Becoming Citizens Architects (original) (raw)
Related papers
Becoming Cosmopolitan Citizens Architects
2020
This paper presents findings from fourteen qualitative interviews conducted with students of architecture from eleven schools of the Nordic Baltic Academy of Architecture (NBAA). The interviews were analysed using the abbreviated Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT) method. The findings reveal that students consider a meaningful architectural education one that helps them making ethical design choices. To do so respondents indicate that schools should help students find their inner compass, develop their professional skills, and ethical attitudes to think independently and make a difference in their society and beyond. Three narratives emerge which describe the multiple roles of an architect in our society: the dissident intellectual, the ethical professional, and the storyteller. On the basis of these findings and with the support of the work of Henry Giroux “Critical Theory and Rationality in Citizenship Education” and Martha Nussbaum “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”, a framework ...
The Production of Knowledge in Architecture by PHD Research in the Nordic Countries
2019
This article aims to make a contribution to the debate on architectural research and academic education. Although their detailed roles and reflective procedures are still disputed, research and design are becoming more and more acknowledged as complementing sources for architectural knowledge. Design can happen within practice or as independent design explorations, in order to add to more traditional research. In contrast to various other design fields (e.g. service design or graphic design), architecture involves much longer production processes and larger costs, so that the realization of fullscale projects – exceeding pavilions or the like – within academic research is difficult. Lately, education too has received some attention for the role it can play within research. Design exploration within a master studio course has the potential to produce multiple illustrations of what is possible and also relevant for a defined context, but it is independent of everyday practicalities. A...
2001
This book holds together the proceedings of a three day international conference on architectural education that took place at the University of Cyprus, in Nicosia, between 23-25 October 2019. The conference focused on first year design teaching and the broad theme under examination was how we introduce students in the world of architectural design. Entering the field of architecture often, still, holds something from the tradition of the master-apprentice model of education or training, despite the fact that the medieval craft guilds may have long been gone. Relics of this tradition can be traced, in the implicit principles of the various schools of architecture, which are usually not addressed explicitly in the curriculum or design briefs of their studios. The purpose of this conference was to present, expose, map and critically discuss the methods and norms, symbols and narratives, customs and dispositions of current practices of first year design teaching, through the term ‘initiation.’ ‘Initiation’ can be understood, first of all, in a temporal basis, specifying that the conference was focusing on the challenge of teaching design at the very beginning of architectural education. At the same time, though, the term was selected because of its rich social or political connotations, as involving some sort of ritual or rite of passage that allows someone to enter a group. The discussions that took place during the conference, as well as, the papers that are been published here, have taken different stances in relation to these two readings. The interpretative framework of each stance has ideological implications, exposing a series of other positionings regarding not only architectural pedagogy, but also the very nature of architecture. Moreover, initiation in the field of architecture through the first year of education was found to be important since it has the power to be quite formative in shaping the future professional architect. The conference revealed that multiple pedagogical approaches coexist, each prioritizing certain values over others, often driven by a different understanding of what the role of the profession of the architect is or should be in society. It thus seems inevitable that any discussion on educational agendas should also discuss the role of the architectural profession, especially now that professional boundaries are reassessed, diluted or even dissolved. Initiating students in first year design studio is a pedagogical experiment that sets up the fundamentals of architectural education: the ethos, creative energy, drawing and making skills, curiosity in exploring and developing ideas, understanding context and how architecture frames ways of living. In this sense, teaching first year architectural design is many things at the same time: a huge responsibility, an arduous process, a joy. And while there may be many paths to choose as a studio instructor, one specific pedagogical approach is chosen each time.
Transforming Architectural Education at the Cross Roads of the World
Architectural Research addressing Societal Challenges
Located at the intersection of Europe and Asia, Turkey is constantly facing both societal changes and challenges. Major cities like Istanbul and Ankara are booming with construction of modern high-rise buildings, while historic Ottoman architecture often seems to stand in the background, observing the race to modernity. While architectural education is at the core of this evolving transition, concerns similar to that of Rafael Viñoly about people coming to the profession without knowledge of construction are being raised. Schools of architecture, particularly in the United States and Europe, are re-evaluating their curriculum and discussing the reinvention of the role of the architect as a master builder. In this paper, we discuss our efforts to transform Turkish architectural education through the establishment of the first design/build lab at one of the leading universities in the country. We describe our built project and compare it to both traditional and contemporary precedents. We develop our argument through an experimental and qualitative method.
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.
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.
Talking About the Hidden in Architectural Education
EAAE Annual Conference Proceedings
The European Association of Architectural Education’s annual conference of 2019 was held at the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb from August 28th to 31st. Titled ‘The Hidden School’, it aimed to open a discussion on the substance and quality of architectural education, an architecture school’s true character, the traits which – however explicitly or implicitly manifested – embody the school’s culture and identity. The conference explored the subliminal quality of architectural education less apparent just by reading the curricula or following evaluation procedures, yet which represent a substantial quality or the culture of a school, quite clearly legible to those engaging in it. The invitation to explore this topic proposed five aspects of a school as triggers, focusing on tacit meanings situated between the lines of the syllabus, the spirit generated by students contributing to it or the educators personifying it, informal learning modalities, spaces it inhabits: the Educator, th...
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.)
Contemporary Debates on the Education of Architects – Selected Examples
AR: Arhitektura, Raziskave, 2014
Analytic research on changes in architectural education at global and local level aims to propose adaptation in accordance with new social conditions. In order to create a basis for understanding and applying the latest standards in the architectural education, various examples of published criticism were selected and analyzed. The most analyzed topics are related to the design studios which are seen as the backbone of architectural education. The paper gives an overview of the following topics: Critical review of the educational reforms in the late sixties and early seventies of XX century; Interrelations of theory, practice and education, and importance of architectural research as a new form of practice; Increase in the number of research studios and design-build workshops with an empirical approach to education of architects; Participation of green architecture themes in the curriculum; Landscape urbanism as a synthesis of disciplines that are used in the higher level of study. ...