EDGE CONDITION Vo l u m e 0 4 NOVEMBER 2014 ‘teaching the future’
ON THE COVER
EDGE CONDITION Vo l u m e 0 4 NOVEMBER 2014 ‘teaching the future’
by Harriet Harris CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE COVER ARTWORK.
EDGEcondition issue 04 published online Nov 2014 UK Editors: Gem Bar ton Cara Courage Cover ar twork: Copyright Harriet Harris Opinions expressed are those of the authors. Ar t Direction: Gem Bar ton @EDGE_CONDITION www.edgecondition.net mail@edgecondition.net
WELCOME
Editors’ note We founded EDGEcondition to give a platform to the many voices that work around the core practice of architecture and with us both being architecture educators – Gem as a Senior Lecturer at University of Brighton, Cara with a background in built environment education with the global network of architecture centres – we both know from our different perspectives just how important the teaching of architecture is. Cai Burton, a young person from Bristol, writes an eloquent blog on the Shape My City site which opens with ‘To lots of young people, the world of architecture seems completely alien’. When faced with words like this, the education of children and young people from primary school through to university education around and through the built environment is brought into a pertinent sharp focus: how can we expect the architecture sector to have a future that is populated by a diverse body of practitioners and supported by an understanding public if we are not engaging
people in it in formal and informal education? Cai goes on to define architecture as more than just buildings, ‘It’s about places. It’s about the spaces in between the buildings. It’s about the communities and interactions that take place in them. Architecture is as much about the buildings as it is the people inside’. This issue of EDGEcondition aims to cover those bases, bringing together those involved in architecture and built environment education from across the world and from multifarious standpoints, from primary school education through to the architecture academy, to social practice, taking theory and its application, asking us to reflect on what architecture education has been, what it is now, and what it needs to be. Our next issue, out at the end of January 2015, is on placemaking. A hot topic, interest in this issue has been keen and positive; if you have an idea for a feature, please do get in contact. Cara & Gem.
LISTINGS LETTERS:
CASE STUDIES
OP-EDS
04 Amy Bourne discusses the real detriment of a mistakefree society in THE PERFECT ATTITUDE.
24 AA Little Architect Director Dolores Victoria Ruiz Garrido talks of eduacting our youngsters in FUTURE CITIES & CITIZENS.
62 Martin Pearce from University of Portsmouth unites art and technology in A NEW UNITY.
06 Graeme Brooker poses the Venice Bienale as an instigator for the prmise that the city is an interior in FUNDAMENTALS.
28 Bo Tang shares the story of SETTING UP THE FIRST SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE IN SIERRA LEONE.
08 Fiona Tindall warns of the richness and dangers of being ATELIER & ACCOUNTANT.
36 Phil Watson tells of his Welsh venture the Free School of Architecture in CONSTRUCTING THE SUBJECT OF ARCHITECTURE.
FEATURES: 10 Karen White analyses design education through the lens of PALIMPSEST TACTICS. 14 Peter Laurence walks us through the work of student Daniel Jencks in WELCOME TO NETKLIX VIEWS. 18 Thomas Mical advocates for risk in architectural education in RISK AMOLIFICATION FOR FUTURE DESIGN SCHOOLS. 22 Harriet Harriss and Daisy Froud introduce their new book: RADICAL PEDAGOGIES.
42 Duncan Baker-Brown contemplates the Brighton Waste House as A LEARNING TOOL. FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE: 48 Derek Hill from University of Strathclyde reflects on its collaborative pedagogy in LOOKING BACKWARDS TO MOVE FORWARDS. 52 Abdulbari Kutbi shares the need for TEACHING INDIVIDUALISM. 54 Shruti Shriva uses her past student skills to inform the future of the architecture classroom in TEACHING ARCHITECTURE TO THE FUTURE. 58 Anon takes us on a personal, reflexive journey from student to professional in SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT?
66 Big Car’s Jim Walker brings social practice into his teaching in Indiana in TEACHING IN PRACTICE. 70 Pratt Institute’s David Burney introduces its new URBAN PLACEMAKING & MANAGEMENT Masters. 74 Colorado’s M12 Studio reflects on the global learning of its ruralfocused practic in TEACHING THE FUTURE, TEACHING THE PAST. 80 Designer Claire Potter tells of an early student project experience that has determined her practice ethos - PERFECT CIRCLES. PHOTO-ESSAY 82 Photographer and writer James Bollen presents J.G. BALLARD & THE FUTURE OF THE CITY OF THE PAST. 90 Photographer james Ried refelects on the ersonal benefits of intensive professional short courses in EDUCATIONAL FUTURES.
LETTERS
T H E P E R F E C T AT T I T U D E Dear EDGECondition, There is a tendency for us to think that technology is the future and this should be where our focus lies however can it inhibit our learning. Our focus on computers, hand held devices and mobiles seem to have driven out important elements of learning the old fashioned way. The age of technology has taught us that making errors isn’t seen as a disaster because we can delete and change things so easily. Paper and pen might not be as exciting as a shiny new edition of the latest tech but I like the little mistakes, inkblots and eraser marks left on the page; the scratches in drafting film and the fuzzy tone you get when photocopying. Often enough, the unintentional things tend to be the most interesting in my work, and if its not, then it can at least be something I learn from. How are we meant to learn if we keep ourselves from making mistakes? The ‘perfect’ attitude is leaking into the real world, how we think we have to look, those photorealistic renders and sterile environments. What has happened to the charm of our imagination? It’s not just the way we work with the new technology but it’s our attitudes to working, our attitudes to learning. Our fast paced life styles have technology at the forefront and this can’t be such a coincidence.
04
Technology is clearly changing our expectations of reality, giving us the ability to tap into information quickly with ease. The perception of its efficiency is rubbing off on how we live, feeling the need to fit more into the time we have. Our want for everything to be immediate, for free and without barriers; at work we want people to respond to our emails now, and when learning we want the answers to our question in the first search in the generic Internet search engine. It’s easy to take for granted the benefits of the tablet (or whatever it is that shall outdate it) keeping us in contact with people globally at every minute of everyday whatever the weather. Taking the time to absorb our surroundings might seem time consuming however the things that we miss out such as an ironic street marking, could be so charming. To me beauty lies in things a little less ordinary, the unintentional, those that are simply more human. Is it possible to rely less on technology and embrace imperfections for the learning opportunities that they are.
from Amy Bourne BA Interior Architecture @ABourneIdentity
IMAGE: AMY BOURNE
05
F U N D A M E N TA L I S M Dear EDGECondition, The Venice Biennale is coming to its end. Similar to one of its increasingly occurring floods, the swell of critical opinion on the show has ebbed and flowed. “Rem Koolhaas presents the Biennale as la fine [the end]: ‘The end of my career, the end of my hegemony, the end of my mythology, the end of everything, the end of architecture’ ” (Peter Eisenmann). “Elements just makes you feel unutterably sad for him and for what he thinks architecture is. That a director of the biennale, whose work and writing make him unarguably the leading architect of his generation, should make a show that proposes that architecture is, when stripped right back to ‘fundamentals’, the mere shuffling around of cladding, walls, doors, stairs, roofs and toilets… Rem is taking the piss. He’s just seeing how far he can push it” (Kieran Long). Why has this Biennale provoked such a reaction? Curated by Rem Koolhaas the metatheme of Fundamentals is iterated in the national pavilions of the Giardini as Absorbing Modernity. Fundamentals is implemented at its most forthright in a show called Elements in the main Giardini pavilion. In this part of the show the evolution of architecture is reduced to a series of tactics: components that chart the history of architecture through their historical development. Doors, windows, stairs, the ramp, walls, floor, ceiling, roof, toilet, lift, escalator, balcony, façade, are elements that are fundamental to building and design. Elements is an exhibition of bespoke and hand-made components, deployed by a designer
with which to realize building. Through their evolution the development of architecture can be charted. The context for fundamentals is significant. Venice is a city of parts, a collage of appropriated elements. It is fabricated from fragments that have been assembled in both a coherent and incoherent manner: A city of bits that have been fabricated from different places. Of course Venice is then reconstituted and assembled again and again through the numerous tourist snap shots and images made by the millions of visitors to the island. The context for fundamentals is important. The city is an interior. Venice is a series of rooms: an urban interior. Both interior and exterior spaces entwine; a simple walk through the city means to traverse exterior spaces that are both inside and out. As light falls the rooms behind the floating palazzo facades become public squares. In this setting the city becomes a live laboratory for the elements in the exhibition. So why the upset? The Elements exhibition is excellent. A comprehensive and brilliantly arranged set of ideas, parts, prototypes, and objects: both full sized and scaled. The reduction of buildings to fragments allows the elements to resonate with meaning. Is it because Koolhaas is making it very clear that the fundamentals of architecture, the basic building blocks of space, the principles of all spatial theory, history and construction, start with the interior? from Graeme Brooker Head of depar tment Fashion + Interiors, Middlesex University (Seat 24 carriage C London to Brighton) g.brooker@mdx.ac.uk @autopilotgraeme
06
IMAGE: GRAEME BROOKER
07
A C C O U N TA N T A N D AT E L I E R ?
08
IMAGE: FIONA TINDALL
Dear EDGECondition, To teach the future is to mould practice to the form you want it. There are two things I would like to consider; firstly the belief that we are not as a profession producing graduates that are well equipped to enter a world of work and secondly that our education system needs to be more flexible so that people can feed in more of their own drives and passions. Recent harder circumstance, has forced many young architect practitioners to take risks they may not have otherwise considered. To strike out alone. People like Assemble, or Something & Son. It may, by some, be considered to be toeing the margins of ‘architecture’ but our practice is richer for it. I feel that often the most interesting work is often that which falls within the gaps between disciplines. Idealist as it may be, but it is as new graduates that we should have the freedom to explore these margins before potentially a more defined practice takes hold. With jobs easier to come by we risk losing some of this willingness to look out with the prescribed path and strive to put some of your own aspirations to paper almost immediately. I am not advocating a complete u-turn on the system. We bind ourselves to years of practice for good reason. It is a complex profession and experience is fundamental. There will always be a place for purist architecture. It should not, however, be producing graduates that are left in what seems like a catch 22 situation. To forgo the creative freedoms they have enjoyed or through lack of business acumen, to come up against a brick wall that suggests that without experience
you cannot win jobs, and visa versa. This is not sustainable. It begs the question, How do we become both atelier and accountant? To know both your price and your creative value. What I would look for is a way for us to equip graduates with the tool kit to enter a world of business and commerce, to know not only the intrinsic value of the design process they have honed but also how to sell it. The two talents do not necessarily make easy bed fellows. Secondly, not to settle for what knowledge is provided for you, procure your own education, beg, borrow and accumulate knowledge, the more unlikely the source the better. Look at examples like Parallel School, or Open School East. These places have become increasingly invested in new models of education, finding ways to adapt a programme to the knowledge you choose to gain, in a more open and flexible way, where the sharing of collective experience is absolutely key. With the cost of higher education rising so high it seems only right that there is an increased drive for a more tailored method of learning. To me the only answer is as follows: Curate your own education. Keep procuring. Follow your drives and passions. Share what you know and listen. Repeat.
from Fiona Tindall BArch, DipArch Co-founder Show Me Yours @FT_____ @ShowMeYours_Gla
09
F E AT U R E S
PALIMPSEST TACTICS IN DESIGN EDUCATION by Karen White Adjunct Professor, Humber College ITAL, Canada quals whitestudio@rogers.com @whitestudiolo
The palimpsest has a long history in the minds eye of the architectural community. It refers to an ancient papyrus or vellum textual support that has been washed or scraped to remove original writing and receive new writing. Over time, traces of the original text would re-appear and co-exist with the new – resulting in an unplanned hybrid. (Fulford 2012). As an artefact, it is plural and irrational rather than singular and intentional. Metaphorically, the palimpsest richly conveys the possibility of open-ended exchange between intention, context and reception. In architectural theory, Piranesi’s blending of personal flights of imagination with archaeological study in his 18th century print Campo de Marzio has been read as a palimpsest of fragments because it uses inaccuracies and exaggeration to suggest
10
architectural metaphor (Tafuri 1987 pp.33-40). At the 2012 Venice Bienniale of Architecture, Peter Eisenman and studio investigated this metaphor with the installation The Piranesi Variations. Piranesi’s Campo di Marzio print was extended and developed through diagrams and a vast gilded scale model to monumentalize “the layers of physical and cultural archaeologies at each site” beyond the obvious contexts and programs of a building (Eisenman Architects). As a fixed visual metaphor, however, the fetishized palimpsest risks being stripped of its disruptive potential, becoming a static image of material processes, the passage of time, or the shadow of romantic longing. More than a metaphor, the palimpsest can be a tactic for disrupting dominant tropes in design education.
In contrast to fixed and monolithic visualization of architectural space, French theorist Michel de Certeau conceptualized space as practiced place (de Certeau 1984 p.117). Space is not a static visual entity; rather, it is incomplete until used and occupied. The operative behaviours of spatial practice can be traced along dialectical dividing lines of weak versus strong, tactics versus strategies. The weak use tactics in opposition to the strength of the rules of a dominant system or space. A tactic depends on time – “it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing.’ ” (ibid, p.xix). While strategies are able to produce, tabulate, and impose spaces, “tactics can only use, manipulate and divert these spaces” (ibid, p.30). Tactics are creative and provisional. Consider the history of designed interiors. Often read as part of a pre-existing container, the relationship between interior and its exterior is typically fixed, thus limiting discussion to static, overtly visualized artefacts. In her essay “Practices of Interiorization: An Inter-Story”, Interior Design scholar Susie Attiwill characterizes existing histories as limiting the subject to “that which occurs inside buildings” (Attiwill 2013 p175). This philosophical
starting point puts the interior designer in a dialectical relation where an exterior is positioned as existing prior to, and thus part of, interior design; hence, “the activity of designing becomes one of negotiation, representation, identification, and even transgression” (ibid, p.176). Attiwill proposes to expand the historical subject. She investigates specific design practices to address the position of interior design if the role of architecture as “the primary ‘space provider’ in culture” is brought into question (ibid, p.176). One example is German Curator/ Museum Director Alexander Dorner’s project during 19231936 to re-configure Hannover’s Landesmuseum gallery spaces to create ‘atmosphere’ rather than establishing a ‘certainty-giving space.’ Dorner redesigned period galleries as ‘atmosphere rooms’ produced “through an attention to design aspects such as layout, sightlines, circulation, lighting, color, and arrangement”(ibid, p.81). Learning from Dorner, Attiwill focuses on the interiorization processes – such as contraction, expansion, turning inside-out, transformation – as opposed to the resulting artefact. Like the palimpsest, this approach opens up exchange between intention, context and reception. The palimpsest and its tactics can also be used to teach
11
design students to engage critically with their own nascent practice through collaboration with designers trained in other disciplines. For instance, each winter students in their third year of Interior Design and Industrial Design degree programs at Humber ITAL in Toronto are brought together in an experimental ‘applied theory’ course. Inverting conventional studio dynamics, ‘Interdisciplinary Practices’ seeks to foster an active practice emerging from a variety of design contexts. Students work quickly through theoretical readings to shift conversations about design collaboration from abstract questions to pragmatic methods. The setting for these conversations is similarly plural as students are encouraged to explore non-academic spatial metaphors such as the workshop, the artist’s studio and the media scrum. Together they use these conceptual and physical places to
12
shake up established disciplinary pre-conceptions. Students recognize that disciplinary training creates biases about methods, technologies (choices of tools), techniques (how these tools are used) and even visual communication styles, and that these biases can create barriers that need to be surmounted for the sake of the project. Blended disciplinary teams work on design opportunities that are ‘found’ in the form of external design competitions. When preparing their submissions, the teams hone their understanding of an interdisciplinary practice in which disciplinary expertise is respected rather than colonized by trans-disciplinary explorers. Disciplinary formation is a dominant system that can be used, manipulated and diverted while searching for new solutions. Creative tactics for interdisciplinary practice are provisional; they are negotiated
for that particular time, place, problem and team. As such, accountability to mindful practice becomes paramount when students – accustomed to a top down studio dynamic in which learning is played out in pinup performances and authoritative critiques – are often asked by faculty to justify process rather than solution. Working as a collaborative team requires careful attention to transformative actions that exist in the real time of dynamic design discussions. Through this process, interdisciplinary student teams prepare design solutions that re-conceptualize design problems and emphasize the lived experience of users. In April 2014, student teams submitted proposals to the ‘Connect: EnAbling Change PostSecondary Design Competition’ organized by Toronto’s Design Exchange in partnership with
the Government of Ontario. The competition’s mandate was to explore design that is accessible to the greatest number of people, to the largest extent possible, regardless of their age or ability, across all design disciplines. Humber students Naomi Kane (Interior Design), Miseng Phan (Interior Design), and Jaclyn Van Barneveld (Industrial Design) were awarded first place in Environmental Design category for their proposal for a Cruising Community Cookhouse. The team designed a multi-purpose, accessible kitchen located in a trailer that could be driven to different communities as needed. Functioning as a classroom, an event space, and an example of barrier-free inclusive equipment and design, the heart of this accessible mobile space was an innovative barrier-free cook top and oven. The project rested lightly in-between major design moves. Bold spatial features, heroic narratives, and dense
artistic visualisation strategies were resisted in favour of simple details about access, temporary event accommodation and the functional orientation of tools for cultural community-building through preparing and sharing food. Giving provisional time-based tactics inspired by the palimpsest a more active role in design pedagogy can help to prepare designers for 21st century impacts on practice – such as ethics of sustainability, the economics of sourcing, the logic of intergenerational occupation and seasons of use, the demand for ‘game changing’ innovation, and the prevalence of digital processes within media-saturated environments. Then they can take the densely-coded, overdetermined built environment we have left for them, scrape it almost clean, and build new wisdom in their contributions.
References: Attiwill, Suzie. (2013). “Practices of Interiorization: An Inter-Story.” In T. VaiklaPoldma, T. (Ed.) Meanings of Designed Spaces (pp. 175-184). New York, NY: BloomsburyFairchild. PRINT De Certeau, Michel. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. (S. Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. PRINT Eisenman Architects. (n.d.). Eisenman Architects: Firm Profile. (Page 2) Retrieved June 10, 2013, from http://www. eisenmanarchitects.com/ Fulford, Robert. (2012, Dec. 18). “A Vested Interest in Palimpsest.” The National Post. Toronto. [Electronic version] Retrieved June 10, 2013, from http://arts.nationalpost. com/2012/12/18/robert-fulford-a-vestedinterest-in-palimpsest/ Tafuri, Manfredo. (1987). The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s. (P. D’Acierno & R. Connolly, Trans.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Original work published 1980) PRINT
13
text by Peter Laurence Director of Graduate Studies, Asst. Professor of Design + Architectural Theor y, Faculty Senator Clemson University School of Architecture clemson.academia.edu/PeterLaurence plauren@clemson.edu
all images by Daniel Jencks Clemson University School of Archtecture
15
Following a line of inquiry that dates from the time of Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture, “primitive hut” exercises are familiar explorations in dwelling and the essence of architecture for students of architecture. Made famous by MarcAntoine Laugier’s attempt in 1755 to reconcile the Classical and Gothic traditions with a new attitude toward nature in the century following the Scientific Revolution, primitive hut proposals continue to offer students and practitioners a way of distilling ideas about the contemporary condition in architectural form. With Netfl-x Views, Master of Architecture student Daniel Jencks created a lesson in how not to live. A satirical anti-primitive hut that transcends the typical overemphasis on the architectural object, Jencks’s project considers the question of community while being no less concerned with our relationship with nature than Laugier’s hut. Today, of course, our relationships with others and the natural world are all too often mediated by a screen. Jencks’s Netfl-x Views takes this to an extreme, but his view is less a dystopian imagination than one that holds up a mirror to our ways of life. Netfl-x Views’ destructive cutand-fill land development practice, neighborhood plan, relationship with the automobile and ultimately with petroleum, and its “snout-house” typology are all commonplace. In the dwelling itself, Jencks strips away the façade and spaces of the home that relate to semi-anachronistic traditions of community and social life outside of and within the home.
16
In an era when we enter our homes through our cars and garages, the front door, the vestigial organ of walkable neighborhoods where sidewalks were not a luxury item, is removed. Also gone are the dining room and kitchen. In their place, Jencks imagines a food subscription/delivery service that combines the ubiquitous drive-through fast food restaurant and food court with the now equally ubiquitous homeshopping services. When so many suburban subdivisions are built on what could be productive farmland, Jencks’s primitive hut highlights the relationship of dwelling and food, and the contemporary disconnection between them. In Netfl-x Views even the water is trucked in, a detail that questions both neoliberal disinvestment in public infrastructure and the enormous and unnecessary consumption of bottled water, while reminding us of the reality of water deliveries today in places like drought-stricken California. Finally, at the heart of Netfl-x Views sits the individual, disconnected from community and all but electronic phenomena, and enmeshed in a system of high energy/high caloric consumption, their anthropomorphic world dominated by products and a bank of monitors. It is a life of convenience, freedom, and ease, with personal mobility and personal choice only a step or a click away. A little too familiar, Netfl-x Views is perhaps a little too close to home.
Netfl-x Views is not affiliated with Netflix™ or any other brand or company. All images copyright Daniel Jencks, 2014 .
17
RISK AMPLIFICATION FOR FUTURE DESIGN SCHOOLS by Thomas Mical Associate Professor University of South Australia
This essay proposes an alternative to the ascendancy of controlspace that seeks to optimize architectural education along predetermined lines. In light of the perceived inefficiency inherent in open or speculative processes, this essay proposes a reverse-current thought experiment, one skewed towards anticipated forms of emergence initiated in risk. The conscious and deliberate amplification of risk in the spaces and processes of architectural pedagogy runs counter to these commandand-control systems, and yet architecture itself is inherently saturated by risk. Risk is welcomed as a disturbance of the established field conditions, the emergence of the unexplained, the anomalous, or glitch permutations recognizable within reflexive modernity. The facilities of the Design School are a type of bounded space, haunted by the subtle trembling modes of risk appearing in the wider speculative field of design propositions, risk seeping into reflexive design experimentation. Risk appears in architecture at different levels of production, and introduces an inefficiency whose extreme value is the potentiality of the unexpected. 18
It is posited that architectural risk is foundational to “architectural intelligence,” where architectural risk is both spatial (situated, emplaced) and tactical (instrumental, generative); and architectural intelligence stands for the diffusive body of embodied and distributed forms of professional, cognitive, visual, and spatial knowledge necessitated in forming architecture - when this knowledge is applied. We must consider that risk, when codified as a variable of unpredictability, can be amplified. For Design Schools, pedagogies of risk promise innovation – so as to include and welcome the tensions and insights arising from the aftershocks of risk driving architectural intelligence. Risk today, following the many critiques of Ulrich Beck’s earlier generative claims for a risk culture in modernity, holds a valuable but often suppressed role in pedagogy, in that risk may well be “at home” in architectural thought and tensioning a range of established (and emerging) design processes. Recursive or iterative design processes amplify disciplinary intelligences. Risk is therefore a potential source of value, and risk is a necessity for design explorations, as risk initiates sensitivity towards the destabilization of normative expectations. Risk, whether amplified or diminished, changes the “natural” outcomes of a process, and thus creates a possible new ecology of ideas: “the effective reality of risk, that which ‘creates’ the risk, is the contestation to which it may give rise.” 1 Though many conventions will seek to expel risk from architecture, as if to make it homeless or unhomely in the discipline, it is this subtle contestation-function that is really being controlled. Risk and
contestation can produce the necessary minimal differences between iterative design solutions, minimal differences that can open up new worlds and new scenarios for advanced design speculation. Beyond actuary tables, and a century away from the avantgarde, it is perhaps time to re-establish a disciplinary need for risk, and it is likely this project will be more at home in the academy. To do this, we should not consider risk as purely interior or exterior to architecture, but housed in architecture. To consider the cultivation and distribution of risk across the conceptual field conditions of architectural intelligence, and to amplify risk culture within future Design Schools, it is proposed that three future strategies be considered: Nomad Processes, Oblique Strategies, and Soluble Spaces. Strategy 1: Of Nomad Processes This complex of concepts and ideas prioritizes open processes of becoming and subtle changes and transformations in artistic / aesthetic processes, as strong models for nomadic and distributed knowledge networks interlacing with the disciplinary territory of Design Schools. The Deleuzian nomadic principles, already adopted into a variety of other contexts, can be the regulator of a search for designing new alternative Processural models - including the disruptive, insurgent, informal, and emerging forms of design processes for architectural intelligence. The primary origin of the conceptual thematic comes from Deleuze’s “On Nomadology” (1988), and this text’s articulation of the differences between Nomad Science and State Science, the former one of flows and trajectories and the latter one of striations and boundaries. 19
IMAGE: ED MEYERS
This strategy engages a mobile sense-making anticipating the production of the new in future Design Schools by coding, decoding, and recoding flows of information between organizational aesthetics and design creativity. Deleuzian rhizomatic-nomadic trajectories of thought can generate new transitive and flexible organizational concepts to develop protocols to cross-circuit - inflect/disrupt - the disciplinary norms, and can therefore redirect, resonate, or amplify differentiated or distributed knowledge through a multitude of forms of agents and agency. Strategy 2: Of Oblique Strategies This complex of concepts and ideas prioritizes aesthetics and compositional processes based on the minimal ambient music and discrete music with both forms conceptualized as the flow of singularities, and the interference patterns and reflexive interruptions of Brain Eno’s
20
“Oblique Strategies” (1971). Eno’s experimental aesthetic practices and theories stand in sharp relief to the expansive corporate design culture of the 1970’s, and created an alternative form of production of new transitive aesthetics, one increasingly important today in agile-digital environments. These processural aesthetics of repositioning, breakage, and signal-jamming are needed in architectural intelligence as openings to risk and discovery. Oblique Strategies can guide both operative creativity - visualizing, demonstrating, testing alternative data sets through recursion; and situational creativity - in flow theory of events and singularities, environment and affect. In alignment with the growing presence of ultra-minimalism and forms of austerity, the Oblique Strategies principles define the indeterminate potential forms of reduction, displacement, and disruption of patterns and habitus in the everyday lived experience of Design Schools as workplace.
Strategy 3: Of Soluble Spaces This complex of concepts and ideas prioritizes the spatial situated-ness of these processes of becoming as artistic/aesthetic processes, calling attention to new models of flexible dreamspaces and fab-labs for future Design Schools posited upon the destabilization of functionalism and determinism in their design and in their pedagogy. The ability of programmed space to become soft, flexible, transitory, and contingent is already housed in a variety of other contexts at the edges of architecture. Moving beyond the beyond Fordist-Taylorist paradigm of organizational spaces in the education-industrialcomplex, this strategy calls for designing - or appropriating - a range of new alternative Design School settings and networks with careful attention to the generative coupling of risk culture permeating, opening, and merging into control-space, a noise within.
IMAGE: ED MEYERS
In the strategy of Soluble Spaces, determinist programmed functionalist space dissolves into pools of subtly differentiated spaces, opening up processes previously rational but now free to the artistic, subjective, and transitory. This new type of porosity of work-life space, in what Foucault defined as “other spaces” and Vidler defines as “dark spaces,” expose the limits and excesses of the optics of transparency in modernist functionalism. We can cultivate sensitivity to the soluble qualities of the universal space paradigm, by addressing the open plasticity of space, which can be traced theoretically through reflexive modernity - as a series of openings – this being the historical axis of architectural intelligence. The necessity of this new spatial logic of the soluble is aligned with the necessity of risk culture, here fused as a concern with temporal transition and dissolve all as metaphors for increasing the solubility of prior
hard parameters. Drawing from the experiments in contemporary design firms, the slow relaxing of some corporate protocols (and architectural imperatives) can drive this strategy of spatial flexibility so as to distort and disturb the logic of control-space. The future of Design Schools is not located in their past, but in the under-examined, suppressed, and invisible aspects of risk culture that can be amplified to disrupt their uniform modern spatial logical and modern organizational principles. To this end, the decision science driving design schools must be expanded to swerve away from rote citation of efficiency into deeper and more diversified values, incorporating risk through discovered curiosities and unknown pleasures, using risk to frame the pedagogy of future Design Schools.
References 1 François Ewald, “Two Infinities of Risk” in Brian Massumi (ed.), The Politics of Everyday Fear, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. 225
Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage, 1992. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Nomadology: The War Machine. NY: Semiotexte, 1986. Eno, Brian and Peter Schmidt. Oblique Strategies (Over One hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas), 1975. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” in Leach, N, (ed.) Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. NYC: Routledge. 1997. pp. 330-336 . Massumi, Brian (ed.), The Politics of Everyday Fear, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Mical, Thomas. “Architectural Intelligences” (internet source: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj. asp?SerieId=AI) accessed 21 Nov 2014. Newfield, Paul and Timothy Rayner. “FCJ028 Learning and Insurgency in Creative Organisations” in The Fibreculture Journal (internet source: http://five.fibreculturejournal. org/fcj-028-learning-and-insurgency-increative-organisations/) accessed 21 Nov 2014. Vidler, Anthony. “Dark Space” in The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994, pp. 167-176.
21
NEW RELEASE
by Daisy Froud Spatial Strategist daisy@daisyfroud.com @daisyfroud
by Dr Harriet Harris Principal Lecturer, Architecture Director of Live Lab Oxford Brookes University www.architecture.brookes.ac.uk/staff/ harrietharriss @harrietharriss
22
Architectural education is largely considered to be both complex and costly. To then graduate our indebted talent into unpaid internships is the Darwinian equivalent of a professional species eating its young. It amounts to both an ethical and an economic crisis. Yet there’s no better time than a ‘crisis’ to be thoughtfully innovative and to take the initiative. Creative schools in general confront enormous challenges and disruptions from market forces, pervasive technologies and government policy shifts. By nature of its proximity to practice, and task of at least in some way priming students to become ‘professionals’, architectural education is more susceptible than other creative disciplines to the impacts of such shifts. It’s little wonder that students can loose their footing in such an unstable learning landscape. The anticipated reduction in the duration of architectural education across Europe, as a result of legislative changes has engendered a collective sense of openness to exploring other models of professional education delivery. The forthcoming book, Radical pedagogy: architectural education and the British Tradition - edited by Brookes Principal lecturer Harriet Harriss & civic practitioner Daisy Froud - responds to this challenge. Featuring voices as varied as digital strategists, students and client managers, it offers an
unrivalled array of philosophically, politically and practically prototyped possibilities, contextualised within the historic tradition of UK architectural education. Drivers behind the need for curricula change – whether coming from industry, schools, students, European legislation or wider society - are identified and discussed, framing a series of questions about why, and how, radical change can take place, and in some cases already is. Questions about where we might locate architectural ‘learning’ - inside or outside our schools or practice offices? Who should teach architecture - professors, practitioners or peers? Should architecture remain a discipline-silo informed only by the demands of professional practice? Or should it evolve into something more nebulous and interdisciplinary? The book is unashamedly concerned with British education, seeking to account for why it is the most exported architectural curriculum in the world, a statistic indicative of the global esteem with which it is regarded. Whilst legislative change may provide an impetus for radical transformation in the coming months, the book suggests that any future curriculum is likely to find as much inspiration in pedagogical ‘tradition’ as it does in pioneering innovation. In doing so, it gets to the heart of what ‘radical’ – a word with origins in the ideas of ‘roots’ - really means.
23
CASE STUDIES
FUTURE CITIES & CITIZENS by Dolores Ruiz Garrido Little Architect Director aaschool.ac.uk @AALittleArchi IMAGE CREDITS LITTLE ARCHITECT
Who is teaching the future? How? Where? Which future? To whom? I am not sure if I have any of these answers to these questions, probably not, but I have become a lecturer on the subject. The future of our cities and the contemporary architecture shaping existing ones are the core of my presentations. My audience is the best that any architect could ever dream to have. They are extremely participative, criticizing, commenting in loud voices or even clapping at many of the slides that I show. Every lecture or round table is full of unexpected reactions and, of course, fun for all of us. My presentations are normally on a primary school carpet. My audience is children aged five to ten years old. “Hi! I am Little Architect director, a new educational programme part of the Architectural Association Visiting School.”
24
In summer 2013 when we designed this programme to teach architecture in UK primary schools, we decided not to be part of the afterschool clubs scheme. We wanted to teach to the whole class in partnership with the school teacher, integrating and complementing the subjects that children are studying in the national curriculum - and that is what we are doing. Step-by-step, Little Architect is becoming more and more established, convincing head teachers and teachers that knowledge of architecture, cities and their citizens is today a gap in children’s education that we have the ability to fill. Teaching architecture to young children can be approached in many different ways, due to the richness of our discipline, so we have tried to choose and compile some inspirational theories to shape our programme. We
could start with R. Buckminster Fuller´s planetarium concern, his opposition to specialization in education 1 and his practical examples of children’s endless capacity to understand complex concepts 2. Colin Ward and his book “The Child in the City” inspires us to look for teaching resources in every corner of London, and Paul Goodman´s educational theories add a pinch of insurrection and sabotage 3. The life of Ruth Asawa 4, American artist and former student at The Black Mountain College, is an example to follow, as she transformed and improved the whole school curriculum of what today is called the San Francisco School of the Arts (SOTA) in San Francisco. Meanwhile, Sir Ken Robinson 5 and Martin Seligman´s books 6 encourage us to create enthusiastic and positive lectures so we talk about hidden monsters and magnificent treasures in windows, roofs or doors in every presentation, since fostering curiosity and observation is key for us. “The Eyes of the Skin”, J. Pallasma’s already classic book, leads us to talk not only about observing architecture but also about feeling architecture. We look for textures, we tell children to touch everything (sorry parents!) - facades, stairs, floors, grass - to smell every material, and even listen to buildings, for there are many times unnoted sounds in architecture are amazing discoveries for children. A long list of architects and artists with utopian proposals and a deep concern about the public realm provide core material for our presentations: Yona Friedman, Peter Cook, Haus Rucker Co, CJ Lim, Lucien Kroll, Archigram, Lina Bo Bardi, Richard Rogers and Gego, Oiticica, Leon
26
Ferrari, Antony Gormley, to give some examples. We try to accommodate in our sessions different ways to engage with architecture, following Howard Gardner´s multiple intelligences theory 7. We encourage drawing and lots of conversation; sometimes we nearly run out of time for finishing the class exercise, as children’s commentaries can be so sharp and interesting. I still remember last year’s debate about MRDV “Rooftop Village” in Rotterdam: Thumbs up or Thumbs down for the blue house. It was only after a long and heated debate that those who liked the blue house won. After sowing the idea that architecture can be much more interesting and playful that they thought, we mainly want to let children express themselves in their favourite way. We set up a creative environment and drawings are taken as communication tools. As children learn about the evolution of cities from past to present, about fauna and flora, transport and clean energy, the urban ecosystem is revealed. They have a moment to think and meditate: What do I want to draw, what am I designing? What do I want for my future house, city, local area or school? We teach them to think about their future; they are the decision makers, they are the main characters in the play. The process, in this case, is much more important than the result. We want them to learn that they can do the same activity while they are sitting at home, travelling by bus or waiting for food in a restaurant: They can observe, draw, comment and imagine their future city inside and outside our lessons.
Our aim is definitely not to indoctrinate children to become architects. Rather, we want children to be much more active in urban processes. We want to trigger a new relationship with their local surroundings, in which they are caring for, but also enjoying and being critical of the cities we all inhabit. That is our main task - to teach them that the future is theirs. References 1
R. Buckminster Fuller. Operating Manual for
Spaceship. p24-26 2
R. Buckminster Fuller.Utopia or Oblivion.
P28-29 3
Colin Ward. The child in the city. P176
4
The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa. Contours in
the air. 2006 5
Ken Robinson .The arts in school.. 1982
6
Martin Seligman. The Optimistic child. 2007
7
Howard Gardner. Frames of Mind: The
Theory of Multiple Intelligences. 1983
TOWARDS A NEW ARCHITECTURAL IDENTITY FOR FREETOWN:
SETTING UP THE FIRST FREE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE IN SIERRA LEONE by Bo Tang Research Coordinator / lecturer - Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources (ARCSR) www.thecass.com/research1/research/arcsr b.tang@londonmet.ac.uk @bo_tang
In April 2014 London Metropolitan University signed an agreement with the University of Sierra Leone and the Sierra Leone Institute of Architects to collaborate in founding Sierra Leone’s first School of Architecture to be set up on the university campus perched high above the capital city of Freetown overlooking the sea.
28
IMAGE: BO TANG
29
This new initiative has grown directly out of research sparked in 2007 by an individual’s request for help to establish a primary school in Kaningo, a poor settlement on the edge of Freetown, whose population was made up of civil war refugees. This request led to the initiation of a research process which was designed to test resistances and make accommodations to locally encountered realities so that insights and new knowledge could emerge as the work progressed. This led to a collaborative partnership, which opened doors to a stimulating academic learning environment. The first aim of the research, undertaken by The Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources (ARCSR), was to understand the local physical and cultural topography around the school site sufficient to ensure an appropriate fit for proposals. In 2007, a local NGO, CESO, was registered. The first two field trips (2008-2010) reviewed the physical, cultural, social and economic conditions in Kaningo and its surroundings. This involved conducting interviews and documenting observations and construction processes through sketches and photographs. In addition a hands-on workshop experimented on-site with making cementitious walling blocks and ventilation grilles and compiled a construction manual. By September 2011 the modest school building was completed with incremental roof upgrading
30
and subsequent classroom furniture design and build. Since then, the school has operated successfully until the recent outbreak of Ebola when it was closed, pending the end of the epidemic, along with all other schools in the country. The research in Kaningo made explicit the deep social problems encountered by poor Freetown residents. These included a sense of isolation from, and a lack of confidence in, democratic engagement with the city. For this reason the second aim of the research was to raise awareness of the architectural history, culture, and potential of places in Kaningo, places were built at different times and under different conditions but nevertheless spatially adjacent and all part of the rich architectural culture of Freetown. Researchers carried out measured surveys of houses and their surrounding neighbourhoods. They assembled data from the literature and recorded oral histories to highlight the particular historical, cultural and environmental context of each settlement so as to facilitate comparison between them. Some conditions were common to all three. These included: the steep riverain landscape hindering settlement access and requiring buildings to adapt to varying gradients; the accelerating loss of primary forest cover leading to increased rainwater erosion and flooding, and the change from
timber to reinforced concrete and cement block as the preferred primary construction materials. Yet, attitudes of occupants to the surrounding landscape differ widely. Spatial division in urban downtown is crisp and legible. Front and back, inside and out, public and private are clearly defined by the placing of the building in relation to the street. Conversely, the colonists area of Hill Station has always been a segregated enclave, a safe, shady, cool, quiet, breezy place to retire to after a day’s work, where, in the past, views over the forest and the sea could evoke dreams of home in the UK. Kaningo, on the other hand, is still emerging from the steep rocky floor of the forest. The research has provided a more accessible narrative of the current changing city topography embedded deep within its culture and landscape. The third aim was to give a sense of identity to the growing populations of newer neighbourhoods where the greatest social change is currently taking place. Exhibitions of the research and talks and seminars sponsored by the British Council in both Freetown and London have helped by generating a wide response from the Krio diaspora, the Government of Sierra Leone, students, professionals and the press but, more importantly, they have enabled the residents involved to witness representations of their neighbourhood included as a valuable contribution to city culture laying down the basis for
IMAGE: BO TANG
31
IMAGE: JOE DAVIS
32
a sense of shared spatial identity. The agreement to collaborate in the establishment of a new School of Architecture which rose from the debate surrounding these two exhibitions should help to promote this third aim. In the academic year 2013/14 two 5th year students proposed portfolio schemes at the city scale incorporating ideas emerging from the Freetown research. Alex McClean worked on the expansion of the National Museum located in the centre of Freetown and Joe Davis began developing a scheme for the School of Architecture building itself based on the upgrading of an existing redundant hall of residence and a new timber studio shed. This research is appropriate because it changes lives and adds value within an ethical framework extending beyond conventional research practice to include the associated environmental, social and cultural costs. This promulgates a way of thinking and practicing which by accommodating strife and minimising side effects and hidden costs can become strategic. Thus this ‘bottom up’ research is providing insights, which are
33
IMAGE: MAURCE MITCHELL
effectively being scaled up to contribute to city culture and policy. On field trips, it was clear that the live projects and research carried out in Freetown have had an important impact on the lay, academic and professional communities in Sierra Leone. Everywhere I went people talked of how the research had dignified a forgotten architectural heritage and how this supported their aim to establish a local sustainable architectural culture capable of resisting the callous forces that have compromised other West African cities and which are now ravaged by the Ebola virus. The ARCSR research area has achieved this impact through a rigorous methodology. It uses cultural and measured surveys not only as a way of recording a place but as a way of making friends and establishing a community of others implicated and committed to their cause. The trust this generates is often the precondition to building projects such as the sanitation projects in Agra or the schools in Mumbai and Freetown. The careful way they then draw the places they study is also important. These narrative architectural drawings capture the life of the areas studied and place the occupants they have met and their lives at the centre of the conversation.
The work of ARCSR also has important educational implications. Research and live projects in areas of rapid change and scarce resources connect students with important ethical and humanitarian issues giving them renewed focus and bravery. In February, 2014 the work in Sierra Leone was published in the book, The Architecture of Three Freetown Neighbourhoods: documenting changing city topographies 2008-13, which has been short listed for the 2014 RIBA prize for University based research. Presently there are only 25 Sierra Leonean registered architects with an average age of 55, practicing in a rapidly changing, largely unregulated environment and where development is taking place that has little to do with Sierra Leone’s history, climate, dramatic landscape, or substantial but untapped material and human resources. The new school will use ARCSR’s research into Freetown’s historic neighborhoods as the basis of it history curriculum and it will use the building methods and attitude to sustainable design pioneered by ARCSR as the basis of its design curriculum. During the first three years of the school students from Freetown and London will collaborate to construct a public room for the new school based on Joe Davis’ 5th year scheme.
35
CONSTRUCTING THE SUBJECT OF ARCHITECTURE INDUCTION OF SUBJECT AND PEDAGOGICAL METHODS FOR DESIGN PRACTICE
by Phil Watson Director Free School of Architecture philwatson19@aol.com
Experimental practices and methods for future architects. The free school is concerned with the development of alternative research for the production of critical design practice and inquiry. The method is the construction of pedagogical interfaces for reconstructing the subject of architecture. Architecture as it enters new territories has no limits, no boundaries and no fixed objectives, the interfaces are experimental visionary tactics coupled to the imagination. The tools of an evolving subject are the principle objectives for remaking the subject of architecture.
36
IMAGE: TEODOR PETROV
37
These tools require cross discipline collaborative techniques that create conditions for speculative experimental practices - we explore the possibilities of philosophical rigour in imaginary technologies.
These architectures are concerned with the idea of remoteness in the architectural imagination where other object ontologies and other natures are possible, remote object technologies invite speculation and experimentation outside of regulated typologies.
Collaborative research across subject boundaries that incorporate contemporary models of other practices. Critical cultural drivers for responsive design practice include philosophy, mathematics, science, art, together with scientific models of research in evolving technologies. These emerging research practices invite speculation on architectures some of which have synthetic objectives as pedagogies rather than objects. The idea is that we need to invest in speculative architectural imaginations, those that create possibilities for experimenting with ideas not directed to product design.
Boundary shifting between subjects provides a platform
Emerging landscapes include the objectless sites that exist
The subject, the object and its utility are tradition in formal architectures, the shift to other architectures that are not founded on these traits is the central purpose of the free school; to search for other types of architectures not limited by conventional practices
38
for experimenting with tools for transferring ideas between scales, subjects and technologies. How we represent architectural research is critical to the development of new practices.
IMAGES: PHIL WATSON + JON MORRIS
39
IMAGE: LIZ WILLIAMS
as the invisible locations of the objects of technology. The sites of these architectures are portable augmentations between objects/ subjects. Randomness from which every truth is woven is the subjects’ material, its trajectory begins at the outskirts of the eventual site, everything else is lawless. Randomness is not visible in the result and the subject does not coincide with the result. Locally there are only illegal encounters (A. Badiou, Theory of the Subject). There are no limits or boundaries to the subjects or ideas of architecture. The point is to experiment with the future and the terms of these architectures in an evolving contemporary world. Revealing new architectures means inventing new grammars, new lexicons with unconventional methods of representation where new natures, new landscapes and synthetic materialities become an environment for collaborative experimental research between science and art practice. The new architectures need new types of experimental architects. This is an invitation to help change the subject. Schools and practices interested in fostering and enabling change in architectural education please contact us for details. We can provide a foundation in critical architectures for individuals or groups.
41
THE BRIGHTON WASTE HOUSE A L E A R N I N G TO O L by Duncan Baker-Brown Director BBM Sustainable Design Senior Lecturer, Brighton Univeristy www.bbm-architects.co.uk duncan@bbm-architects.co.uk @bbmarchitects All images courtesy of Univeristy of Brighton
94
Writing this piece nearly five months after the formal opening of The Brighton Waste House at University of Brighton – and the UK’s first A+ rated house from an EPC (Energy Performance Certificate) point of view and the first to be made from ‘compostable’ material - has given me a bit of time to reflect on a project that occupied most of my conscious and a fair bit of my unconscious mind for a solid two years.
44
Inspired by my time studying under Florian Beigel at the London Metropolitan’s Architectural Research Unit, as well as the work of academics and students at the University of Sheffield’s Live Projects Programme and finally of course Hale County’s path-finders Rural Studio, I was determined to make the building of Waste House a real learning experience. It was therefore my ambition from the start to allow the re-design and the construction of our new ‘live’ project to involve as many students as possible.
In May 2011 tutors and students from our Interior Architecture course started to construct what would be the first of the annual pavilion structures to be built in the courtyard of the College of Arts & Humanities. At the very same time apprentices from local contractors The Mears Group (a national contractor charged with servicing and maintaining the social housing stock of Brighton & Hove, and that have a commitment to training a large number of apprentices) were starting the construction of the foundations and below ground drainage for our build. Mears had generously promised to deliver this first phase of the works for us. However what we hadn’t planned for was
that Mears’ apprentices drifted around the corner and helped our students complete the build of their pavilion which included loaded-bearing rammed chalk and straw bale walls that year. This transfer of knowledge and skills from makers to designers and designers to makers was hugely successful. So much so it inspired Mears to commit to delivering the completed building in 2012. During 2012 I had met a number of experts in the subject area of waste as a valuable resource or The Circular Economy. Designers such as Nick Gant who runs the Sustainable Design MA at The College of Arts and Humanities and Diana Lock from ReMade South East, a government funded organization charged
with getting larger companies and corporations to reduce the amount of waste their product created in manufacture and crucially in-use. Diana told me that many large multinational corporations were very concerned about ‘resource security’ as well as the cost of the ultimate disposal of their products. They were looking at ways to avoid relying upon buying so much raw material, as well as avoiding sending their products to landfill or incineration, in order to make or sustain their profit margins, or in some enlightened cases, to reduce their burden upon Planet Earth’s natural resources. The sensible money was investing in the world of the Circular Economy. 45
In August 2012 I called a mini “waste summit” where I met Cat Fletcher who helped form FREEGLE UK “an exchange for unwanted stuff ” with over 1.8 million subscribers. Myself, Cat, together with Dr. Ryan Woodard, a Research Fellow at The University of Brighton who has been working in waste management research for over 15 years, and with Nick and Diana, contrived a plan for redesigning the building so that it was constructed of waste and surplus material from the construction industry. Following Cat’s suggestion we also looked at collecting items of waste material currently flooding domestic waste sites; material such as VHS video tapes and CD’s. Mears agreed to provide an experienced site agent to run the construction site, together with their apprentices. We planned to start works on site in the autumn of 2012.
It was during this period that I had another fortuitous meeting. I went to meet tutors delivering construction courses at City College Brighton and Hove. I wanted to see if they could construct a glue-laminated timber beam for the roof of our new building. They couldn’t make a glue-lam beam, but rather amazingly for us they wanted to build the Waste House as every year they build the equivalent of a new building in their three storey workshops. We had our team. The structure of the Waste House, which was made using waste ply and timber off-cuts was completely constructed by approximately thirty 16-18 year old carpentry students in the workshops, over a threemonth period. The structure was then delivered to site at our Grand Parade Campus where the Mears Site Agent David
Pendegrass worked with over 275 different students - construction students from City College and architecture and interior architecture students from the University of Brighton - over a twelve month period which resulted in the completion of Europe’s first permanent building made from nearly 90% material discarded by others. During this period we had a Volunteer Summer School Camp that ran from June 2013 until September 2013. Over 50 students completed the most challenging part of the construction process during this period. 25 of the volunteers were City College students, and another 25 were architecture students, with many of those from the Interior Architecture course. This was perhaps the most profitable time as far as skills and learning exchange amongst
students, apprentices and the one or two professional trades people we had on site. It was the one period of time where design students could spend three, four, maybe six weeks in a row working on site. Some of these committed design students became so adept at their new trade that they ran small teams of volunteer carpenters on site; teams that included City College carpentry students. It was during this time that Mears promoted five City College students to Apprentices because of their work on our project. A number of our students received Achievement Awards from Mears. During the construction of the Waste House we also worked with deaf students from Hamilton Lodge, as well as a number of students with learning and behavioral difficulties. Construction sites have always
been a social and intellectual leveler, and so it proved with our Waste House. We recorded over 25 short films during the construction period that included interviews with students from all institutions taking part. We also welcomed over 750 pupils from local primary and secondary schools, as well as other technical colleges from around the South East. This unusual learning environment was completely facilitated by our immensely patient site agent David Pendegrass who had to do a Health & Safety Induction for every person who arrived on site, whether they wanted to work or simply visit, and remember he also had to get the Waste Hose built on budget and on time. This he did.
professionals to work with students and volunteers on a truly innovative design idea, but more importantly to work together on a very rare thing, a collaborative pedagogic project where age, academic and vocational abilities were no barrier to being involved. The Waste House continues to act as a learning tool. It hosts the MA in Sustainable Design and continues to welcome schools, colleges, design professionals and anybody who is interested in innovative sustainable design. For further information click here. To view Waste House construction films click here.
For me The Waste House was a dream come true, an opportunity for design and construction 47
FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
LOOKING BACK TO MOVE FORWARDS REFLECTIONS ON COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS
by Derek Hill Project office Design Super visor Univeristy of Strathclyde www.strath.ac.uk/courses/undergraduate/architecturalstudies derek.hill@stratch.ac.uk @derekhillarch
Working within the Department of Architecture at the University of Strathclyde, I have developed several collaborative design processes to expose our students to an architectural education not limited to books, drawings and balsa wood models. Instead I provide them with an altogether different pedagogy which seeks to embrace the RIBA principle of embedded professional content through curriculum based practical experience. Several of these processes are based on strategies that have been integral to the structure of the teaching for some time, while others are in their infancy but all have now allowed a period of self-reflection, focussed on determining the measurable and immeasurable benefits these styles have had upon the cohort.
48
ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF R.CAMPBELL
I encourage my students to engage with real clients, on real projects, in collaboration with real industry expertise. These collaborations come, not in addition to the students’ curriculum of learning, but as a fully integrated facet of it, and as early in their education as Year One / Project One where, within the first six weeks of their education, I challenge them (as Year 1 Studio Director) to react to a live client brief to design, fabricate, construct and deliver a small installation in a rural context with a very modest budget of £250.
In developing these new strategies, I have introduced a new Special Study Class in Year 4 that presents students with the opportunity to gain further exposure to real projects, collaborations and processes. While the opportunity for students of architecture to get their hands dirty through a construction process is, I believe, a positive one – and the most common ‘live project’ typology within UK centres of architectural learning - perhaps more important is the opportunity for students to understand the process and processes which take their drawings into reality. My
aim for the Special Study Class is therefore to provide exposure to the processes from concept to delivery, working with industry professionals on projects that require funding streams, that must react to actual deadlines and which may or may not come to fruition. In the initial weeks of the class, industry professionals from Glasgow based design practices present a range of real projects to the students. These projects already exist in one form or another but are requiring of a degree of additional input or resource in order to be truly 49
realised. Existing links between industry and academia have allowed symbiotic relationships to be forged: industry projects require resourcing, students of architecture are hungry for experience. The concept is simple: small groups of students (Design Team) unite with practicing architects and Department staff (Design Directors) to form ‘Design Practices’ enabling the resourcing and delivery of these projects. Projects range from archive and feasibility studies to research based typology studies; from traditional design projects to the design of temporary installations with limited budgets. The commonality across these projects is that they are each lack appropriate resourcing in order to drive them forward. The Special Study Class provides this resource and students are distributed across the projects, working in pods of four to facilitate a dynamic resource to a number of projects. Thereafter the projects continue under the steward ship of the collaborator/s with student involvement as and when required by the project programme. Due to the nature of the process, the class does not sit within the rigid formality of an academic timetable. Rather it operates through emerging liaisons between students and industry with meetings, charettes and discussions being encouraged to take place with the Department to further develop links to reality. At appropriate points, the full group gathers to discuss all projects with input from students and collaborators. These half day sessions do much to blur the lines between academia and industry and take the form of design charettes and informal
50
design meetings – round the table, not on the wall – as a break from the traditional ‘crit’ set up within schools of architecture. This is deliberate to reinforce the feeling that the project ownership remains with the industry collaborators. Each project works at a pace appropriate to its individual programme with student involvement encouraged – and supported – across academic recesses and out with timetabled hours. The academic credits are the motivation but not necessarily the drive, and as students begin to feel a connection with their project, the desire to remain involved grows. Students are tasked with submitting their own Project Case Study which demonstrates their process and involvement throughout regardless of whether the project was or is completed at the point of ‘hand in’. This format begins to imitate the RIBA Part III Case Study which currently forms part of the submission criteria for the Part III exam and develops students’ ability to record and reflect as part of an ongoing process, not merely at the conclusion of one. The submission of the Case Study – together with an A2 ‘Project Abstract’ to serve as an image bank of the project allows parity of assessment across a very varied portfolio of project involvement and directs the emphasis away from the ‘product’ of the project (good or bad) and places it on the pedagogic learning. This strategy is placed deliberately in Year 4 because the students have by this stage completed 12 months in practice
as part of their Part 1 experience and, therefore, already have some understanding of dynamics of practice based design. It also allows the Department to reflect on the experiences and outcomes in a live manner as the students move through into Year 5 and begin to evidence, through their developing working methods, collaborative and ‘live’ processes when tackling their Masters year of study. This immediate crossover from the Projects Through Collaborations Special Study Class into Year 5 has, this year, given rise to a number of students expressing real interest in working on ‘live’ projects to fulfil the Thesis and Masters project requirements. As a result, Studio 04 in Year 5 has been identified as the ‘Live Projects’ studio and we now have connections – and funding streams - with Scottish Government, Loch Lommond and the Trossachs National Park, Glasgow Institute of Architects, Glasgow City Council, the University of Strathclyde Estates Department and a number of other developing relationships as our students continue to take ownership of their area of study and present provocations through their body of research. We also have a number of our students who have elected to study in Bolivia at the Universidad Privada de Santa Cruz de la Sierra as they seek to take collaborations to a global level. General processes now deployed within the Year 5 studio could be identified as being directly related to learned process while working in collaboration with an increased sense of professionalism in conduct and aptitude combined with a greater ability to manage
time and respond to self-imposed deadlines and targets. While these represent, at some level, measurable benefits for the students there may also be less obvious benefits for the students who are exposed to the new teaching strategy. For example, some collaborative teams engaged with students from lower years within the Department at critical points within the process, thus establishing a naturally occurring vertical element to the teaching strategy which, in turn, ensures benefits are not exclusively focused on Year 4. Elsewhere, the interest from industry to engage with the Department through the Collaborative Class has heightened with demand for collaboration outweighing student supply as we enter into the new academic session for the Projects Through Collaboration class. This could suggest that the model could be expanded – either horizontally across Year 4, or vertically across all years to satisfy this demand from industry. Although still in the initial stages of its development the class has already displayed measurable benefits for students, the Department and our industry collaborators and through ‘live’ build, exposure to ‘real’ clients and an expanding portfolio of ‘real’ projects, the Department of Architecture at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow can be seen to be promoting creative solutions through new educational strategies to react to an ever-changing career pathway and architectural profession.
51
TEACHING INDIVIDUALISM by Abdulbari Kutbi MA.Arch candidate UCA www.akutbi.tumblr.com akutbi13@gmail.com @abdulbari_kutbi
IMAGE: ABDULBARI KUTBI
‘The university teacher is therefore no longer a teacher and the student no longer someone merely engaged in the learning process but a person who undertakes his own research, while the professor directs his research and supports him in it’ Wilhelm Von Humboldt
52
The years spent in education are the most valuable for developing critical positions about the role of architecture in society. I have often asked practitioners what advice they would give to a student, the most common reply is “enjoy education while it lasts’’. Higher education provides an opportunity to practice architecture in a personal way, to imagine and to test ideas about the world without the external conditions applied in a working environment. Schools of architecture should not be factories for the production of designers; they should be laboratories, where scholars are driven towards forming critical opinions and ideas about the world. Students and educators/ practitioners need to realize the vast potential of educational space, of being able to occupy and to object, to stage events and represent ideas, to be ambitious and creative; to create and engage society at large. Educational institutions are responsible for enabling those activities to emerge and exist as part of the teaching of design. It is their responsibility to foster an environment that is conducive for forming social initiatives through the mediums of expression. Having passed through the hoops of an undergraduate education, I believe there is an expectation both by students and faculty that the task of design education is to provide the skills for moving into industry. While this is necessarily true, it does not restrict the task of teaching to the delivery of vocational skills. There is certainly
more to architecture than draughtsmanship, layout skills & technical detailing. Students or scholars perhaps, should enter architectural education with the expectation of being engaged in critical discourse about society at large. During my third year we had a brief series of open sessions with the course leader. In those he would attempt to bring up areas of critical engagement with the subject. Those sessions were the equivalent of a pinch, hoping to cause us to question the preconceived methods of occupying residential space in the context of our housing projects. What often frustrated me was the apparent difficulty that most of my colleagues appeared to have in contributing to the discussion. Does our education system still dispossess us of the desire for expression? Or are we too young to have any ideas about the world? A related concern is how architectural study is increasingly viewed as economic rather than social. In their 2013 report, SCHOSA (The Standing Conference of Heads of Schools of Architecture) mention that ‘’in practice too architecture is, for some, principally a social art and for others a vehicle for commercial gain.’’ 1 Schools of Architecture and Design are responsible for where graduates position themselves on this scale. Architecture is a mesh of many types of knowledge from the social to the anatomical; however it is when the designed product is of pure economic nature that design becomes industrialized.
The increased cost of higher education borne by the individual raises the question of whether society or indeed policymakers believe it to be a worthwhile exercise anymore. The gradual privatization of higher education is causing institutions to lose their ability to act as free and independent spaces, the capacity of a school to act as what John Dewey called “an embryonic society”. Universities become corporations for producing the workforce, fulfilling the functions that policymakers assign to them. How can we counter this? One way is for us to once again become polymaths. The profession is both in need of specialization as well as generalization of our interests. The nature of a social entrepreneur is the ability to assimilate different interests and specialisms as needs require. This is most available for exploitation during university study, when plenty of spare time and energy is at hand. But the question still stands, how do you instill the search for alternatives through study? I am not sure you have to, perhaps scholars must for themselves find the desire for an alternative, but higher education should at least increase the chances of that happening. References 1
SCHOSA. (2013). Pathways and Gateways: The structure and regulation of architectural education. SCHOSA. Dewey, J. (1915). School and Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. SCHOSA. (2013). Pathways and Gateways: The structure and regulation of architectural education. SCHOSA.
53
TEACHING ARCHITECTURE TO THE FUTURE by Shruti Shriva B.Arch kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture, Mumbai Design intern at Apruva Amin Architects shruti.shiva6391@gmail.com
Recently, I had the opportunity to be a teaching assistant to some first year students. In this rite of initiation, where one is often asked to translate their formal ideas from abstract things like videos, paintings or poetry it becomes imperative for the teaching assistant to teach students the basic ‘concepts of architectural design’ and how to arrive at form. To do so, I dipped into my five years of learning, trying to sift out lessons I learnt as a student and how I could pass that on. However, standing on the precipice of pedagogic and practical, I realized that there is a chasm between what I learnt and what I was taught as a student of architecture.
54
1. The unique and the useful As the freshers began to explore their ideas in groups I found myself constantly drawn towards instructing them to find a unique expression for their ideas, for that approach was what was constantly deployed by our guides to teach us. For instance, in the second year, our design project was based in a culturally, historically and spiritually blessed river island called Majuli, Assam (India). We were to assume that
the island had succumbed to its impending threat of drowning and that we should design an intervention which would serve as a marker to what was. One of my classmates proposed a series of interventions, tucked into small nooks and crannies, where he had secretly hidden bottles of soft-drinks and alcohol, as these substances were banned within this sacred island. The project was praised for its quirky approach,
IMAGE: AKSHAI WILKINSON
which arose from a personal experience. However, one juror questioned the conscience of the project. Sitting among a team of senior architects and clients, volleying back and forth between need and self-expression, I realized that we as students of architecture are raised to be unique but sometimes at the cost of being useful. Our education encourages
originality and rareness, a process through which more often than not, common and pertinent issues could be sifted out. While working over the age-old issue of housing, I could see myself reach a consensus on the ‘overpractical vs. the exotic’ debate. So I told my junior “You don’t have to pick unique concerns or have unusual programs. Find an exotic approach to a banal yet relevant issue”.
55
2. Jack of all trades. In year three, we were introduced to what was considered the most dreaded yet essential aspect of architectural practice- the working drawing. As I worked on my ambitious second year building, where form was born out of a luscious concept of shifting landscapes, I saw myself bludgeoning the life out of my building to suit the working drawing framework. Each elective I had chosen in the past - climatology, history, theory of architecture and so on - became an ornamental plug-on in an effort to create a sound design. Though architecture schools teach a myriad of design related topics they fail to integrate these areas into the main architectural studio. While everyone told me that the real world would be the same I was delighted to be proven otherwise. Over my senior architect’s table were four other professionals (landscape, structure, civil and environmental architects) brainstorming over one printout, with inputs and large pencil strokes pouring in from each corner. With the proliferation of newer materials, software and technology, architecture today is all about pushing the limits, where one cannot simply treat topics like sustainability, technology and history as peripheral matters. As I stood over this table, I remembered the words of my fourth year design guide “What
56
are these leftover spaces for? Just landscape them or something” These words collided against the words being said by the landscape architect “landscape is not just a decorative smear, neither is sustainability a selling point”; elucidating the prevalent thought versus what it should be. 3. Genius or Scenius When talking about architecture and its growing complexities and the immediate need for architectural schools to embrace a more holistic approach one cannot ignore the most crucial offshoot of that thoughtcollaboration. In my entire architectural career, I’ve been a part of numerous group projects where the design produced would often be a result of a single idea which was agreed upon rather than an idea produced out of deliberation and consensus. In architectural school though the subconscious message and teaching always lean towards producing solitary brilliance. As every other field is moving towards scenius, we still veer towards producing a genius, when nothing can be further from the need of the day. So when my students sat with their individual sheets and brushes, I asked them to toss them aside and bring in a large canvas, debate, argue and then reach a suitable consensus. “Despite the persistent image of the architect as a heroic loner erecting monumental edifices through sheer
force of will, the building art has always been a highly cooperative enterprise” (Martin Filler) Through the years, I noticed that my perception of the purpose of architecture and architectural teaching has changed. In the beginning, I would often stand in the sides, watching juries, noticing my fellow course mates, warding off subjective criticism from the jurors on their designs. This would always make me question if design can ever be taught. How can something as subjective as design ever be taught? Today, I’m still not entirely equipped to answer that ques¬¬tion. However, I do know that the form of the question must be changed. Architecture is far from merely a subjective art and somewhere amidst numerous site visits, thousands of lines drawn, many models and countless hours pondering over design, I realized that there will never be a definitive method to teach design. But there is one thing I learnt, which I tried to embed into my students’ impressionable minds, in the hope that this one lesson should encompass all that I mentioned before The role of an architect is not to build buildings, but rather to arrive at a building and to teach is to take you through that journey.
IMAGE: AKSHAI WILKINSON
IMAGE: AKSHAI WILKINSON
57
ARCHITECTURE EDUCATION:
SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT? by ANONYMOUS
At the end of a long day in June ‘89, I took down my drawings from the crit-room wall, crying. Exhausted from the late nights and the emotional commitment, I had also begun to turn over in my mind that architecture might be no more than cultural nail varnish.... Eleven years on, after time in practice and a series of parttime tutoring jobs, I took on my first full-time academic role, intent on teaching in ways I had rarely been taught: with respect, honesty, humor and hope. As a female student in the male world of UK architecture, I felt such values were lacking, but actually they relate to each of us, no matter what gender we are; and indeed no matter what stage of life we are at. As teachers we are also learners; conscious of our own ignorance, and hence, like students, both open and vulnerable in those moments of learning. 58
Even now, I feel the need of those values as much as I did as a student. Those that manage me might think otherwise. After 30 years of studying, teaching and researching architecture I do however understand a little better what makes architectural education a hard place to be for many of us; why those conditions that support learners/teachers are difficult to achieve; and what actions are needed to induce them, or, survive without them. Fundamentally, it’s about generating and actively working to maintain a space of equality and acceptance of alternative readings and actions within the breadth of architecture. But it is the board church of architecture itself that generates the problem in the first place – that is, we individually suffer most from what is collectively our strength: our group plurality creates our personal insecurities.
IMAGE: AUTHORS OWN
Let me be more specific. Schools of Architecture are by necessity populated by a diverse collection of (high-achieving) individuals. Even where there is a policy to recruit staff and students to support a school ‘agenda’, leadership in contemporary universities changes so rapidly that shared identities quickly dissipate. 1 Instead all points of the compass are covered; from the technical to the political, from the systematic to the poetic. Such diversity naturally results in a cacophony of fundamental and challenging questions: Can one be involved in architecture and not build? Can one care about the bottom line and maintain an ethical position? Can one draw and not know how to construct? Can one still practice and be sustainable? All valid, critical questions but potentially also
destabilizing and unsettling for individuals caught in the maelstrom. Within such contexts people can feel isolated; ethically undermined and professionally vulnerable: - technologists can be threatened by the eloquence of cultural commentators and activists devalued by the quantitative measurements of construction managers. Without intelligent and humane management of such diversity, schools of architecture can easily eat themselves. Across the five schools of architecture where I have worked, I have only witnessed such management style once, where as a young academic I did feel trusted and respected and given sufficient space to do ‘good work’. But for the most part, ego and competitiveness define the management styles I have mostly operated within. In such environments people end
59
IMAGE: AUTHORS OWN
up investing energy and talent in battling for position; quality and diversity are put at risk. As a young academic I quickly learned that no one, not even the most seasoned male colleague, was beyond feeling isolated and devalued. As a reaction to the loneliness of academia, I sought out people in other schools and universities that worked and thought in similar ways. I prefer to work with people outside architecture, not only because I am naturally curious about those edge conditions, but I also find that internal politics within the discipline is replaced by mutual respect across disciplines. At different stages I have also looked 60
for mentors in senior positions who have helped me (sometimes painfully) to refocus my work. In retrospect, I wish I had looked for them more often and bore the pain of the ‘crit’ more frequently in order to progress my work. I have also benefited greatly in mentoring others - like teaching, one is mentored by mentoring. The things I am not certain I have achieved but would recommend others to try are: Do a strong and personal piece of work as early as possible in your career.(and here I don’t necessarily mean a PhD). Return to it as often as you can to develop a distinctive, self-
referenced and reflective body of work Make that early work bigger than the planet! – extend its lifespan, expand its influence.
acknowledgement you may gain by being compliant.
Know what the mainstream wants by watching those that the system values (they won’t be architects). Decide what it is about their work that makes it valued and if what they do is something you want to do.
As to crying… I sometimes wonder whether academics cry more than students. But then our engagement is profound: crying is both a sign of the depth to which we care and a release on those days of multiple ‘malfunctions’. But still….I wish we cried less.
If you don’t want to compromise your approach to suit the dominant value system of higher education, do so in the knowledge that sometimes the value of doing your own work in your own way far exceeds any reward or
Remain confident in your own abilities, AT ALL TIMES.
References 1 Most schools of architecture have periodic ‘rotating headships’; some don’t even have a head of discipline within a wider interdisciplinary school. It’s also generally accepted that people have to move to be promoted so academics tend towards an itinerant lifestyle.
61
OP-EDS
ART AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
A NEW UNITY by Martin Pearce Principal Lecturer University of Por tsmouth www.por t.ac.uk/depar tments/acaemic/architecture mar tin.pearce@por t.ac.uk @archithink
2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the Deutsche Werkbund, the German Association of Craftsmen exhibition in Cologne. It was the same year that it was first suggested that Walter Gropius to take over the directorship of the art and crafts school in Weimar, which was later to become the Bauhaus. Gropius built a model of education in response to an ever more industrialised world. 100 years on and in the midst of a technological maelstrom of ever relentless intensity his ideas translated into a digital epoch provide some indicators for the emerging design pedagogies of our own age.
62
The Werkbund’s aim was to bring high quality design to industrial products and advance Germany’s then backwards manufacturing base. Gropius’s vision was the dismantling of the historic divide that had vested design with either the Academies as a fine art or with the craftsman and the trade guilds. This new unity of art and technology would aspire to produce high quality products that would benefit society and bring economic prosperity to all. Gropius and Meyer’s model factory and Bruno Taut’s glass pavilion for the 1914 Cologne exhibition represent the two seemingly opposed attitudes to design education that would form the basis of the Bauhaus and still persist in much of education today.
Firstly was an attitude of learning through doing termed Weklerne which valued the action of the practiced hand on fine material. Secondly Formlerne emphasised the creation of expressive forms and followed the romantic spiritual ideas of German expressionism. Thus the first intake of students to the Bauhaus in 1919 was confronted with a strange fusion of seemingly opposed theoretical positions. Gropius enlisted the talents of Johannes Itten who under the spell of oriental mystical turned the studio into a something akin to a Buddhist seminary in which students were encouraged to express their inner emotions in an attempt to translate their inner mystical spirit into physical form. Focusing on Light-Dark,
Colour, Material and Texture, Form (expressive and subjective) along with aspects of Rhythm, the Basic Course sought to free the individual’s creative powers. Students proceeded through a series of workshops each led by a master where learning took place through practical experience. The workshops comprised: Ceramics, Weaving, Carpentry, Metalwork, Graphic Printing , Printing and Advertising , Photography, Glass and Wall-Painting , Stone and Wood Sculpture, Plastic Arts Workshop and Theatre. The masters included the likes of Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer and Marcel Breuer. Only after successful completion
63
of both Werlerne and Formlerne could student progress onto architecture. As Robert Hughes dryly observed, Gropius believed it was better to make a first rate teapot than a second rate cathedral. In the 25 years since Tim Berners-Lee invention of the World Wide Web the structure of society and of design education have undergone a revolution whose implications outstrip the challenges of industrialization 100 years earlier. In a world of transnational shoddiness flooded with cheap but on the whole dreadfully designed products the competitive advantage of uniting good design in partnership with industrial manufacturing is as relevant today as it was for the Bauhaus. Much has been written about the relevance of craft based education in the digital age. Materials workshops are expensive to run and student numbers have declined. However we should not reject Gropius’s underlying ambition for want of being unable to replicate the technologies
64
and crafts of 1914. Today the crafts may have changed but the principles of the Bauhaus education might be translated to meet our own technologies in the digital age. Today there is an enormous expectation on students to use an ever more diverse range of digital tools. Digital forms of photography, animation, film making and drawing combined with computer aided design and manufacture are the craft tools of today. Instant access to a world of information and ever developing methods of communication have led to new models of collaborative working and knowledge exchange which have changed the educational landscape. In a world of Wikipedia and YouTube knowledge is no longer the privilege of the academy and skills no longer the preserve of the guilds. The skill and time to master these digital tools and techniques are no less challenging than those of fine weaving or the making of exquisite silverware. The ubiquitous nature of technology lulls the idle mind into its most
ordinary application. Once there were once looms in every house producing the ordinary and the mundane, yet few had the skill and commitment to weave great works of art that would endure. It should go without saying that students are not born with an innate ability to use Photoshop, Microsoft Office or 3ds Max, or at least to utilise these programmes with the mastery that Gropius would have no doubt expected. Yet the challenge is not just to equip students with the expertise of today but to enable them to master forthcoming technologies and this digital literacy will be key to their future careers. The Bauhaus understood that skills were not enough in themselves. The counterpoint of formlerne was equally important in this education and here Itten lessons are helpful. The Bauhaus basic course sought to foster the individual’s talents, engender selfconfidence where exposure to a variety of techniques would allow the student to find the element of design to which they were wellmatched.
In both the werklerne and formlerne aspects of the Bauhaus the collective endeavour of the studio or workshop was central to the advancement of design learning. Exposure of ideas and comparative analysis of solutions and an iterative process of design refinement played a central role in the developmental process. Today changes in communication technology have given rise to different methods of this development but students indicate that the best way to master digital skills and develop their individual expressive potential is not in isolation and gravitate to the studio for the exchange of ideas and shared learning that takes place in a creative environment. The Bauhaus promoted a creative community where cross disciplinary working was the norm and the workshops attended by all encouraged students to rub shoulders with each other not through artificial alliances but in a shared creative experience.
has much to teach us. Shared digital workshops across disciplines can provide a fertile ground to promote synergies across disciplines. Emphasis on practical digital skills and an ambition for all students to develop standards of digital literacy led by exceptional teachers who are masters of their digital craft do promote excellence. Craft and skill when seen as the compliment of design exploration will nurture the individual’s creative talents and enable them to gravitate to the creative pursuit with which they find the greatest affinity. And lastly this creative crucible when framed in the context of the pragmatic concern of bringing good design to all, ensures the promotion of industry that leads to economic prosperity. Through such a unity of skill, creativity and production a new digital Bauhaus emerges. One whose axiom, ‘Art and Digital Technology: A New Unity’ restates that of 100 years previous, but today reshaped for a digital age.
As education treads tentatively into a digital future the Bauhaus
65
TEACHING IN PRACTICE by Jim Walker Exec Director Big Car Collaborative www.bigcar.org jim@bigcar.org @walkerjj @bigcar
Over the last 20 years, I’ve taught composition, journalism, drama, poetry, visual art, and — most recently — a socially engaged art class linked to an exhibit at the University of Indianapolis celebrating ten years of Big Car Collaborative projects. In addition to these classes for college students, I’ve taught free classes and workshops on similar subjects with children and adults, some of them writers or artists. While the things students made — papers, stories, plays, poems, drawings, occurrences — changed with each class, my primary hope for the people involved was consistent: I want them to be comfortable, even be excited about exploring the question why? This is the same hope I always have for the community, for the audience Big Car reaches here in Indianapolis and beyond.
66
IMAGE: JIM WALKER
I hope for people to look at something, experience something, and not be intimidated by mystery, by strange juxtapositions, by surprise. Explore! Turn the corner and see what’s there! Open the windowless door with no idea what’s behind it. I want to share this idea: The unknown is marvelous. It’s nothing to worry about! Kids don’t fear it. Adults do, which is sad. And that’s why growing up is terrible for many of us. For me, finding out about the Dadaists and Surrealists as a college student was like being struck by lightning. When you feel something like this, you have to share it. How can you just keep something like that to yourself? So, as a teacher and an artist, I’m evangelical about encouraging people — my students and the community we work with and everybody
I can reach (including my own children) — to not only make art but to explore in all ways, to analyze, to never stop asking why. To dig. To unpack and unpeel. To really want to know and not fear the unknown — not fear maybe never knowing. That’s OK. That’s wonderful. I hope to teach that problems and challenges and puzzles are normally not about what we see at first, but what we find when we keep looking. We shouldn’t be satisfied to stop at because I said so. I didn’t buy that as a child and don’t now. Yet, too often in schools, students are taught, by administrators, faculty, and peers, to not ask why. To do as they’re told. To be another brick in the wall. This anti-analytical approach makes things easier for people in charge. But it’s terrible for developing smart, creative people.
67
IMAGE: JIM WALKER
It’s terrible for a civic society. It’s terrible for making good voters in a functional democracy. And it’s especially terrible for the arts. Not being analytical is one thing that leads to people walk into a room filled with art and retreat in fear. We need to help grow people who are curious and brave. Who love the idea of exploring ideas and issues they may never figure out — and being fine with that, even relishing in the idea that there may be no answer. What I’m talking about here is negative capability — the idea Keats had that it’s important to enjoy the exploration of questions, even when we have no guarantee of finding an answer. And it’s important to understand and accept that we simply can’t know
68
some things. We need to teach that. So I teach that. Whatever the class, whatever the context, I talk about negative capability. I talk about the kind of art and literature that is wrapped up in this notion. Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus are all about this. And I love to make and share work that contains the spark caused by a collision of distant realities and points out that this is just what happens in our lives every day. Life, of course, is defined by chaos. Try as you will, you can’t control it. So we should really just enjoy this fact. Just as we should accept and enjoy knowing that you can’t figure life out. But we can relish the journey toward (maybe) understanding some of it.
IMAGE: JIM WALKER
In our class this Fall, we connected all of this up to socially engaged art. Like Surrealism’s “disinterested play of thought” as an approach to making art and poetry automatically, socially engaged art can’t be pre-planned or predetermined. The same is true for the class, for what projects to expect from the students, and where well all end up. But, like the best Surrealist or Fluxus work, socially engaged art — and a class about it — requires a frame, a logic (often of its own devising), a balancing element, a straight man to react to the joke, a rulebook for the anarchists, a little order in the center of the chaos. Then you can see back to what you learned — while still looking ahead to the beautiful things you don’t, and may never, know.
69
URBAN PLACEMAKING & MANAGEMENT A new program of the Pratt Institute, Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment
by David Burney FAIA Associate Professor of Planning & Placemaking at Pratt Institute School of Architecture, programs for Sustainable Planing and development IMAGE CREDITS PRATT INSTITUTE
70
In the fall 2015 semester, Pratt Institute will launch a graduate program in “Urban Placemaking and Management”- the first of its kind in the country. In the past 10 – 12 years there has been a paradigm shift in thinking about planning and urban design, from a primary focus on buildings to a focus on the spaces between buildings—“public space.” Rather than allowing these spaces to be formed as an afterthought of building design, “placemaking” sees the creation of successful public spaces as the starting point, which in turn dictates the siting and design of other components of the urban fabric. The Masters of Science (MS) in Urban Placemaking & Management (UPM) prepares professionals for this rapidly
growing field. Students learn to create successful, vibrant, equitable, and economically viable public spaces from a bottom-up, community driven, people-centric approach. The program is for students with professionally oriented undergraduate education, professional degrees, or professional experience in architecture, engineering, environmental, landscape design, urban planning and related studies. Students are immersed in the core skills of analysis, conceptual design, and management of the public realm in cities. The 40-credit program equips students to qualify for employment in a range of institutional, governmental, non-
profit, and private sector settings. Students gain a broad theoretical knowledge of the historical, political, and social frameworks with which to conceptualize the public realm, while developing skills to analyze urban space and understand the relationship of public space to public policy and private development. Through studios and internships, students further gain practical understanding of the planning and design of public space, including management and the integration of the principles of sustainability into public space development. The core knowledge and skills-base of placemaking as a discipline are delivered over four semesters through a combination of lectures, seminars, case studies,
and studio-based exercises. Students pursue a curriculum of study structured by four academic knowledge streams: Design and Infrastructure; Economics; Planning and Policy; and Management. The program offers flexibility to students to develop advanced knowledge and skills through electives in three areas of focus each corresponding to an area of employment for placemakers: communitybased design; parks, open space, and green infrastructure; and transportation and Main Street management. Graduates are equipped to effectively analyze, manage, and influence the complex process of public realm design and management. Before joining the Pratt faculty I spent 10 years – from 2004 to 2014 –as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Design & Construction where I implemented a Design 72
and Construction Excellence Program aimed at improving the quality of public works, from streets and plazas to libraries, museums, firehouses and other public facilities. My agency was responsible for the design and construction of many new streetscapes and plazas as part of the City’s policy for “complete Streets” and a more walkable public realm. This work made me realize the breadth of skills, from both the management and design disciplines that were necessary for the creation of successful pubic spaces. I also realized that my project managers were only partially equipped by their education to be successful “placemakers”. As a visiting professor at Pratt teaching a planning studio on Sustainable Development I thought we could develop a Pratt program that would build on Pratt’s strong foundation of sustainable community planning to address
the needs of “placemakers” – those people engaged in the creation, design, or management of public space. My work with the City taught me the importance of neighborhood planning and the need for quality planning and design across the City. Pratt Institute is the national leader in community planning and is the natural home for a program focused on the design and management of public space. Stuart Pertz, FAIA is a Pratt colleague and the founder of Pratt’s Urban Design program. Stuart and I, with the help of Anna Fyssiak, a Pratt graduate student, set about crafting a curriculum that would meet the needs of placemakers. It was not easy – our first draft produced hundreds of possible credit courses and it was impossible to cram all that we thought relevant into a 40-credit curriculum. We also anticipated we would have applicants from a wide variety of
backgrounds with very different educational histories. Our conclusion was to offer a breadth of courses that would give students a clear understanding of the process of placemaking and of the role the different disciplines play in that process. Fred Kent, the president of Project for Public Spaces often points out that one of the reasons for failure of some public spaces is that the design is controlled by one discipline – often landscape design or architecture – at the expense of others. We wanted to ensure that our placemakers avoided that pitfall by obtaining a broad understanding of what makes successful places. The UPM program curriculum comprises 40 credits that span the spectrum of skills needed for placemaking, from community engagement to design to economics and long-term maintenance. We do not claim,
or intend, to make students expert in these skills, but rather to give graduates a broad understanding of the role each plays in successful public space so that can themselves be successful placemakers. 30 of the course are “core” required courses and 10 are “elective” so that students can choose courses that fill in a gap in their education. There is also significant crossover between UPM and other Pratt programs, so that students can take elective course in any of the PSPD programs – City & Regional Planning; Sustainable Environmental Systems, Historic Preservation and Facility Management to complete their degree. CRP classes run at night; and the faculty represents a “who’s who” of planners, policy makers, civic leaders, and consultants, including the inspirational Ron Shiffman, one of the originators of
advocacy planning and sustainable community planning (and a winner of the national APA’s Planning Pioneer award and the prestigious Jane Jacobs Award). Best of all are the students. The Pratt PSPD has always featured a student body that is diverse in age, background, training, and work experience – providing an extraordinary opportunity for peer learning. The common denominator is attitudinal not demographic. Pratt students are engaged in promoting sustainable and equitable places, communities and cities. In part because of the faculty’s broad involvement in the City, students are able to get a variety of jobs to pay for tuition and gain relevant experience. Ten of our students regularly intern at the Pratt Center for Community Development.
73
TEACHING THE FUTURE, TEACHING THE PAST by M12 Studio Colorado http://m12studio.org/ IMAGE CREDITS M12
“This most modern art discipline— Social Sculpture/Social Architecture will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor, or architect of the social organism.” - Joseph Beuys, “I am searching for a field character”
74
This statement is a foundation of social sculpture, of M12’s social sculpture. Written roughly forty years ago, it still describes the non-hierarchical approach to art making that we, as a collective, practice and promote. We are both students and teachers exchanging experiences and information. Our work is a product of this exchange. Most of the time, we are students. Members of the M12 collective come from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines. We have a holistic organizational
philosophy, and so we are always ever learning first from one another. Our projects explore rural identities, communities, and landscapes. Because the works are context-based, it is paramount that we then also learn from the places and the people we work alongside. Locals show us their homes and their towns by taking us on a squiz (an Australian expression we picked up, meaning “to have a look”). They invite us to appreciate their landmarks and to eat at their dinner tables. We
are their guests, their students. Frequently, our hosts are a community’s elders; they have, after all, been there the longest. The art historian Grant Kester has described these processes as “dialogical,” a description that we embrace. This dialogical quality is present in most every project that we pursue. For us, cultivating these relationships through dialog is a means of field research, as well as the most reliable way to develop the trust necessary to execute any built work, especially in rural places.
75
In 2011, these exchanges became more than our method—they became the stuff of a work, Gran’s University and Elder’s Hill. The two-part project was designed in collaboration with the Swedish-based collective Kultivator. Inspired by Grand Mother’s University in India, a platform designed both to honor the knowledge of our grandparents and to enable its transfer to younger generations. The platform was a mobile, pop-up classroom that traveled between rural communities dispersed throughout the Eastern Plains of Colorado. Along the way, grandmothers (and
grandfathers) shared histories, recipes, and skills with their communities and with us. Elder’s Hill, on the other hand, was designed as a more permanent site for such exchanges. Located in Öland, Sweden, Elder’s Hill is an open-air classroom and root cellar, constructed using the 19th-century sod house building techniques found in both the American High Plains and rural Sweden. Whereas Gran’s University used recordings to archive the culinary traditions shared, the root cellar at Elder’s Hill instead archives plants and preserves.
Facilitating the exchange of intergenerational knowledge is especially important in rural areas, where radical demographic changes are underway. As much as we focus our attention on a community’s elders, we are also deeply committed to understanding younger generations of rural citizens. We value the role that younger generations play and will continue to play: from providing summer work, to inheriting and managing family farms, to leaving their homes to grow and shape the rural diaspora worldwide. As part of our Action on the Plains program, we collaborated with the Dutch artist Wapke Feenstra
on Farmers & Ranchers (2012– 14), a two-year documentary project about rural teens. Students from the Future Farmers of America (FFA) program at Deer Trail High School in Eastern Colorado partnered with like-minded students from the Dutch province of Fryslân in the Netherlands. The two groups reflected on their shared experience—from milking horses to rodeo barrel racing—through a series of visits between the two countries, as well as through images, interviews, and writings. In October 2014, they converged in Last Chance, Colorado for a film screening and Rocky Mountain oyster fry.
77
Teaching the future (creator, sculptor, or architect of the social organism) There are a growing number of art departments in the United States reframing the sculpture areas to include social sculpture, now commonly referred to as social practice or poststudio practice. Some program initiatives are a pedagogical arm of an individual faculty member’s art practice, and this too is the case for M12. Its founder, Richard Saxton, who teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder, has shaped a dynamic collaboration between M12 and the university, which partnered to expand the Feed Store, our studio in Byers, Colorado, and to support the Art and Rural Environments Field School that we host there, some sixty miles
from the university proper. In 2010, M12 initiated its International School of Rural Experiences (ISRE), an internship and experiential learning program based at the Feed Store. The program began by bringing four students from the University of Colorado into the M12 family to collaborate on a project called Campito. Together, we conducted interviews with sheepherders throughout the Eastern Plains of Colorado about their sheep wagons, the designs for which have not evolved much from their 19th-century ancestor: the covered wagon. From this field research, students devised a number of improvements,
including upgrades to sanitation, access to communication and fresh food. The research portfolio and their re-designs were reproduced as pamphletposters that we then distributed and discussed first as part of the Biennial of the Americas (2010), and then as part of Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good for the 13th International Venice Architecture Biennale (2012). The feedback from sheepherder to artiststudent, from artist-student to public produced for those involved, some insight into the challenges faced by agricultural laborers in the 21st century.
Motivated in part by the success of Campito, we continue the International School of Rural Experiences today. Students participate in field excursions and tours, lectures and workshops, all guided by visiting artists, writers, and scholars. The students also produce from their time with
us, their own events—from exhibitions and performances to concerts and potlucks celebrating regional music and food. In so doing, these students develop their own strategies to first understand and then to produce a connective, rural aesthetic.
“To explain something to someone is first of all to show him he cannot understand it by himself.” -
Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster
M12 agrees with Rancière. Our approaches to practice and to teaching, which are bound, acknowledge that “every living person” (to return to Beuys) is capable of understanding the works that we make and the
themes that they address. We do not explicate or translate the rural experience or the rural landscape. Our rural image is only one of many and M12 too is only one of many students.
79
PERFECT CIRCLES by Claire Potter Claire Potter Design www.clairepotterdesign.com hello@clairepotterdesign.com @clairepotter
A group of us were creating a temporary installation in one of the foyers as part of our degree work and we wanted to create a series of large metal cages. Being skint students, we were pretty shocked when we came to pricing up our sketches with stock from the generic DIY sheds, so we trundled into town to visit the scrap metal yard that I vaguely remembered from my childhood. We found everything we needed – and more – for a few quid. Sure, we had to make a few slight alterations to the initial designs, but hey. We saved a stack of cash we really didn’t have, which was far more important than sticking religiously to the sketches.
80
And this is how it continued for the next three years. As soon as the next brief was issued, we were all out – fishing through skips, trawling charity shops and reclamation yards for materials to work with. It took far longer than nipping over to B&Q, but our projects were cheaper and the stuff we had built them out of had more character. They had life - and instead of being binned, we gave them a new meaning which made us all feel nice and cosy on the inside. But most of all, it was cheap. Fast forward a few (ahem) years and I realise that a lot of my work is quite similar. Running a
multifaceted design practice, we specialise in using reclaimed and recycled materials in our projects – not because it is cheap, but because it’s what we think is right. As designers, we believe it is our jobs to design and build spaces, landscapes and products that not only function well and look great but are made with as many responsible, recycled, reclaimed elements as possible. And for the record, sometimes it is cheaper. But was this mind-set created at university? Was I taught about salvage, disassembly, waste recovery and responsible product selection? A bit. We certainly had elements of ‘eco design’, but there was nowhere near the amount that, looking back, could have been integrated through the entire lifespan of the degree. Most of it came down to a personal obsession and lack of cash. True, this was a time when ‘eco design’ had nowhere near the level of recognition and ‘every day’ status as it does in modern day design education, even though there were many practitioners championing holistic construction and design methods, but I do wonder – how have things changed? Are we producing design graduates, from architecture, products to fashion, who have a good understanding of how important responsible design and the circular economy is? How often do we hear that
students are undertaking an ‘eco design’ module – inferring that somehow this way of working is almost divorced from the rest of the process and warrants a separate area of study. Surely this methodology is integral – and foundational - to all elements of designing? How easy it is to create a product or building, then add in a recycled material or a sedum roof and call it a piece of ‘green design’. The difference between a true, complete piece of responsible, circular economy based design and a load of greenwash is vast. And as our young designers graduate, do we really want to be instilling in them that designing in a fully ethical, responsible, circular way is a choice? That you are an ‘eco designer’ or not? If I was able to rewrite all the design courses across the land, in all disciplines with the snap of my fingers, I would scrap the ‘eco design’ module and terminology and ensure that at every step that the principles, concepts, material selection, disassembly and waste recovery methods were integrated - in context - to the rest of the course. It would not be about creating ‘green’ buildings / garments / products. It would be about creating things in the most responsible way possible. Which is the way it should be, not the way it could be.
ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF CLAIRE POTTER
81
P H OTO E S S AY
J.G BALLARD & THE FUTURE CITY OF THE PAST by James H. Bollen Photographer, writer, translator www.jamesbollen.com james@jameshbollen.com @jameshbollen IMAGE CREDITS: JAMES H. BOLLEN
‘The future is going to be like a suburb of Stuttgart.’ – Sinclair, Super-Cannes His writing aside, JG Ballard was noted for his ability to predict the future, which ranges from the advent of Sat Nav to the evisceration of the middle classes.
82
Ballard’s prescience lies in his upbringing in 1930s and 40s Shanghai. In The Kindness of Women, the book’s narrator Jim says it’s ‘a media city, perhaps the first of all, purpose-built by the west as a test-metropolis of the future.’
83
Ballard was one of the first authors to write about global warming. His 1962 novel The Drowned World imagines a London submerged in water, a result of polar ice caps melting. The origins of its inspiration likely lie in Shanghai’s tropical climate.
84
The irony of Ballard foreseeing the future is he believed that it’s been annexed into the present. In his short story News From the Sun, one of the characters writes ‘It’s possible to imagine that everything is happening at once, all the events ‘past’ and ‘future’ which constitute the universe are taking place together.’
Skimming through our social media feeds while they continually churn out information and news emphasises this feeling of living in a constant present.
85
Ballard wrote in his introduction to the 1995 edition of Crash that, ‘Freud’s classic distinction between… the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality.’ This insight stems from his childhood. In his autobiography Miracles of Life, he writes that in Shanghai, ‘the fantastic, which for most people lies inside their heads, lay all around me.’ 86
‘What about you, Karen? – wouldn’t you like to be in the movies?’ With a stiff forefinger she explored the knuckle of his wrist. ‘We’re all in the movies.’ Furthermore with the advent of YouTube, live streaming, and news and social media feeds, our lives increasingly resemble that of a movie.
87
Ballard said in many interviews that life is just a stage set, and that the whole cast and scenery can be cleared away at any moment. This is undoubtedly a result of him and his family being forced from their large, prosperous household into a civilian internment camp by the Japanese military during the Second World War.
88
Ballard’s characters often find themselves in situations where their surrounding stage sets are dismantled. As he said in an interview with KGB Magazine in 1995, ‘their way out is construct a psychosis which dramatizes their own predicament, and to come to some sort of solution.’
and political insecurity, all of which Ballard envisioned and wrote about, the chances of ourselves encountering similarly catastrophic scenarios as one of his characters feel increasingly tangible. Alongside Bear Grylls’ survival tomes, you might want to keep one or two of JG Ballard’s books handy for the apocalypse.
Faced with climate change and increasing economic 89
EDUCATIONAL FUTURES by James Reid Photographer www.jamesreidphotography.com IMAGE CREDITS JAMES REID
The expansion of educational opportunities and the abundance of full time University courses at undergraduate and post graduate level, asks the question ‘does it end there’? I recently attended the international Summer School in Urban Photography at Goldsmiths College, UOL, which categorically answered ‘no it does not’ Traditional Undergraduate courses over time provide the framework for basic skill development and lateral thinking. Post Graduate courses allow specialisation within a chosen field. But this framework leaves very little opportunity to develop further thinking and obtain new
90
skills, perhaps and especially in completely new but related areas of thought. Online courses and short intensive school sessions with world-class organisations provide a rich bed of opportunity to break out of your comfort zone and push your educational boundaries and obtain new skills. A traditional trait amongst graduates has been to leverage their ability from which University they attended and their grades attained. However, continuing self-development as a supplemental and important educational must is now heralding a new way forward.
91
92
93
94
95
96
To continue the development process, especially within photography it is essential that photographers develop skills within the context of our environment, science, society and the anthropological and historical factors surrounding contemporary life on earth. Developing skill sets and improving our understanding in other areas of concern, is part of the continuing education process. At Goldsmiths, the intensive 3-week course provided tutors who’s background was in Urbanism with expertise in sociology, anthropology, visual art and fine art. The participants were equally as varied, coming from academia, architecture, anthropology, sociology, fine art and visual art. This rich combination when meshed with intensive course work and thought provoking lectures, supplemented with interactive working groups, meant that learning took on a whole new meaning. I decided to focus my Urban Visual Project on London Bridge, an area formally on the edge of social and cultural breakdown. A major transport terminus with a largely white population and extensive unemployment, poverty and crime. Today this area is now the focus of major regeneration. I had walked the London bridge area for many years, tracing my steps using memory to relive the
97
98
the past emotions. Which is important when producing a body of work. The images were captured from a range of perspectives from looking down, looking up, looking inside and centering the work on the Shard itself as either the beacon of Capitalism or the viewing platform of a place in city space. The imagery was shot in the digital black and white medium to provide a resonance of the everyday banality of the ordinary. The imagery also uses all the elements of the Urban Environment, including street photography, street portraiture, object photography and landscape. The most important aspect to the work was to incorporate the thinking of Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, whilst not photographers themselves, their writing on the subject has been a huge influence in producing the work. Their writings are a clearly a departure from normal thinking and reflect the banality of the everyday, reflecting the onslaught of civilization and realistically describing the message captured and held within photography and the urban setting. The benefits of online courses and especially regular attendance on short courses at Institutions of note, reap important benefits such as he ability to engage in thought provoking thinking, expand into new areas of thought, related to your own practice, obtain new skill sets, and break the paradigm of traditional thinking, pushing boundaries whilst under pressure to develop new work and most importantly having fun. 99
C O N T R I B U T E TO EDGEcondition? FORWARD FEATURES LISTINGS Vol. 05 // Jan 2015 "placemaking" Vol. 06 // March 2015 “heritage” For further themes and information please visit our website. GETTING IN TOUCH: When submitting a letter or pitch please email it to mail@ edgecondition.net with the ‘Vol. number and title’ in the subject line. We work approx 1-3 volumes in advance. We are currently on the hunt for cover artists for future issues. To contact the art director please email mail@edgecondition.net with ‘cover artists’ in the subject line. For further information about content, to suggest future topics and themes for discussion and for media collaboration please feel free to contact the editors at mail@edgecondition.net
101
Vo l u m e 0 5 OUT JAN 2015 ‘placemaking’