Creativity real and imagined in architectural education (original) (raw)

2014, Frontiers of Architectural Research

Of all aspects of architecture what mystifies most the layman is the power of architects as 'creators', their apparent capability to invent, conceive and construct 'out of nothing' unprecedented daring forms. In the West, the idea of 'creators', defined as those who can 'make things out of nothing', is very old. It had and has far reaching influences, not always benign, that are still felt today in many disciplines related to the production of the human-made environment including architecture and architectural education. In the broad sense of the term, (that comprised poets but also the makers of machines), the definition of 'creator', one who 'makes something out of nothing', goes at least as far back as Plato's Symposium (II,201,c), while the specific idea of the architect as 'creator', emerged later, during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when the architect was called demi-god, 'come semidei'to quote Cesare Cesariano, the Renaissance military architect and theoretician of architecture-"Wittkower, R., 1962. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, London Lefaivre, Liane and Alexande Tzonis, 2004, Emergence of Modern Architecture: A Documentary History, from 1000 to 1800, London" and his gift to give birth to new forms was claimed to be miraculous. Accordingly, the belief in the wondrous nature of architects 'creating' 'out of nothing' 'microcosms' was so strong that people gathered to watch the famous 'inspired' seventeenth