A
rchitecture existed for millennia before anyone thought to teach it at university; indeed it was practised long before anyone thought of universities. So why is the mere 175th anniversary of a university’s architecture department cause for celebration? The answer might lie in universities’ potential to transform and enhance their subjects. After religious bodies, they are arguably the most resilient institutions in the Western world, outlasting many states, monarchies, legal systems and corporations. Their origins lay in the need for the Church to codify and teach canon law, the ideological basis on which it operated, in an essentially secular world. But that quickly begat the concept of civil law, the foundation of modern political thought. Within a short time of appearing, universities showed their capability to transform old and develop new ideas in response to temporal contingencies. University College London was founded in 1826 to fill a gap England’s ancient universities were ignoring: the challenge of devising and developing ideas to address the social and economic change of the Industrial Revolution. Given that London was then 25 years into a century of population growth (from one to four million), it was almost inevitable that architecture would become part of its stable. When architecture came to UCL in 1841, it could rub up against emerging and traditional subjects, from engineering to classics (the latter being transformed by developments in archaeology and philology), medicine and law. Each could offer the others chinks of light in the barriers to progress, which might have been impossible in their own terms. Their rough or epistemologically unsound parts could be smoothed and relevant new knowledge honed. From the early 20th century other subjects grew
out of the architecture department. These now constitute a faculty of the college known since 1920 as The Bartlett following a donation from Herbert Henry Bartlett. The School of Architecture remains its largest single part. This publication shows how the discipline of architecture has evolved within this academic context. It opens with some of the most powerful imagery created by students, showing advances in digital and image-making technology. The next chapter outlines new approaches to pedagogy that have emerged since Peter Cook was appointed professor of architecture in 1990. The focus then turns to history, identifying the most critical moments in the school’s evolution. And in the final chapter we introduce some of the school’s most successful alumni, among them RIBA Gold Medal and Stirling Prize winners. Many are designers but a notable number have helped set the legislative, academic and cultural terms through which architecture is practised and experienced. If there is one common characteristic throughout the school’s history, it is how the contingencies of the time affect the ways in which ideas can be turned into objects. The most successful pedagogic programmes turn these contingencies to advantages, for students and the subject in general. The following pages show how this has happened in the past and the platform it provides for the future as the school, under Frédéric Migayrou, initiates new courses, occupies new premises and co-opts new technologies to inaugurate a new phase in the history of designing and making. Migayrou and the school’s director, Bob Sheil, set the scene over the next few pages. Jeremy Melvin Editor