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When I first entered the small room in the archives of the Architectural Association, I saw a picture hanging on the wall and though: I know this, that’s Koolhaas. The portrait showed a map of London in which a series of squares arranged along a selected strip across the city, in this case the river Thames, excluded certain fragments of idealized architecture visions from the rest of the real city. After Ed, the archivist, introduced us all to the space of the collection, he pointed at that same picture and said: And for those of you who think that’s Koolhaas, it’s not. Then, he explained that the image was actually part of a 5th year project by Peter Wilson, a student in AA Diploma Unit 9 between the years 1973 – 1974, under tutors Elia Zenghelis and Leon Krier. In my eyes, the project looked a lot like Exodus or the voluntary prisoners of architecture and I had a feeling that there were many stories that had not been written. Architecture schools, from the German Bauhaus and the Soviet Vkhutemas to Harvard GSD and the Architectural Association, had always had precise programs. Knowledge was, and is, produced with a specific objective, a precise ideological tendency, and a prolific aim. The forces pushing behind these interests usually correspond to the needs of those who are trying to construct a solid professional practice, either in the form of an individual or a collective. However, I would argue that generally a persona is constructed and edited out of a complex network of people, institutions, actors, and associations that operate in the shadows of what then become consolidated narratives. Architecture education and architecture practice should be understood as one thing. At least in the space of this book, I will be looking at how certain pedagogies, their agendas and their ideological interests are deliberately merged with what we usually identify as the professional world – and vice versa.
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