A Liberal Education: Tom Wiscombe on Archinect Sessions One-to-One #14

2016-03-07T17:00:00-05:00

Architect and educator Tom Wiscombe has made major inroads as SCI-Arc's BArch chair to establish a stronger connection to the humanities and critical theory in architecture education, founding the school's Liberal Arts Program last year and bringing in contemporary philosophers and theorists to spark new dialogues. We discuss his role in the southern Californian architecture culture (particularly in regards to MOCA's 2013 New Sculpturalism show), how he prioritizes theory in architectural practice and education, and his ongoing Main Museum of Los Angeles project in the city's enlivened downtown.

Listen to One-to-One #14 with Tom Wiscombe:

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Special thanks to UCLA for helping coordinate the interview, after Tom gave his Distingui...

Harvard's new undergraduate design program teaches "architecture as liberal art"

2014-12-17T18:47:00-05:00

These three streams—history and theory, design imagination, and the physical act of making—are the central components of the undergraduate track in architecture studies, a joint program from the Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ (FAS) department of history of art and architecture. [...] The first students in the track, housed within the art-history concentration, graduated last spring.

The Graduate School of Design at Harvard has long been revered as one of the world's top institutions, but only recently has that pedigree been extended into an undergraduate architecture program. As recently as a few years ago, there were no architecture studio courses available to Harvard undergrads – those interested in architecture would concentrate in the department of History of Art and Architecture, a liberal arts program which isn't tailored towards the 5-year accredited BArch programs of similar undergraduate institutions. But for the first time in Fall of 2012, the GSD and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (where History of Art and Architecture is housed) opened a new, collaborative program for undergraduates. Students who enroll in this track of studies will take two studio courses in architecture, within the context of a wider-ranged liberal arts education – the foundational idea being that architectural design thinking is its own form of liberal-arts practice, and that t...

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A Liberal Education: Tom Wiscombe on Archinect Sessions One-to-One #14

Harvard's new undergraduate design program teaches "architecture as liberal art"