It is with much trepidation that I responded to the prompt of pedagogy issued for this round of Cross-Talk. A bit of hesitation because having graduated less than two months ago the...wounds are fresh, shall we say. The hand that fed is not yet out of eyesight... The master is still very much near. Take your pick of idioms and metaphors; it is difficult to write on the subject within which one is so acutely implicated. I have been a product of it and continue to subject myself willingly to its current operators. What I have included as my response will react to the pieces written by fellow participants of this current Cross-Talk—participants who I also call my teachers, peers, and friends. Friends for now, I might add, for if these Cross-Talks are in any way successful they should at least shake these friendly foundations out of simple curiosity and mischievous delight—two things this writer is quite prone to. 

This Course Will Teach Absolutely Nothing

In 1994 David Foster Wallace taught a semester long course at Illinois State University titled “English 102 - Literary Analysis: Prose Fiction.” The syllabus for his course was released by the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, which made scans of his class handout to reveal the professionally pedagogical side of his teaching. Of course, with Wallace, no such side exists and if it does it is not of a conventional nature.

In an excerpt from that document we find his course intentions:

“...English 102 aims to show you some ways to read fiction more deeply, to come up with more interesting insights on how pieces of fiction work, to have informed intelligent reasons for liking or disliking a piece of fiction, and to write—clearly, persuasively, and above all interestingly—about stuff you’ve read.”

For the course, Wallace assigned popular or even ‘borderline generic’ fiction—novels that could be purchased at any bookstand across the country. And yet the challenge that he set forth was that it was these exact soft-core literary works that would produce the most radical readings. Nothing of Wallace’s syllabus indicates that such analysis should result in anything other than personal revelation. A better reader means a better writer simply because a better reader is more generous and prone to finding wonder in the innane.

it should be the hope of our education to encourage a love affair with architecture

Let’s pretend, for a moment, that architecture education allowed for such personal development…that its structures and machines might instead churn for the renewal of curiosity and awe—towards the expression of an architectural taste. Better yet, an appetite. Unfortunately the difficulty of this endeavor is the demand for honesty from its instructors. Let us for a moment look at the proud commitment between student and teacher:

Everything that I am showing you is worth something—there is meaning here.

We enter into a mode of meaning-fullness (meaning-making and meaning-seeking, one upholding the other, filling every word, pause, gesture, and participating element with meaning) trying to find in the material, the message. For those who teach, endowing arbitrary objects with arbitrary allure is dangerous, as neither teacher nor student possesses the patience to feign interest for too long in things that span miles wide and inches deep. 

If Wallace’s hope was to encourage in his students the desire to love writing, it should be the hope of our education to encourage a love affair with architecture. Like any good romance there are tools of engagement: love letters, intimate memorabilia, and obsessive reflection. One cannot teach these things, merely unveil one’s own experience and disclose the lessons of love affairs past. It is then the quest of the student to love unlike the teacher, to undo what has not yet been done.

Feudalism, Apprenticeship, and BDSM

Interestingly, Wallace’s approach gave heavy emphasis to peer review. Students would be expected to read each other's work intensely, taking the time to truly understand the intentions of their peer writers. The goal of this attempt seems much less interested in tapping into, or contributing towards a larger discourse. That is to say, this course was not an exercise in the participation of a larger movement (if we may call the development of an academia within literature or architecture or art a movement). The efforts of such localized reading and writing could only benefit the individual first before ever having consequences in the broader structures of a discipline, or—dare we say it—a profession. To the point of dead professions, or disciplines divided, the schizophrenics of a split mind within the training of young writers, architects, or artists seems outdated. Long have these discussion been had—of architecture being split between engineers and artists, politicians and magicians, servants and slaves. Somehow we believe this to be a pedagogical question when in fact it is not. It cannot be a pedagogical dilemma simply because to narrow the avenues of architecture within the formation of architectural knowledge would be to undercut the possibilities of a future laden with architectures, architecturalisms, architecture-likenesses, and the infinitude of things somewhat resembling and invoking a thing that may or may not be architecture. To split the baby at birth would be unwise.

To The Difficulty of Desire

Ah but love is hard and oftentimes useless in architectural education. Love is not very productive. In fact, lovesickness brings about the un-productive, expressions of intimate turmoil that are hard to relate to and almost impossible to understand on any level of rational architectural method. Love has little to do with advancing the technological, or the socio-political, or—even—the cultural. It is entirely self-reflective and selfish. To love architecture does not do much for the world at large or for the betterment of humanity and yet it is essential to any act of architectural sincerity.

The demand for a new architectural pedagogy is flawed in its belief that architecture can or should be taught at all.

Here lies the problem of architectural education. The demand for a new architectural pedagogy is flawed in its belief that architecture can or should be taught at all. That in the teaching of process, technique, method, means, and ways students will also be endowed with the desire to reconstruct social relations, to combat the servitude of design to capital, and to redefine the bounds of policy and form. Unfortunately these radical desires are neither induced nor adequately cultivated in simply learning how to make things. You must make them, and love them. Investment of the most intimate kind—to believe in what we makes implicates our selfhood into our processes. The place where identity and politics meet in architecture is the same place where the desired object meets its smitten lover. The difficulty in developing or discussing pedagogy is the same challenge of defining the process of passion*: unfortunately and undoubtedly impossible. 

*The 1985 American Institute of Architecture announced that for its annual Design Awards Ceremony there would be, for the pleasure of its esteemed guests and members, an imported live display of Bowerbirds to be installed in the center of the National Historic Archiving and Registry building in Philadelphia. At the center of the great hall an immense steel cage was erected within which seventy-five Bowerbirds taken from the depths of the Adelbert Range in Papua New Guinea were set free into a manicured replica of their habitat. To the delight of the event’s planning committee not only were the birds a wonderful addition the year’s theme (Nature’s Unmatched Beauty) but they had caught the birds in the midst of their mating season rituals. The male Bowerbirds set about in a frenzy building elaborate and ornamental nests to attract the females, who tentatively approached the structures to inspect the quality of work. The director of the Massachusetts Architecture and Design Board of Educators boomed gloriously, “Look at the birds of the air; even onto them the Lord has endowed the honesty to tell good Architecture from the bad!”

Fifteen minutes later a gate along the southern edge of the cage was found to be rather loose and the crowd made its way into the transported forest for closer inspection.

“Ah! See this one here, a complete and utter lack of regard for the hierarchies of load orders!”

“And this—dear God—I would like to say that this is embarrassing but I must say that I cannot even muster the embarrassment necessary for I am seized by overwhelming boredom! Truly! It is not even bad enough to inspire shame!”

“I did see one which brought about within me the stirrings of a kind of nostalgia, but I feel that the nostalgia itself was an accidental phenomenon. It is the spirit of the Past and Memory which has filled this object with the sweet perfume of my own childhood.”

There was a collective sigh and an agreement was reached that Nature’s Unmatched Beauty was a most effective psychoanalytic tool, revealing the sins and desires of their society.

The crowd nodded vigorously, lucky were they that they had learned to interpret from the chaos such eloquent truths.

Cross-Talk is a new recurring series on Archinect that endeavors to bring architectural polemics and debate up-to-date and up-to-speed with the pace of cultural production today. Each installation will feature four responses by four writers to a single topic. For this week's iteration, the topic is 'pedagogy'.