Archinect - Features

Architecture Gave Me a Black Eye: A Note to Architectural Educators

2021-11-19T08:32:00-05:00

I was eight years old when I entered my first slave quarter—that was the first time architecture hit me. It was the first time that I can recall thinking about spaces that dictated where my race belonged. But, more than anything, the hit was mostly a surprise, and I questioned if something so much older and so much larger than me was allowed to hit me. Was I, in turn, supposed to fight back?

While I do not blame the building, I do, in fact, blame the education responsible for curating that experience. I can only imagine the difference felt if this field trip was anchored by discussions about inequality and self-worth, rations and resourcefulness, or degradation and fortitude. Instead, I spent my time on the plantation that day trying to figure out if I would have been a field slave or a house slave. In that moment, what everyone failed to realize was that whether they recognized it or not, the slave quarters were also telling my white classmates where they belonged. And just like ...

Going All-In at Bard Architecture; The Opportunities and Challenges of Architectural Education in a Time of Transformation

2021-07-27T16:23:00-04:00

This spring, the first year of classes came to a close at a new undergraduate program in architecture at Bard College, a 2,000-student liberal arts school in rural Annandale, New York. According to the co-directors, Professors Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco and Ross Exo Adams, designing Bard Architecture’s new curriculum has been an opportunity to rethink architectural education by asking: “What is architecture in the first place?”

Fellow Fellows: Galen Pardee

2020-10-27T13:17:00-04:00

In this latest installment of Fellow Fellows we connect with Galen Pardee, M.Arch graduate of Columbia University, where he received the Alpha Rho Chi Medal. Pardee chats with Archinect about his work and latest exhibition, "The Great Lakes Architectural Expedition." While academia transitions and shifts to better address and adhere towards fighting social and racial injustice with architecture, Pardee shares what he's learned in the process as 2019-2020 (now 2021) LeFevre Emerging Practitioner Fellow at The Ohio State University.

Fellow Fellows: Jonathan Rieke

2020-08-14T12:31:00-04:00

Fellow Fellows is a series that focuses on the role fellowships play in architecture academia today. These prestigious academic positions can bring forth a fantastic blend of practice, research, and pedagogical cross-pollination, often within a tight time frame. They also, by definition, represent temporary, open-ended, and ultimately precarious employment for aspiring young designers and academics. Fellow Fellows aims to understand what these positions offer for both the fellows themselves and the discipline at large by presenting their work and experiences through an in-depth interview. Fellow Fellows is about bringing attention and inquiry to the otherwise maddening pace of academia, while also presenting a broad view of the exceptional and breakthrough work being done by people navigating the early parts of their careers.

This week, we Archinect connected with Jonathan Rieke, M.Arch graduate of Harvard GSD and the recipient of the 2018-2019 Schidlowski Emerging Faculty Fellow a...

MIT M.Arch Graduates Alexandre Beaudouin-Mackay & Sarah Wagner Inject "A New Way of Play" Into Architectural Pedagogy

2020-07-20T12:34:00-04:00

Graduates Alexandre Beaudouin-Mackay & Sarah Wagner take architectural pedagogy in a direction driven by play. According to the duo, "by understanding play as a powerful methodology, architects can engage others in creative processes with the ambition of implementing new, meaningful, and imaginative design strategies. Play is not aimless but productive..."

In their thesis project A New Way of Play: The Forms and Functions of Participatory Design and Critical Pedagogies, Beaudouin-Mackay and Wagner they push for architecture to reimagine play. As recent graduates from MIT's School of Architecture, they created a set of play spaces for children in order to understand how different forms of architectural authorship could be challenged.

Archinect's Spotlight on 2020 Thesis Projects: 2020 has been an extraordinarily challenging year for architecture graduates. Students were displaced as schools shut down, academic communities had to adapt to a new virtual format, end-of-year celebration...

MIT M.Arch Graduates Kevin Marblestone and Emily Whitbeck Investigate Architecture Pedagogy's Relationship to Time

2020-07-13T12:42:00-04:00

In their thesis project, graduate students Kevin Marblestone and Emily Whitbeck engage with architectural pedagogy by exploring time and it's relation to the design process. According to the duo, "Architecture needs a new generation of practitioners that can think differently about time."

Recent graduates from MIT's School of Architecture, Marblestone and Whitbeck make use of time-based media to work through their thesis project Pedagogy of the Fourth Wall. Archinect connected with the duo to learn more about their exploration and dissection of contemporary design pedagogy and their thoughts on the architecture industry as a whole.

Deans List: University of Calgary's Dr. John Brown Discusses the Importance of Fostering Design Innovation and Entrepreneurship

2019-11-05T06:00:00-05:00

The Deans List is an interview series with the leaders of architecture schools, worldwide. The series profiles the school’s programming, as defined by the dean — giving an invaluable perspective into the institution’s unique curriculum, faculty, and academic environment.

For this installment, Archinect spoke with Dr. John Brown, dean at the University of Calgary School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape. A seasoned architect and academic, Brown's background has allowed him to explore how academia can not only teach students but foster a level of thinking. From running a practice filled with people-centric design, research, and entrepreneurial spunk, Brown expresses for students to "look at what it is they want to do and how they can do that most effectively without being constrained by conventional practice."

A supporter of design innovation and entrepreneurship, Brown shares the challenges the program has faced and how the blending of research and multidisciplinary has led t...

A Conversation With Jennifer Bonner: Architecture's Playful Provocateur of Practice and Pedagogy

2019-06-21T12:14:00-04:00

Understanding architectural practice and pedagogy is one thing; learning how to merge them together and challenge its idiosyncrasies is another. A name often associated with playful obscurity, Jennifer Bonner is a powerful force in the academic and practicing world of architecture. The Huntsville, Alabama native often thanks the city of Las Vegas for her interest in pursuing architecture, but owes much of her highly specific design aesthetic to her experience challenging design systems. Pulling influence and application from ordinary things outside of architecture, Bonner learned to embrace the every day in order to understand any object or task can be represented in architecture.

Pushing herself, her students, and the profession, Bonner continually finds ways to take risks and find new opportunities for discourse and disruption through playfulness and architectural representation. This week Archinect chats with Jennifer Bonner for an in-depth interview discussing the power of alter...

SoapBox: Pedagogy

2017-12-06T13:15:00-05:00

Soapbox is a weekly series delivering a curated set of lectures, talks and symposia concerning contemporary themes but explored through the archives of lectures past and present. With the plethora of lectures, talks, symposia and panels occurring world wide on a daily basis, how can we begin to keep up and if not, find them once they are gone? Soapbox looks to assemble a selection of recent, archived and outlier lectures surrounding a given theme. Soapbox looks to curate this never-ending library of ideas into an engaging and diverse list of thoughts and provocations. Soapbox is just that, a collection aimed at discovering the occasional needle in a haystack.

SoapBox: Discourse?

2017-11-20T13:02:00-05:00

Deans List: Heather Woofter discusses the future direction of Sam Fox School of Design

2017-08-01T13:34:00-04:00

Heather Woofter is already a familiar face around the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, where she's been teaching since 2005. She also practices what she teaches, having continued working with her design partner Sung Ho Kim at the firm Axi:Ome since she joined in 2003. Now that she's been appointed director of the respected design school's architecture programs, what are her pedagogical goals? She discusses her approach toward taking a school with one of the oldest established urban design programs in the country into the future in the interview below.

Cross-Talk #2: Deborah Garcia on 'Pedagogy' Today

2017-07-30T09:00:00-04:00

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.

Cross-Talk #2: JuneJuly on 'Pedagogy' Today

2017-07-29T09:00:00-04:00

When asking questions about how to teach architecture, we have to understand what architecture is as a profession. The profession, as the academy understands it, no longer exists. The service of architecture can largely be separated into two fields: design architecture and executive architecture. Design architecture is concerned with the design of space, and executive architecture with the delivery of that design. Pedagogy today attempts to prepare students for both of these roles, and in that way prepares them for neither. Contractors and fabricators are already comfortable executing architecture, and extra-disciplinary creative agencies (advertising, graphics, branding) take on the design of architecture without hesitation. This is indiscriminate to whether or not those who do the work were trained as architects. This will only continue.

Cross-Talk #2: Constance Vale on 'Pedagogy' Today

2017-07-28T09:00:00-04:00

Pedagogy is animated theory that transforms the discipline. It emerges from discussion, debate, and creation and involves the collaboration of instructors, students, and institutions. Essential to pedagogical development is the understanding that architecture is a cultural discipline, one that thrives on creative speculations that enter into tension with external issues.[1] Effective architectural pedagogy alters the world beyond the boundary of its originating institution, changing conformist ideologies and empowering the disenfranchised via the implications of aesthetics.[2] In the pursuit of disciplinary transformation that will destabilize the status quo, pedagogy must first address how to forget and how to fail.

Cross-Talk #2: Patrick Geske on 'Pedagogy' Today

2017-07-27T12:29:00-04:00

At its core, architecture is a personal pursuit that involves an itinerant and systematic questioning of everything one grows up to find in the world—pre-existing as it were, solid and opaque as if somehow natural.

Cross-Talk #2: Matthew Allen on 'Pedagogy' Today

2017-07-26T12:02:00-04:00

Not so long ago, not everyone would be expected to graduate from high school. (Graduation rates in the US: 1900: 6%; 1930: 55%; 2016: 83%.) Now college is more or less mandatory in many lines of work, and an advanced degree is almost a requirement to be an architect. But somehow an old idea persists: the idea of the architect as a generalist problem-solver, a gentleman amateur. This is a nineteenth century idea that fit, say, Frank Lloyd Wright, but, strangely enough, it also fits most contemporary architects that come to mind.

Cross-Talk #2: 'Pedagogy of The Present — Frederick L. Ackerman’s Unrealized Vision for Architectural Education' by Zachary Tate Porter

2017-07-25T12:18:00-04:00

In recent years, various social media platforms have reconfigured the distribution and consumption of architecture—a transformation that has reinvigorated the discipline and produced a wide array of provocative imagery. Yet, while architects can and should celebrate this exciting culture of exchange, there is also the risk of becoming too insulated from the problems and paradigms of larger culture. Ultimately, architectural schools bear the burden of navigating these forces and setting the tone for emerging professionals. As architectural educators chart the course for our discipline, they would be wise to revisit the pedagogical visions espoused by our predecessors.

Cross-Talk #2: Pedagogy — Introduction

2017-07-24T14:46:00-04:00

pedagogy

|ˈpedəˌɡäjē|

noun (plural pedagogies) the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept: the relationship between applied linguistics and language pedagogy | subject-based pedagogies.

Discussing the role of jargon and difficulty with Harvard GSD's K. Michael Hays + Lisa Haber-Thomson

2017-06-09T10:30:00-04:00

Why are introductory architecture courses often packed with dense, off-putting jargon? It’s a question I didn't anticipate asking an esteemed architectural historian and current Harvard GSD professor, yet after I unintentionally offended K. Michael Hays by publicly airing my annoyances with jargon and difficulty as part of a recap of a review of his new online course, I realized that I needed to ask it. In fact, I owed it to the Professor; it’s unfair to criticize someone’s teaching style if one hasn’t thoroughly experienced it, although I've taken courses taught by others that used a similar approach.

What's Wrong with Academia? On Alternative Schools of Architecture

2017-03-09T12:17:00-05:00

Over the course of the last few years, debate around the form of architectural education has reached new levels of popularity, illustrated by the proliferation of reflexive initiatives, conferences and publications around artistic and architectural education as well as through the emergence of new experimental models.

Dean's List: Kate Schwennsen's balancing act at Clemson University

2016-12-27T10:02:00-05:00

Kate Schwennsen, Dean of Clemson University's School of Architecture, is hoping to strike that ideal balance between theory and practice that will prepare students to not only tackle the day-to-day challenges of working in architecture, but give them the inspiration to explore new conceptual territory.

Michael Rotondi's GamerLab™ Wants to Revolutionize Architecture Education Through Gaming

2016-10-31T15:41:00-04:00

In a typical media narrative, video games are responsible for social isolation, decreased attention spans, and even violent tendencies. But according to GamerLab™, a new educational platform and pedagogical method developed by the LA-based RotoLab, as well as an increasingly large body of research, games can offer major benefits for education, particularly when it comes to architecture.

The Bartlett's Director of Architecture, Bob Sheil, Pushes for Evolving Research in Academia

2016-10-11T12:05:00-04:00

The Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London is consistently one of the most highly ranked architecture schools globally, and occupies a significant part of revolutionary educational history in the UK. Founded in 1826, UCL was the first English university to accept students regardless of religion, gender or social status, and was also the first to appoint a chair of architecture, in 1841.

Learning from 'Learning from Las Vegas' with Denise Scott Brown, Part 2: Pedagogy

2016-10-05T11:59:00-04:00

We left off our conversation with Denise Scott Brown talking about her childhood in South Africa and her early architectural influences. Now, in part 2 of our 3-part series, we discuss the unique pedagogical methods she pioneered alongside her husband, Robert Venturi.

Screen/Print #44: 'Education: Trial and Error' from The Metropolitan Laboratory Magazine

2016-09-08T11:26:00-04:00

A hyper-competitive culture pervades today’s workplaces and academic settings. It often seems like the only path to success is, well, success. But what about the value of failure? After all, it’s hard to know what’s right when you don’t know what’s wrong.

Gaming the System: role-playing spatial and political change

2016-09-01T09:13:00-04:00

"[The] sovereign art, of course, will be the one whose laws rule over the relations among men in their totality. That is, Politics.

Nothing is alien to Politics, because nothing is alien to the superior art that rules the relations among men.

Medicine, war, architecture, etc. – minor and major arts, all without exception – are subject to, and make up, that sovereign art." — Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, 1973

Working Life: Does Taliesin’s collaborative and pedagogical domesticity suit the 21st century?

2016-08-10T12:45:00-04:00

Founded at a time when Frank Lloyd Wright was floundering financially, Taliesin’s blend of education and site-bound intimacy has created a custom domesticity. As the site for the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, Taliesin combines both passion and white-knuckled acumen, teaching its student inhabitants to thrive with scarce resources and a generous community.