Re-adjusting the objectives of Architectural Education (original) (raw)
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The Proceedings of The Malaysia Architectural Education Conference held at Lecture Hall, Faculty Of Design and Architecture, Universiti Putra Malaysia on 4 -5 October 2012, 2012
This paper responds to some of the negative tendencies that continue to characterize the delivery of knowledge in architectural education. It accentuates the shift from mechanistic pedagogy to systematic pedagogy and outlines the characteristics of each. Building on critical pedagogy and the hidden curriculum concept transformative pedagogy is introduced as a form of pedagogy that can be interweaved into conventional teaching practices. Translating the premises underlying these pedagogies and building on the author’s earlier work on design studio pedagogy and the teaching practices involved, a theory that explores the integration of knowledge in architectural design education is articulated. The paper demonstrates how the theory and its underlying components and mechanisms can be applied to both lecture-based courses and design studio sittings. In an attempt to address the challenges architectural education should encounter, the implementation of the theory would offer students multiple learning opportunities while fostering their capabilities to shift from passive listeners to active learners, from knowledge consumers to knowledge producers, while positioning themselves in a challenging future professional world.
Searching for a new paradigm in architectural education
2009
This paper is a position paper that will provide an extensive literature review on design education and raise questions regarding the current goal and a possible direction for architectural education. The paper will examine several critical issues such as education vs. training, the increasing disconnection of architectural education from the “real world” of design practice, and the role of research and theory in academia and the practice of architecture. This paper will address the challenges inherent in defining clear goals and directions for the field, given the current state of the architectural profession and academia. It will further argue that research can drive the development of a common language for use in a dialogue between the academic and the practitioner, a dialogue that is mediated by educational institutions, and which can also help shape architectural education and the profession as a whole. We are currently in a networking boom where global, intricate, and complex ...
Redefining + Redesigning Architectural Education: Beyond Tinkering in an Ethos of Emergency
The effective education of architects is a crucial responsibility in our troubled times, especially considering the rapid depletion of resources, the dramatic decay of the environment and the everyday attack on humanity evident in countries, cities and communities across the globe. Design is an undeniably powerful tool for realizing positive change. In a world where the urban now eclipses the rural, it is essential for architects to understand complex systems, to acknowledge diversity of people, politics, culture + conditions, to steward precious assets, and to seek above all else a higher quality of life for humankind as we negotiate and navigate a complicated, confusing and often very difficult existence. Despite a rapidly & dramatically changing milieu over the last century, the education of architects has remained relatively unchangedmany of the principles and practices deployed in schools of architecture beckon back to methods and manners forged as cities began to develop due to pressures and possibilities of industrialization. An arguable obsession with material culture, with building as object and with technology as tool has de facto limited attention to other essential dimensions of design. All too often neglected are the social, cultural, spiritual and human facets of being & dwelling. In an era of escalating conflict, of growing tension, of unclear values and of obscured vision, it seems timely and appropriate to re-imagine how we educate architects. We need to move beyond the technicality of bricks & mortar and glass & steel. We need to transcend bottom-line-inspired sustainability checklists. We need to surpass a focus on the quantitative, the easily measured and the lowest common denominator. The present paper argues for a more balanced curriculum, a more people-oriented pedagogy and new ways of considering architectural education that shift emphasis from the physical to the phenomenological. It urgently calls for an architectural education that balances poetics + pragmatics while invoking an overarching passionate focus on people, place & quality before machine, space & quantity.
A radical rethinking: the future of Architectural Education
2016
The anticipated reduction in the duration education in RIBA validated Schools of Architecture has encouraged a sense of collective openness to exploring other models of professional education delivery. There’s never been a better time to be thoughtfully innovative and take the initiative. This lecture will examine the emergent debate about the future of architectural education, placing it within its unique historic tradition and raising questions as to where architecture schools should be situated, who should be teaching it and whether it should be treated as an interdisciplinary, rather than silo-based subject. The lecture also examined a series of case studies and provided a set of actionable insights which should question, provoke and inspire.
Editorial: Affecting Change in Architectural Education (2009)
Architecture concerns not so much an explicit body of transmittable knowledge and protocols as it does a set of implicit understandings, sensitivities and sensibilities. The education of an architect therefore concerns the mission of endowing candidates with those implicit traits. This is not to say that architects do not possess and wield prodigious amounts of explicit cognitive knowledge, because they certainly do. But that explicit component of architectural know-how is actually vested in and deployed by the architect not so much because the knowledge has been invented, discovered, or developed by architects; but rather because they have assimilated it from other disciplines in a special way that gives architects adductive and hermeneutic insight into vast, detailed, and complex design challenges. Engineers make better machines, artists make more meaningful artifacts, and psychologists provide better human environments; but architects are trained to see the underlying opportunity and potential celebration of how those constituent menus might become a feast. In any unresolved complex of space, material and form, architects grasp a unique essence in how they perceive the “happily ever after” of what it might be and how that vision might be made whole and concrete. By the time a student of architecture is fully indoctrinated, this grasp of an underlying ideal essence is so potent that it becomes the student’s identity… and the purpose of that insight becomes an irresistible intention.
2018
Architectural education has since long received attention both from within and from outside the field; it has even been presented as a model for all professional education. Developing tendencies in education overall have not left architectural education unaffected. Especially in conditions of the recent economic crisis of 2008 it is expected to remain in scrutiny: Is it about developing the student's individual expressiveness, or is it a process of coming to terms with society, and even, developing a 'world' citizenry? Is it a process of unifying the fragmented areas of knowledge and interpretations of reality into an articulate and meaningful whole or is it about acquiring instrumental knowledge towards professional mastery? Such broad questions that inhabit recent discussions on architectural education pertain to the level of educational goal setting (pedagogy) and are not easily translated in concrete ideas for advancing modes of teaching and learning in architecture (didactics). The thesis argues for the priority of didactics in an effort to overcome the rather untheorized condition of architectural education. To this end, the thesis (re)constructs a discussion, from which essential questions emerge, to help clarify the landscape of the current enquiry. Further, it proposes the use of two distinct theoretical frameworks (pragmatism and phenomenology) for the study of architecture's two didactic tools, of the Design Studio and the Live projecthence, proposing a component of descriptive didactics.
EMPOWERING ARCHITECTS FOR AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE NURTURING PLURALITY IN ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION
Formamentis - For a Didactics of Architecture, 2025
The text is an exploration of the evolving pedagogy in architectural education and the role of architects in a rapidly changing world. It examines fundamental questions about what it means to be an architect and how to prepare students for this dynamic profession. The author reflects on the balance between theory and practice, the integration of new technologies, and the enduring importance of foundational skills like design and material knowledge. It also highlights the role of lifelong learning and discusses specific teaching methods and experiences at the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta in Brussels. The text emphasizes the need for architecture education to adapt to societal, cultural, and technological shifts while equipping students to face future challenges.
The design studio educational process is a unique, intensive, laboratory-based learning environment with a full range of media for exploration of diverse concepts that strategically merge the art of design with sciences and technology in a decision making endeavor. As for the intended learning outcomes proposed by the literature, most importantly was the recognition of the role of the architect as a player in a larger team, and architecture as a social service, dedicated to those who will benefit from it. The studio, then, should promote for the human cultures, and critical thinking and self learning. Including the different sources and domains of knowledge, the studio practices are expected to interactively integrate knowledge unity and/or connectivity. . Hence, the design studio IS truly a "melting pot" in which all the knowledge and experiences and skills are blended. Consequently, the design instructor has a crucial and complicated and intertwined role, as all approaches for devising design studios depend primarily on this persona. It is believed that the design instructor's role towards his students is the same role of the designer towards his society; a "facilitator". Someone who directs the process rather than runs it, as literature puts it.
Design Pedagogy: The New Architectural Studio and Its Consequences
Architecture_MPS, 2020
This article argues that the typical architectural studio is both outmoded and irresponsible. It is outmoded because it typically is organized around a nineteenth-century model of design virtuosity, and it is irresponsible because it ignores pressing and current spatial justice problems. It also takes to task the aura of the academic setting in which the formally motivated studio reigns supreme. In lieu of this model of architectural education, the article argues for an education that empowers graduates to tackle the major problems that society currently faces: housing, climate, income inequality/unemployment and health. To do this, it acknowledges but suggests overthrowing the many institutional hurdles keeping architectural education attached to the status quo.
Toward a New P A R A D I G M in ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION
This is not academic research conducted within a classroom setting, nor is it an exhaustive literature review. I have read extensively in order to expand my language and understanding of current conceptualizations of creative thinking and to provide a theoretical context for my own 25 years of teaching practice. The discussion you are about to enter wrestles with the definition of creativity within the context of a technical architectural education. It will not be about defining “art” (architecture) versus “craft” (construction) or whether one of these is more creative than the other. It is hoped that after reading the included essay “BIG “C” Creative and little “c” creative”, you will agree that creativity is not so hierarchical. This document takes the position that an architect can be agent of change in the collective process of building cities (social, cultural and urban infrastructure) by impacting a city one building at a time. It situates the educator within this process as a catalyst in the exploration of shared values and group action…one student at a time. Most educators today know that there are different types of intelligence and different ways of knowing. Elbert Hubbard famously said that “Art is not a thing; it is a way”. Art making is a way of conceptualizing, of knowing, of being in the world.