Archinect - News

Peter Zellner to launch the Free School of Architecture, a tuition-free, experimental architecture school

2016-09-29T20:37:00-04:00

Architect Peter Zellner of ZELLNERandCompany (formerly known as Zellner Naecker Architects) is launching a new, tuition-free post-graduate school of architecture dubbed, appropriately, the Free School of Architecture (FSA). Slated to launch in 2017, the FSA hopes to become a laboratory for new thinking about architecture and how it's taught.

While a major part of the motivation for starting the school is to explore where “architecture education might go” without massive financial burdens for students and academic pressures for professors, the FSA also aims to “absolve both students and teachers of conforming to established models of thinking,” Zellner tells Archinect.

“One might think of FSA as providing an extracurricular or alternative education, less a traditional education,” Zellner states. “The end goal is to promote new ways of thinking architecture, not to rubber-stamp more academic and/or professional worker bees.”

The FSA is not yet accredited — Zellner expresses wariness abou...

Columbia GSAPP and the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library host a collection of 20,000 images of 20th century architecture projects

2016-09-13T13:35:00-04:00

Are you looking for design inspiration for a new project? Historical references to bolster your design proposal? The Columbia GSAPP Visual Resources Collection (VRC) and the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library host an online collection of 20,000 images of 20th century architectural projects. Underway for nearly two years now, the project includes drawings, images and photographs, primarily of modernist projects spanning from 1871 to 2013.

Unbuilt projects, like the Chicago Tribune Tower and the Lenin Library, are showcase alongside a collection of built projects. In total, the archive includes 1,000 projects from 55 countries. The project was curated by Ayesha Ghosh, who was assisted by Carsten Rodin and James Brillon.

The archive has a Plans and Sections project alongside collections of digital images, 35mm slides, and lantern slide formats. There’s also VHS and DVD recording of over twenty years of lectures hosted by GSAPP. Unfortunately, you’ll need a Columbia email to access...

Open Call for Submissions: "Learning"

2016-09-07T12:07:00-04:00

As the role of “the architect” seems to expand ever outwards, the architect’s education hasn’t exactly kept pace. While the profession delves into new territories, its optimism and diversification run parallel to the bloat of inflated degrees, unpaid labor and student debt that have come to characterize educational institutions at large. What’s an aspiring architect to do? As current academic models appear less and less adept at teaching architecture as we know it, perhaps a pedagogical break is needed to better understand: “How on Earth should we teach architecture?”

This September on Archinect, we’re considering all aspects of 'Learning' from pedagogy to continuing education to psychology. And under our open call for submissions, we’re looking for projects and writing that reconsider one of the core aspects of architecture education: the studio.

》PROJECT SUBMISSIONS: A New Studio

There weren’t always Kuka robots on every corner. The studio space where architects do the majority of th...