The Lore of Building Experience: Deconstructing Design-Build (original) (raw)

How to draw a line when the world is moving: Architectural education in times of urgent imagination

Visual Research Methods in Architecture, 2021

From the ‘Introduction’ to the volume by the editors: “What is or should architecture and architectural research concern itself with in a globalized, contested twenty-first century? This question drives Tariq Toffa’s architectural pedagogical practice at the University of Johannesburg. Chapter 3, entitled ‘How to draw a line when the world is moving: Architectural education in times of urgent imagination’ by Toffa, argues that architecture’s contemporary purpose is to produce agency rather than products. Arguing that globalization neglects the social, Toffa contends that an ethical imagination in drawing is needed to generate new visions and voices. Drawing from Arif Dirlik’s argument about the inseparability of the aesthetic and the social, Toffa exposes the power relations inherent in Euro-American-centric ‘visibility’ as having a significant influence on architectural design pedagogy and spatial designers. Through speculative, mixed-media drawing work, promoting a dialectic method and working explicitly with difference, Toffa’s studios explore research inquiries and conditions informed by methodological tactics of ‘voicing’, ‘multi-modality’, ‘siting (surfacing)’, ‘spaces of publics’, ‘territory’, ‘perspective’ and ‘reflexivity’. Noting the recent shifts in sociology and art history, where ‘sociological reflexivity’ is used as a research tool (d’Oliveira-Martins 2014: 193), the aim of Toffa’s and his students’ pedagogic work is to refocus an ethical imaginary that transcends and re-writes disciplinary and racial conventions through site-specific actions. Drawing can make social power relations visually tangible and Toffa’s essay makes an original contribution by presenting new drawing practices for research that decolonizes and emancipates space and architectural education.” (Troiani & Ewing 2021, Introduction: Visual research methods and ‘critical visuality’, in Troiani, I. and Ewing, S. (Eds.), Visual Methodologies in Architectural Research. Intellect publishers, 2021.)

The Raging Meaning of Architecture or Why Architects Matter

In an essay style screed, the paper challenges traditional notions of success and greatness in the architecture world. It attempts to also put forward an existential philosophical underpinning to work not otherwise lauded. A significant portion of the writing relies on knowledge or work of the reader in a wide range of subjects, and can therefore be challenging.

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.

Architects: life and work in practice

2019

In a large room, on the third floor of an old woollen mill in the South West of England, nine architects spend most of their working lives, designing buildings and overseeing their construction. Asked where these come from, architects admit a kind of ignorance: ‘Total magic!’ as one puts it, ‘Something comes from nothing!’ Focusing on the everyday lives of architects, the book explores how buildings are assembled through an intimate and elusive choreography of people, materials, places, tools and ideas. Through these interactions, it asks and answers some questions of wider interest: What is the relationship between a working and a personal life? What is creativity? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? What does it mean to claim to know with authority? Most basically but most fundamentally the book is concerned with the question of what it is like to be an architect, and what lessons others might learn from the example their experience provides. Amongst other things, these have to do with the nature of expert knowledge, design, creativity and the central but less celebrated arts of administration.

EMERGING IDENTITY OF ARCHITECTURE: CHALLENGING THE EXISTING

This essay does not deny the idea that there is a pattern within architecture, which produces superficial facades driven by consumerism, but attempts to highlights the emerging identity of ‘social’ Architecture, focusing on the South African context. Social architecture as discussed in this essay refers to architecture challenging architectural convention, such as exploring insitu community participation and developing the informal milieu. Anthony Wards states: What is called social architecture is the practice of architecture as an instrument for progressive social change. It foregrounds the moral imperative to increase human dignity and reduce human suffering . . . [architecture] is ‘‘nothing but social’’, yet its social practice has both supported and reinforced existing social hierarchies and has operated mostly as a mechanism of oppression and domination. ‘‘Social architecture’’ . . . challenges structures of domination and, in the process, calls capitalism itself into question’ (Jones & Card, 2011)"

Struggle in the Studio: A Bourdivin Look at Architectural Pedagogy

Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), 1995

This article seeks to establish two propositions. First, architectural education, although obviously intended as vocational training, is also intended as a form of socialization aimed at producing a very specific type of person. It is contended that the effects of this process have been considerably underestimated by architectural educators. Second, this process favors certain types of students-those from well-to-do, cultivated families-at the expense of others. The sociological framework of Pierre Bourdieu is enlisted to conduct the analysis. Toward a Sociology of Architectural Pedagogy All forms of education transmit knowledge and skills. All forms of education also socialize students into some sort of ethos or culture. These two functions are inseparable. Much has been written in these and other pages about the first function of architectural education, about how architects should be trained, about what they should know. Very little has been written about the second. Although every academic knows that there is a definite culture into which architecture students are socialized, usually described as a form of romantic individualism, discussion about it has remained informal and theoretically unarticulated, as Thomas Dutton noted, beyond his own use of the notion of hidden curriculum to describe it.' I present here what I believe to be an especially interesting and challenging model of the architectural enculturation process based on the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Two reasons particularly commend Bourdieu's theorizing to architecture educators. First, the discipline and profession of architecture are deeply embedded in the cultural world, and as Scott Lash said in the introduction to a volume on modern cultural sociology, "Bourdieu's general sociology of culture is not only the best, but it is the only game in town."2 His work on the relationship of culture to society has important things to say about architecture's place in the social world. Second, he is a leading sociologist of education and has for many years been a locus classicus for European educators. His theorizing in that area can explain many otherwise puzzling phenomena about architectural education. Reading Bourdieu Pierre Bourdieu is not a name that the architectural reader is likely to have encountered in the way that one encounters other French intellectuals like Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida or Jean-Francois Lyotard, although a poll of French intellectuals ranked him among the ten most influential intellectuals.3 Well known in France, he has only had a major impact on the Anglo-American field in the past ten or so years since the publication of his book Distinction.4 In that time, "he, more than any other comparable figure, .... has come to personify the continued value and vigour of a distinctly French intellectual tradition within the social sciences."5 His impact on architecture has been minimal: a few scattered references and the occasional borrowing of some key concepts, often wrongly (albeit innocently) attributed to others.6 The reasons are not hard to find. Unlike other French luminaries, he has never claimed the robes of a philosopher-king, garments especially alluring to architectural theorists. Instead, he positions himself squarely in the field of sociology. He has conspicuously avoided the voluminous and verbose debates that constitute the discourse of postmodernism.7 Although one can hardly find any academic writing on architecture that fails to take that phenomenon as central, Bourdieu has only ever referred to it in order to dismiss it as intellectual faddism.8 He might perhaps have found an audience twenty-five years ago during architecture's brief flirtation with the social, but contemporary theory and writing, being a sort of nouvelle cuisine Heidegger, has no place for someone so unpalatably left of center. Preferring their seers to be, like their architects, gifted with a unique, personal, and solitary prophetic vision, theorists would find unappealing Bourdieu's extensive empirical studies and would be disillusioned on finding that his work is collaborative and collective, relying on the efforts of his coworkers at a French state research institute. His writing is long-winded, discursive, convoluted, formal, and rhetorical; when one can understand him at all, it is easy to take him as arguing for positions to which he is strenuously opposed.9 His theoretical formulations are scattered and diffuse, rendering it difficult to give precise references. Reading Bourdieu is like watching a Peter Greenaway film: Beneath the tortured rococo exquisiteness one can dimly make out that he really has something profound and important to say, but it is often difficult to determine just what it is. One perseveres as one perseveres with Derrida or Foucault, knowing that the stylistic theatrics that are part of the repertoire of all French intellectuals are crucial to the content of their thought.'o Finally, whereas all previous sociological work has analyzed architecture in terms of a sociology of the profession, Bourdieu has no distinct interest in professions. He regards the whole concept as more misleading than useful, arguing that a specific sociology of professions, rather than a general one of occupations, does no more than accept the professions' image of themselves as somehow inherently superior sorts of workers." In this he moves with the general trend of sociology to abandon the whole notion as inadequate.'2

A Few People, a Brief Moment in Time: Architectural Education Experiments 1987-91

2020

This essay draws together an account of pedagogic experiments in architectural education that took place at the Polytechnic of the South Bank School of Architecture, Postgraduate Diploma (RIBA Part 2) between 1987 and 1991. Revisiting this period of holacratic autonomy and student-led collaborative education, the essay aims to shed some light on the value of manifesting transformative creative educational models in the contemporary context of design education. Charting an extraordinary period of student agency, the work considers how the notion of social and individual political resistance, manifested as creative action, can inform a transformative and liberating feminist methodology. Thirty years after these events, amidst the march of the privatisation and commodification of architectural education, the increasing homogenisation of a skills-based, profession-led curriculum, may be a moment to reconsider the potential embedded in an alternative, rebellious, feminist design studio and practice.