couldn’t picture before. In a school like the AA or GSAPP, we focus in creating

settings where we can deal with the audience problem of architecture. The Crystal Palace was portrayed in the Times as the building that will destroy European

civilization, because it was the first gathering of large scale crowds in Europe, it’s a good moment to register this industrialization not just of materials and structure, but of new ways of gathering and communicating ideas.

CD2

Mark poses a question to both speakers, given the ongoing transformations on

architectural pedagogy and settings for teaching, what would the difference be in the composition of the student that such a system would call forth. There was a

certain kind of subject, student, appropriate to the previous kind of regime, so what would a student appropriate to your shared points. Or possibly, a teacher.

Wigley starts saying that he is not certain that they have students, on one level he is tempted to say that what they want to reproduce is children, so they offer the

opportunity for people to do the activity that has been defined as the activity that precedes being an adult: like treating a little model as if it were the real thing and

so on. Architecture schools create a kind of a limbo zone that offers somebody the opportunity to never grow up. Because the contract is that you will never grow

up, that you will be forever in a space of fantasy, you can then internalize the fact that you are not going to get paid, that you are not going to have weekends, that

nobody will quite understand you, that nobody will fully love you… you will enter a field in which you will enter competitions and you will be destroyed and you

will just be routinely subjected to be totally in love with your project and believe that your project will change the face of the universe; then lose, because of some

minor problem, which has nothing to do with the quality of your project and then you reboot again. In a sense, architecture schools have created the possibility of

not being a student and thus not entering adulthood, perhaps especially in AA and

GSAPP, where it is said “we are not going to really be your teachers, we don’t really know, we are not grown ups either, we haven’t figured out architecture, we are

in love with buildings and we don’t know why we love buildings so much: maybe you could help us understand that, maybe we could do it together.” There might be a kind of reactionary turn in both presentations which, listening to what has

been said, it sounds very much like Le Corbusier and the others in the 1920s: Le Corbusier was saying “they world changed, steel and glass architecture changed the world, the only people that seem not to get it are the architects, we need to

produce architecture that will not be in the future, it already exists, back in the

middle of the nineteenth century, so it’s towards an architecture, not towards a new architecture.” In our defence, I will suggest that our (Brett and himself) argument is slightly different, namely, that if the role of the architect is to produce a kind of hesitation in everyday life, and in that moment of hesitation you see your built 67

environment for the first time, and perhaps for a moment you think differently; if you think differently, maybe you will live differently and maybe you will have

a different society. It is that kind of unbelievable optimism of the architect: that a small tweaking of a door knob will change your relationship to the door, and

therefore the future of the universe. The question then becomes: in today’s world, moving at the speed that it moves, and under that conditions, how would one

stage a hesitation in an environment. If there is anything we have learned for the last 3000 years, is that the irrelevance of the architect has not at all interfered

with the existence of the figure of the architect, so the question is: in which way

to be redundant? Wigley argues that there is a need to get closer to the speed of

the world we’re in, in order to then construct those hesitations. So, it is not about

inventing an architect that matches the world of today, it actually means, inventing an intellectual who is able to create some kind of hesitation. In fact the role of the architect is to create a different image of the world, the question is: how could an

architect allow us to see the world in different terms. It is not about us (architects) getting so fast, so maybe we run the risk of reintroducing the idea of the student.

Brett argues that the role of the student is that of the disruptor. His history of this place (AA) is sometimes unexpected forms of disruption. He signals the growing

utility of slowness in a world that is accelerating every season. Architecture moves

like a dinosaur, it is an incredibly slow-moving apparatus. A student today would be one who has faith in not doing everything instantly.

WIGLEY: people that run schools are a little bit like running a dinner party; it is

not about one of there being one of the the meals, being the ideal meal and it is not

about the fact that the meal wears “themes” as a chinese meal, it has to do with the kind of conversation, what you are most proud of is not any individual thing, but you might be incredibly proud of what someone else did. And secretly you know that behind the scenes you did a few things that enabled that person to perform

beyond their expectations. This was very true for instance for Peter Cook: one of

the reasons that made him a great teacher is that it really doesn’t matter what you take in front of him, it could have been something we would never had produced in a million years, but he’s got to talk about it and interact with it. The role of the

director of the school is like somebody that makes a good garden or a good meal: it’s always an indefinable something. For all of us, when we go back to our own

school, we always miss that secret thing that it was there when we were there. If you are a student of the 60s you are appalled by the 70s’s disinterest in radical

politics; if you are a student of the 80s, you cannot imagine that someone is not

talking about algorithms and so on. The trouble is: you can never say, while it is happening, what it is, that the students will remember 4 or 5 years later. When

a school is genuinely experimental, what it means experimental is: we just don’t know, which of the projects and who among the people will be the ones that, in memory, will become mythological.

Peter Cook told Brett, when he was his student, to never walk in into another

unit’s space, because you will contaminate the problem. Mark Wigley wonders

about the outcome of asking Peter (Cook); what would your way of drawing add to architecture as a field? In a certain sense, this is at the edge of your understanding,

it is close to artwork. He also speculates about that hard line present in all of Peter’s drawings have on the outside of every volume. The moment he realizes what is the 68

contribution of his drawings, he would probably stop drawing. Mark feels schools of architecture are the same: you just do and you hope that people like it. Mark

Cousins intervenes: it would seem to him extremely foolish for someone to proceed by starting to say: “architecture is...” if someone says that you might as well go to sleep, because you are going to get some kind of essentialist nonsense. It would

be particularly disastrous if a dean adopted that position, because they are over an institution that wants to ask the question, not to be told what the answer is.

If the AA or Columbia weren’t in some sense pluralists in terms of the approach

to architecture, they wouldn’t be able to evoke the experimental enthusiasm that

they do. This is at a theoretical level but also practical level of a kind of democratic governance. Mark shows the ambivalence of the argument praising The Projective Cast by Robin Evans, claiming that it shows that architecture really is about drawing; he finds it an incorrect view of the book.

Following a question, Mark Wigley confesses his nostalgia for the idea that space, in the context of the school, matters. He pays attention to the actual space of

education because having the right space will allow to think about electroni8cs

differently. Not by accident, the schools that think about an experiment with the

spatial organization, also experiment with tweets and blogs and social networks.

There is still a vestigial belief of the architect that part of the physical environment

can be articulate by the non-physical world. Vitruvius was not a very good designer, he was fortunate enough to be friend of the sister of Augustus Caesar, so he gave

him a pension to write his scrolls. He makes this argument that is still so resonant: he launches the idea that the architect is an intellectual; one of a very particular

kind, who knows a little bit about almost everything, but not a lot about any one

thing. So he sells an idea of the architect as one that is able to synthesize multiple sources of information. The argument that architecture is all about drawing was

made by Vasari and others in the so-called Renaissance in an attempt to clarify the nature of this intellectual activity, as drawing was not in the head and not in the

world either but somewhere in between. The meaning of professional has changed.

The school could be seen as an incubator of new thoughts, tendencies, etc. But

when professionals define what they are doing, they describe a school: research

capacity, broadcast capacity, open to ideas, etc. This is a moment in which we could radically increase the capacity of the traditional figure of the architect, simply because we have so many colleagues.

69

Ideal Practice: Architecture and Education Zaha Hadid, Robin Middleton, Dalibor Vesely, Peter Wilson.

Date Running time Abstract

20/6/1996 93 mins

A symposium jointly organised by the AA and the Alvin Boyarsky

Memorial Trust to coincide with the publication of The Idea of the City, in memory of AA Chairman Alvin Boyarsky. The publication evolved from a 1990 symposium

on the city held at the AA in celebration of Alvin’s life. ‘Ideal Practice: Architecture in Education’ is structured around Alvin’s role in setting up an alternative model to the relationship between architectural education and architectural practice.

Moderated by Robin Middleton, the symposium includes short presentations by Zaha Hadid, Dalibor Vesely, and Peter Wilson.

Transcription:

NICHOLAS BOYARSKY: Before being a book, the content had the status of

an underground publication in Xerox form, as the economic support came

unfortunately very late. Its theme is education, in which Alvin was certainly

interested. Education allowed to take an architectural idea to the edge, to an

extreme and then see where it could go. His contribution to that realm might be to have taken the risk of freeing a situation from ordinary controls: academic,

administrative controls, for instance, and then allowing a culture to take place.

I have decided to open this event with a quote of a conversation Alvin had with

Rodrigo Pérez Gómez in 1983: it is entitled anti-curriculum: “I’ve always felt that curriculum is a horrific thing. It’s a rigid pattern, it’s done and other people have

to carry it out, and like this they walk around in each other’s shoes, like dead men.

This has a stuntifying effect on the teachers, and after a while, teaching becomes really automatic. It seems to me that the students respond with a low level of energy as a result. The opposite of this is a kind of anarchy, which I believe in

wholeheartedly. The best definition of anarchy is that people are responsible for

their own welfare and their own progress through society and life, with a minimum of hindrance. I’m an anarchist, in the following sense: you set up a situation which

is well serviced and you provide a platform for teachers that teachers work on their own script, their own activities, propositions, and problems. Teachers quite often

produce open-ended situations. This is the kind of anarchy which I think is healthy.

It’s not a destructive anarchy. People don’t throw bombs at each other, but it is a

sort of anarchy that individuals contribute to the sum of activity and the work of

the school. Everybody is inventing all the time. It is often stated that the world of the AA changes every three or four years, and looks entirely different. I don’t see it that way, I see incremented change all the time, it is a cast of characters, it is a

development of the individual teachers and of the individual students. From my

point of view, it can be corrected by adding someone who believes in ‘this,’ or who does ‘that.’ Although it is volatile, self-correcting and has its own energy, it is also

in a way, manipulable. I can manipulate it just a little bit by adding something from someone. I think that is the basis of the anti-curriculum.”

ROBIN MIDDLETON: I would like to start by talking about the teaching of history in architecture, which I understand can provide a basis for the understanding of 71

the possibilities of architecture, which have changed remarkably in my lifetime,

and particularly at the AA. When I was first trained as an architect, history was a

very rudimentary affair, in a way. I went to a school of architecture which had been

sustained on the ideals of Le Corbusier, thus its history course was focused entirely

in ancient Greece and on the Italian Renaissance. Unfortunately, one would not have contact with any real architecture. This was mediated through Banister Fletcher, which meant reducing all architecture to some miserable diagrams appearing

in one page containing plan, section, elevation and some details of the column.

That does not take one very far. Locally, there were people like Rudolf Wittkower, who wrote a book called ‘Architecture Principles in the Age of Humanism’ or

Colin Rowe, who changed the whole way of thinking about architecture itself

and architecture in relation to architecture in the past. He offered a whole way of looking at a buildings as well. When I started operating in general studies at the

AA, Alvin was not just encouraging risk (as Nicholas Boyarsky mentioned), he was in fact opening up all possible ranges of choice. Choice is a very important aspect of the whole teaching here, both in general studies and in the unit system. If one

looks at the events list of the time, there was far too much happening: up to three

lectures every night. But there was not very much of a common culture, there was a sudden diversity, too many new people in London at the same time and nobody knew where to place them. In that situation people had to learn to decide what

they wanted and needed. Alvin did set up this extraordinary situation, there was

a sort of free hand on who came and went. It was a whole realm of profusion. One cannot be ultimately sure that it worked. But it certainly was an antidote to the

structured, doctrinaire approach and a way to allow divergent opinions. The units under Alvin ceased to be isolated, as they had been previously, they interacted in

healthy dialogs and angry arguments. In the unit system this worked, but I am not quite sure that in terms of history. Peter Smithson, for instance, complained, and

he would not come to the school. After a certain time, I asked him why and he said: “it’s just a circus, everybody does their own thing, there is no coherence, they have not thought through what they are doing in any way.” There was also disbelief, reaction against the system. But in the years when history was taken up and

miserably misused—I think it is called postmodernism or something like that—

Charles Jencks was lecturing here twice a week to a packed lecture hall. Despite the fact that Charles used the most seductive imagery, straight from wherever it was,

before any of the magazines had published it, the students resisted postmodernism in an extraordinary way: they did exercise choice. Perhaps in the situation of

‘having too much’ there was an underlying sensibility, in which people knew what

was worth. Another side of the whole problem, what it is really sadly lacking is the architectural historians. Architecture history is in an extremely rudimentary state, even today. There has not been a buildup of theory and ideas of how one might

begin to understand architecture at all. In the end, architecture has more to offer architecture historians, than architecture historians have to offer architects.

ZAHA HADID: I was surprised by the title of this symposium, ‘Ideal Practice;’ as

I think that dentists practice, whereas architects do other things. I joined the AA in 1972 with other 120 students in first year. An idea prevailed, that if you are

confronted with continuous chaos, you learn something, and many of us revolted

against that at the time. The course was divided in four cycles (they were not called units): one was to do the bus, other was to mess around somewhere in Camden; a third one was about messing with one professor, and the last one was going to 72

Wales. We all ended up in doing furniture, then we cleaned the warehouse for

about two weeks, and other of us had to draw. Then, the idea of drawing was a

taboo; it was anti-design, anti-architecture, anti-drawing. Then there was a group of students who were doing the bus, which included tearing it into pieces to put it in

the yard. Some of us revolted, went to Alvin and told him that we wanted to design

buildings; he thought that was ridiculous, but they eventually provided us an space

in the street—because we were not to be part of the school. That was an interesting and exciting moment, given that we had to do seminars on buildings, architects and

architecture. Then we realized that that kind education—out of chaos—can provide a degree of fluidity and freedom. Regarding this, I do not believe that knowledge prohibits creativity. It has been very important to the AA to question what is the creative process, what is creativity, and how do we actually produce ideas or

develop ideas that eventually will have an impact on the world. I am critical of the idea of the school that to be interesting is to remain in the margin, as I think that architecture is fundamentally about improving the way we live, and that is our

agenda. The AA provides with a kind of platform, enabling research, but lacks both the participation of the general public, and ability to effectively communicate so

they can understand it. When I finished in 1977, many of us were unemployable, however, I went to an office in Charlotte street; only to decide I will never work

in a British practice again. In the late 70s, or early 80s, Alvin made the conscious

decision to shift what we called ‘metaphysical working’ to actually building, and he became interested as well in how ideas generated in the school can become part of the mainstream. When I decided to quit teaching in the AA, in 1985, I had to

make clear that it was not because of lack time, but due to the fact that the school

no longer supported the products of the units. Beyond that, I have been extremely

critical of the AA and other schools, and their indulgement in those things that are

not a project, such as observation, which is not a project, but one layer of it; history courses alike. This layering process is only possible in certain places; the AA could have it in a very dynamic, organic way. The AA should take more advantage of

being anti-institution; of not having a University over it, as without one, it doesn’t have a political system: it is totally dynamic. In this sense, the scape from the AA

that ARTNET provided in the 70s was very crucial. On the history courses I have to confess, I never did a paper in the AA, but it never yelled, because it was not

intertwined with the units. I am interested in the electronic age and I do not know

how it is going to interfere in the way we think; my skepticism is how to use that so we can generate ideas. Education is at the crossroads, as it can have an impact on the way we do projects.

DALIBOR VESELY: I would avoid nostalgia of the 1980s and 90s. A time when going around the top floor of this building, from one door to the other, around the 70s and 80s, it would be possible to meet Rem (Koolhaas), Zaha, Bernard Tschumi,

among others, it looked like a jungle or like a market. What Alvin really meant with this, I still don’t understand it, but I wouldn’t call it anarchy. It can be explained as a shared ground that as soon as it starts happening, it crystallizes into something

else. Peter Cook, in conversation would say: “It’s all fine, but literacy is very crucial.”

Coming back to Alvin, I remember several times when he would say: “As you go

here, through this floor, there are wonderful people around here, you know, and

what this is all about is” (he would make a pause here and inhale deeply) “is the kind of culture that goes with it.” He meant something quite interesting. He was very puzzled, intrigued, fascinated by this field of possibilities. They committed 73

to create something which he understood as Europe; and as a contrast to the land

where he came from: the tough Chicago, and Montreal. There is a dimension to this of a very difficult consistency, difficult to grasp; I would compare it to the stability of the Italian political system, where the government changes almost every year, but it has, however, the most stable political system in Europe. One culture that I can speak for was one under development around certain studios. On the one

hand, there was people like Daniel Liebeskind, someone who is not possible to fully understand (and he wanted to make clear that you never will): he would be the

agent provocateur. On the other hand, someone like Peter Wilson: who does not

say much, but watched very carefully what he was doing. Like this, it was possible to go beyond the superficiality and stupidity that aesthetic concerns sometimes

bring about. What I think it is going to be the most prominent issue to deal with is twofold: on the one hand: virtual possibilities, simulation, digital information civilizations and so on, and on the other hand there is a territory that we have simply inherited from our friends, collaborators etc, which is our own kind of

culture. The grey zone in between is the business of mediation: how to come to

terms in an imaginative and poetic way with what it is available around, and still

keep in mind that there is a deeper part, that cannot be named or labelled. I would refer to this as the domaine of the plausible poetry. There is a counterpart to the constructivist-deconstructivist wave, which is what Rem Koolhaas named ‘after surrealism.’ Particularly referring to issues like “crisis of an object,” we are now

moving into crisis of a situation, where the question of poetry will be posed in a

much more radical way. As Breton put it: “the beauty is going to be convulsive or it is not going to be at all.” The game is very open now for people to walk in, and

civilize it. To do this, some sort of equipment is needed: a bit of intelligence—what

Zaha just called knowledge, and Alvin calls culture—is desperately needed in order to survive. AA has a chance to do it, as it did avoiding to fall into postmodernism.

It is very easy to use computers nowadays, it is very easy to walk around and talk poetic language.

PETER WILSON: The issue we all face today, in terms of the direction of education, was very well worded by Zaha: “it is not just about having ideas, but about

achieving them.” Because of Alvin, there is an AA family, of whose tradition, we

are either partakers or inheritors. I was part of the first generation who studied

diploma under Alvin’s system of units; we graduated 23 years ago. In our fourth

year there was not a unit system, we were taught by Dalibor. He would always say, when looking at a project: “you have missed the point.” Which relates very much

to Alvin, as you would never hear him say “that is good,” he always said “next time better.” I would like to start with a quote from Mies: “Besides an understanding

of the nature of materials, and the nature of purposes, a timely architecture must also inquire into the spirit of the position in which we stand, and must learn the

carrying and driving forces on our time.” Alvin’s approach had a lot to do with this definition of our time. The collapse of methodological functionalism generated an

ideological vacuum. There was an intact professional structure, unlike today: today there is no profession to react against. The position Alvin took was reactionary,

precisely because there was something there to fight. This idea of the avant garde is simply not possible today: neither in art, nor in architecture, as it is essentially a counter statement. Today we have a media, which immediately absorbs any

criticism and makes it part of the system: we cannot step outside that, we cannot today be avant-garde, we have to develop other strategies. The early 70s, when 74

Alvin moved to the AA, was an important time that signaled the end of the phase

of positive utopias, which had been the first part of the modernist trajectory. Alvin was revitalizing the modernist trajectory, even if no one realized at the time. Very accurately, Alberto Perez Gomez called it the age of incomplete nihilism: a time

when we liked to tell each other frightening stories, to talk in a cataclysmic sense

about the present, and to read Baudrillard. It is the time when the word alternative was completely gone to death. Alvin set out on a different trajectory, in order to

revitalize and reconstitute architecture, not in terms of practice, but in terms of a discipline of thought. His method involved an initial suspension of one of Mies’s tenets: the one of purpose. Alvin defined architecture not in terms of purposes,

but as self-authenticated. Anything was possible, students were left in the lead. It was all about trajectory finding. In the 80s trajectories were found and explored

in depth. Among the successes of this experiment, there are a number of buildings across the world which would not be there if Alvin had not brought certain people together in the AA. There is a large project in Paris, an extra large building in Lille, town hall in Reykjavik, fire station in Vitra. That idea of architecture, which was

propagated, is now ubiquitous, part of the culture of architecture. Another reading of success is done looking at students. I have trained a lot of good teachers, I think

the AA produces fantastic teachers, but I must say that I have not seen a building of any of my students which really excited me and I read that as an enormous failure.

Success number three is maybe the unit system as conceived by Alvin: this culture

of conflict, of people that have to answer for themselves. This culture is part of the

architecture culture as well, it exists in many other schools: Berlage, Columbia, and so on: it can be called the schools as a laboratory. The definition of architecture school as a laboratory is now true for architectural schools everywhere. When

Alvin started the AA as a laboratory project, there were polytechnic schools, which do not exist anymore. One laboratory gives measure to everything else, but when

everybody is doing scientific experiments, one starts wondering about who knows

how to keep the rain out. In order to continue the trajectory of Alvin Boyarsky, one has to seek new directions, perhaps to abandon the idea of the avant garde and

also the idea of infinite invention. In the discipline of architecture is not necessary to start always from scratch. In England, there is no profession to react against

to; building is conditioned by the market or by heritage nervousness. We must

stop the hermetic games. Most of the times practice is quite painful, but one has to get out there, enter the field, otherwise the game is lost. In Germany, only 3% of people who study architecture actually gets to build their own designs. In my

office, we hire mostly people from the polytechnic, those who know how to draw

a straight line. Of course, there are firms who need AA students, probably because

they do not have their own ideas. Le Corbusier said “the architect is an acrobat and not a clown.” The questions of today are quite clear: the question of technology;

the one of physical environment, which is changing so quickly we cannot put up

with it most of the times. Today’s radical trajectory is perhaps to do simple things well. I would like to conclude with Richard Sennett, who wrote that “our society

is drowning in simulations, and floating signifiers. A truly radical art today would restore our attachment to physical things.”

Questions follow.

75

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