Brett Steele

Brett Steele, An Architecture of Anti-Realism, 28 de noviembre de 2013. Fotografía: Anna Font. Archivo EAEU.

An Architecture of Anti-Realism Brett Steele

Un proyecto institucional, un proyecto disciplinar, y un proyecto cultural suelen ser esfuerzos independientes. Sin embargo, cuando se alimentan mutuamente pueden converger hacia un proceso transformador robusto y expansivo. El éxito y la trascendencia de un proyecto educativo amplio dependen fundamentalmente de esto último. Así lo atestiguan algunas de las experiencias formativas que más impacto tuvieron sobre distintas generaciones de arquitectos modernos, desde la Bauhaus de los años 1920 hasta la Architectural Association de los años 1970, pasando por experiencias como Ulm, Valparaíso y Austin. La conferencia tiene como objetivo echar luz sobre estas relaciones, examinando los proyectos educativos en arquitectura que actualmente definen el territorio de la disciplina y darán forma al campo profesional e intelectual de los próximos años. La mirada hacia ellos permite expandir nuestro conocimiento sobre las condiciones de la educación que impartimos y recibimos: reflexionar sobre la escuela que hacemos y la que queremos. La conferencia presenta el trabajo de Brett Steele en la Architectural Association, haciendo énfasis en la necesidad de la producción de audiencias, más que de arquitectos. Discute el rol del trabajo experimental y especulativo en arquitectura, la importancia de la diseminación de ideas, y el ascenso de las culturas de diseño conectadas en red.

Excess of Realism

I have been working on the question of realism in architecture schools and the ways in which they increasingly find themselves approaching the realistic problems of the world. We live in a world of monstrous real problems. Ours is an era that pulls us into the expectation that our job is solving other people’s problems. Certainly that is part of the profession, part of what architects do, but I think architecture is suffering from an excess of realism, like reality TV and other forms obsessed with instant production. I believe the job of schools today is rather the invention of new problems that take the place of the old ones. I am thinking through the ways in which an architecture school can play a part on a larger project regarding the creation of the new problems of today. Once we start focusing on them, this might also create ways to think about where architecture is going as a discipline and as a profession.

Research and Search

We live and work in the context of global economies defined by investment in research and development, huge empires that, despite having complete control of the universe, still invest vast amounts of money and energy to uncover new things about what is happening in the world. But architecture operates regarding research in a different way than other fields. We operate in self-directed, self-fulfilling, and, to a certain level, self-satisfying ways. In that context, I try to distinguish between search and research, and the way in which there might be a paradigm for how schools, and not just offices and other parts of architecture culture, can use search to uncover projects that, in the next years, will be the means through which architecture looks forward.

Engines and Boxes

It is not just about schools, but about the ways in which schools operate their search engines. My job is to create platforms for people to get on. When we work together, what we try to do with the larger collective project is to break many kinds of boxes, including walls, ceilings, and floors of buildings.

Audiences within Audiences

One curious thing of the school is how even the most ordinary habits, when overlaid with advanced communication technologies, create audiences within audiences. What do you do when you have more than one audience in a singular event, when the conversations are literally multiple, broadcasted, recorded and distributed? One of the fantastic things you can see in multi-audience events is that nobody really knows where to look in the room, when trying to figure out where the action is. The question is who you bring focus to, how you steer conversations, how you open interactions between people coming together from different audiences. Open Models

The modern believe that an architecture school is a sacred space separated from the world is no longer tenable. Twenty years after Mies van der Rohe made his sketch for IIT, a fellow of the AA, Alvin Boyarsky, launched IID, the International Institute of Design (not Technology). In the first two years, he held the first global symposium on architecture. He was able to do so because that was exactly the moment when airport travel was launched, and London was the first long distance jumbo jet destination site. Suddenly, at the end of the sixties, the city was filled with people from different countries coming together, and Alvin realized that it was the moment to bring this into the school. The other striking thing he choreographs is the idea of a fixed architecture curriculum. He literally blows it off and thinks of a school where the students walk into and find thirty people teaching things that they think are important. Each must defend that argument to the whole of the school, and that is the education that students get. Until this day, the school still does not have a curriculum for architecture. We have no idea how to teach architecture. Absolutely no idea.

Tribes

My vision of architecture culture is that, like most forms of cultures, it is becoming an increasingly tribal organization. One of the paradoxes of the communication, information, and post-digital life is that the world has flattened out. We all use the same laptop, the same phone. The other side of that equation is that you go to the Apple Store, you click on radio station, and you get 9000 stations you have access to, each of which has vast communities built around them, sharing their obsessions about sound. We are deeply invested in promoting and exploring this in the context of the school.

Miniaturization

We looked at how architecture schools have been since their origin, the Ecole of Beaux Arts, the avant-garde European schools, the industrialized American graduate schools of the 1970s, like John Hejduk’s Cooper Union, and the argument I would make is that schools are a piece of technology. They are completely artificial, designed in the nineteenth century in Europe to serve a purpose. Some people think they were reinvented dramatically in the early twentieth century, but schools have continuously evolved, and followed a pattern of miniaturization not unlike other technologies.

Space as Material

One of the things we became interested at the AA is how to treat the space of the school as a medium to reconfigure thought: not a site, but a material. We happen to have grade-one listed buildings, and we have been experimenting with them, to the extent to which the English law allows us. We have put a series of plans in place to start opening up different rooms, overlaying new media structures, carving spaces though the buildings for the different worlds to talk to one another, quieting the spaces, decorating them, and giving them new ceilings periodically.

Everywhere

We have reconceived the school to operate not only as a specific geographic location as much as a constellation of sites. This year, we

have 1200 students worldwide enrolled in 50 to 60 design workshops and short courses that run around the world and rotate each year. The interest lies in imagining learning as a chain of communication, rather than a series of destinations. This is actually no big deal: it is the way modern architecture operated, like Walter Gropius in a helicopter flying in and out of office meetings at the end of his career. He is someone whose entire career is defined by the ability to jump between continents, from Germany to America, and continue an evolution of architectural education. Some things are only possible to discover outside the studio. One of Rem Koolhaas’ thesis is that architecture is everywhere, and a corollary of this is that architecture schools are everywhere other than the spaces we inhabit during our working lives.

The Life of Ideas

These two projects, the reinvention of the school and the student projects, come together into a genuine collective project, which involves the invention of audiences, not of architects. The difficulty we all have when we get caught up in teaching and learning, is to believe that the purpose of a school is to create architects. It is rather the opposite, want it or not. We are all here just for a few years, and then you are an architect. So the really challenging project is how to build up settings in which audiences are constructed, not just events, by which minds are brought together. Ideas do not live in a space, they do not live in books, they do not live in laptops: they live in the minds of people.

Pass Through

The obvious thing to do is to think of ways in which studios become gathering places, even in the most ordinary events, like an architecture jury. We can work with traditional forms of discovering. But the point is simply that architecture schools are more similar to airports than to destinations. They are places we pass through. Schools are places you and I inhabit in temporary form, but which ultimately are left behind by all of us. Communication

Communication is an imperative of schools. AA publications has now become a big company. It is not about promoting our work. Any active publishing involves the construction of a different audience than the one that takes place in juries, lectures, or seminars. The industrialization of printing in the nineteenth century is the precondition of the arrival of modern architecture itself. One of the reasons why modern architects were, at first, editors, is that new forms of media had arrived and become the basis that allowed ideas to move quickly.

Extractos de la conferencia de Brett Steele, con introducción de Ciro Najle, organizada por el Centro de Estudios de Arquitectura Contemporánea, el 28 de noviembre de 2013.