Resuscitating Architectural Education
The term ‘live project’ is usually used to denote a form of project that is carried out in real time, with real people on real sites; it is invested with liveliness in its engagement with the shifting sands of its context. But what if we take the word ‘live’ at face value and state boldly that the defining feature is that the project is alive? Where does this leave ‘normal’ studio-based projects against which live projects are often contrasted and compared? It must leave them as dead projects, drained of any life.
To suggest that mainstream architectural education is dead is, of course, sacrilegious. All the evidence would indicate otherwise: lively and engaging students, lots of production, super freshness exposed on an annual basis at end of year shows, dynamic form, animated debates in juries, and so on. All of these, surely, attest to a far from dead discipline. However, what I want to argue briefly is that these outward signs of life serve to mask an underlying stasis in architectural education, and that live projects present
opportunities and means to resuscitate that flagging body.
Slow Death
I have written about architectural education elsewhere (Till, 1996; Till, 2009), so here will concentrate on the factors that may confuse an apparent liveliness with an actual fixity. Most spectacular of all is the recent explosion of new forms/shapes in architectural schools, driven by rapid advances in computing speed and software which not only generate multiple form-making possibilities but also allow those forms to be represented in ways that make them appear more real than they deserve or really are. In old-fashioned orthographic drawings or constructed perspectives one was always conscious of the very abstraction of the method; the physicality of the act of drawing served as a continuing reminder of the fact that those lines were no more than codes. Now, however, the commonplace of the computer screen as a window to multiple worlds creates the sensation that the image stands for something real, and the smoothness of the interface forms an apparently seamless connection with, and so belief in, the objects presented. Although pinpricks of life are applied to these objects (all those flocks of birds that started to populate my students’ drawings, as if a special Photoshop filter had been invented for just such invigoration), they remain static lumps of matter. As Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva note, “the static view of buildings is a professional hazard of drawing them too well.”(Latour & Yaneva, 2008, p. 83). Just as reality TV presents a severely edited and sensationalised version of real life, so architectural drawings tend to foreground the spectacular and suppress the everyday, with the result that as they become ever more realistic (in representational terms) they become ever less real (in actual terms), or rather as they appear ever livelier they become more static. This trait is not limited to architectural schools, but the misleading effect is exacerbated because students are not exposed to all the other dependencies of practice (clients, costs, changing contexts, etc.) which serve as reality checks during the course of a project and bring randomness to the process. For the student, architectural drawings and models are usually all they have to work with, and they do so not against a backdrop of changing dependencies, but in the quest for betterment in a linear trajectory towards an artificial deadline, during which process the refinement of the drawing becomes the point of obsession. Even if narrative, events, or human presence is projected onto models or drawings, these representations tend to suck the air out of the original life, reducing its content to form, and abstracting it so that any social and ethical content is held mainly in the words of intent, if at all.
The thin, but ever replenished, surface of representation not only disguises a stasis of matter, it also conceals a stasis of process. Because the outputs from schools of architecture look different from year to year, from place to place, from school to school, an impression of ceaseless activity is given, with the assumption being that progress is being made on all fronts. However, the differences in the way that things look are not matched by differences in the way that architecture schools operate. Architectural education is structured through a set of rituals many of which have remained more or less unchanged since the establishment of formalised architectural education at the École des Beaux Arts in 1819. Throughout the world schools cling to the founding tenets of the Beaux Arts: the studio tutor as all powerful, the emphasis on formal output as the prime focus of all discussion, and the use of juries as the culmination of the educational experience. Of course there are variations, but the underlying structures remain stubbornly fixed. Most revealing is the continuing attachment to the design review, jury or ‘crit’, first introduced in the Beaux Arts as the means of bringing expert and independent views to the student work. However, the review is much more than a means of assessment; it wraps up all the rituals and associated values of architectural education into a highly charged and strictly orchestrated ceremony, in which roles and associated power structures are all too defined. In her work on the architectural review, Helena Webster clearly identifies the pervading paradox that it contains, where the apparent liveliness of the activity hides a desolate reality: “On the one hand staff perceive the review as a highly valued method of collective dialogue and objective assessment, while on the other hand students perceive the review as a tutor-centred pseudo-mystical ritual that elicits feelings of fear and failure.” (Webster, 2005, p. 267). For the tutors, the review is seen as a lively open-ended discussion, but this is conducted purely on their own terms, which control everything from language to prescriptions as to what should be presented. For the students it is seen as a special occasion to build up to, with the ever-present fear of humiliation driving them into long nights and submissive behaviour, so that the actual event is too often characterised by half-comatose students who, Webster’s research shows, assimilate all too little useful information, but nonetheless see the review as an essential rite of passage (Webster, 2005, p. 271; Doidge, Sara & Parnell, 2000). In a nod to the ritualised nature of the review, my students at Sheffield used to play crit bingo: cards were handed out at the start of day gridded with the tutors’ favourite words, and then filled out as the reviews progressed, with barely suppressed cries of ‘bingo’ usually arising all too early in the day. This was a form of game play that brought some life to an otherwise static event.
Revitalising
Architectural education is by no means alone in perpetuating a lifeless form of pedagogy. The image of the student as a passive receiver of frozen facts is one often used by critical pedagogists from Paolo Freire onwards to capture the stasis of education (Freire, 1996). The task therefore must be to revitalise all aspects of our educational systems, starting with declaring dead some of the present forms of knowledge and rituals. As Elizabeth Ellsworth argues, “pedagogy’s job is to declare knowledge already made to be merely half-living – unable to sustain life” (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 164). She suggests that one does this through confronting what is already known “as a provocation and a call to invention.”
In an architectural context this would suggest that action is best posited against real conditions that can then be transformed. It is almost impossible to do this within the normal studio context because of the artificiality of the conditions within which briefs are set – an artificiality that is often exacerbated by setting projects in the most extreme of sites and/or for the most rarefied briefs, which in lifting the project above the mundane provide a distraction from their possible irrelevance. Live projects, on the other hand, by their very definition present students with conditions that may be everyday, but which armed with transformative intent answer the “call to invention”.
Because live projects are set and run outside the school, literally and metaphorically, students are exposed to the wider context of architectural production in terms of social, environmental, and political conditions. In order to work most productively with this externality, live projects are best set against some ground rules. First the project should have a real – live! – client or user who is prepared to meet the students on a regular basis; they must have a real project and some idea of outputs to be delivered, and the project must have a fixed deadline. This might sound self-evident, but it is important for all these potentially turbulent ingredients to be in place, otherwise the project quickly slips back into being a standard studio project which, although it might have a ‘real’ client with a ‘real’ site, irons out the lumps through the linear development of the project in the comfort of the studio. Second, and more importantly, live projects are best if their terms of reference exceed what could be delivered under a standard architectural service. This is partly to avoid any potential exploitation of students as cheap labour, but mainly because live projects provide the opportunity to expand the definition of what might constitute architectural practice.
Live projects therefore do not necessarily have to include design, in the sense of producing buildings or their ciphers. Through shifting the attention of live projects away from the fixed concerns of the profession – in particular the design of objects – towards the contingencies of practice, they introduce new values and methods of working. Thus the live projects that I have been involved in have often skirted round the design of stuff, instead investing energy in the prior stages (briefing, feasibility studies, consultation, etc.) or post-occupancy (empirical research, surveys, etc,) This is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater; architectural knowledge and intelligence is still deployed, but it is done in a more febrile and responsive manner and it is applied to far more than the static object alone. What defines this knowledge and intelligence as specifically architectural is their spatialness – space understood in the Lefebvrian sense of being a social product. Live projects are very good at exercising and developing spatial intelligence, a skill and understanding that is absolutely central to architectural education (Van Schaik, 2008). In studio projects the only outlet for this intelligence is in the manipulation of matter on the drawing or model, with the result that spatial here is associated with the physical in a very Euclidean manner; in live projects the attention shifts to the space as a set of social relations, and the skill of the architect lies in understanding the complexity of these networks in a spatial manner. Lines on pieces of paper here do not act as stylistic instruments, but are suggestive of future social relations. Again, it can be seen how live projects bring life to the educational project. Because live projects are always conducted against a backdrop of moving targets and uncertain outcomes, they become a far better introduction to the vagaries of architectural practice than does the detached polishing of aesthetics and technics in portfolios.
Live concerns
Together with Nishat Awan and Tatjana Schneider, I have elsewhere introduced the term ‘spatial agency’ to encompass this expanded field of architectural activity, and live projects fit well within the tenets of spatial agency in a way that challenges the preoccupations of studio-based work (Awan, Schneider & Till, 2011). Spatial agency explicitly acknowledges that the production of the spatial environment is not the work of experts alone, but is a collective effort that includes a wide range of actors, both prior to and after the ‘completion’ of the building as object. Where the studio project is almost always associated with the student as sole producer of architecture, live projects quickly introduce an awareness of the shared nature of spatial action, and the role that designers might play in this as agents working for and on behalf of others. In contrast to the solipsism in the studio (and the attendant danger that this trait is carried over into later practice as a means of defence against the demands of others), live projects always bring with them some form of social engagement, which introduces the concerns, politics and lives of others to architectural education.
In this engagement with others, live projects expose the ethical imperative of architecture – ethics here defined in the spirit of Levinas as one’s responsibility for the other. Within the studio ethics can only be dealt with, if at all, at the level of generalised good intent. In live projects ethics, as the basis of immediate negotiation with others, become very palpable, even concrete. It is here that live projects most clearly depart from, and challenge, normal architectural values, which so often bind ethics to aesthetics, and so freeze out the social content. Live projects almost by default introduce a sense of ethical responsibility to the processes of architecture. The trick is not to labour this aspect (because then live projects collapse under the soft weight of worthiness) but at the same time not to ignore it (because then the projects get over-determined by skill-centred outcomes.) The clearest way to do this is to ally live projects with Bruno Latour’s call for critical attention to be shifted from matters of fact to matters of concern (Latour, 2004). As a matter of fact, architecture can be subjected to rules and methods, which are in turn best manifested in static objects. Instead, we should see the objects of architecture “merging (as) matters of fact into highly complex, historically situated, richly diverse matters of concern” (Latour, 2004).As a matter of concern, architecture must engage with socially embedded networks, in which the consequences of architecture are of much more significance than the objects of architecture. Live projects move beyond the act of design (as the playing out of prejudices masquerading as facts) as the sine qua non of architecture. As matters of concern, they become wrapped up in what a thing or action might do, rather than what it is in itself.
Judging live projects
The final challenge that live projects present to standard architectural procedure is the problem of judging their success. Although the criteria for success in studio-based work might be contested across competing theories and contexts – again adding noise to what is quite a stable background – in the end awards, grades and habit construct an accepted set of values against which work is judged. The same cannot be said of live projects. In their relatively immature state, one knows that one ought to like live projects but is not quite sure why. The way forward is to begin to articulate their strengths not in terms of the norms of the profession, but precisely away from them. Does a ‘good’ live project necessarily result in a ‘good’ outcome in the sense of a design or product? The answer has to be no, because otherwise one resorts to the fixed norms of the profession. This is one reason why the uncritical fetishisation of the Rural Studio’s buildings as aesthetic stuff or technical innovation is so misplaced, and misses the much more radical social intent of Samuel Mockbee and Andrew Freear. This is also why I feel uncomfortable with the title of the otherwise honourable book on community design in the USA, Good Design: Good Deeds, which manages to conflate worthiness and nice objects as a signal of success (Bell, 2003).
It is for this reason that in reviewing live projects it best to discuss the process and the way that this has been reflected upon, and also to examine the consequences of the project rather than the end result. Sometimes the ‘best’ live projects are exactly those that have failed against traditional parameters. They are the ones with dysfunctional clients, or with impossible briefs, or with an outcome completely different from that initially anticipated, or with a clumsy object as the only permanent evidence, or where the context has shifted radically in the course of the project. In all these cases, student and tutors alike have to be flexible enough to respond to contingency. The tutor assumes a new role here, not as possessor and purveyor of power and knowledge, but as one potentially fragile human among others, with past experience in coping with contingency as the main point of support to the students. My experience of teaching live projects has shifted my role from one of holding authority to being a collaborator and, sometimes, adjudicator when group tensions go toxic.
The ‘best’ live projects are those that have opened up a broad range of issues against which students are required to make judgements – not just technical and aesthetic judgements but social and ethical judgements as to how their architectural knowledge and spatial intelligence might be best deployed. The ‘best’ live projects are those alert to Cedric Price’s famous maxim that the most appropriate solution to an architectural problem is not necessarily a building. It is sacrilegious to suggest in architectural circles that something that is not a building could be a successful architectural project, and this is why live projects present such a provocation. They exceed the limits of normative production, and should be allowed to enjoy this escape. The problem is that the exercise of judgement, in all its quiet and sometimes invisible ethos, is very difficult to legislate let alone validate, and so this central feature of live projects fits uncomfortably into the system of control that dominates architectural education.
Thus a RIBA Validation visit to the University of Sheffield in 2004, shortly after we had established the live projects programme, was a slightly uncomfortable experience. It was not that they explicitly criticised the live projects, but implicitly they fretted that they were taking the students away from their final projects. But much more problematic was the mapping of the ‘learning outcomes’ of the live projects onto the RIBA Validation Criteria, which were dominated by the phrase: “Students should demonstrate within coherent architectural designs…”. If, as we were arguing, live projects are concerned with issues beyond architecture, employ more than just design, and accept messiness rather than coherence as a virtue, then this left us very exposed. Our saviours were the students, who in their session with the Validation Board by all accounts brilliantly articulated the importance to them of the live projects in developing a broader educational landscape, and how those projects had informed their overall approach to the more standard studio-based work. In particular they were clear that the values developed in the live projects continued through into their critical understanding and execution of the rest of the curriculum. What this suggests is that live projects need to be seen not simply as an alternative to studio-based work in architecture schools, but as integral parts of the whole.
Live projects are sometimes tolerated in schools of architecture and the wider educational community as a form of social conscience that relieves the rest from the need for ethical intent. However, my hope is that rather than being seen as a worthy other, live projects should be intertwined with the rest of curriculum, revitalising the dead knowledge of the lecture hall and the fixed systems of the studio. Architecture is an endless negotiation between the human and the non-human, not as a binary but as dynamic interactions of the social and the material. What live projects do is to inject the former into the latter – bringing the human to the non-human - and so can serve to invigorate the static bodies that have come to dominate architecture schools.
Bibliography
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Published in Jeremy Till, ‘Resuscitating Architectural Education’, in Live Projects, Melanie Dodd et al, eds. (Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2012) pp4-11, ISBN 9781921426933