Posted by Kevin Matthews on December 08, 2001 at 14:59:43:In Reply to: Re: Self Controlled Wheelchairs-our inventor dads posted by Jacques Pochoy on December 08, 2001 at 02:50:04:
ÊJacques, I warmly agree that learning deep intuition for real materials, connections, and processes, is fundamental to being a good architect.
At certain times and places, architectural education has made an attempt to address this through integration of the school shop into the curriculum and into the daily work of students. When I was a graduate student instructor teaching construction at Berkeley, I set up my portable forge in the courtyard at Wurster Hall and took students through the behavior of steel when heated, and when heat treated, by direct live observation. That did not give them the visceral connection with the material one gets from years at the anvil, but it did seem to make the cardinal weakness of steel as a building material part of their individual realities in a way books or software are not likely to equal. They also built brick arches, and, with the additional leadership of guest teacher Ed Allen, analyzed, built and stressed a practical wood truss pedestrian bridge (which later became the entering exhibit for Golden Gate Bridge 50th anniversary displays at the Exploratorium in San Francisco).
Anyway, a positive, proactive approach to that level of supplemental or even in many cases remedial direct work with real materials was built in to the architecture of Wurster Hall, and actualized in my day through a wonderfully open and engaging shop supervisor.
Christopher Alexander had to sue the Berkeley faculty in order to exercise the right to teach his own curriculum, but in the time I studied with him, in the curriculum he was able to introduce as a result of the settlement, we spent a third of our time working directly in construction, partly in hands-on production tasks, and partly in research in materials and methods pursuant to Alexander's vision of renewing Western building culture. Beyond that, many design excercises involved making physical objects, such as ornamental expressions or pattern pieces.
So despite the bitter internal conflict, in those days there were actually some elements of philosophical unity within the archietcture school at Berkeley, supporting the importance of undrestanding with our hands and bodies, as well as eyes and minds.
Which makes quite a contrast with the current situation at the University of Oregon, where a huge hew shop stands largely unused, under a supervisor who seems to treat it as a limited access sacred province, at a location which is across a busy four lane state highway, and then down a few blocks, from the main architecture building.
It is honestly sickening to me to see such important resources tied up behind unnecessary bureaucratic barriers, when architecture students need to be able to live, breath, and dream in the workshop. Maintain safety, and all else should be openess. (The same dicotomy occurs among librarians, some who see the library as a treasure house, where information should be hoarded and protected against the ravages of potential readers, and the great ones who see the library as a garden of knowledge, to be as open and forthcoming and USED as possible, with just enough security to protect information for continued access.)
Behind these contemporary differences in attitude, there is also, as you and the forum have been observing, fundamental cultural change on a larger time scale. In the U.S, it is still only a couple of generations or so since the majority of people lived on a farm, where direct hands on experience was practically automatic.
Ironically, the traditionalists in many architect schools are bent on fending off the challenge of digital tools for design vsualization and communication. But pencil and paper, despite historical concurrency, do little or nothing to fill in for the visceral experience once provided by rural and pre-industrial or pre-electronic upbringing.
Looking forward, good design-oriented digital tools should be allowed to fill the design studio and supplant traditional media whereever digital tools are truly better for the particular visualization and/or communication taks at hand. What needs to be protected, and really, needs to be much enlarged at most schools, is the practical hands-on curriculum in making and breaking.
Put another way -- if cultural change means students come to architectural education with less and less developed material intuition, then architectural education should increase the priority it grants to developing it.
Best wishes,
K
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