Editorial 2/2
Bureau A
HOW TO LEARN BETTER is a number on architectural education and learning. Inspired very intimately by the writings of Richard Sennet, The Craftsman and Together, this number of the CARTHA series explores how an architect is or can be educated and what are the milestones of the architect’s learning progression. What are the skills he […]
HOW TO LEARN BETTER is a number on architectural education and learning. Inspired very intimately by the writings of Richard Sennet, The Craftsman and Together, this number of the CARTHA series explores how an architect is or can be educated and what are the milestones of the architect’s learning progression. What are the skills he or she must develop and how this skills can be or not useful in a professional world.
Education is probably the most influential moment in an architect’s career, when the beginning of a creative identity emerges and starts pointing out to particular interest and fields of exploration that will constitute later, in a professional journey, the specificity of every practice. We believe thus, that this moment, those years of learning are of an incredibly importance, where the amount of cultural discovery is balanced by the formation and definition of specific personalities. Despite the fact that the process of learning does clearly not end by the end of the studies, the first impulse is launched during those university years and will drive the continuous learning process.
The other aspect of education that seems quite intriguing is the variety of educational typologies that have prevailed for the past 100 years or so, from Beaux-Arts oriented schools to what Beatriz Colomina has named Radical Pedagogies (implemented by schools such as Black Mountain College in the 1930’s). It is very curious to admit that the education imparted by all of these very different institutions provides more or less the same professional title. We are forced to admit thus that architecture can hardly be considered as an homogeneous discipline. Or shall we draw the conclusion that the definition of the skills that an architect must have is so vague that it can be achieved through a wide diversity of educational paths?
Yet, the education of an architect calls for tools, and these tools make him/her skilled. Drawing, writing, model making, photography and filming are indispensable tools that the architect will use throughout his professional life to accomplish his projects, to materialize his/her ideas.
Richard Sennet’s writings have focused on craft and making. His trilogy “Homo Faber” (from which the two first volumes have been written) deals with the relation of man to things. How can mankindrelate to a physical world of made things and what are the tools and skills needed to materialize this relation. The philosophical background of this question is not negligible: can we even think or name one thing without having it experienced it physically? Can the idea of an object appear before its physical existence?
In the second volume of his trilogy, Together, the Sociologist develops the notion of collaboration as opposed to solidarity, where a bottom up human activity achieves highly efficient and qualitative levels of production.
The relation to THE FORM OF FORM, -This year’s theme for the Lisbon Triennale of architecture- is thus a logical consequence of this same thinking. How can we talk about FORM without discussing the form of WHAT? And how can WHAT be defined without a physical reference? And then, this is where the physical reference is rooted, in the CONTEXT that produces it, that allows its emergence. And finally WHO makes, within this context, the WHAT that addresses a FORM? We strongly believe that forms cannot be discussed outside this complex system and that form does not exist as an object, even as a conceptual one. Within the context of the Triennale the question would then be: from what moment of the learning journey of an architect can form be discussed? When does this question becomes important, if it does?
HOW TO LEARN BETTER wants to address theses issues through a pictorial approach. The words and sentences are painted, made out of collage of from a graphic design approach, like definite slogans that address the issue of learning architecture. This pictorial approach presents the learning process in its relation to methodology. The written / painted words or sentences are a condensed broth of an educational theory.