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Antonio Tejedor Cabrera
The search for a teaching model
The workshop of architectural design
Closing lecture given by Aurelio Galfetti at his home on the Island of Paros. 1st August 2009. Athens beyond history, International Workshop.
ennobled by the fruit of labor.
Le Corbusier. Mise au point (1965)
In principle, those of us who dedicate ourselves to an ancient discipline such as architecture should have clear which are the procedures involved in the training of an architect. However, we find ourselves sharing a general opinion, that teaching is a complex and debatable issue, full of uncertainties that are, paradoxically, the best demonstration of its force and contemporaneity.
Unlike other technical teachings of great strength today, architecture is a core subject of society at any time and place, hence the polyhedral extent of its knowledge, and the relationship with all branches of human learning that characterizes it. Since its official birth as university education, which in Spain took place in Madrid in 1844, the historical process of the refinement of teaching has attempted to combine overall education of the student with information on the various technical aspects of construction.
If the implementation of the Academy model in most European states marked the triumph of the creators who had opted to abandon the craft working conditions of their work, prioritizing intellectual activity above the purely manual, the development of engineering in the early nineteenth century powered the encyclopedic separation of knowledge derived from the Enlightenment into independent subjects, announcing the appearance of the model of the polytechnic. It is in these moments that teaching "architecture design" establishes itself as subject and therefore subject to preset standards.
Against the system of mentoring and lectures developed by the Academy, the polytechnic backed integrated teaching under the practical and theoretical responsibility of a teacher, within a structure of curricula in which the discipline shared purposes and objectives similar to other levels of knowledge. Thus, the two main contributions made by this system are the incorporation of knowledge and technical advances into artistic architectural education, and an approach where teaching practice and theory come together under the guidance of a teacher.
It was not until the introduction of the Bauhaus in the nineteen-twenties when again proposals were produced for the organization of the above. The search for new bases for adapting teaching discipline to new times called for the union of all trades in a single concerted effort to give back to each student the simultaneous conditions of craftsman and artist. To remedy the shortcomings which dominated the area of craftsmanship, the training of students was intended to arise from successive "workshops" that started in the "preliminary course". With this proposed meeting between the artist and the artisan, Bauhaus conducted a major reform of the discipline that has expanded virtually worldwide: from it, and its teachers, came the most influential centres. Some approaches based on direct contact of the student and the teacher and the formulation of the method rather than the content, strengthen the interest in teaching as a process in which personal experience prevails.
The Black Mountain College, where Albers taught, and which strongly followed the above principles, eventually consolidated the dominant topics from then on. Materials, methods, conversation and an artistic sense of teaching took effect on the proposals of the main schools of architecture. Only recently, with formulations such as those carried out by Louis Kahn and Aldo Rossi, has an attempt been made to modify this line, drifting back into experiences that are more readily intermarried with the academic style.
In this historical development, architectural teaching shows two distinct and complementary dimensions: first, the valuing of student life experience; the second, the streamlining of codified models of high architecture, namely the acquisition of a qualified architectural culture. Even today, this remains one of the central issues of teaching models in our schools.
Therefore, we might say that any teaching of Architectural Design should pursue a balance between these two dimensions-the experiential and rational, and must be based on the choice of contents at the expense of others less relevant, because all are possible: "man can only act because he can ignore, and content himself with a part of that knowledge which is his own particular rarity" (VALÉRY, 1982, 62). However, upon this negative condition may be superimposed a positive sign: the teaching of architecture "must clarify, step by step”, Mies van der Rohe said, “what is possible, what is necessary and what makes sense" (MIES, 1965. Guidelines for architectural education. In NEUMEYER, 1995, 507).
Learning in the workshop seems particularly vulnerable to the current trend of a university education based on "capacity building" and not so much on the vocation or building of a "career" in the long term; indeed, the workshop is based on slow learning and the acquisition, further to skills, of good habits such as manual labor discipline, concentration on specific problems and an appreciation of work "well done". Like the "good craftsman" of Richard Sennett, in the workshop the student "understands the importance of the outline, ie, lack of complete knowledge of the details of an enterprise at the time of embarking on it"; "assigns positive value to contingency and limitation due to the consideration of problems in situ as opportunities"; "avoids perfectionism" and "learns when it's time to stop" (SENNETT, 2009, 321-323. From the spanish edition El Artesano translated by Tejedor). It is significant that the author chooses an example from the field of architecture to show the qualities of a good craftsman. By contrasting the work of Adolf Loos for the House of Moller with that of Ludwig Wittgenstein for the house of his sister in the Kundmanngasse of Vienna, Sennett notes that the compulsive desire for perfection led Wittgenstein to not build any other home. "The positive alternative to this compulsion toward resolution is to allow the item some imperfections, deciding to leave it unresolved", as Loos did.
Currently, all curricula show with considerable similarity the status of “polytechnic” which Spanish schools of architecture have adopted. "Projects" form part of a scheme in which technical subjects apply methodologies based on the system of practical work which eventually becomes designs and partial projects. This, combined with the excessive autonomy of the departments, has weakened the longstanding goal of universality of architectural education. The new 2010-12 Plan of Studies of School of Seville, which gives a central role to the "Architectural Workshop" as a formal subject, allows the retrieval, following Bauhasian aspirations, of this teaching space of convergence and synthesis of all disciplines through a system of exercises with common themes and objectives of the subjects in each course. However, its actual application, with no permanent work spaces and too many teachers, prevents the student from developing his or her exercise with the continuity and concentration of a functional workshop. In my opinion, despite these new architecture workshops, it is for the subjects of Architectural Design to continue to play the integrating, nuclear role in the Architecture courses, different in their methods to other more technical subjects and more diffuse regarding the limits of their specific contents. I am convinced that, in the organization of the teaching of projects, the workshop model will continue to prevail in which the student chooses from prior knowledge a working line and a form of production reiterated from the teacher. In fact, a student in the workshop, through their own work, increases their knowledge, learns how to solve problems, draws conclusions, exercises their skills, finds his or her particular method of designing and, finally, identifies the experience with creative freedom.
The architecture workshop should configure, therefore,
a conceptual territory and the material in which multiply those possibilities
of manifesting themselves, becoming visible and present, those conditions that
make sense and make possible and necessary the work of the
architect.
Translation from spanish to italian by Celeste Da Boit
Antonio Tejedor Cabrera is a Doctor of Architecture and tenured professor at the School of Architecture of the University of Seville.
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Poster of Italica: Time & Landscape. International Workshop. Universidad Internacional de Andalucía and Universidad de Sevilla. Seville, Set-Oct 2010
