School of Architecture, Design & Construction
A CLARION CALL FOR INTEGRATED ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION EDUCATION
In 1953 Ivan Chteheglov wrote his Letterist manifesto about the future of architecture and the city as ‘Everyone will live in his own personal “cathedral”, so to speak… there will be rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help but love…’
He described ‘new changeable decors’ and ‘buildings charged with an evocative power, symbolic edifices representing desires, forces, events, past and present and to come’. Chteheglov was 19 years old at the time. It is this naivety and bravado of youth that is the lifeblood of Architecture, Design and Construction school. Schools should be bustling with ideas, with new ways of expediting an architect’s craft – different perspectives on subverting technology, philosophy, management, practice, law, space and time. This precociousness is a fundamental benchmark of a successful Architecture, Design and Construction school.
There are three engines that define a top rank School – Student, Faculty (staff) and Profession.
Students must not be spoonfed, they must be happy to follow a path of self realisation, self responsibility and self enquiry. They must be bright, well educated with a healthy interest in both the empirical and the poetic. Let us be clear, being an architectural student and vicariously an architect is a luxury that cannot be afforded to everyone – it needs sensibility. It mustn’t be a sideshow to a type of social engineering that attempts to cover up for an often poor state school primary and secondary education. It must be a meritocracy.
Staff must be actively involved in ideas of change and liberation and see clearly architecture’s and design’s role in beneficial change. Staff must live by the sword, they must be brave, opinionated, engaging, open to debate and steadfast in their belief that Architecture and Design can benefit humanity and not be a million shackles that deny spatial and political freedom.
Such a school is sceptical of the normative, the tried and tested, legislated and quantified lacuna of commercial architecture and seeks to explode the myths that stifle creativity. An excellent contemporary school should not brand itself as ‘visionary’ as my friend Lebbeus Woods reminded me – that to court the word ‘visionary’ is an excuse for others to marginalise a school’s efforts. We look to the future…
The final engine is the Professions, a School must seek out interesting practitioners, it must ignore the sophists, but must engage in dialogue with the professions. The school is the professions’ research arm, their antenna, their moral touchstone and their playground. The school will make no distinction between the everyday practice of Architecture and Design and its search for new, ethical and sustainable, and future orientated discourses and design outputs.
Architectural Education and the Politics of Negation
This all seems sensible – so, why then is much education often despised by those who practice? Why are those who teach often undervalued by the professions with a thousand putdowns and one-upmanships that are thrown across the Professions’ internal barricades. There is a ‘geology of lies’ that we tell one another and this geology has been used to oppress students and young professionals and has given poor schools the remit to poorly prepare its graduates for the professions. These include “Have some fun before you graduate – this is your last chance before you go into practice where invention is stifled’ or ‘It is all about teamwork, no lone designers anymore… compromise, compromise, compromise … there is no point in speculating about new technologies we use the same six or so materials and that is that’ ‘Those who teach can’t do’.etc. All these statements are often fundamentally wrong yet are used to generate a miasma that obscures a basic dichotomy.
The professions often like to legislate against what are seen as errant educationalists so they can persist in the misguided illusion that a student must immediately and only be a useful economic unit to an office. In short an ‘oven ready turkey’. Schools often fail, in what is a lengthy education, to deliver technical competence. And indeed they should be able to deliver it but such contemporary competence is merely the beginning of an education. It is those specialisms, preoccupations above and beyond diligence in quickly outmoded normative procedures that will define a mature professional’s ability to stay active, proactive and reactive to changes. A school therefore has a fundamental obligation to nurture hope, invention and experimentation as it is through these endeavours that the seeds of our future profession are grown. Schools need to encourage students to be mentally dexterous in an ever-changing terrain. The Professions must encourage this by nurturing, fuelling, and not quashing with cynicism. The Professions must value interaction with students’ ideas, changes in technology, etc. Good schools do this – it is a partnership of equals not a tyranny of legislation, professional hubris, gagging, fagging and selfish spin.
After two decades witnessing the assault on the real by the virtual with its paradox of liberation/surveillance and the development of soft, smart materials we have much to do and this is not helped by the continual disregard of the tripartite structure I have described that is so crucial to developing good models of contemporary Architecture and Design education. Also this is not a time for dogma.
- We must actively seek new ways as educationalists to collaborate with the profession, to use their skills, augment their research and enterprise and sharpen their understanding of contemporary issues that affect their practice by offering them our skills.
- We must deliver a sound technical education. Students must be aware of the numerous avenues that are used to build architecture. The day of the Doge and Popes are almost gone.
- The profession needs to be more self critical, and so do schools, and so does the student
- We must think holistically about education/practice not just economically.
- The service we deliver to society is in much need of rearticulation to enable us to provide a vital and important future for our students. One that is not marginalised by clients, other professionals, and even ourselves.
- ‘We must wake up from the world of our parents.’ Waller Benjamin
- ‘Every generation must build its own city.’ Marinetti
In short, building, architecture and design education in the U.K. has historically compromised itself in a thousand ways. As educationalists we must think creatively about how to counter our own depressed and destructive psychology and thereby gain the initiative and create a new architectural education that is fit for purpose, fit for use as the 21st century unfolds. New models, new modes, no received wisdom from a previous century.
We must tune and oil our engines to ensure they provide traction in the right direction and that direction is forward. One might say the well-oiled student is key to our future!
Professor Neil Spiller
Dean, School of Architecture, Design and Construction