Problematic Flexibility as an Asset for a Thorough Reflection on Architectural Education

This paper is exploring the benefits and assets of an educational experiment without clear ownership. More specifically, it is about a form of democracy of doing in almost all the phases of a continuous exercise in the WTC1-tower in Brussels. An unintended lack of control over the different event processes led to a curious form of critical thinking about the “context” for architectural ‘schooling’, which is generally understood as necessary. The very special experiment contains many more elements than anyone could have foreseen.

Towards a Methodology for Rethinking Modernity

The subject of this paper is twofold (1) towards review and revision of extra-curricular learning model in the form of a student workshop as an extended environment and a reflective arena, and (2) towards generating workshop content aimed at examining modernity in contemporary conditions of urban transformation. The paper is structured in three parts. The first part introduces the concept of an architectural workshop with a discussion of general methodological perspectives that shape this approach that takes place through three continuous stages during which students develop the process of analytical thinking, architectural programming and architectural design. The second part of the paper contextually and conceptually position the content of the workshop aimed at examining modernity in contemporary conditions of urban transformation between imagined, realized, and lived space. The third section introduces the content of two student workshops as an illustrative example of the implementation of methodology with specified assignments and substance.

Effects of Restorative Environments on Creativity in Case of Architecture Education

Creativity is a mental process, and cognitive psychology has focused on this subject, especially in the last century. While neuroscience concentrates on creative processes; new data emerges. When we consider architectural production as a creative process, the "free association REST thinking mode" focuses on the principle of free circulating thought, allowing relaxation and free-thinking to lead to new connections (creative moments) in the brain. The paper aims to focus on how spaces affect the creative process in case of architectural education, production, and creation. If REST mode — as relaxation, meditation, and awareness — supports the process of creation, how do restorative (calming, meditative) spaces and environments affect this process as well? With this approach, students will be questioned with quantitative methods to collect data about the effects of faculty and meditative environments on the creative process.

Ways of Choosing

Architectural education must produce graduates which have demonstrated standards of knowledge, skill and competence for practice as an architect, who possess particular professional attributes and who are also aware of their civic responsibilities. As such, graduates are taught to question and direct design conditions from particular design paradigms and stances. In the context of two dichotomous design culture stances — Architectural Design Excellence (ADE) which prioritises aesthetic architectural ideals and space-making, and Sustainable Performance Excellence (SPE) which has technical prowess and the built environment response to social, environmental and economic sustainability as its focus — this paper studies the role of school design culture in Irish Schools of Architecture in providing the focus on what constitutes architectural design excellence, and what shapes the framework in which these ideas sit.

Becoming Cosmopolitan Citizens Architects

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 referred to as “Cosmopolitan Citizenship Architecture Education” is developed.

Read Between the Walls

The spatial dimension of a school transforms an abstraction into a situated phenomenon. In doing so, the context intentionally or implicitly affects education. The potential impact the physical environment and the implied connotations it carries on one’s experience in and of it, is best argued by common sense. In the sense that architecture can be considered as a means to curate scenarios, anticipate and influence behaviour and even create a narrative, architecture is an agent in what composes the hidden school. In the case of educational spaces for architecture, the built environment is particularly influential as it is not only a representation of the idiosyncratic nature and program of an architecture school but also a reflection of its attitude towards the discipline and a statement about its aspirations and culture. Every aspect of an architecture school’s physical presence can be interpreted as a statement about its character and spirit, despite the fact that those analyses may be inconclusive hypotheticals. A school’s location and context can be related to both its self-awareness and its attitude towards the outside world.

Both of Stuff and Not

Architecture is a quite elusive discipline, both unleashed and restrained by a perennial calling into question of its own fundamentals. Being and becoming an architect means to cast a doubtful, unsatisfied, interrogative gaze on the world and especially on the world of architecture. Teaching such a (self-) critical discipline is, therefore, an intrinsically impossible task. Of course, syllabuses include specific competencies such as drawing, history, structures, law, economics... but when it comes to integrating them into the architectural project, any fixed framework becomes questionable, and it is precisely this questioning that makes design architectural, offering that necessary potential which can turn mere building into architecture.

Students' Approach to Participating in Informal Education

The way of learning and performing practice, the tools and methods that are being used for it and the spaces that these processes take place are shifting with the change of information and technology. Under these circumstances architectural education has faced difficulties in being up to date in particular about curriculum, program and physical requirements. While instant solutions give instant results, it is inevitable that rooted solutions will be encountered to keep up with this rapid change. For this reason, countless “informal education” activities are being implemented, such as competitions, workshops, assemblies, forums, publications, etc. This paper focuses on BASS (Betonart Architectural Summer School) as a case to understand the motives of participating in such activities from the perspective of architectural students. It tries to demonstrate that students are aware of the importance of informal educational activities, furthermore they are increasingly demanding.

Handprint, the Shower of Gold, and Thingness of Architecture

Architecture is an eminently artificial human enterprise but subject to natural laws and principles residing somewhere between the mineral world and vegetation. It is eminently archaic, as the dominant epistemologies, pragmatic conditions and techniques may change, but fundamental notions, ideas and principles remain where they have been ever since the construction of the first shelter. Architecture is also eminently thingly. As a thing, every work of architecture is in opposition to our broken world of events. For better or for worse, in actual practice this opposition settles in the act of construction, as a project becomes a building: material, structure, space.

Knowledge Production at the Borderline Territory

Learning is a life-long process of growth and transformation through personal experience. Learning, like creation, takes place in relation. Life happens in the interval of matter. In the magnetic field of an active void— the space-time interval of change — a new form of life is created. Intention is to explore the incentive for knowledge production dynamics in the education of architects through a lens of relational phenomena. The key stimulus for production of knowledge is a transformative encounter with the dissimilar ‘Other’. The process of learning architecture is examined through the phenomenology of perception as the epistemologically most suitable apparatus. Experience of the inside-outside relation in spatial perception of architecture is compared with the one in psychoanalytical dynamics. Winnicott’s seminal concept of ‘transitional space’ is juxtaposed with a dynamic experience of transgressing porous architectural boundaries — both being analogs of the learning process.