LEARNING ARCHITECTURE IS CHILD’S PLAY
A BRIEF HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION
‘A MOULD FOR ARCHITECTS’ Founded in 1870, the École de Beaux-Arts provided students of architecture with a rigorous curriculum that focused on drawing, painting, and sculpture. This included learning through making models and drawings based on observing and reworking classical art10. The system was set up to produce competition at every level, to prepare the student for their future work as an architect11. The school became famous for holding anonymous competitions, with the aim being that the talent of the individual artist would shine through. The students who won these competitions would often later go on to become masters of their own atelier, training architects in their own image. Most students, without the means to travel, would learn about the world through the eyes of their master12. Despite this teaching system being initially designed to encourage creative freedom amongst students, it should be noted that there is evidence of some elements within it that may have had a detrimental towards artistic development of the students. While the competitions and charettes could be interpreted as a game that combines elements of alea and agon as outlined by Caillois13, there are still two things that mean this game isn’t necessarily an act of ‘play’. Firstly, Huizinga would argue that because the winner of these competitions receives status, recognition and at times even money or the promise of a commission, that it sits outside the bounds of what can be considered play. A true game sits outside of ‘serious’ life, should be engaged in freely (not forced) by the participant, and the motivation to play should be unrelated to any kind of material interest14. Secondly, the strict hierarchy present in the atelier, with students looking up to and following their studiomasters15 without question created an environment which meant that ways of organising objects, societal rules, and aesthetic values were rarely challenged. In the context of the Beaux-Arts, the vertical relationship between master and pupil restricts the kind of interactions and environment that foster play, and this results in a lack of skill in critical thinking, something which would be considered essential for architects practicing today. For Fröbel, the teacher was not a master, but a ‘guide’16. The proper learning happens through direct interaction, certainly not through any explanation or the experience of another person. The Beaux-Arts, very much a top
down down institution, and play is something that can only occur between17. Play originates from the interactions that occur between human and human, or between human and object. Taking one of Fröbel’s gifts as an example, a child spinning a wooden cylinder on a string, will subsequently observe a sphere and inside that, a cube. The child therefore, through play, gains an intuitive understanding of how the natural laws of geometry work in the world18. Could the same level of innate knowledge be achieved by forcing a student to make a study of static proportions, to memorise, draw and redraw the classical orders? The ultimate goal of the École was to prepare its students to become architects. It knew, only too well, that the only valid environment in which such a proficiency could be achieved was in that of an architectural office, and that the only place for them to learn how to put a building together was on the construction site19. Any extra activities that verged away from architecture were excluded from the curriculum. As skilful as they were, the absence of play meant that the graduates of this system were not necessarily equipped with the ability to, as Fröbel puts it, construct an understanding of their own world, to express their true ideas, feelings, and emotions. The failure of the Beaux-Arts is that it mostly produced carbon copies of the same architect, building the same old buildings. Even Viollet-le-Duc who famously refused to study architecture at the École des BeauxArts, labelled it as ‘a mould for architects - they all come out almost exactly the same.20’ He deplored that the contemporary use of the classical orders gave no representation of natural principles, or, if it does, uses an out-of-date, primitive image of these forces21. When he took over the construction of the Notre-Dame’s second spire in 1857, where a Beaux-Arts graduate probably would have applied the same learnt classical rules to the restoration, he believed architecture to be a product of synthesis22. Like a child with Fröbel gifts, he broke down parts of a whole in order to gain an intuitive understanding, and like Huizinga, he explored ways of creating order and logic. It could be argued that this resulted in a design language independent of any other existing style. Fig. 1: Architecture Atelier, École des Beaux-Arts, 1937. Livre Grande Masse des Beaux-Arts 1937, Paris.
10 Jean Paul Carlhian, “The École Des Beaux-Arts: Modes and Manners,” JAE 33, no. 2 (1979), 9. 11 Ibid, 8. 12 Ibid. 13 Caillois, Man, Play and Games,9. 14 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1. 15 Carlhian, “The École Des Beaux-Arts: Modes and Manners,” 9. 16 Friedrich Fröbel, The Education of Man. (London: Sidney Appleton, 1887), 164. 17 Pascal Gielen, “Playing with the Rules of Play: The Spirit of the Avant-Garde in Arts Education,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 52, no. 4 (2018), 18 Wilson, “The ‘Gifts’ of Friedrich Froebel,” 238. 19 Carlhian, “The École Des Beaux-Arts: Modes and Manners,” 17. 20 Andrew Ayers, “Romantic Deliria: On Viollet-Le-Duc’s Architectural Vision,” Architectural Review, July 21, 2020, https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/exhibitions/romantic-deliria-on-viollet-le-ducs-architectural-vision/. 21 Martin Bressani, “Notes on Viollet-Le-Duc’s Philosophy of History: Dialectics and Technology,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 48, no. 4 (1989), 340. 22 Ibid, 327.
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