Dear classmates, dear architecture students,

Some of you might have witnessed the lecture “Unwording: An Aesthetics of Collapse” at gta exhibitions given by Jack Halberstam a few days ago. For some of us, the message he brought to the school was exciting and full of hope. As some students pointed out in the round of questions, Jack’s proposal “of tearing ‘this shit down’” is extremely controversial within the context of a school of architecture, which is primarily dedicated to the task of erecting structures. Instead, Halberstam proposes an aesthetics of collapse, that visually enacts his vision of tearing down and subverting current hegemonic systems of colonial supremacism.¹

It is 1:41 am now. We are finishing this letter last minute (as always) addressed to you, driven by an increasing feeling of discomfort and unease within our academic environment. We would like to open the debate in search for a new way of studying and learning together. 

In the 1968 issue of Architectural Design “What about Learning”, Cedric Price defined education at his time as a practice that distorts the mental and behavioural structures of individuals, so as to insert them into predefined social and economic schemes.² The education system fails to renew itself and reflect beyond its strictures, presumably due to the fact that the formats and contents are solely prescribed by the few. The time of the publication coincided with the student revolts of the Unité Pédagogique No. 6 in Paris, which positioned themselves against the “Beaux-Arts” methodologies that were still put into practice.³ The students accused the faculty of being unable to establish relationships between architectural design and urgent social and political issues.

In 2013, the same question was rephrased by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in their groundbreaking essay “The University and the Undercommons”, in which they problematized the idea of university in relation to its commitment to professionalisation. The subversive intellectuals who are able to vandalise the norms are necessary to the university, but not welcomed by it: “​​Maroon communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa-expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers” are forced to escape and go underground, because the university “will say they are unprofessional.”⁴

Since then, few things have changed.

The overall pedagogic structure in the schools of architecture is still organised around a rigid hierarchical structure. Architectural design is taught by recognized architects, in the format of a studio where fierce competition among students is encouraged. These design studios have become capsules in which reproductive design methodologies are taught and, in many cases, fail at empowering students with real autonomy and responsibility. The only possible choice is either to submit and become malleable, with the promise of a secure working position or the possibility of entering an endogamic relationship with university. As Derrida stated, faculties become onto- and auto-encyclopaedic – they reproduce themselves and secure their spread and durability, as well as their supremacy.⁵ Even the critical academics, as Harney and Moten identify them, will do little harm to the institution itself and will never recognise “the unregulated, ignorant, unprofessional labor that goes on not opposite them but within them.”⁶ With such a structure, it is almost an impossible task for the academy to adopt radical changes in teaching and to address urgent issues promptly. As a result, the teaching curriculum is still dominated by an all white, male, colonial, extractive and anglo-eurocentric vision of the world. How can we subvert it?

 

Disciplinarity

In “Discipline and Punish”, Michel Foucault asserts the task of the university, in accordance with that of prisons, is to “straighten out” and correct what he calls “the perverted individual”.⁷ The correct training deploys hierarchical observation, normalisation of judgement and examination, and is put into administrative and pedagogical use in the modern society. ⁸ Prison and school are the two sides of a governmental apparatus that operates upon the individual. “Correction begins with the ascription of the body itself, the imposition of body onto flesh; the attribution of perversion to the specific body, which justifies its correction, […]” The discipline that is put into practice in order to correct the perverted individual did nothing but to confirm the perversion, which again called for more instruction.⁹

To become ‘undisciplined’, to free ourselves from the aforementioned strictures, we have to leave the well-lit territory dominated by disciplinary thinking, and seek for new sites of knowledge.

 

Postcolonial Theory

As Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi argues in her text “The University and the Camp”, the university, both in its physical form as the campus and its epistemological form as the curriculum, is not innocent to coloniality. The term coloniality “refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjectivity relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations.” Coloniality outlasts colonialism and is therefore still present in Western epistemologies.¹⁰

In March 2015, Chumani Maxwele (a student of political science on a scholarship at the University of Cape Town) set fire to the “Decolonise the Curriculum” movement, hurling a bucket of excrement onto a bronze statue of the British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes on the university campus. This incident was followed by a large group of students subversively reshaping the campus: “tagging the statue with graffiti, covering it in black garbage bags, and singing anti-apartheid songs”. The statue was then removed and a curriculum revision in several programs took place with inputs from the student’s union, including the “expansion of the curriculum, greater diversity and inclusion in enrollment and hiring, and the cessation of economic exploitation of campus workers”.¹¹

“Their vandalism produced a forum.” writes Siddiqi.¹² 

Indeed, Rhodes’s legacy was interrogated, which includes not only his financial bequests, but also the worldview he wrote down in his will: to extend the British rule throughout the world, to colonise the entire Continents of Africa and South America, as well as the Islands of the Pacific and the seaboard of China and Japan.¹³

We must look for the traces such a vision has left in Western epistemologies, and how architectural pedagogy has become one of its political agents. 

Maxwele’s “vandalistic” act established a powerful precedent. Postcolonial power structures were interrogated through a performative and vandalistic act that challenged the university in its spatial expression. It has unfolded three key points which might help us imagine different ways of studying architecture.

 

Challenge the curriculum through spatial intervention in the campus.

The ephemeral studying experience takes place in the campus space, and it is the spatiality of the campus that enables, organises and structures it. Lecture halls, studio spaces and libraries are necessary devices through which a legitimate curriculum is defined and established, however, learning is something that takes place as well beyond the boundaries of the lecture hall . If the curriculum can be thought through the campus space, we might start destabilising it by speculating on the capability of our bodies to transform campus space from an institutionalised one into a fugitive one – through our movements and actions. Those can be performed collectively, and thereby a space can be carved out for a (secret) counter community to develop, that aims at destabilising the foundations of Western academicism in its embodied format – the campus. In this collective bodily experience, the building of community takes place through the emergence of difference, since “difference is not a manifestation of an unresolvable estrangement, but the expression of an elementary entanglement”.¹⁴

 

Establish a counter curriculum through conversations and actions with our peers.

Maxwele’s action opened up a space of critique and debate that questioned the given postcolonial power structures. In fact, his protest revealed that behind the elegant facades of the university buildings, many Black students were already very angry and ready to speak up.

The forum that students established on the following days formed a kind of counter curriculum, filling the gap of (but also questioned) the institution’s predefined curriculum. Just as Siddiqi concludes in her text, “decolonial thinking means that producing knowledge and living it are not separate… It illuminates the links between knowledge, social practices and social action – between architecture, architectural history, and spatial practice”.¹⁵ 

Moten and Harney define “study” as a social event that is never constrained to university.¹⁶ In fact, study has been constantly excluded from university – in the name of teaching, and for the sake of making professionals. But as soon as we start to treat all these conversations as study, we start to expand the curriculum across the whole community, through horizontal structures and bottom-up initiatives. Eventually, those peer-to-peer conversations and actions can enact other ways of studying. In the chats after the crit, during lunch time, during a night out, or on the bus of a school excursion, what is discussed “can be discarded, forgotten, but there’s something that goes on beyond the conversations which turns out to be the actual project.”¹⁷ We will begin to acknowledge the informal, the rebellious and the counter curriculum as part of the broader meaning of curriculum in formal education. 

 

Let vandalism be our code of conduct.

Maxwele’s scatological act was a vandalistic one. It could have endangered his own position as a student and scholarship holder at the University of Cape Town. The setting up of a counter curriculum will necessarily “break up” with established normativities, codes of conduct, which might jeopardise the positive assessment of the student’s academic performance. We should be ready to fail the exam. Or, as Walter D. Mignolo states, “if you apply to get grants or fellowships to engage in decolonial praxis, be sure that you will not get them.” ¹⁸ Let us recall Halberstam arguing for rupture and collapse in a non-reparative way.¹⁹ When we break something, the result is at first unexpected – yet the new composition and relationships of the broken elements bring up new significations that were not imaginable before. The act of breaking requires courage, because it comes with a price and it brings no promise for outcome. Still, unbuilding can become a more generative process than building.

 

The Internal Outside

We are looking for a vision of the outside of the institution, given that the system will not revise itself. But what if this “outside” we are searching for is, as a matter of fact, an “internal outside”? The refugee camps, the indigenous resguardos, the hidden cruising spots – the sites that are already among us. Through the terms of Moten and Harney, we want to go beyond “general antagonism”²⁰, and start to imagine what can happen informally. If “nowhere” is somewhere we take refuge from the institution, then we are all already in the refuge.

 

Let’s take our school.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Shen He and Juan Barcia Mas

 

 

1 Jack Halberstam, “Unwording: An Aesthetics of Collapse”. Cabin Crew lecture series, gta Exhibitions, ETH Zürich, 18 May 2022.
2 Cedric Price, “Learning”, Architectural Design May 1968.
3 AR Editors, Radical Pedagogies in Architectural Education, The Architectural Review, September 2012, https://www.architectural-review.com/today/radical-pedagogies-in-architectural-education
4 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “The University and the Undercommons” in The Undercommon: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Brooklyn (2013), po. 22 – 43, here p. 30.
5 Moten and Harney, p. 26.
6 Moten and Harney, p. 32.
7 Michel Foucault,  “Panopticism” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York 1991, 334-337.
8 Michel Foucault, “The Means of Correct Training” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York (1995), pp. 170-194. Here p. 171.
9 Foucault,  “Panopticism”, 334-337.
10 Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “The University and the Camp”, Ardeth 6 (2020), http://journals.openedition.org/ardeth/1179, pp. 137-151, here p. 140.
11 Amit Chaudhuri, “The real meaning of Rhodes must fall” in The Guardian (2016).https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/16/the-real-meaning-of-rhodes-must-fall
12 Siddiqi,p. 142.
13 Chaudhuri, 2016.
14 Fred Moten and Wu Tsang, “Who touched Me?” in If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, Amsterdam 2016, here p.1.
15 Siddiqi, p. 149.
16 Fred Moten, Stefano Harney and Stevphen Shukaitis, “The General Antagonism: An Interview with Stevphen Shukaitis” in The Undercommon: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Brooklyn (2013), pp.100 – 159.
17 Ibid.
18 Walter D. Mignolo, “What Does It Mean to Decolonize?” in: Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, Durham: Duke University Press, 2018, p. 106.
19 Halberstam, 2022.
20 Moten, Harney and Shukaitis, pp.100 – 159.

Juan Barcia Mas (he/him) is a recent graduate from ETH Zurich’s school of architecture. Originally from Madrid, he currently works as an architect and writes regularly for different publications.

He Shen / 何珅 (he/they) studies architecture and a lot of other things. He is currently pursuing his free master thesis at ETH Zürich, investigating the hidden interior of historical queer spaces in Zürich. He is also part of Kitchuan, a performative Sichuanese cooking collective.

Together with the collective Querformat, they have both curated the exhibition and event series “Cabin Crew” at gta exhibitions.

 During the autumn days of 1988, a geography teacher was fired from the local Majid Al Shams high school for conduct of misbehavior. The alleged claim is that the teacher misappropriated ways of teaching, and of passing on knowledge and truth about the geographies of Golan Heights. Warned not to speak of the past, the teacher went ahead and taught the students about the geography of the area, the names of its valleys, its destroyed villages and lands. 

 Referred to as the Jawlan in Arabic, Golan Heights is internationally recognized as Syrian territory occupied by Israel. All levels of school education were registered under the Israel state’s central administration, and were consequently forced to adapt to a curriculum composed of highly tailored and censored subjects. Teachers are still obliged to follow the strict framework to this day. 

 The teacher’s position was that of retaliation and, ultimately, an act of non-cooperation. This act situated itself in a wider initiative; a group of teachers, parents, and students expanded the operations of the Golan Academic Association to combat the corrupt educational institutions across the Jawlan. One particular initiative sought to form alternative infrastructures of education through the format of summer camps. 

Starting from 1985, summer camps began to operate annually with a communal agenda to change ways of learning about the Jawlan. These camps would, on one hand, oppose the state’s infiltration of local education systems and their curriculum of history, geography, arts and languages. On the other hand, the camps would provide alternative spaces to exercise resistance, as well as to actively refuse and unlearn falsified knowledge. 

Above all, the summer camps would not follow the banking system of education that reinforces oppression, a process described by Paulo Freire in Pedagogies of the Oppressed whereby an educator regulates and orders knowledge.Here, in the summer camps, the position of the teacher was not to transfer knowledge to the youth, but to create different possibilities for the production and construction of knowledge. The teacher would not be a creator of a radical change in educational systems, but would mobilize that very change. 

Acknowledging the histories of these spaces of learning, the photographic essay traces the pedagogies within academic infrastructures that visualized the landscapes of the Jawlan. Various images circulating in digital spaces reveal these urban spaces of learning and public life. While each image in the following selection captures the intimacy formed in these alternative spaces of education, the total collection of images reflect the politics of care, resistance and belonging that enlivened these non-institutional spaces of learning.

The images shape the urban imagination of the Jawlan, a land once enshrined by the memories of the people, but now largely unknown due to an underrepresented history. Just as the youth engaged with alternative spatial and temporal systems of education in the summer camps, following the ephemeral traces of these images requires a rethinking of spatial geographies to recollect stories and reconjure archives of Golan Heights anew. 

Summer Camps as Spaces for Unlearning 

While schools of the settler-colonial state continued to be physically constructed in the Jawlan landscape, these summer camps became spaces for the youth to exercise their rights and rediscover their own identities. Groups would gather to raise the Syrian flag and to sing the anthem of the summer camp. The following verse of the anthem projects a clear and powerful agenda: 

Your glorious vision in the horizon, ورأيتك المجيدة في الأعالي

Will be woven by loyal men, بأفئدة الرجال سننسجها

Tomorrow with education, not ignorance, غدا بالعلم لا بالترهات

And with actions, not wishes, و بالأعمال لا بالأمنيات

The anthem reinforces the importance of education, and finding means to seek alternative knowledge. Another verse narrates: 

On my left is the book, and on my right is the weapon, 

بيسراي الكتاب وفي يميني سلاحي

And authenticity is on my forehead, والأصالة في جبيني

Between dreams and knowledge, وبين الحلم و العلم اليقين

 

At the entrance of the summer camps a sign read “your hand raised in the face of the oppressor.” The text on the signage continues to project that the future of knowledge sharing about the Jawlan is in the hands of the youth. Welcoming young students to these camps, the entrance invited them to participate in the creation of a better, fairer and liberal environment; proving to these students that resistance was possible in the face of oppression. 

In each tent, young students would learn about the history and the urban geography of the villages, as well as the history of expelled families; their roots, traditions, and socio-cultural practices. Each tent had a similar set-up to a classroom yet housed varying information on the area; students would move from tent to tent to learn about the erased urbanity of the Jawlan.The tents were a visual and social reenactment of the destroyed villages of the Jawlan. The camps acted essentially as spaces for unlearning what was taught in the official schools. 

The geographical location of the camps – between the two largest villages Masa’ada and Majd Al Shams – was set up to connect the two disparate areas. Collectively, the tents would represent and serve as a spatial microcosm of the erased lands of the Jawlan. A spatial reading of these camps allows us to reconsider common notions of space and time: the camps are neither political spaces of exception, nor spaces for the stateless. Instead, these camps produced multiple pockets of spaces for liberation. 

Extending beyond the tents, the leaders of the summer camps would organize trips within and around the landscapes of the Jawlan. A documented trip to the Masa’da Lake shows a radicalized pedagogical progression in that the geographies of Golan Heights should be taught by physically being in the landscape. The purpose of these trips was not only to introduce students to the history of the Jawlan’s geography, but to imagine the patched-up terrain as a holistic land that belongs to the students and future generations. 

Future Knowledges

Through alternative learning spaces, the community navigated between the inherent structures of power between the state and their freedom for creative education. Alternative education on areas of geography, lost architectures, arts and history would restructure and shape different ways of learning about the Jawlan lands and communities. Opposed to the official curriculum taught in schools, the summer camps’ pedagogies were new means of producing knowledge and gathering future knowledge to learn the history of the landscape. 

Each year, the camps would run for the duration of the summer days and nights. The temporality of these summer camps reflected the community’s hope in the ephermatility of the occupation; each classroom set-up was impermanent, trips were sparse and the curricula were designed for a short timeframe. Years on, however, the occupation had intensified and cemented, and the temporality of the violence had become permanent. Dreams for the summer camps fell apart and years later in 2010, with the escalated tensions of a Syrian civil war outbreak, the camps stopped operating due to the community’s internal clashes about the future of the youth’s national belonging. 

The summer camps of Golan Heights were once a space of learning and unlearning, which now has residues in the contemporary built environment. A reading of the histories of these camps can serve as an invitation to rethink through the politics of resistance beyond its alienation and, instead, to reposition the camps as spaces for actively practicing liberation. Archiving these images and stories has a central aim: to ensure a democratic shaping of curricula and academic bodies for future knowledge production. To follow these camps closely, and to learn what the students have been learning for and fighting against is to depart from reading the politics of resistance bound to public spaces and territories but, instead, to humanize the narrators of those who were oppressed, and of those who fought against the face of oppression with education and knowledge. 

 

A Note from the Author :

My interest in alternative spaces of learning started during a course, Mapping Borderlands: Drawing from the Jawlan, taught by Nora Akawi in partnership with Aamer Ibraheem and Khaled Malas at Columbia University. We traveled to Jawlan and met with some organizers of the summer camps during which they shared their stories, lived experiences and images of the summer camps.

Jumanah Abbas is an architect, a writer, and a curator, working through an ecology of interdisciplinarity that architecture debates, concepts and dialogues engage with. Jumanah is part of ongoing collaborations with institutes, regional organizations, and universities: one was the “Mapping Memories of Resistance: The Untold Story of the Occupation of the Golan Heights” project in collaboration with London School of Economics, Birzeit University, and Al Marsad, Arab Human Rights Center in Golan Heights. The other was Tasmeem Biennial 2022, themed around Radical Futures, by Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts in Qatar. She is currently working towards the realization of the upcoming Qatar Museums’ Quadrennial project, a multi-site art exhibition opening in 2024. 

 

 With ongoing externalized pressure following the socio-cultural turmoil of 2020, there are currently widespread attempts to increase diversity in architecture schools across the US. Amidst this active recruitment, there is a real need to evaluate recent methods of attracting and retaining underrepresented students. Defined preparatory programs are initiatives set up to make an impact in introducing underrepresented students to the discipline and provide an on-ramp to the pursuit of architecture. While these processes have aimed to produce more equitable pathways into higher education, there is a need for broader-scaled networks that stitch these discrete practices to sustain commitments to diversity and equity. 

In Spring 2017, Dr. Sharon Sutton visited the University of Michigan to speak about her recently published book When Ivory Towers Were Black: A Story about Race in America’s Cities and Universities. In the book, she tells the story of Columbia’s “experiment” to actively recruit minority students in response to the civil rights protests and campus rebellions of the late 1960s and in Sutton’s words “made the recruits the stars of the school.”¹ In light of the present-day tumultuous socio-political landscape, Sutton’s 2017 visit presciently provided a historic context for the radical framing of engaged work that has since become commonplace in contemporary architecture schools. In hindsight, the lecture also underscored the academy’s relationship to social justice and reminds us of the work that remains to be done. 

That current measures to increase diversity and equity are insufficient comes as no surprise to a contemporary audience, but Sutton’s observations then, with Columbia’s 1968 efforts in mind, took issue with solely data-based recruitment strategies aimed at increasing the Black and Brown student “pipeline” into universities; what she called “a ruse that diverts the attention from the here and now to an ever-elusive future.” Among many potent lessons from the lecture, Sutton’s points on creating an “educational ladder,” the importance of continuous tracking and support for Black and Brown students, institutional focus on attrition, and a student-focused education that reflects lived experience resonate strongly with gaps in current initiatives. Of utmost importance was what Sutton described as the failure of Columbia’s epic recruitment experiment: its inability to persist, adapt, and “transform the structural conditions that underpin white privilege.” 

Over the past ten years, 13 out of 53, Predominantly White Institutions (PWI) have initiated early-learning programs for underrepresented students that introduce architecture as a career pathway before the college application process ensues. From 2016-2018 I was a Michigan-Mellon Fellow in “Egalitarianism and the Metropolis,” a multi-faceted fellowship that included full-time teaching for a Detroit-based pre-college architecture program (ArcPrep)–a design and research project–and administrative responsibilities. The position exposed me to the detrimental effects of status quo recruitment strategies, and the roadblocks that students face outside of the classroom environment which impact continuity beyond. My experiences in Detroit affirmed that along with inventive pedagogical strategies, more attention and creative thought must be given to tasks that are typically deemed to be non-design-related or administrative. Recruitment, post-evaluation, and large-scale mentorship are just as important as course content in providing students with an egalitarian, human-centered education.

 Over the past ten years, 13 out of 53,² Predominantly White Institutions (PWI) have initiated early-learning programs for underrepresented students that introduce architecture as a career pathway before the college application process ensues.³ From 2016-2018 I was a Michigan-Mellon Fellow in “Egalitarianism and the Metropolis,” a multi-faceted fellowship that included full-time teaching for a Detroit-based pre-college architecture program (ArcPrep)–a design and research project–and administrative responsibilities. The position exposed me to the detrimental effects of status quo recruitment strategies, and the roadblocks that students face outside of the classroom environment which impact continuity beyond. My experiences in Detroit affirmed that along with inventive pedagogical strategies, more attention and creative thought must be given to tasks that are typically deemed to be non-design-related or administrative. Recruitment, post-evaluation, and large-scale mentorship are just as important as course content in providing students with an egalitarian, human-centered education. 

Written with contributions from three of my former Detroit high school students who now study architecture at a collegiate level, this essay calls for new measures that prepare students to evaluate institutions and the discipline at large, beckoning for a provision of tools to be purveyed to unlock genuine interest and think critically about a future in and of architecture. 

“How long will it take to become an architect?” and “How much money will I make?” were frequent questions asked by high school students in ArcPrep. These concerns came before the less tangible social challenges emerged–if students were at the top of the class and made it through to elite architectural education, they would most likely for the first time in their lives be a minority in their environment. Cederick Campbell, who is completing his undergraduate degree in Architecture but has ambitions to follow in the late Virgil Abloh’s footsteps as a fashion designer shares: 

“Socially, being an Architecture student isn’t easy. I am 1 of 5 black students in my graduating class of about 35. It doesn’t feel like a family at all. I’ve noticed a pattern of everyone gravitating toward people who look similar to them; forcing me and my black peers to gravitate toward each other as well. The closest thing I have to ‘family’ as an architecture student is my friend… who has helped me more than my last two professors.”⁴ 

While roughly half of new NCARB record holders identify as a person of color, “the proportion of African American candidates in the profession has seen little change over the past decade and continues to be underrepresented when compared to the U.S. Census data.” Furthermore, Black Americans report the longest licensure path of 15.2 years.⁵ This speaks to Sutton’s concerns on the validity of “pipelines” if students are not even coming out the other end (i.e. arriving as a licensed professional). These figures bring to the fore several important questions: what does it mean to experience an architectural education in which one may be the only Black student in a graduating class, what role does mentorship play in a 15+ year path to licensure, and, more broadly, how can we imagine alternative professional trajectories? 

When I asked what my former student Aonor Washington remembered from her first day of architecture school her response did not miss a beat: “Wow, I’m the only Black girl.” While Aonor explained that initial shock wore off after a year, what has stuck with her is the constant comparison amongst her white peers and the need to one-up each other: “I still don’t understand the secrecy–no one talks about the confusion, or how they know what steps to take–it leads to the feeling that you’re on the outside of an unnamed club.” This secrecy and underlying competition runs counter to Aonor’s impression of what being in a studio would mean, asking “aren’t we a collective?” Aonor further recalled her feelings during the transition between ArcPrep at starting at UM: 

“As a Black student entering a PWI campus at a young age I already had my mind focused on representing not only the people from my high school but people within the creative Black community. Being chosen to be the student speaker of my graduating ArcPrep class was a bit shocking because I assumed that a male figure would be chosen to represent our group. The thought of speaking in front of people that I did not know, and held so much power over my possible future education or opportunities, frightened me.”⁶ 

In 2020, 1,482 Black students were enrolled in Accredited Architecture schools in the United States (including Bachelor, Master, and Doctor of Architecture degrees).⁷ Out of the 136 institutions offering accredited programs, 24 are listed as Minority Serving Institutions (MSI), with 543 Black students enrolled in these schools.⁸ The remaining 949 students enrolled in the 112 Predominantly White Institutions (PWI) reveal an average of 8 Black students per school and 2 students per graduating class.⁹ Although it has been shown that the number of Black students has been stagnant at 5% for the past 11 years,¹⁰ at the macro-scale, trends show an increase in diversity in schools. The profession has yet to show the same growth. To put these numbers in context,¹¹ in 2020 there were: 

1,350 Black men practicing architecture 

691 Black women practicing architecture 

2,060 Black individuals practicing architecture (accounts for those who did not disclose their gender, selected other, or unknown) 

47,951 white men practicing architecture 

14,260 white women practicing architecture 

The on-the-ground reality of these figures creates an anxiety-provoking environment in which many underrepresented students are left feeling vulnerable. Brandon Battle, who received top grades in ArcPrep, shared his thoughts on his first day of architecture school at the University of Michigan: 

“I think my experience during my first university architecture course was probably a shared experience amongst many students in majors where your work is directly compared. I felt a bit outclassed. When our seminar began and my peers’ portfolios were pulled up on the projector, I was in awe at the quality of work that the students already had. Feeling inadequate is definitely a problem that is not easy to overcome. I don’t think I’m a great student and I’m always worried with what my future is going to be like once I’m out of college.”¹² 

Discussions with my former students often hinged on feelings of (dis)comfort and, moreover, how mechanisms of support might provide comfort, balance, and joy in their creative work in ways that would allow them to excel. Four years after graduating from ArcPrep, Aonor prepares for her next steps after graduation. She says, “Something I’ve been thinking about lately is comfort–I know I would be more comfortable in a Black firm, a Black environment, but that’s not reality, and choosing to graduate from a PWI rather than a HBCU has prepared me for that reality.” As Aonor’s journey unfolds, her experience as a minority in the academy of architecture has not engendered a sense of comfort working in a predominantly white environment. Rather, it has left her (devastatingly) resigned to a perpetual state of discomfort in a future professional environment that she acknowledges may also be predominantly white. 

As initiatives aimed at amplifying diversity in architecture continue to grow, it seems an appropriate moment to take stock and forecast opportunities for how the field (both in academia and the profession) may continue to encourage inclusion. Among the most significant issues is the lack of continuity that exists between programs aimed at increasing diversity and the students’ future endeavors. In other words, despite their intentions, these initiatives frequently do not provide sufficient opportunities for students to stitch experiences and develop a cohesive trajectory leading to licensure and practice. When the guidance that might facilitate such linkages is absent, broader scales of mentorship could assist in providing needed continuity.¹³ 

Providing meaningful mentorship, though, might require fundamental reconsiderations of institutional stewardship networks. These types of networks do exist presently but at a local scale or across a limited series of institutions,¹⁴ and in these cases, their reach is limited. Instead, amplification of these institutional networks could provide a broader support system for underrepresented students interested in pursuing the discipline. Two possible frameworks emerge for how to consider institutional stewardship. 

1) A vertical network that connects academia with the profession on a large scale. Currently, models such as ArcPrep’s awarded internships construct a relationship that stitches high school to practice. While this has been impactful for students such as Brandon, it is a competitive position reserved for the top few. Harvard’s Black In Design links all participating students with practicing mentors from Perkins&Will and graduate student mentors from GSD, thus, forging a circle of exchange between the three, and altering the more typical synergy between mentor and mentee. 

Sustaining and amplifying links such as these between academia and practice also have models that might propel a broader cultural transformation in the discipline. Cooperative education–in which students alternate between academic semesters and those working in the profession–is one such effort, but is limited to emphasizing conventional pathways to the practice of architecture. Perhaps a more fitting mentorship model would be following the medical residency in which medical school graduates hold residencies in hospitals or clinics; a period of time that is both apart from an academic environment and consists of educational training under the guidance of a senior physician. In effect, the residency blurs education and profession within a mentor-mentee environment between the attending physician (senior) and resident (junior). The difference between these models and current practices would transform idiosyncratic links between academic institutions and professional practices into routine mentorship and training methodologies; thus embedding the notion of mentorship, in fundamental and far-reaching ways, within the discipline of architecture. 

2) Alternative to the above vertical mentorship opportunities between academia and practice, an equally broad-scale and horizontal cross-institutional network model might exist between academies (and possibly between disciplines or departments). To think between would accommodate the range of capabilities of students that participate in preparatory programs and enable a rethinking of the goals of early-learning programs. To work between institutions would be to offer outlets and pathways that extend beyond the “host” preparatory program (often a top tier, elite school) and link up with other academies at a range of tier levels. 

A common ethos of architecture preparatory programs is that they are a gateway to a multitude of related professions. These programs measure success not by admittance into elite architecture schools but instead aim to expose students to thinking critically about the built-environment with the anticipation that doing so can open up interests in a host of related fields (such as design, engineering, law, or public policy). These intentions are admirable and do a great amount of good. But the interests cultivated in preparatory programs deserve (and require) continued support beyond the semester of architectural introduction. Sustained efforts to support and track students following prep courses could assist in placing them in schools existing in a variety of tier-levels and facilitate connections with other disciplines. A suitable analogical model from other disciplines is hard to come by, but the ethos of working together across institutions for the common good is in the spirit of the preparatory programs’ aims, and helps to evaluate whether architecture is the right fit for a given student. Simply put, if institutions that host preparatory programs would provide pathways to other institutions, even those with whom they are in competition or at different tier levels, a number of bridging opportunities could arise. 

Since Sutton’s book launch in 2017, the parallels to the events that spawned the 1968 campus rebellions have only increased, and the number of Black Americans in the profession has remained relatively unchanged. Preparatory programs are extremely successful in exposing students to the discipline of architecture, but without structural change in our institutions, these programs are destined to create little change. Additional support through mentorship and cross-institutional networks would amplify their effects and provide a broader-scope pathway for underrepresented groups to enter into the discipline and feel greater comfort in doing so. Along with structural changes, as the current NOMA president, Jason Pugh, says, we need to consider “milestones” throughout the journey.¹⁵ Large-scale change will rely on the accumulation of several smaller scale initiations that most importantly provide continuity and extended support for longer than a singular introductory course can offer. As universities seek methods of increasing diversity, it will become necessary to expand beyond current investments in recruitment and move toward building expanded support networks. These advancements toward continuities of support would suggest a new model of collective stewardship and, moreover, they would leverage the capacity of institutions to instill an ethos from which all scales of support can grow. 

 

 ¹ Sutton, Sharon Egretta. When Ivory Towers Were Black: Lessons in Re-imagining Universities and Communities. Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor, Michigan. September 26, 2017.
² This data was derived from a combination of researching all accredited school’s departmental websites, and performing internet searches containing the keywords “underrepresented,” “high school students,” “architecture prep,” “architecture development program,” and “architecture program.”
³ Early-learning programs take different shapes and vary from intense, semester-long design studios like the one Aonor, Brandon, and Cederick were a part of (these include University of Michigan: ArcPrep, Princeton University: ArcPrep, University of Southern California: A-Lab) to short-term programs that span several days up to a week (Rice University: Summer Immersion Program, Virginia Tech: Explore VT), workshops (SCI-ARC: Pop-Arc), mini-courses (University of Buffalo: Architecture + Education),) after-school classes (Pratt Institute: DICE), and programs that roll out over several years (Pratt Institute: Pratt Young Scholars). These initiatives are unique in that they offer free design experiences yet remain tethered to a university. While the degree of intensity varies depending on time and resources, the programs share a similar ambition and focus on exposure, support, and empowerment.
⁴ From interview with Cederick Campbell.
⁵ The average candidate NCARB. “Demographics: AXP and ARE.” Accessed March 3, 2022. https://www.ncarb.org/ nbtn2021/demographics-axp-are.
⁶ From interview with Aonor Washington.
⁷ NAAB. “2020 NAAB Annual Report on Architecture Education.” Accessed March 3, 2022. www.naab. org/wp-cont e n t / uploads/2020_NAAB_MSI_ Report.pdf
⁸ Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
¹¹ American Institute of Architects. “Membership Demographics Report 2020.” Accessed March 3, 2022. https://content. aia.org/sites/default/ files/2021-11/2020_ Membership_Demographics_Report.pdf
¹² From interview with Brandon Battle.
¹³ Broader scale mentorship ideas can be drawn from existing models including Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and Near-Peer Mentoring: Lauren and John Arnold Foundation. “Social Programs That Work Review: Evidence Summary for Big Brothers Big Sisters.” Social Programs That Work (November 2017): 1-3. And, Trujillo G, Aguinaldo PG, Anderson C, et al. “Near-peer STEM Mentoring Offers Unexpected Benefits for Mentors from Traditionally Underrepresented Backgrounds.” Perspect Undergrad Res Mentor. (2015).
¹⁴ Existing networks include, for example, ArcPrep-Michigan, Cornell PSP, ArcPrep internships in Detroit firms.
¹⁵ NOMA. “Baseline on Belonging: Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Architecture Licensing.” Accessed March 3, 2022. https:// www.noma.net/research/

Suzanne Lettieri is co-principle of Jefferson Lettieri Office and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. Her work tackles a range of scales and links image-culture and related technologies to socially conscious design. Lettieri was a University of Michigan‐Mellon Design Fellow in Egalitarianism and the Metropolis where she was the lead instructor for ArcPrep, an immersive pre-college program in Detroit. Additionally, she served as an Assistant Professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she initiated the pilot program ‘Inclusive Recruitment Strategies.’ Her work has been published in Project, The Cornell Journal of Architecture, The Plan Journal, and Plat. She has been awarded a MacDowell fellowship and a Graham Foundation grant. 

 

 

 

 

 

The set of illustrations is a part of a broader series started in 2016 investigating how spaces and flows – of people, objects and information –  interact with one another. Focused on informal and non-formal learning environments, the drawings document fragments of situations in constant movement.

Joanne Pouzenc is an architect, educator and independent curator based between Toulouse and Berlin. She began curating at the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau (DE). Amongst her projects: the platform Post+capitalist City (2012), the transdisciplinary festivals Berlin Unlimited (2014) and Make City (2015 and 2018), Public Space conferences: Fights and Fictions, 36h Factory of Thought at the Akademie der Künste Berlin (2016), projekt bauhaus Preliminary Course: from Bauhaus to Silicon Valley to Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2017) and projekt bauhaus Werkstatt: Datatopia at the Floating University (2018) in collaboration with ARCH+ magazine. How Together, a publication-installation with Constructlab has been featured in the Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2019.

She is currently director of the Maison de l’Architecture Occitanie-Pyrénées since 2019, director of the publication Plan Libre, a doctoral student at the TESC at UT2J in Toulouse, educator at the school of architecture ENSA Toulouse and active member of the international network Constructlab.

 When one talks about architectural education, one usually discusses it within the institutional framework. Portfolio agencies, on the other hand, although they have many students (clients) and have become an important part of many students’ education, are generally not mentioned, both because they are outside academic institutions and operate somewhat under the table. This article is dedicated to these portfolio agencies. 

Although portfolio agencies may still be a foreign concept to many in the US or Europe, architecture students¹ from Asia who plan to study abroad are usually more than familiar with them. These agencies’ services have almost become a must for applying to architecture schools in the west, and consequently, many complicated issues related to architectural discourse and pedagogy are involved. 

A portfolio agency can go by many other names, such as XX Design Tutoring Office, XX Educational Consulting, XX Studio, XX Institute of Design, XX Design Classroom. etc. In fact, the only name they won’t call themselves is XX Portfolio Agency. However, in essence, the purposes of all these businesses are all the same: to improve the quality of portfolios in a short period for the purpose of helping students get into colleges or grad schools. 

 Any type of admission rubric will result in people finding ways to cope with that rubric. Colleges in the US require the SAT and GRE for admission, so there are SAT and GRE tutoring services. Similarly, western architecture schools use portfolios as the main selection criteria for admission, so it’s no surprise that portfolio agencies subsequently emerge. 

The essence of all the portfolio businesses can be boiled down to profiting from asymmetric information, which in this case, is the formula for producing portfolios targeted at specific schools that reflect the schools’ ideal student types. The admission rubrics necessarily reflect architecture schools’ value judgments, stated another way, what portfolio agencies sell are the unspoken rules within the architecture education bubble. 

This is a unique phenomenon in the field of design. You rarely find similar agents focusing on other majors in universities: In those disciplines, a student’s GPA alone is sufficient to prove his/her qualification. Moreover, it’s difficult to coach students on lab experiments or writing journal articles; These are more complicated and lengthy processes. In contrast, portfolio agencies are widespread, largely because the medium for evaluation is different, and images from portfolios don’t always tell the stories accurately. It’s possible to rapidly elevate the quality of a portfolio: A beautiful drawing may come from a year of thinking and hard work, but it can also be a quick mimic completed in just one night. 

A typical portfolio consultancy in China costs 9,500 USD (around 60,000 RMB)². The services portfolio agencies offer disadvantage students who choose to apply on their own (which increases the number of students using them every year), and their high prices make their customers more likely from relatively better-off families. The very existence of the portfolio agencies creates inequity and injustice. 

Beyond that, how these portfolio agencies operate is exactly why they are so controversial: Architecture is a creative design discipline, and the portfolio is the self-presentation tool by which the admissions process evaluates the student’s design ability, creativity and endeavor. The main method by which portfolio agencies use to quickly improve the quality of portfolios is through a focus on representation. Portfolio tutors in the agencies are usually graduate students from prestigious architecture schools. They bring in their experience of successful admissions and offer their clients reference projects, drawings, and portfolios from their target schools, and guide the applicants to imitate the style and design. 

The portfolio is also used as a way to access the ideas and interests of the prospective student. Yet the agencies help their clients decide on project topics: they would often replicate studios from top schools or suggest topics deemed current and relevant in the institution, resulting in sets of homogeneous portfolios which at the same time feel like a collection of fragmented pieces. If one looks at enough of these portfolios, one can start noticing the similarities. However, this collage approach to creating portfolios has been exceptionally successful in terms of the admission results. Statistically, more and more students are entering top schools through portfolio agencies every year. 

 

When design homogenization has developed to the extreme, it can lead to plagiarism. There is no more famous incident than the one that happened in 2018, where a student was accepted to MIT and Yale using one of the largest portfolio agencies in China. Her portfolio agency put images of her portfolio in their promotional article, and then a Princeton alumnus noticed that one of the drawings was originally from a Princeton thesis. Both the student and the agency claimed that the image was only used as source material for the representation purpose and it had nothing to do with the major design concept, stressing that this was within a normal range of referencing in the architectural discipline and therefore should not be considered plagiarism. Because of the sensitive nature of this topic, the story soon hit the headline on Zhihu³ and attracted widespread attention, garnering more than 1.6 million views. Many people outside the architecture community commented that this action should not be excused just because it’s considered as “reference” in the design field; It was clearly plagiarism in those people’s eyes. Indignant architecture students (some of the applicants who got rejected by MIT and Yale) continued looking for images in that student’s portfolio that were similar to the ones on Pinterest. In the end, under numerous reporting letters, MIT and Yale withdrew the student’s offer (this student went to Rice University eventually, because Rice didn’t consider it as plagiarism). Before this incident, portfolio agencies would normally show students’ portfolios and their actual names in their promotion articles to brag about their portfolio “make-up” skills. Since then, the portfolio agencies have become more cautious, choosing to use aliases and not showing their clients’ full portfolios anymore. 

 

The portfolio agencies are a product of the marketization of education, architecture schools necessitate and support the market by setting the standards of their ideal candidate, and the reputation and ranking of the schools determine their influence on this market. The schools’ value systems help define the appearance of and the content manufactured by the agencies. Schools which look for skills in graphic representation during admission, will likely get applications from portfolio agencies whose aesthetic is tailored to style, level of detail and look desired. The schools get what they want, the market provides it and the system works. But the question arises: when the admissions process has become a market and a successful portfolio can be bought, the schools seem to lose their abilities to assess the candidates on the terms they purport to. 

The portfolio agency has the inherent problems of marketization of education, but it is also in some ways a means of using marketization to address the problem of uneven educational resources. For overseas students, part of the reasons they choose portfolio agencies arise from the differences in education systems. For example, while each school has its own focus, architectural education in China remains largely focused on designing buildings in a rational and cost-effective manner.⁴ This pedagogy is very much in line with China’s social and economic bases. In contrast, architecture schools in the US are generally more conceptual and experimental in valuing abstract and critical thinking. The “academic architects”, instead of building, tend to shift towards installation, exhibition, curation, which typically belong to the art domain. In recent years, the discourse has become more socially and politically oriented as well. Because having a western educational background is still considered an advantage, many Chinese students are still willing to study abroad to gain a relative advantage in the fierce competition even though there is such a mismatch between the educational systems and the way of practice. For them, portfolio agencies are equivalent to after-school programs, purchased to overcome the mismatch between two educational systems. 

Many of those who got accepted through portfolio agencies, even before starting their first classes, start training the next batch of students on how to prepare portfolios. They’ve won their authority from their admissions, now they are trying to earn back the money they handed to the portfolio agencies. But even as portfolio tutors, it’s hard to say that they are the ones who benefit. In some ways, the interests of portfolio agencies and portfolio tutors are at odds: The more successful the portfolio tutors are at their business (lending talent to students who don’t have ideas and skills themselves to pretend as perfect candidates and get accepted into top graduate schools⁵), the more devalued their own diplomas become. Besides, what is taught in school is of little use in producing (capitalist) value in this capitalist society, also won’t bring them higher paid jobs or more opportunities to get commissions. After they graduate, they find out they actually don’t have that big of an advantage in the job market as they expected, they may understandably choose to earn their money back by training the next batch of international students. 

If international students make use of portfolio agencies because of the differences in education systems, then the reason why college students who already study in western architecture schools go to portfolio agencies is more likely because they are not satisfied with the portfolio as the physical manifestation of the education they receive. As portfolio agencies gradually take over some of the school’s educational functions, the school seems to be increasingly reduced to issuers of diplomas. 

These agencies exist because we live in a system where anything can be bought, even access to creative education. They exist because the institutions prescribe what is interesting, what the aesthetics of the day are, and what a ‘good’ project looks like. 

As long as the portfolios are still used as the primary measure to judge students, portfolio agencies will continue to exist. For now, portfolio agencies earn profit from Asian society’s pursuit of western approaches (including their higher education business) and take a piece of the pie. They might be thought of as mini versions of western architecture schools, but it turns out many of them are larger than some of the US schools.⁷ Although these portfolio agencies are not as authoritative as the elite schools, they have taken up part of the architecture schools’ responsibilities. 

The emergence of so many portfolio agencies seems to have somehow shattered the ”myth“ of architecture schools and their intellectual monopoly. They seem to suggest the possibility of learning architecture without (at least partially) the education institutions. Can these portfolio educations be considered another sense of democratization of education? Portfolio agencies might actually offer us a mirror to reflect on current architecture academia and hint toward a new model of education. 

 

 ¹. There are portfolio agencies for other arts and design disciplines as well. Here we mainly focus on portfolio agencies in the architecture field.
². Although portfolio agencies in China are used as examples throughout the text, it’s because the writer is from China thus knowing the situation better. As mentioned earlier, portfolio agencies are common throughout Asia, and they exist in the United States as well, and the writer doesn’t want to mislead readers into thinking that this is a China-only issue. 
^3. The Chinese equivalent of Quora. More discussion (in Chinese) on this can be found on this website: https://www.zhihu.com/question/271911643. 
^4. Many of the studio projects in studios of Chinese Universities are similar to what students might be doing after they go into practice. These may include residential towers and neighborhoods, community food markets, or focusing on researching a specific kind of architecture (this is more common for upper year students), like transportation, vernacular buildings, high-rise buildings, or green buildings. Besides, Chinese universities require all faculty to have a PhD (compared to US architecture schools, most of the architecture studios are taught by design instructors who hold master of architecture degrees), which also leads to teaching that is more oriented towards research than design.
^5. There is a difference between the role of portfolio agencies in undergraduate admissions and graduate admissions. American universities have the flexibility to switch majors at undergraduate level, and schools of architecture are relatively easy to admit in some colleges where they are not considered popular majors. Therefore, there are students who use portfolio agencies to enter a university’s architecture department first, and then transfer to another department after taking general education classes.The portfolio agencies in this case are mainly responsible for helping clients who have never been exposed to architecture to do small projects that will help their acceptance.
^6. The largest portfolio agency I’ve seen claims to have 910 instructors on their website. Used for comparison, SOM (one of the US’s largest architecture corporations) (only) has 1000 employees. And then there are others working for lesser-known, small and medium-sized portfolio agencies. Most of the portfolio agencies have their own option studios, and sometimes there are even design-build workshops (you might be able to find more option studios and workshops in a portfolio agency than in MIT every semester). Leaving aside the under-qualified tutors, oftentimes the agency faculty are not very different from American universities. They are graduates (not only Chinese) from prestigious American and European schools who are passing down what they learned and explored in school. Students can also learn a lot if they meet a good teacher. Portfolio agencies also host their own academic lectures and they invite professors from universities all around the world to lead workshops. They also boost camps for improving technical skills or winning competitions and may offer extracurricular activities such as career counseling or company visits. Some portfolio agents have even signed official partnerships with universities such as SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture), UAL(University of the Arts London), or IAAC (Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia), helping these schools with recruitments.

 

 

Zhifei Xu (Fei) received his Master of Architecture degree at MIT. He builds his work through different formats and media, ranging from buildings to interactive digital content. He has published writing in Doums China and MIT Out of Frame. Zhifei Co-found PlayCity, a practice focused on gamifying urban experience.

In From Allies to Comrades,¹ Jodi Dean traces the term “comrade” to its etymological origins in the word camera meaning room, chamber, or vault. A structure, then, which forms and holds a space, soon becoming a vessel to capture the light. The camarada becomes they who share your room, they who reproduce its space both next to you and with you, physically, socially, symbolically. In Dean’s words, ‘Comradeship is a political relation of supported cover’.

In my work, I consider pedagogy in light of comradeship and its sister concept, solidarity. I read solidarity as the social and spatial practice of making-room, of building positions that reach beyond the self and towards others. Solidarity, then, nurtures comradeship, and vica versa. Each form reproductive relations that allow for their proliferation beyond the proximate. This proliferation builds movements. As an educator, I am tasked with developing and nurturing a form of “reason” among students and binding this “reason” to the production of, in the case of architecture school, socio-spatial knowledge and practice; in other words, I build positionality in the making and re-making of room(s). 

In the words of bell hooks, who feminises her concept of comradeship and solidarity into the form of “sisterhood”: ‘theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfils this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorising towards this end.’ Similarly, scholars involved in feminist and decolonial struggles across the world find themselves exploring ‘methodology as a site of struggle’; it’s not what you do/ know, it’s how you do/know it, and it’s not from which position you do/know it, it’s towards which horizon you push it.’² I ground definitions of reason in solidarity by emphasising the embodied and the lived as “reason” and by rejecting the (re)production of hegemonic reason by the default of dominant subjectivities. 

 Translating this into an architectural context, how as spatial makers do we produce this space in which we become/reproduce comradeship? We have a rich spatial language through which to think through comradeship, but, as spatial practitioners, can we begin to form a spatial contribution to help strengthen social movements? 

My work draws on existing thought on Social Movement Pedagogies together with emergent thought on Critical Solidarity, Fugitive Study and Mutual Aid, all of which bring Haraway’s seminal work on Situated Knowledge (1988) into paradigms of social struggle.³ In each of these frameworks, partiality and reason are confronted not only with feminist, queer and decolonial reworkings of subjectivity and knowledge, but also the ways in which one can act with-, for- and through an understanding of, a making-space for, the “other”, a looking-with rather than a looking-for, a framing-with rather than a framing-of.⁴ Building on this, I also bring in Helen Hester’s work, which looks to invert common notions of alienation. Hester argues that alienation is not always defined by a distancing from our actions, experiences and neighbours. Instead, alienation can bring us together as an active site of struggle; a position from which an intersectional empathy, reason and agency can meet and push towards emancipation. Hester proposes a “situated solidarity” as a ‘precondition for processes of careful solidarity building’ between people, species, and life-forms. By situating solidarity when making-room, I believe we can build a relational and polydirectional commitment to political movements – spatially conceptualised by Hester as a site beyond sight – one that is critically aware of institutional affordances and deploys them at the service of emancipation rather than extraction.⁵ 

These concerns inform my ongoing pedagogical practices at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London and the University of Rojava, Kurdistan (officially Northern Syria). Resisting the idea of personal or professional growth, I try to find ways in which pedagogical frameworks can push for collective growth in the production of socio-spatial knowledge – within and beyond the institutional form and, in-turn, towards methodologies oriented in “situated solidarity.” 

At the RCA, I teach Embodied Knowledges and Urban Struggles for the recently-formed MA City Design, in which subaltern, marginalised and activist knowledges built in struggle are foregrounded as the lens through which any formalised spatio-political theory is to be read. We focus on diasporic social movements across London and decolonial struggles in Rojava, Chiapas, and Palestine, where our design studio is based. The module holds regular Student-led seminar sessions in which academic, disciplinary and/or journalistic texts are always brought into the room with anecdotal, informal and experimental voices, namely: 

a) materials produced in the wake of struggle such as zines, call-outs, manifestos, plays, games, evidence, testimonies, counter-maps, and 

b) perspectives and positions born of those who struggle, as-found in journals, music, testimony, photographs, protocols, strategies and dialogues. 

Our routine meetings are peppered by intensive, 2-day workshops with campaign groups, activist projects and unions in a range of institutional, organisational and community settings. For students, these workshops explore how our source material hits the ground: how it is lived, embodied and fought for/against. In resistance to formalised educational structures and commitment to the embodiment and situation of knowledge, workshops take varied forms and locations from eating together with a question, walking alone/together with an idea, playing games to enact and experience cycles of political strategy, to live-chatting as we screens something online, to reading and rehearsing dialogues and scripts out-loud. In collaboration with our guests, we build socio-spatial representations and articulations of their struggles by developing maps, archives, designs, prompts and props that can offer material and discursive contribution to their work. 

‘If you want to learn about movement building, get yourself outside involved with people that are building movements. That doesn’t mean don’t read books, or don’t talk to people with all kinds of intelligences. It does mean, get out, get involved and get invested.’ ⁶ 

In a similar vein to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s statement, RCA students take on both the birds-eye and worms-eye view of research. The birds-eye swoops above and around knowledge landscapes. Alone, it lends itself to projects of superiority, surveillance and pseudo-objectivity. If we, alongside the elevated overview, also swoop down into the earth, we invest in it like the worms that process and aerate the soil, facilitating growth by making fertile ground as they move through it.⁷ Doing both keeps our focus in shift, occupying multiple and marginal positions; we both blur and sharpen methodological concerns, challenging social and spatial notions around perspective, scale, context, and relation. 

Parallel to my work at an elite Western University like the RCA is my role at the revolutionary University of Rojava, founded in the wake of the 2014 Rojava Revolution. To put it briefly, the Rojava revolution is a decolonial, feminist (though Jineology is the name given to Kurdish feminist thought) and ecological struggle for self-determination which rejects the very concepts of the nation-state, territorial borders, and hierarchical structures that have defined civilisation since its emergence, notably in the Kurdish region of Mesopotamia. The Rojavan revolutionary movement sees education, like hooks, as ‘the practice of freedom… a way of teaching that anyone can learn.’ The university brings into its ethos the principles of the Rojava Revolution, Jineology, and emancipatory forms of knowledge. There, I teach socio-spatial thought and practice to the first MA Social Science cohort; our collective aim is to nurture concepts, methodologies and projects through Rojavan revolutionary frameworks. My students are, to varying degrees, protagonists of the revolution, each engaged in communal, political and military organisation as individuals and students. 

Our collaboration is wide-ranging; it began with the translation of relevant socio-spatial texts into the historically-suppressed Kurdish language as a form of solidarity work. These texts were compiled into our core syllabus; they comprise radical academic and literary texts, manifestos of sister struggles, and excerpts of my own work on Rojava. Rather than being laid-out, the texts are a starting point for debate, critique and nurture in relation to the Kurdish geographical and political context. 

For example, we confront Bourdieu’s conceptual triad of physical, social and symbolic space – a concept that itself emerged partly from study of the Algerian Kabyle community during a period of anti-colonial struggles – with Kurdish liberation leader Abdullah Ocalan’s socio-spatial mantra ‘we must remove the ziggurats from our minds’, whereby this early-civilisation tiered architecture is said to have encoded the submissive and hierarchical human mindset.⁸ We put these in the room with Zapatista Thought on ownership, labour and liberation, epitomised in the phrase ‘the land belongs to the tiller’, and invite bell hooks’ work on domesticity, resistance and reproductive labour,⁹ and Jinwar Women’s Village and the Women’s Defence Units theorisation of self-defence, territoriality and the (re) production of free life. We also examine the politics of spatial representation as-seen from the students’ lived perspectives, confronting the Map of Greater Kurdistan and historical framings of the “vernacular” home as both malleable and contestable pieces of evidence in conflicts over individual and collective self determination. 

As the course progresses, students engage with literature on visual methodologies in relation to decolonial and feminist thought, before going into the field to explore the spaces around them that are of personal (and) political importance. They visualise and analyse – in photographs, sketches, etc. – the physical, social and symbolic aspects of their everyday lives at a range of scales and sites. They draw their body in relation to the spaces around them, tracing the connection between space, social struggle and subjectivity. And they map the reproductive labour(s) done with and through space by themselves and those around them, noting shifts and endurances since the revolution, and how this might still be redistributed and redesigned in service of the region’s revolutionary claims. This activation of the future within socio-spatial critique carries their concerns towards a horizon, to what can still be done. As the emergent protagonists of the Rojava Revolution, students are empowered to facilitate socio-spatial understanding and critique in their communities, leaving the door to the room a little open. 

These two classrooms meet each other in the form of Solidarity events online. These public and private, direct and indirect interactions use simultaneous translation, synchronised exercises and shared live documents to build a body of work between classrooms. Students position themselves by harnessing distance, transgressing institutional confines, and looking/acting both inwards and outwards. This nurtures an embodied and reasoned awareness of both situation and solidarity; doors are opened, each according to the need and the light that they capture. 

In thinking through these parallel pedagogies as two sides of the same coin, you could say I’m trying to build comrades out of spatial thinkers and spatial thinkers out of comrades. We share a room and lend our lenses. If, as Marisa Belaustaguigoitia tells us,10 the classroom itself is a borderland, it is necessary, and indeed urgent, to see how this space and those within it are reproduced, traversed, held, and situated in solidarity. Like a camera, the classroom forms both room and lens to look towards an emancipatory horizon. 

 

 

¹ The first chapter in Dean, J. 2019, Comrade : An Essay on Political Belonging. Verso, London.
² Dirik, D. 2016, Challenging Privilege – On Solidarity and Self-reflection. Roar Magazine.
³ For further inquiry into these strands of thought, see : Methodology as a Site of Struggle (Dirik 2019) Social Movement Pedagogies (Cox 2016, Melero 2019), Critical Solidarity (Plan C 2015, Plessman 2020), Fugitive Study (Moten & Harney 2013), and Mutual Aid (Spade 2020).
⁴ In particular, Nishat Awan’s understanding of Embodied Spatial Practice resists formalised ideas of disciplinary spatial knowledge (‘critique’) by foregrounding informal and subjective practices. Awan’s term emphasises that space, like subjectivity, is (re-)produced by social standing, and that this affects how different people can or can’t “practice” it. In my own research, I push for the notion of embodied spatial labour, rather than practice, as a more useful term in considering the material circumstances and consequences of socio-spatial subjectivity. For further enquiry, see: Awan, N. 2016, Diasporic Agencies: Mapping the City Otherwise, Routledge, London.
⁵ Hester, H. 2020, Masterclass with Caja Negra and Hester, H. 2020, Xeno-Solidarity and the Collective Struggle for Free Time.
⁶ Betasamosake Simpson, 2014. Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation.
⁷ Maree Brown, A. 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press, Chico.
⁸ As Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan writes in Liberating Life: Woman’s Revolution. 2013, ‘This three-tiered enchainment of society is illustrated by the ziggurats, the temples established by the Sumerian priest-state. The upper levels of the ziggurats are propounded as the quarters of the god who controls the mind. The middle floors are the political and administrative head-quarters of the priests. Finally, the bottom floor houses the craftsmen and agricultural workers who are forced to work in all kinds of production. Essentially, this model has been unchanged till today. Thus, an analysis of the ziggurat is in fact an analysis of the continuous mainstream civilisation system that will enable us to analyse the current capitalist world-system in terms of its true basis.’
⁹ hooks, b. 1990 Homeplace : A Site of Resistance, in Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics, South End Press, Chicago.
¹⁰ For further inquiry into Belausteguigoitia’s Pedagogical Concepts, see: Marisa Belausteguigoitia Rius, Pedagogical Concepts and Themes. 

Charlotte Grace studies and teaches the (re)production of spatial knowledge in relation to emancipatory struggle. Her doctorate on Rojava is due for completion in 2023. Alongside the above teaching roles, she curates the public RCA School of Architecture International Lecture Series, this year exploring the Reposession of self and space. She is a member of the UK Kurdistan Solidarity Network and has been involved in a number of campaigns for socio-spatial justice in the UK, Italy and Netherlands. 

The course I (Sabine) enjoyed most at Simon Fraser University (SFU) near Vancouver, BC, was our first-year public art project that placed student artworks all over the campus. Although I was fascinated by the spatial and architectural qualities of the iconic buildings up on Burnaby Mountain, I soon realized that my enthusiasm for the modernist campus was not universally shared. The campus, built in 1965 by Canadian architects Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey, is a brutalist megastructure which reflects a moment of educational expansion in Canada. Erickson went so far as to claim this new positioning of education and knowledge production would be led by architecture: “Universities are the new visual and intellectual environments.” However, most of the students as well as many of my colleagues experienced the concrete shapes and spaces of brutalist architecture as an outdated, hostile, or even depressive framework for learning and teaching. Despite the positive and enthusiastic re-evaluation of brutalism globally, I have not seen this perspective of the architecture and program of the campus change. The new buildings on the campus largely ignore Erickson’s original masterplan and the recent renovations  and maintenance treat the beauty of the concrete as a problem to overcome.  This had led to demolitions of several key buildings on campus. I have followed the development of the campus and I always wondered why there was not more debate about the qualities and values of this architecture.

To get at this perception of Erickson’s architecture, and to critically examine how the public architecture of the 1960s and 1970s  hold and create social meaning, we turned to two exemplary educational megastructures from Erickson – SFU and University of Lethbridge, Alberta.  Our projects Public Seminar¹ and Unsettler Space² try to identify what we call “past future moments” in which universities are imagined as sites of both speculation on and critique of the university’s present and future role. We look at historical experimental spaces of learning as markers of an educational turn in architecture which anticipated and still informs the current conditions of flexibility and mingling of learning, working and living within cognitive capitalism and its new forms of immaterial labor. 

For Public Seminar we focus on the radical architectural and pedagogical concepts that shaped the iconic architecture of the University of Lethbridge, also from Erickson, built in 1968 to 1971. For Erickson, this campus was a next step in rethinking the educational institutions themselves. In “The University: The New Visual Environment”, Erickson argued “The metamorphosis of the contemporary university has to do with profound and important changes that are challenging the values and the structure of North American society in every aspect. […] The change we see – the dramatic change in the visual environment- of some of the new universities – is not so much a change in architectural thinking, style, structure or technique, but a change in the purpose of the university itself.”³ Regarding the future of the university he postulates: “At the same time that the university is becoming more part of the public domain, it is also engaged more critically in the life of the community. We may find in the not too distant future that the last boundaries of fragmentation are broken down – that the university cannot be separated and isolated, as has most often been the case, from the fabric of the city; nor can university training be separate from everyday existence.”⁴ 

The video project “Public Seminar” focuses on how this new understanding of educational institutions and pedagogical concepts were realized spatially, how this mixing of teaching, learning and living was manifested in the architectural and spatial design. Along with its relationship to a spectacular landscape, the university was also unique in its spatial organization. Erickson’s plan combined all aspects of the university in one building, from classrooms, faculty offices and student housing. The long concourse hallway serves  as the main axis that runs the length of the building and is bordered with tiered areas designed to function as open classrooms and lounging areas, an influence Erickson took from the Al Azhar University and Mosque in Cairo.

Based on photographs from the University’s archive, of  a short-lived experiment of “Public Seminars”, we re-staged a similar seminar in its original location in the long hallway. We worked with a group of students and used a range of archival material in order to raise questions regarding the spatial plan of the university, pedagogical practices today, and the relationship of knowledge and labor. We collectively asked how these progressive pedagogies of the 1960s and 1970s relate to the pedagogical concepts and imperatives of the present, or, how does learning produce particular spaces and spatial relations? Reading excerpts of Erickson’s text on the new visual and intellectual environment, watching promotional videos for the university from the 1970s to the late 1980s on handheld devices and laptops (the very devices that now force a merging of life and learning) as well as a series of signs demonstrating the current student´s condition of learning and studying were all structural elements of the seminar. Students pointed out that Erickson’s radical impulse of blending life and learning has returned as the imperative of life-long learning: “Lifelong learning = always working.” The late-sixties dream of collapsing boundaries to fold learning into life and to coordinate work and life has led to the educational industry of life-long learning. 

While Public Seminar reactivates and performs an educational turn in architecture-history, Unsettler Space points towards the necessity of a dramatic  epistemological turn and a rethinking of spaces of radical pedagogies today; this necessity is driven by the fundamental challenges that Indigenous knowledges brings to all educational institutions in Canada.  SFU, like the University of Lethbridge, was constructed as a “peoples’ university” representing democratization and access to education with the goal of bringing the social peripheries to educational centers for training and progress; yet this national project never really imagined Indigenous students, let alone Indigenous knowledges, being in the university. SFU carries a reputation as a “radical campus,” a term coined due to the actions of students and professors in the mid-1960s in relation to education and labor and because of Erickson’s vision to break down the hierarchies and disciplinary boundaries of education through smaller classrooms and cross-faculty learning spaces – but this radicality really only pointed to reforms within a western model of education and knowledge.  

To counter this modernist vision of progress and nationhood that actively excluded Indigenous peoples, Unsettler Space – a project we initiated with Métis scholar June Scudeler – sought to both question the potential of these radical spatial concepts and to enact a form of Indigenous pedagogy on the campus.  

This last goal was delayed due to the quick shift to remote learning due to covid. However, in March of 2022 we held a day-long event in the outdoor Convocation Mall at which we, along with Indigenous and other students, silk screened t-shirts that expressed support for Indigenous land struggles and opposed the continuation of an extractive economy that strips resources from Indigenous lands. This event was a platform for dialogue and solidarity. We also produced t-shirts that identified the Squamish language name of the site that the university sits on – Lhuḵw’lhuḵw’áyten (where the bark gets peeled in spring) – in a gesture of decolonizing the naming of the place name.  Likewise, Treena Chambers, a Métis writer and students who worked with us, devised a strong linguistic inversion to parody Canada’s process of “reconciliation” with Indigenous peoples – the state’s upbeat term was overturned to now be “Wreckonciliation.”  This new term accurately names Adam Gaudry and Danielle Lorenz’s critique on how Canadian universities perceive reconciliation and Indigenization and how Indigenous people ask for transformation: “While universities utilized reconciliation rhetoric in most cases to beef up inclusion policies, Indigenous faculty members envision a transformative indigenization program rooted in decolonial approaches to teaching, research, and administration.”⁵ 

Throughout the process of staging such an action on campus, we tried to stick to the protocols we had collaboratively made (under the name “Guests & Hosts”⁶) to guide our working together that was based on mutual respect, patience, humor and understanding. Did such an action overcome the architectural determinations of the campus and open a new space for Indigenous knowledge? In retrospect, it is not only  the built physical spaces of the campus that are determinations (space always matters!), but the hierarchical administrative and functional aspects of the university which underpin its colonial functions. In the accompanying publication to Unsettler Space, Unsettling Educational Modernism, we turned images of SFU upside down, signaling both crisis and enacting a humorous critique. In this way, Unsettler Space makes a playful step towards doing the necessary homework and unlearning that Sami scholar Rauna Kuokkanen requests in Reshaping the University. Calls for scrutinizing historical circumstances and articulating one’s own participation in structures that have fostered various forms of silencing, discrimination and epistemic ignorance represent to Kuokkanen a shift away from the idea of fieldwork toward the idea of homework. This offers a critical way of learning from architecture. 

Likewise, with Public Seminar in Lethbridge, we found that the collapse of life and work and of learning and living is viewed by students now as a fact of everyday life and is therefore relatively transparent. But, if this has been achieved, the question of if incorporating life and learning together has generated any radicality or if has helped expand the conditions of work into every aspect of everyday life: as the students observed, “Lifelong learning = always working,” and this is a long way away from the concept of a fuller life that was a part of Erickson’s understanding of universities.

Dealing with the hopes and plans of a social and cultural modernism rooted in colonial domination illustrates that the modernist educational architecture requires a particular type of engagement and critique. Unsettler Space does not take architecture as a given nor as a stable container, where we are invited to help ourselves to learn as we wish, but to understand architecture as an act.  As Eyal Weizman puts it, architecture is social forces slowed down into form, through which we enter into a field of multiple relations. Rethinking educational architecture and entering into ethical relations to reform it comes with a duty; we have to position ourselves in relation to its history and the social forces that produced it in order to reform its potential and build new relations.

1  Public Seminar – Performing Archives of Learning was realized at a solo exhibition at the SAAG Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Canada, Juli – September 2021.
2 Unsettler Space was realized in the context of the exhibition Education Shock – Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s” curated by Tom Holert at HKW, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany, May – July, 2021.
3 Arthur Erickson, “The University: The New Visual Environment”, The Canadian Architect 13/1 (Januar 1968), 25.
4 Ibid.
5 Adam Gaudry, Danielle Lorenz, Indigenization as inclusion, reconciliation, and decolonization: navigating the different visions for indigenizing the Canadian Academy, AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, Volume: 14 issue: 3, 2018, 224.
6  Guests & Hosts was formed by Bitter, Scudeler, and Weber, and included Métis scholar and student Treena Chambers, Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) student Toni-Leah Yake, and research assistants Rachel Warwick and Hannah Campbell.

Vancouver- and Vienna based artists Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber collaborate on projects addressing the politics of how cities, architecture and urban territories are made into images. Mainly working in the media of photography and spatial installations their research-oriented practice engages with specific moments and logics of the global-urban change. In 2004, they formed the urban research collective Urban Subjects with Canadian writer Jeff Derksen. www.lot.at https://www.sfu.ca/~sbitter/performing_spaces_of_radical_pedagogies/index.html

 The laboratory based architectural studies in Japan is a product of a long tradition of Engineering School driven architectural education. As opposed to the commonly held semestral design studio-format education in the West, a student will generally spend 2-3 years of their final study years at one specific laboratory conducted by a single Professor and several scientific assistants. 

Tange Lab at the Tokyo University, led by Kenzo Tange between 1946 and 1974, may be one of the most iconic architectural laboratory of all. The Lab engaged in issues concerning the interface of city and architecture, both in realised and speculative projects. Tokyo University being one of the few prestigious former Imperial Universities, generated a semi-governmental Think-tank character of the Lab. There, students became researchers engaging in a collective effort to develop strategies for restructuring the post-war cities. Topics of research ranged from social demographic analysis, economical modelling of dwelling allocations to building technology related solutions. Professors at public universities then were not allowed to run a practice outside of the university, which meant commissioned building projects were as well drafted by the members of the Lab. 

Tange Lab’s significance lies in contributing greatly giving a direction of development in Japan’s turbulating society in the 1950-1970’s as well as having educated generation of architects and academics who continued this path. Not only did Tange Lab produce architects who gained later international success such as Fumihiko Maki, Kisho Kurokawa and Arata Isozaki, other graduates cultivated fields outside of architecture utilising the methodologies and knowledge collected at Tange Lab. Atsushi Shimokobe became involved in politics, becoming an administrative Vice-Minister at the Ministry of Land in his later career, meanwhile developing the Information society scheme. Junichiro Obayashi, who studied the realm of national planing at Tange Lab went on to work at the Ministry of Construction contributing to the establishment of the building standard law. Takashi Asada, the former principal assistant of Tange Lab, further developed his research field of the building production system design at the Lab and later established the Environmental development centre, acting as a consultant for urban development strategies. Sachio Ohtani and Sadao Watanabe furthered their path in the academic world and succeeded Tange’s position at the Tokyo University as Professors.

Amongst many topics of research, the research on Urban core and Architectural core draws an exemplary instance highlighting the Think-tank character of the Lab. The set of researches and realised projects presents a wide range of multidisciplinary contribution by the students over generations between the 1950’s-1970’s, drawing visions for ever growing postwar centralised cities. Beginning from the postwar wounded state, Japan has gone through a period of rapid economic growth and an accelerating increase in population during this period. It was followed by the Income Doubling Plan launched by the then Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda in 1960 and Comprehensive National Development Plan implemented by the government in 1962, that defined the directions of constructing industrial zones, infrastructure for housing, cities and roads. 

When Tange Lab was commissioned later by Japan’s northernmost fisherman’s town of Wakkanai for an urban planning study in 1951, existing knowledge of the Lab such as the statistical analysis regarding labor productivity by Obayashi and distributional analysis of urban industrial zones undertaken by Shimokobe were applied. Having set the increment of income and quality of life as the main scope, the team concluded to construct an urban centre, that would serve the urban dialectic of dwelling and production.¹ 

The notion of “outward expansion of residential areas” and “the growth of the urban centres” was further elaborated, while Tange worked on his Doctoral Thesis “Urban regional structure and architectural form (1959)” whose sub-categories were supported by individual thesis of the students at the Tange Lab. One chapter of the dissertation dealt specifically with the concept of Core and Sphere, in which Tange analysed how suburban areas of post war Tokyo expanded outwards to the periphery, meanwhile operational spaces clustered in the urban centre triggered by the development of the tertiary industry.² 

The Urban core analysis in this chapter was tackled through 4 stages of analysis covered at the Lab: 1. measurement of the degree of separation between place of work and dwelling; 2. distribution of land use pattern; ³. transport network of Tokyo; ⁴. relationship between vehicular, pedestrian traffic and parking facilities.3 Statistical modelling of the commuting patterns as well as statistical analysis between the vehicle traffic density and the floor area ratio of the city were undertaken by the students. 

In order to tackle accompanying issues of highly concentrated urban centres and nonetheless aiming for an organic synthesis of the city and the architecture, Tange Lab worked simultaneously on the conceptualisation of the Architectural core. The development history of high-rise American office buildings as well average profitability per surface area of the existing Japanese skyscrapers were studied by members of the Lab such as Maki and Isozaki in order to develop a new prototype for Japanese office buildings. Based on previous research done by the Lab, Asada modelled the optimised open spaces, parking areas and floor area ratio of high rise district derived by the vehicle traffic quantity, which laid foundation of the later development of West- Shinjuku high rise district. 

The collective effort lead to Tange Lab’s successful former Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building competition proposal in 1952. Here, a concentrated central core system was developed containing vertical circulation, facilities and seismic shear walls, securing uninterrupted column-less office spaces. A pioneering instance of a steel-reinforced concrete office building with an earthquake-resistant central core resulted through a collaboration with a structural engineer Kiyoshi Muto and it is regarded as a model for later development of high rise buildings in Tokyo. 

The Architectural core was further rationalised on the occasion of building Kagawa Prefectural Government Building, integrating the structural and mechanical system by means of the Tange module, a collective language developed in the Lab through trials and errors of various projects aiming to unify the scale of urban planning up until the furnishing of the building.⁴ 

Tange Lab’s Plan for Tokyo 1960 emerged as the waterfront landfill development on Tokyo Bay came into public discussion in the midst of accelerating population increment and necessity for more housing in the city. The previous two Core schemes were synthesised and developed further in this project, which built a linear spine consisting of multiple transportation layers simultaneously entailing commercial, office and residential zones across Tokyo to Kisarazu over the 80 km distance of Tokyo Bay. The scheme was largely publicised as Tange held a programme on national television channel on the first of January in 1961 to present the project as well as 

a story was covered by a mass weekly magazine Weekly Asahi.⁵ 

While working collectively on an urban model that was adaptable to forthcoming growth of the population and the tertiary industry, young members of Tange Lab contributed greatly in developing each aspect of the scheme. Kurokawa developed the Cycle transportation system, organically integrating different modes and velocity of transportation together with the buildings. Isozaki developed the Joint core system, distributing exposed vertical cores containing elevators and mechanical facilities and spanning office units in-between. Though the financial and structural feasibility was casted doubt and the project essentially remained an utopian project, the radical idea addressing the imminent issues of the capital coupled with architectural solutions gained support from those outside of the field of architecture. Although not literally transcribed by Plan for Tokyo 1960, the span of Tokyo Bay was then connected by the transportation bridge-tunnel Tokyo Bay Aqualine many decades later in 1997 and waterfront landfill districts with high density along Tokyo Bay such as Toyosu and Urayasu were developed. 

Following the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 reflecting on its related infrastructural investment and anticipating for the information oriented society, Tange Lab updates and explodes the Plan for Tokyo 1960 into the visionary project Tokaido Megalopolis (1964-1971). It draws a cross-national network system connecting the Japanese Archipelago through the strengthened industrial axis between the metropoles Tokyo – Nagoya – Osaka, creating a central nervous system. Layers of energy network, information network and recreational area network were mapped above projected transportation networks and industrial hubs. The research was financed by the prime minister’s office during the regime of Eisaku Sato as a commissioned proposal for “visions for the 21st century.” ⁶

 

 

As we enter the 1970’s, the air surrounding the growth orientated planning of Tange Lab changes. Kakuei Tanaka, who comes from a humble provincial background came into the position of prime minister by the manifesto of Plan for Remodelling the Japanese Archipelago. A decentralisation scheme was promoted using industrial relocation and forming a nationwide network of transportation as well as telecommunication in order to reverse the flow of people, money and goods from megacities to the regions. Tange Lab’s vision for concentrated urban centres was contradicted by a bigger force. Later came the first Oil shock in 1973, that triggered massive inflation and soaring prices of land and stock prices. This event together with “limits of growth” by Club of Rome in 1972, a keyword that spread in the wide public opinion practically wiped away public discourses on growth oriented grand visions such that of Tange Lab and other architects from the Metabolism movement and turned those into target of criticism. Ironically, those growth oriented positivist schemes were then welcomed by the oil producing countries in the Middle East, which led to Tange and other Metabolists’ commissioned projects and opened up a new chapter of their praxis. 

Within rapidly changing social demands of the nation, the consistent engagement by the academic entity of Tange Lab undeniably made a large contribution in reconstructing Japan’s postwar carte blanche state. Not only did the Lab erect spaces of national identification through War memorial in Hiroshima, Yoyogi Gymnastic hall for the Tokyo 1964 Olympics and the festival hall of the Osaka Expo 1970, different schemes of analysing urban mobility related issues and construction methods of high rise buildings set a model of prototype for later city centre development. In parallel, the Lab produced many talents such as Kurokawa and Maki from whom the Metabolism movement later sprung out of. Those who went into the field of politics such as Shimokobe and Obayashi reflected on their thesis from Tange Lab and worked on strategies of reappropriating the distribution of industrial zones throughout the nation in Comprehensive National Development Plan implemented by the government starting from 1962. 

Though maintaining at times a close relation to the government, Tange Lab’s contribution in the postwar urban development was never realised in a pure and completed form in Japan, as interest of different sector became entangled. Kenzo Tange frustratedly expresses: “we had a dream and hope of drawing a new city as if on a blank white sheet. But we soon learned that there is a thick opaque layer of political, economic, and social realities beneath the scorched earth of each city. In fact, the cities were reconstructed not according to an urban plan but political realities.”⁷ From the panoramic sphere of the Fuji Television building, built by Kenzo Tange in his Post-modern phase in the 1990’s in the Odaiba sector of the water front city, one could cast a gaze on Tokyo Bay and try to see remnants of Tange Lab’s vision of Plan for Tokyo 1960. 

Tange Lab as a pedagogical institution portrays a strong spirit of the time and sense of urgency amidst the postwar restructure of the society. Members became specialists in socio-geographical, economical, mechanical and structural topics in order to serve one grand purpose as a collective unit. Kenzo Tange devoted a decisive role, utilising the resources and directing this large unit of knowledge over generations of quarter of century for the better future of the nation. 

^1. Toyokawa, Saikaku, Architectural Theories and Practice by Kenzo Tange Laboratory, 2012, Ohmsha, p.26
^2. Ibid, p.86
^3. Kuan, Seng and Lippit, Yukio, Kenzo Tange: Architecture of the world, 2012, Lars Müller Publishers, p.20
^4. Ibid, p.21
^5. Koolhaas, Rem and Obrist, Hans Ulrich, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks, 2011, Tachen, p.284
^6. Ibid, p.680
^7. Ibid, p.106 

Yosuke Nakamoto is an architect and researcher based in Zürich. Originally from Tokyo, architectural studies at TU Wien under Prof. Staufer & Hasler and Accademia di architettura di Mendrisio, where he received his diploma in 2020 under Prof. Yvonne Farrell & Shelley McNamara. He has has worked with Adolf Krischanitz in Vienna, EMI Architekten and Baumann Roserens Architekten in Zürich. His research emphasis lies in cross-cultural exchange and manifestation of ideas. He is currently developing a piece on Bruno Taut and his architectural refugee during the interwar period. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison? 

Marguerite Yourcenar, The Abyss (1968)

 

Libertine Philosopher

The choice of D.A.F de Sade¹ to enlighten us on current states and future becomings of ‘Learning Architecture’ might seem somewhat unexpected; yet the provocation is not vain, nor the seductive operation bluntly spiteful. Rather, it implies an apparently naive but fervent exhortation to reconsider the man, beyond expeditious reception reducing him to sensuous profligacy, in order to reflect upon the role and quality of the Institution as the main vector of (social) order, political revolution, formation of knowledge, elaboration of critical thought and aesthetic sensibility.

Considering how satirical critics such as Louÿs and de Sade, appropriating the tradition of initiation novels, deflected their allegorical value as pedagogical instruments in order to mask poetic or revolutionary intent within educational treatise; an oblique lecture of Sade’s La Philosophie dans le Boudoir² suggests a different perspective on education and political action. The theatricality of the spatial setting, the discursive structure of the dramatic dialogue, the philosophical pamphlet Frenchmen, yet another effort, if you would become Republicans (fifth dialogue) suggest serious leads of what ought to be hoped for within the realm of architecture.

The inevitable controversy sparked by the marquis’ fulfilled or fantasied cruelties, sexual obscenities and blasphemy, more often than not, renders the broad scope of this work opaque: I do not blame those who dare not to leap into the abyss of thought he opened up, I merely wish to bring to light how strategies may be derived from de Sade’s liberal stances in order to question the status quo, to mistrust conventions, and face the existential anguish awoken by vertiginous freedom (of choice and action). Moreover, despite a continuous oscillation between condemnation and glorification, rejection and praise, the causes of the lasting fascination exercised by de Sade and his apathetic libertines must be found somewhere in this indeterminate region between monstrosity and banality.

His preoccupation with the structures of social relations and the analysis of power make him an intensely political writer, deliberately setting out to write against the cultural norms and structures of thought constituting the world. The repetitiousness of his vehement refutations of the existence of God reveals the shift from logical to metaphysical revolt: Sade’s atheistic revolt is an existential one (God is the most revolting lack of being); not unlike the artistic revolt before the irreconcilable conflict between form and content (where ‘blank’ space might be the most intolerable lack of meaning).

Naturalistic Venture³

Subsequently to this atheistic revolt, Sade replaces the transcendent God and the supremacy of Reason by prioritising Nature: of the infinite ambivalence of the natural world, of it’s vivifying principles of brutality and violence, he derives the features upon which to build his account of the universe. Nature stoically creates and obliterates, with little concern for the fate and form of any mound of flesh, as the annihilation of moulded creatures implies the chance to recast them anew. Sade emphasises the continuity of humans and other animals. His libertines strive to equate Nature through a process of estrangement and, paradoxically, of disembodiment: personal preferences and any kind of self-interest, preoccupations for the consequences of their deeds, empathy for victims’ sufferings are radically eliminated. Sade’s apathetic characters aim at something beyond any particular expression of cruelty; they aspire to an activity that can persist unhindered and unobstructed.⁴ A mechanical dehumanisation, a metaphorical decapitation, a metaphysical pursuit, in order to stoically engage with the universe and live in accordance with Nature.

Ingenuous Poetry

Sade referred to himself as a philosopher describing life as endless flux and destruction and, holding that total harmony would destroy the natural order, asserted the moral attitude of the revolutionary. Indeed, “[he] never stopped expropriating man from within himself and giving him back to the world”⁵ without realising this was the gift of all great poets, the great privilege of childhood to reconquer one’s sense of physical sovereignty. Breton already pointed out to Sade’s ‘innocent ferocity’ of childhood in his Anthology of Black Humour; Le Brun’s surrealist lineage is accredited for a profoundly poetic approach to the marquis, and a vigorous opposition to any kind of doctrine: “it is in the nature of ideologies to produce ideas without bodies, ideas that only develop at the expense of the body; […] – poetry speaks of nothing else.”⁶

Against Deontology⁷

The discourse of Sade’s libertines is invariably built according to the method of paradoxical praise: demonstrations sustained by the strength and amount of converging examples in order to prove that the norm interiorised by the individual, and deemed by him as universal, is but a prejudice contradicted by other practices. No fact could be moral or immoral in itself as there are no facts at all, merely interpretations. Such moral and philosophical relativism strips all signifiers bare of their meaning. The terms ‘vice’ and ‘virtue’ are no longer the two categories of an immutable moral typology, they solely categorise in a contingent manner a reality that is neutral in itself. Through the eyes of his characters, he describes the hallucinatory spectacle of a uniform reality – consisting of crimes and debaucheries endlessly repeated – not unlike the sanguinary displays he witnessed from the depth of his prison. Countless executions and the bloodcurdling strike of the guillotine, the nauseating sameness of years spent in isolation, the maddening solitude of prison – were submitted to the same harrowing law of endless repetition. Against the backdrop of the revolution, the crimes he describes become tainted with a bitter irony. He strives to condemn historical progressivism interspersed by the successive overrun of previous flaws, where we are but powerless pawns facing the absurd repetition of the same crimes and witnessing the nonsensical stuttering of History. Sade foreshadows Nietzsche in many regards; he too, philosophises with a hammer, as every case he exhibits tremors of the doxa of his time.

Theatrical Body⁸

It was during his imprisonment in the 1780s that Sade wrote the greater part of his theatre, unfolding his singular atheism and bringing his interdependence of mind and body into play. Unlike other philosophers of this time, he goes further than to set the sovereignty of his mind against the illusion of a divinity. For Sade, this sovereignty is established by the reality of the body alone, which is why the theatre, insofar as it functions as the site of bodily incarnation, will offer him the best means of taking free thinking beyond the limits of philosophy. Sade’s novels brought philosophy onto the stage, he made it physically present through a veritable theatricalisation of thought which begins by asserting itself as much as a critique of theatre by philosophy as of philosophy by theatre. He thus introduced the body into the philosophical debate. Just as he had himself been educated by the Jesuits who saw theatre as a pedagogical instrument of first order, he went on exploiting the dramatic space of the stage to unravel his acid critique of modernity and hopefully educate his contemporaries.

Satirical Carnival

Throughout Sade’s libertine works, there is evidence of a carnivalesque spirit which Mikhail Bakhtin⁹ identified as a ‘rehabilitation of the flesh’ characteristic of the Renaissance in reaction against the ascetic Middle Ages, but which he declared virtually absent from the desperately ‘abstract’ Enlightenment. A consequence of Sade’s focus on the body is the implication of the carnivalesque which also has a politically subversive impact: inversion of all official hierarchies accompanied by what Bakhtin called ‘grotesque realism’: “The essential principle is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity.”¹⁰ In the Philosophie dans le Boudoir, the reversed focus of philosophical thinking from the mind to the body is accompanied by a savage black comedy that indeed corresponds closely to Bakhtin’s ‘grotesque realism’ as a positive political force. The entire dialogue can be read on a political level as inverting all hierarchies in ironic echo of the Revolution.¹¹ The Boudoir is truly carnivalesque insofar as it operates the inversion of the low and the high, the official and the popular, the grotesque and the classical. Depicting the body as ‘multiple, bulging, over- and undersized, protuberant and incomplete,’ ambivalent fragments longing for hybridising to achieve the illusion of determinacy.

Transparent Institutions

The political and educational quality of Sade’s pamphlets tend to be overshadowed by the common condemnation of deviant figures, censoring outcasts declared unfit for a righteous society. The marquis was prey to conflicting notions on society, government and class structure. He was obsessed with the dissection of the structures and nature of power, with indeed a certain pedagogical quality: how might the revolution be communicated? There is also the recurring theme of transparency: immediacy, publicity, radiant virtue, freedom from plots. Transparency is both the key and the trap – not only the solution sought through pedagogy but also the presupposed state of things hence obviating the need for pedagogy.¹² This paradox corrupts the hierarchies and systems inherent to the Institution. Under these circumstances, is the refusal of Sadism still a necessary posture?

Grotesque Scenery

If all the world is a stage, our cities – and hence architecture schools where discourse emerges – certainly seem to have become the parodic backdrop to a nonsensical play, a cacophonous comic scenery¹³: disjointed positions, fragmented visions, erratic laments and foolish scansions desperately seeking for attention. Layered screens and plots, commissions and partitions,  multiplied in the name of transparency – rendering the space of debate all too opaque after all. Time has come to reclaim the central political void and, borrowing from Sade, to overlay tragic and satiric sceneries before ultimately placing the body in the centre of the stage. The contemporary set (of both the city and the place it is thought and taught) would extend towards infinity (unobstructed vanishing point); humility should prevail (no frontal views); indefinite lines, shifting shapes and dynamic forces (suggested by the rustling satirical landscape) could embrace change, tropisms and tensions: the rise of a truly grotesque scenery where philosophical doubt, positive political forces, poetry and lyricism converge. Sadistic Endeavour¹⁴ Delacroix, Baudelaire and Wagner: a trinity of artists bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. The beholder has no hope to resist the forces playing him like an instrument. Now consider Michelangelo’s Sforza Chapel (1561-64), Shinohara’s Tanikawa House (1972) or Takamatsu’s Ark (1983) – was it not also their ambition “to reach and as it were possess […] that tender and hidden region of the soul by which it can be held and controlled entire […] to enslave… and to bring us into bondage”¹⁵? The architect is at once scientist, composer, poet, actor, mechanic, fetishist, zookeeper: he must acquire adequate knowledge of psychology, physiology and probability; affecting others treated at once as selves, machines, animals. As a discipline, architecture is undisputedly a matter of force, every building is an action, any space a choreography. It must ultimately provoke, and thereby train to provoke, an erection of both the mind and the soul.¹⁶

Learning Architecture

Sade’s satirical criticism and revolutionary exhortations exemplified by the dialogues staged in the Boudoir expose:
1) stoic disembodiment and estrangement, to equate Nature’s creative and destructive processes;
2) poetic displacement and lyrical disruption, to reclaim childlike ingenuity;
3) paradoxical praise, to question norms and conventions;
4) the theatrical stage of bodily incarnation, to transgress the limits of philosophy;
5) carnivalesque distortion, satirical criticism and grotesque realism as positive tools of political thought, to overthrow status quo;
6) dissection of organs and structures of power, to fathom their literal and phenomenal transparency;

However unsettling, the Marquis’ libertine philosophy inspires us to repress the generalised tendency towards demagogy. It instigates us to reclaim the institutional environment as a political space of discourse, of experimentation of ethos, pathos and oikos – striving for the radical discredit of the norm. Of course, daring to interfere with the majority and its established prejudices demands moral integrity, courage of convictions and fearless insolence. And if it implies assault and outrage, so be it. Ultimately, an Institution must train from individuality towards collective excess, rather than lead collective exhaust of individuality towards extinction. It must assume the trying role of the framework beyond which will be worked. Remembering that every inclusive attitude is by default an exclusionary position, it must not bow to the whims of the majority, of the average, yielding under the levelling forces of normalisation. It must provoke frantic creative impulses, teach all forms of pictorial violence¹⁷ and instruct how to end up like an animal, completely numbed through intoxication, since otherwise we would be afraid of faltering. Learning to dare, to risk, to fail. Could any less be expected from those who shape the space of bodily experience? From those who wish to build timeless stages reflecting cosmic orders and who claim to have probed the depths of  aesthetic thought? To all aspiring architects intending to contribute to the tragedy of matter seeking its form, striving for an authentic absolute and radical aesthetics and discourse, Sade just might have something unique to teach after all. Dimmest possibilities of something else, both fantastical and dreadful, that may still succeed. Grafting the prophetic eye of the philosopher¹⁸ to the boundless mind of the sadist, I urge the institution to train “violent” minds, whose ambitions turn away from ideology, conformism and prejudice.

Let us assume the cloak of the lover, the lens of the poet, and walk with the mad.

¹ Le Marquis de Sade, byname of Donatien-Alphonse-François, Comte de Sade, (born June 2, 1740, Paris—died December 2, 1814, Charenton), French nobleman whose perverse sexual preferences and erotic writings gave rise to the term sadism. Man of conviction, he was uncompromising enough to spend most of his existence locked away in dungeons seemingly having materialised straight out of his own imagination. The twenty-seven years he spent in eleven different prisons and under three different regimes, this literal displacement and forced silence, his physical revolt, the spectacle and threat of the guillotine, lay at the foundation of his thought. Embalmed by scandal, his works were banned in France until the 1960s. At the end of the 19th c., the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebbing introduced the term ‘sadism’ as a clinical concept; a decade later, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire published the first comprehensive study on the life and work of the marquis, largely contributing to establishing his status as a major figure. see: Guillaume Apollinaire, L’oeuvre du marquis de Sade (1909); Pierre Klossowski, Sade mon prochain (1947); Georges Bataille, Le secret de Sade (1947); Maurice Blanchot, La raison de Sade, Lautréamont et Sade (1949); Simone de Beauvoir, Faut-il brûler Sade? (1955); Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Folie à l’âge classique (1961); Pierre Klossowski, Le Philosophe scélérat (1967); Gilles Deleuze, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch. Le froid et le cruel (1967); Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971); Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Sexulalité (1976); Annie Le Brun, Soudain, un bloc d’abîme, Sade (1990); Jacques Lacan, Kant avec Sade (2002).
² D. A. F. de Sade, La Philosophie dans le boudoir ou les instituteurs immoraux – Dialogues destinés à l’éducation des jeunes demoiselles, 1795.
³ ibid. 2. About Ideology and offence, see further: “[…] Among the many reasons for the offence this text may cause us is our own tendency to fall into the ideological trap of justifying the unjustifiable: […] Any attempt to identify Sade with a totalitarian ideology of any kind “only ends up passing judgement on the person who attempts it.” For it seems as if the person making that attempt “has been simultaneously terrified and fascinated by the feelings that Sade’s text awakens in him, and has hastily repressed these criminal urges by dumping them into that area still known as absolute historical evil.” Thus, our disgust at reading parts of Sade derives as much from our emotion at the revelation of our criminal tendencies as from our aversion to Sade; “there is always a moment when the mind cannot bear to be confronted with its latent criminality.”
⁴ see: Beatrice Fink, The case for a Political System in Sade, 1972.
⁵ Annie Le Brun, Sade, A Sudden Abyss, Translated by Camille Naish, City Light Books, San Francisco, 1990.
⁶ ibid. 5.
⁷ see: Annie Le Brun & John Phillips, Sade or the first theatre of atheism, Paragraph, March 2000, Vol. 23. No. 1, Sade and his Legacy.
⁸ see: John Phillips, Obscenity Off the Scene: Sade’s “La Philosophie dans le boudoir,” The Eighteenth Century, Summer 2012, Vol. 53. No. 2.
⁹ Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 1984.
¹⁰ Ibid. 9. 19-20.
¹¹ Peter Stallybrass & Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 1986.
¹² Julie C. Hayes, “Aristocrate ou Démocrate? Vous me le direz:” Sade’s Political Pamphlets, 1989.
¹³ Sebastiano Serlio, Regole Generali di Architettura, 1545.
¹⁴ Todd Cronan, Paul Valéry’s Blood Meridian, of How the Reader became a Writer, 2011.
¹⁵ Paul Valéry, Degas, Danse, Dessin, 1936.
¹⁶ ”La beauté déteste les idées. Elle se suffit à elle même. Une oeuvre est belle comme quelqu’un est beau. Cette beauté dont je parle…provoque une érection de l’âme. Une érection ne se discute pas… Notre époque se dessèche à force de parlotes et d’idées.” Jean Cocteau, Poésie Critique 1, 1959.
¹⁷ Glossing Valéry and Bacon, in his Logic of Sensation (1981), Deleuze explains the crucial difference between the violence of form and the violence of representation: “The former is inseparable from its direct action on the nervous system, the levels through which it passes, the domains it traverses: being itself a Figure, it must have nothing of the nature of a represented object.” (FB, 32/38)
¹⁸ “True philosophy,” wrote Merleau-Ponty, “consists in relearning to look at the world” Phenomenology of Perception, 1962.

Marine de Dardel is an architect, visual artist and scholar. She studied architecture at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) and Creative Coding at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Besides being engaged in several publication projects as well as in architectural practice, she currently holds a position as a teaching assistant and research fellow at the Voluptas Chair for Architecture & Design (ETHZ) and has taught various workshops experimenting with architectural language and computational narratives (ENSA Paris Malaquais, FR / Royal Academy of Fine Arts x UAntwerp, BE). Her investigation field ranges from philosophy to technology, specifically focussing on radical fringes and questioning strait-laced conformism.

 1. The ratification of the Bologna Agreement on 9th June 1999, produced an unprecedented revolution in the educational system. Part of the greater European project (Euro currency, Schengen, NATO, G8), the declaration was meant to establish a comparable structure for universities throughout the European Union (EU) in order to facilitate the mobility of students across Europe and increase competition amongst universities.¹ At the core of the proposal, the implantation of a common educational currency would ensure the comparability between all institutions: The European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) was decided to be worth 30 hours of work.² Furthermore, a common 3-cycle framework was put in place from undergraduate study (180-240 ECTS credits), to the master degree (60- 120 ECTS credits) and the doctoral degree levels (120- 420 ECTS credits).³

Under the premises of equity, the project of homogenisation initiated by the Bologna Declaration acted as a tabula rasa in architectural pedagogy.⁴ Until then, the discipline favoured a pluridisciplinary approach in an attempt to situate architecture within a broader range of studies, but also to stimulate the subjectivity of the students.⁵ For example, at the Centre de réalisations expérimentales (CREX) in the architecture school of Geneva, students were taught philosophy, history of the environment, geopolitics and biology alongside “traditional” theories of construction, as well as design within the studios.⁶ 

Like in most architecture schools at the time, the teaching of Humanities was a central point in Geneva. To develop a comprehensive critical framework, studios and classes were taught simultaneously in the same room using a large wooden table and a common blackboard. Quasi-informal, the configuration of the work space transcended the academic framework. The methodology and the educational content formed a coherent didactic experience based on humanitarian principles and reciprocity. 

Eventually, due to an increased financial pressure caused by their non-compliance with the Bologna Agreement, the school was forced to close in 2007⁷. The radicality of the curriculum was inherently non-achievable within the framework of the Declaration and throughout Europe, most experimental programs were eventually reformed or shut down.

2. In order to understand the implacable success of the Bologna Agreement and the ultimate demise of radical pedagogies around Europe, one has to situate the declaration within its context. As Iryna Kushnir, researcher in Europeanization, Institutions and institutional change highlights, the declaration remains a central point in the creation of the EU, and with it, the expansion of a new form of capitalism.⁸ Based on the theories of Fred Hayek, neoliberalism fundamentally differs from “pure” capitalism in its transnational reach.⁹ The EU undermined the autonomy of the signatory nations in order to create a central market and similarly, the Bologna Agreements fulfilled the same objectives with the homogenisation of the curriculum throughout Europe. 

The premise of the neoliberal project is as simple as it is effective; everything is now to be treated as a commodity. Thus, knowledge, like wheat, could be bought, traded, or even speculated upon. As Chris Lorenz explains in his paper “Will the universities survive the European Integration?”, the Bologna Agreements implemented the necessary structures to transform the very essence of knowledge production.¹⁰ Contrary to the way scientists of the Enlightenment sought knowledge in order to define a “truth”, the Bologna system defines knowledge as a simple currency. Knowledge is now no longer an end itself, but merely a means to extract capital. Through a Marxist perspective, the new curriculum can be understood an unprecedented transition from education for its “use value” to education for its “sign exchange value”, as Jean-François Lyotard argues: 

“The old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training (Bildung) of minds, or even of individuals, is becoming obsolete and will become ever more so. […] Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its ‘use-value’”.¹¹ 

As a paradigm of neoliberalism, competition is central to the proper functioning of universities. The choice of courses, professors, doctoral students and their numbers is directly defined by the market.¹² The emergence of complex ranking systems aimed at quantifying an asset’s performance is pushing universities towards a rationalisation of the educational process.¹³ For example, the “impact factor” is an index used in the academic world to measure the importance of an author or a journal. Independent of its intrinsic quality, its market value is directly determined by its influence calculated in academic citations.¹⁴ Thus, knowledge is abstracted to a simple quantifiable performance; “homo academicus is now modelled after homo economicus”.¹⁵ 

Bologna thus rationalises the educational process, but also participates in the standardisation of its content and the ranking of knowledge according to its marketability.¹⁶ Furthermore, transferability is essential to the new system which forces the educational content to be “mathematically” quantifiable. Consequently, it favours “explicit” knowledge which can be learned through study and tested through examination rather than tacit or embedded knowledge learned through process and repetition.¹⁷ Being able to test students’ explicit knowledge in a subject makes standardisation of courses and grades much easier and, according to Joan Ockman, explains the recent expansion of polytechnics, whose curriculum is mainly based on scientific branches. The marketability of “applied technologies” particularly leads private companies to allocate funds to finance research. However, this also leads to increasing influence by these corporations over the direction of the educational programme. For example, the closure of the CREX in Geneva is directly linked to the introduction of the architecture programme at the Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne.¹⁸ Sponsored by Holcim, Rolex and Logitech, the Lausanne school is infinitely more lucrative than an experimental programme based on environmental philosophy. Moreover, thanks to the allocation of funds in their respective fields, they can also expect a direct return on their investments.¹⁹ 

As argued by Pier Vittorio Aureli, the fundamental shift initiated by the Bologna Declaration is in the fact that the new architectural curriculum favours the formation of a new entrepreneurial class, rather than the “formation of a good citizen”.²⁰ Indeed, without the previous critical framework, students reproduce the same systemic schemes they are taught; an endless loop of oppressive architectural production. Through the concept of the habitus, Pierre Bourdieu defined a system of values and behaviours, both formal and informal, implementing a correlation between the product, the circle of production and reproduction. Thus, the habitus would perform as “structures structurées prédisposées à fonctionner comme des structures structurantes”.²¹ Hence, when looked upon through a Bourdieusian lens, the globalised study plan reinforces and replicates ideas and practices of the dominant culture: male, white and western.²² 

As defined by Antonio Gramsci in the 20th century, the homogenisation of educational programs is undoubtedly linked to a hegemonic dynamic aimed at establishing a central power.²³ The Bologna Declaration, based on the Anglo-Saxon university system, forced the rest of Europe to comply with its demands, which resulted in the suppression of localised curricula. Furthermore, it prevents through financial incentives the production of an alternative system that does not conform to existing power structures.²⁴ Therefore, as Eva Hartmann argues, the design of the Bologna Agreements can be seen as an unprecedented attempt of cultural colonisation.²⁵ 

3. The homogenisation of the different curricula has been essential to the functioning of the new school system. However, this has resulted in an inexorable rationalisation of educational content and forms of pedagogy leading to a suppression of potential alternatives. The standardisation of the system is, however, carried out in order to facilitate transferability and exchanges, which, according to the original statement, aims to democratise “access to education, training opportunities and related services” throughout Europe.²⁶ With its noble aim of facilitating intercultural encounters and exchanges through the single structure, the Declaration has in fact only served to propagate the dogma of neoliberalism.²⁷ 

If the new forms of teaching are articulated around the concept of marketability, the creation of a new academic currency is a key feature of the new curriculum. The ECTS does not represent a monetary value as such, but rather a standardised equivalence between time and performance. Therefore, the European Higher Education Area decided that 1 credit will be worth 30 hours of “successful” work.²⁸ However, the very basis of the equation is problematic; although ECTS credits are supposed to define a common basis on material elements, they relate two abstract values: time and quality. 

Architecture, at the intersection of art and technology, is confronted with the impossibility of conforming to the logic of universal credit. The quality of a project, itself debatable according to the subjectivity of the master, does not systematically correspond to its equivalent workload. The possibility of granting – or not – credits thus becomes an additional means of pressure, allowing teaching staff to increase the workload at will. In that sense, ECTS caused the opposite reaction in architecture to the one originally intended; instead of regulating the workload to be done to obtain a certificate of competence, it opens a loophole to increase competition between students and between universities. 

“We must in particular look at the objective of increasing the international competitiveness of the European system of higher education. The vitality and efficiency of any civilisation can be measured by the appeal that its culture has for other countries. We need to ensure that the European higher education system acquires a world-wide degree of attraction equal to our extraordinary cultural and scientific traditions.”²⁹ 

Competition is essential for the proper functioning of neoliberalism. In that sense, the facilitation of transferability induced by the standardisation of the curriculum and the introduction of ECTS credits actively reinforces competition in the academic environment. In order to do so, a maximum of workers – or in that case, students – must be put in competition, and the Bologna Agreements define the creation of a single educational market where universities pit students against each other in order to achieve the best possible results. However, the regularisation of working time promised by the instigation of a universal credit system is inherently incompatible with architectural studies. Therefore, the theoretically “healthy” competition turns into a continuous exploitation where the constant fear of academic failure, used as a repressive tool, prevents students from actively tackling the multiple challenges inherent in their studies.³⁰ Like the factory worker, students have given up on promises of qualitative apprenticeship by accepting their exploitative condition. 

Internalised, this culture of violence is justified by numbers, rankings, credits, and grades, regardless of the intrinsic value of the education. Because of the raging competition throughout Europe, the Bologna System reinforces the need to obtain a “proof” of knowledge, as a token of competence. In consequence, experimentation with potential failure is not rewarded, which questions the ability of competition as a factor of progress. Thus, as Ivan Illich already wrote in the introduction of “De-schooling Society”: 

“Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value.”³¹ 

In order to regulate the number of future practitioners, competition is reinforced by the importance given to the grading system, which in theory defines a fair and rational model that rewards workload and quality. However, the Bologna System does not consider the differences or the multiplicity of students. As a consequence of the ever-increasing workload, the System favours those who have some stability and easy access to financial and social resources. In contrast, those who have less time and less money are more likely to suffer financial difficulties, more likely to suffer from mental health issues, more likely to fall behind on school work, and more likely to drop out.³² 

Architectural studies actively participate in social reproduction, which is already pronounced at the level of higher education.³³ Consequently, the hegemonic dynamic is also reproduced in the professional environment where women make up a smaller proportion of working architects, managers, and business owners in most countries, while BIPOC women are almost non-existent in the professional world.³⁴ In the US, black people only make up for 2% of the licensed architects, while accounting for 13% of the wider population, whereas black women represent 0.2% of the licensed architects.³⁵ Even though this dynamic is not exclusive to the architectural discipline, its consequences are particularly relevant in our case with regard to the power of spatial reproduction that architecture carries. Indeed, the lack of diversity – whether in school, or in offices – directly impacts the political production of spaces, and eventually materialises inequalities in the built environment. 

4. From its conception to its implementation, the Declaration has been a great success from the European Union’s point of view. 49 countries – including Asian countries, not signatory to the Lisbon Treaty – are currently active members of the project. Never before have so many European universities topped the Shanghai ranking, while European universities witness an unprecedented number of students enrolling per year. Thus, many of the goals of the Bologna project have been achieved. However, as we have seen from the text, the implementation of the new System has also put an end to unconventional educational experiments, as they could not function without the subsidies of a state signatory to the Agreements. Moreover, the implementation of the project has actively participated in a standardisation of educational content and forms of learning, a suppression of diversity, while establishing a culture of violence caused by extreme competition. 

Thus, the “real” success of the new curriculum leaves much to be desired. But what other alternatives exist today? How can they be implemented, without subsidies, without time, and in the face of the adversity of the entire system? If one accepts the practical impossibility of creating organisations outside the system, why not fight it from within instead. As David Harvey notes: 

“By seeking to trade on values of authenticity, locality, history, culture, collective memories and tradition they open a space for political thought and action within which socialist alternatives can be both devised and pursued. That space deserves intense exploration and cultivation by oppositional movements that embrace cultural producers and cultural production as a key element in their political strategy.” ³⁶ 

Thus, the system needs to retain a space of resistance, in order to increase its “symbolic value”, and it is precisely in that space, that students need to organise alternatives in order to cultivate collective forms of opposition. Nowadays, a growing number of organisations, collectives and committees have entered this space of contestation; Draglab (EPFL), Parity Group (ETH), Volta (Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio), CLAIMING*SPACE (TU Wien), Gender Board (TU Munich) and many more around the world have recently started to oppose the architectural status quo through an intersectional decolonial/feminist/classist lens. Their purpose is to offer an alternative form of knowledge, through alternative means, aiming to subvert the hegemonic circle of reproduction. Going beyond their respective department, school or country, these groups have managed to create a trans-institutional power which enables them to challenge the might of the Bologna Curriculum. Yet, this labour-intensive process does not grant ECTS credits and is often performed at the expense of the students’ well-being. Thus, oppressed parties are pressured once again, into choosing between the sustenance of collective care or their own. 

 ^{Cover : Mladen Stilinovic, “The conditions for my work are not in my hands but fortunately they are not in yours either”, 1972
 1.} The European Higher Education Area, “The Bologna Process and the European Higher Education Area,” accessed May 4, 2022,https://education.ec.europa. eu/education-levels/higher-education/higher-education-initiatives/inclusive-and-connected-higher-education/ bologna-process
^2. Patrick Atack,“What is the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS)?,” 4th May 2022, accessed May 4, 2022, https:// www.study.eu/article/what-is-the-ects-european-credit-transfer-and-accumulation-system
^3. The European Higher Education Area, The Bologna Declaration of 19 June 1999: Joint declaration of the European Ministers of Education, June 19, 1999, http://www. ehea.info/page-ministerial-conference-bologna-1999
^4. The discourse of renewal – moments of destruction, allowing moments of creation – is characteristic of the neoliberal dogma. See: Nik Theodore, Jamie Peck, Neil Brenner, “Neoliberal Urbanism: Cities and the Rule of the Markets,” in The New Blackwell Companion in the City. (London: Blackwell Publishers, 2011), 18.
^5. Pier Vittorio Aureli and Peter Eisenman, “A Project Is a Lifelong Thing; If You See It, You Will Only See It at the End.” Log, no. 28 (Summer 2013): 68.
^6. Vanessa Lacaille and Mounir Ayoub, “The Geneva School (1999-2007)”, OASE, no. 102, (2019): 24.
^7. Secrétariat du Grand Conseil. Rapport de la Commission de l’enseignement supérieur chargée d’étudier la pétition pour le soutien de l’Institut d’architecture de l’Université de Genève, 9th June, 2008.
^8. Iryna Kushnir, “The Role of the Bologna Process in Defining Europe.” European Educational Research Journal 15, no. 6 (November 2016): 664– 75.
^9. Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2020)
^10. Henry Etzkowitz, “The Evolution of the Entrepreneurial University.” International Journal of Technology and Globalisation vol. 1, no. 1 (September 2004): 64-77. DOI: 10.1504/IJTG.2004.004551
^11. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984),
^12. Henry Etzkowitz, “The Evolution of the Entrepreneurial University.” International Journal of Technology and Globalisation vol. 1, no. 1 (September 2004): 64-77. DOI: 10.1504/IJTG.2004.004551
^13. Lorenz, Chris, “Will the universities survive the European Integration? Higher Education Policies in the EU and in the Netherlands before and after the Bologna Declaration” Sociologia internationalis 44, no. 4 (March 2016): 123-151.
¹⁴. Waltman, Ludo, and Vincent A. Traag. “Use of the journal impact factor for assessing individual articles: Statistically flawed or not?.” F1000Research vol. 9 366. 1 Mar. 2021, doi:10.12688/ f1000research.23418.2
^15. Lorenz, Chris. p.123-151
^16. Joan Ockman, “Slashed”, accessed May 5, 2022, https:// www.e-flux.com/architecture/history-theory/159236/ slashed/
^17. Joan Ockman, “A Brief History of Architectural Research” (Lecture, EPFL, Lausanne, 4th June 2019)
^18. Vanessa Lacaille and Mounir Ayoub, “L’école de Genève,” accessed May 5, 2022, https://www.espazium. ch/fr/actualites/lecole-de-geneve
^19. Lorenz. p.123-151
^20. Pier Vittorio Aureli and Peter Eisenman. p.68
^21. Bourdieu, Pierre, Le Sens Pratique (Paris: Les Editions De Minuit, 1980): 82.
^22. For example, in a census produced in 2020 at the EPFL by Morgane Hofstetter and Marion Fonjallaz, 335 male architects were discussed throughout the Bachelor whereas only 12 females were mentioned (sometimes as “wife of”, like in the case of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi)
^23. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (Turin: Einaudi, 1975): 2343.
^24. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998)
^25. Eva Hartmann, “Bologna goes global: a new imperialism in the making?” Globalisation, Societies and Education 6, no. 3 (October 2008): 207-220. DOI: 10.1080/14767720802343308
^26. The European Higher Education Area, The Bologna Declaration of 19 June 1999: Joint declaration of the European Ministers of Education, June 19, 1999
^27. Claudia Wiesner, “Capitalism, democracy, and the European Union”, Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft 10, no. 3-4 (December 2016): 219-239. DOI:10.1007/ s12286-016-0320-y
^28. Atack
^29. The European Higher Education Area, The Bologna Declaration of 19 June 1999: Joint declaration of the European Ministers of Education, June 19, 1999
³⁰. Julie Malfoy, “Suicide en école d’architecture: «On nous poussait à bout psychologiquement et physiquement»”, Libération, May 3, 2022, https://www.liberation. fr/societe/suicide-en-ecole-darchitecture-on-nous-pouss a i t – a – b o u t – p s y c h o l o g i q u e m e n t – e t – p h y s i q u e ment-20220503_LZI4SEVLSVC4ZI6YJYLKLZNBYE/
^31. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1971): 27.
³². Vivyan Adair, “Poverty and the (Broken) Promise of Higher Education,” Harvard Educational Review 71, no. 2 (July 2001): 217–240. https://doi.org/10.17763/ haer.71.2.k3gx0kx755760x50
³³. Gabriel R. Serna, “Social Reproduction and College Access: Current Evidence, Context, and Potential Alternatives.” Critical Questions in Education 8, no. 1, (Winter 2017): 1-16.
^34. Laura Mark, “Women in Architecture survey reveals widening gender pay gap,” The Architect’s Journal, February 8, 2017, https://www. architectsjournal.co.uk/news/ women-in-architecture-survey-reveals-widening-gender-pay-gap#:~:text=level%20for%20 women.-,’,pay%20gap%20 increasing%20with%20seniority.
³⁵. Unknown, “On Race and Architecture,” Curbed, February 22, 2017, ht tps : / /ar chi ve. curbed. com/2017/2/22/14677844/architecture-diversity-inclusion-race
^36. David Harvey, “The Art of Rent: Globalization, Monopoly and The Commodification of Culture,” Socialist register 38 (March 2002): 93- 110

Pierre Menoud was born in Geneva in 1995. He studied architecture at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where he completed his Bachelor’s degree in 2019. He is currently finishing his diploma at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETHZ) accompanied by Arno Brandlhuber. During his studies, he pursued several internships in Brussels, Zürich and Geneva, where he worked collectively on research, exhibitions and publications. Founding member of the ROHBAU collective, his multi-disciplinary practice deals with the political history of urban forms and the contemporary role of the architect within capitalism. In 2021, he published his first solo article “drills, skills and pills” in L’Atelier Magazine and he recently completed a self-built project at the Stadionbrache of Zürich.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The presence of a core studio sequence within Master of Architecture programs is commonplace. Given that an MArch is a professional degree, there is a required basis of universally agreed-upon “core” foundational knowledge that all graduating architects are required to have. Although national accrediting boards set requirements that the curricula for professional architecture programs must follow, there is a degree of leeway left to the discretion of the school to explore within the limits set forth. Rather than examining the history of how these rules and regulations changed over time, this research is instead interested in exploring the ways in which educators innovated and progressed the discipline from within these confines. 

Architecture schools are dynamic and living things whose character is shaped by the students, faculty, and administrators that comprise it at a particular moment. Those who are familiar with architectural education and its history know that it is constantly reinventing itself, reflexively critiquing, and re-molding its ways of operating. The common mythological conception of Princeton (whether or not it is still true, or ever was) is that it is a school for academics—more likely to produce the next dean of a school than the architect of its building—the curriculum is said to result in individual thinkers rather than practicing architects. Princeton’s MArch program is one of the few in the US that only has a two-semester long core followed by three vertical design studios. By allowing students to move directly to vertical studios after their first year, along with the flexibility of choice in other course requirements and the open-ended nature of briefs, the education of no two students is the same. The overall flexibility and opportunity for personalization embedded into the program confronts the discipline with the question: what is, if anything, the required knowledge for the education of an architect? 

What is core and who defines it? 

ARC 501 at Princeton is the first core studio course that all Master of Architecture students take upon entering the program. Operating under the hypothesis that the syllabi would contain traces of the disciplinary or pedagogical shifts, I conducted a research project for a seminar with Eva Franch i Gilabert analyzing the ARC 501 syllabi archived at the SoA. The project traced key elements of the syllabi over the last 63 years, including the names and number of projects assigned, the textual and building references given, terminology used, and also included interviews I conducted with faculty members who had either taught the course or who could speak about broader pedagogical shifts within the school. The collection of syllabi archived beginning when the school moved to its own building in 1963 presents a record of what each instructor thought were the most crucial skills and knowledge sets to be taught to students—the basis for the rest of their education. 

Princeton has historically avoided the traditional concept of a “core.” For many years, 501 and 502 were not even regarded as “core” but were more modestly defined as “introductory” studios. Due to Princeton’s small size, only recently doubling its MArch class size from around 10 to 20 under the deanship of Mónica Ponce de León, there is less of a pressure to “institutionalize consistency” that is present at other schools.¹ If a school has a large class that needs to be separated into multiple core studios taught by different instructors coordinating across multiple semesters to make equitable experiences, then consistency needs to be codified into the course material itself. The core curriculum, therefore, cannot actually be understood as reflection of the institution, but is instead a reflection of the faculty who teach it. That is to say, “core”—commonly perceived to be a universally prescriptive leveler—is in Princeton’s case entirely ephemeral, specific, and dependent on the instructors who teach it. 

Princeton further distinguishes itself with a tradition begun by Ralph Lerner, who joined the faculty in 1984 and became dean in 1989. Upon arriving at the school he began teaching ARC 501, and continued to teach the course eight times over his twelve-year deanship. This was a direct result of Lerner’s time at Cooper Union while under the deanship of John Hejduk, who believed that because core was the first course that a student encountered, and thereby established a school’s pedagogy, it should be taught by the dean^.2 This practice was continued by Lerner’s successor in 2002, Stan Allen, also a graduate of the Cooper Union who taught core for eight out of the ten years of his deanship, as well as Mónica Ponce de León, the school’s current dean who has instead elected to teach the second-semester core studio, 502. 

What should core teach? 

In the interim between the deanships of Lerner and Allen, 501 was taught by Paul Lewis whose syllabus stands out as the one with the most projects—a grand total of eleven, resulting in roughly one per week of the semester. Prior to Lewis, it was typical for 501 to include three to five projects, with Lerner usually assigning four. Taking a closer look at his syllabus, the first heading reads “Efficiency Studio” in bolded letters. In the section below, titled “Framework,” it reads, “The projects for this semester will be galvanized by Efficiency. Efficiency is pervasive in contemporary architecture… Efficiency is seen as a moral imperative. Efficient design is equated with good design… Efficiency defines the production in an architectural studio—how much work in how little time.” A position on what is most crucial to the discipline is not only described in words but codified into the course schedule itself—reinforcing the same position within the singular document of the syllabus. 

Once Allen took over, for the first time in the course’s history, the project titles defined on the syllabus were not longer descriptive names of the building assignment itself (for example, “Community Center in Trenton” or “New Graduate Student Housing,” as under Lerner) but began to pull from (or define) disciplinary terminology. The four project titles from the first syllabus were “Fields and Patterns,” “Movement,” and “Repetition, Multiplication, and Aggregation.” By Allen’s final iteration of the course, these naming conventions had been refined until the three main projects were titled, “Platform,” “Screen,” “Canopy.” For Allen, this project sequence was a way of working through the different elements of architecture sequentially with increasing levels of complexity—the platform was about a relationship to the ground and the definition of a site, the canopy about the tectonics within an expansive field, and the screen turned attention to enclosure and its relationship to porosity and reflectivity.³ 

Allen described his position as such, “When I became Dean in 2002, it was really coming out of a period, particularly in the 1990s at Princeton, with a very strong history/theory culture in the school. To some extent, the design culture had been sort of pushed to the side. Part of this back to basics approach in first year studio was about rebuilding the design culture of the school—that you could communicate sophisticated ideas through the medium of design itself, without appealing to a kind of outside theoretical framework.”⁴ Allen’s desire as Dean to strengthen the school’s design program became legible in his syllabi for 501, with the word “design,” for example, being the first or second most-used word in six out of his eight syllabi. This legibility of a position confirms the importance of the syllabus as a record of how faculty members perceived the discipline in a particular moment, and what they considered to be most crucial to it. 

Does core reflect broader shifts? 

In the final year of Allen’s deanship, before the arrival of Alejandro Zaera-Polo as dean in 2012, Michael Meredith began teaching first-semester core. Under Meredith, 501 as a snapshot of the current state of the discipline took on new valence. The syllabus now included a five-paragraph preamble, not describing the course itself but Meredith’s take on the discipline as a way to frame the assignments to come. It states: “As of late we’ve witnessed a kind of return to the ‘real’ in which the tangibly of the built trumps the speculation of the unbuilt, where discourse is trivial at best and where the representation of reality offers an irrefutable proof of concept… Architecture has become a kind of social science, embracing a facile mode of technological positivism in order to escape the uneasiness of cultural production.” He ends with the sentence, “We find ourselves in a moment after Architecture” signaling to the students that the discipline has ended before they have even begun. 

In a certain sense, Meredith seems as invested himself in uncovering the answers to the questions he put forward for the students. He repositions the role of the professor from that of an instructor who imparts knowledge, to a collaborator who helps produce it. Similarly for Lewis and Allen, there was the consistent position that the studio should serve as an introduction to the concerns of the field, thereby providing enough knowledge for the students to be able to enter the disciplinary conversation while not prescribing what they must then say. They emphasized the teaching of tools and techniques that would allow students to craft arguments and articulate them through the medium of architecture.⁵ It seems that with Meredith’s syllabus, the definition of architecture is not what is being taught, but reflexively discovered through the progression of the course itself. The students are now folded into the process of determining the state of the discipline along with the instructor. Architecture is no longer being taught but defined. 

What is the future of core? 

The most recent shift in the 501 syllabus occurred in the fall of 2020, following a tumultuous and consequential year of Covid lockdowns and a resurgence of BLM protests. With the course now co-taught (a practice begun in 2017 between Meredith and Ellie Abrons, continued with Erin Besler from 2018 to 2020, and most recently with Anda French) the opening sentences of the co-authored syllabus read, “The first-year studio is based upon looking, discussing, and making architecture together. Our focus is on the making of buildings. It will be an open, collaborative, and discursive process. We will share our experiences together… Our pedagogical goals are to design while thinking about buildings from/ through multiple viewpoints, values and perspectives, as well as to be able to articulate design thinking.” For the first time, the word “together” became one of the most frequently used words in a syllabus, alongside “community” which had not been frequently used since Francisco Sanin and Anthony Vidler taught the course in 1992. 

The emphasis on collaboration and building are clear, and the rumination on the current state of the discipline is replaced by a list of defined terms, with the invitation to “add or rewrite” at the top. This syllabus, in particular, reveals the ways in which the curriculum of 501 serves as the optimal reflecting device for the state of the discipline as seen through the eyes of the instructors. Through examining the archive of syllabi, the course showed itself to rarely remain static. Even if taught by the same professor year after year changes were introduced, reinforcing the conception that at Princeton core is anything but stable, consistent, and rigid. Given its tie to the instructor more so to any other (such as an institutional agenda or the criteria of an accrediting board), the course is free to be amenable to shifting conditions as they are perceived in real time. 

In returning to the question of, “What is, if anything, the required knowledge for the education of an architect?” we perhaps realize that the inability to definitively state what constitutes this knowledge set is, in fact, its most crucial characteristic. The future role of the architect, existing within a world fraught with ecological, climatological, social, and economic crises, is drastically shifting. Given the impossibility of knowing what exactly that role might be, only through a flexible and responsive pedagogy can we be confident that the discipline will be reactive enough to not only keep up with a changing world but anticipate it. The foundational knowledge of an architect must not only equip them to enter the field in its current state, but prepare them for an unknown future that they can add to, rewrite, and help shape. 

1 In conversation with Paul Lewis.
2,3,4 In conversation with Stan Allen.
5 In conversation with Paul Lewis and Stan Allen.

A Note from the Author :

Many of the ideas and perspectives in this essay are indebted to the valuable conversations conducted with Stan Allen, Paul Lewis, Guy Nordenson, Anthony Vidler, M. Christine Boyer, Erin Besler, and Michael Meredith. Furthermore, this project would not have been possible without the guidance and support of Eva Franch i Gilabert.
For an abridged version of the research project, which tracks key projects, texts, buildings, authors, architects, and words contained within the history of the ARC 501 syllabi, please see HERE. 

Christina Moushoul obtained her Master of Architecture degree from Princeton University School of Architecture in 2022 where she won the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize and the History and Theory Prize. She is a founding member of Office Party and a founding editor of the journal Party Planner. While at Princeton, Christina was an editor of Pidgin and a co-founder of Salon Series. Christina previously worked for the media artist Refik Anadol, serving as project manager and designer for WDCH Dreams and Das Paradies at the LA Phil. Her work currently focuses on alternative spaces of knowledge production, radical pedagogies, and media architectures. 

 

As we can tell from our own lives, brief moments of intense experience are often the ones that most decisively define our perception of reality in the long run. In the field of architectural education, an interesting case where ephemerality was explored as a strategy of intensification can be found in the teaching activity of Peter Zumthor in the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio. Although his presence in the school from 1996 to 2007 represents a widely known fact – particularly widespread with the publication of the essay Teaching Architecture, Learning Architecture as part of his best-selling Thinking Architecture¹ – little attention has been given to what could be called the most ambitious and revealing act of Zumthor’s pedagogical approach: the atelier he set for first-year students in the academic years of 1996-97, 1997-98 and 1998-99.

The study of this seminal event was made possible by the rediscovery of the archives of Atelier Zumthor kept in Mendrisio, where the documentation of its activities – including items such as teaching journals, exercise reports and over 4.000 photographs of student works – remained silent for the last two decades. There are no clear reasons for this oblivion. On the one hand, Zumthor himself seems to have lost interest in claiming the material as part of his own intellectual oeuvre.

On the other, his withdrawal from the Academy was followed by the progressive erasure of all physical traces of the archive – including original models – allegedly due to the difficult conservation conditions required by their materiality. Such abandonment is all the more hard to understand if we consider that the construction of the archive was consciously planned by Zumthor as a necessary tool to communicate what he considered to be an educational experiment. In that sense, today’s critical reconstruction of Atelier Zumthor is based precisely upon the accuracy with which its activities were described and assessed – something that also indicates how ambitiously teaching was taken as a privileged space for conceptual research.

A fundamental instance explored in the conception of Zumthor’s primo anno course was the temporal dimension of learning. It informed not only the delimitation of a three-year time frame for the ‘experiment’ to take place, but also the creation of a didactic structure based on brief exercises which were designed as true events. Aimed at first-year students, this sequence of 19 exercises was aimed to teach what was defined as ‘the foundations of composition’,² i.e. the most radical knowledge upon which architectural training would later evolve. This notion of ‘ground zero’ represented for Zumthor an unique opportunity to develop a didactic that intentionally avoided all kinds of academicism – doomed as something ‘abstract’ and therefore non-reliable – by assuming a ‘concrete’ approach whose legitimacy stemmed from its ‘self-evident’ condition. Taken as architecture’s primary quality, ‘to be concrete’ stood thus as the conceptual cornerstone of Atelier Zumthor, defining a phenomenological approach in which all instances of the educational process were constantly referred to the student’s experience of the world.³

This is visible, for instance, in the emphasis given to sensory perception as a fundamental theme of the course. Particularly evident in the structure of the first year, many of the proposed exercises were developed with the intention of making students aware of the value of their five senses. In that regard, it might be said that their own bodies represented a central instrument in the atelier, explored as main mediators between the project and the object’s factual qualities. Besides this instrumental frame, the absence of external references to validate students’ work seems to have also lent a particular importance to authoriality as a project’s positive and expected value. In other words, while institutionalized training in many architecture schools tends to promote equal and standardized education – often understood as their main duty – every activity of Atelier Zumthor was aimed at encouraging students to explore personal expression as a necessary quality of design.

An illustrative example of the atelier’s structure can be found in the sequence of exercises developed along its inaugural year. The first exercise, called The personal construction module (A), required students to build a block with given dimensions using a material that should tell the content of a personal experience. The apparent simplicity of the task condensed a much deeper process, starting from the selection of a biographical memory to be presented, then followed by the identification of the role played by a specific materiality in its conception.
A former student told how, from the experience of penetrating a grass field as a child, he produced a block built as a dense weave of grass branches. Another student, whose memory was that of walking on a melting sidewalk during a hot summer day, built a block entirely made of asphalt. Important, however, was not the material itself, but the effective experience it could convey, bringing characteristics like scent and touch to be central components of the constructive challenge. Therefore, the grass block should contain the scent of a spring Alpine morning, just as the second one had to smell like melting asphalt. The exercise’s fulfillment was assessed in the block’s capacity to communicate the content of the experience in such a way it was understandable to the entire audience. Ultimately, materiality acted as the mediator of a transformation process that translated a highly individual image into something collectively graspable.

The importance given to presentation as a moment of verification was transversal to the atelier. In 100 steps for a blind (B), the second exercise, students should design a tunnel connecting a town to a park, imagining how a blind person could find orientation inside it. The final submission consisted of a resonance body – a model at 1:20 scale – which was then put to a real sound test. Projects tended to explore different materials and morphologies as a means to obtain different acoustic responses, as in the case where a crescent scale of voids was carved beneath a wooden floor inside the tunnel, generating a progressive change in the reverberation of steps guiding the blind walker. In An indirect-lighting lamp (C), a lamp should be built using a given set of materials and following a set of rules such as “the lamp must not be seen” and “use simple forms”. More important, however, was the fact that the lamp was meant to work effectively, stressing how much the practical challenge stood as one of the atelier’s main mottos. The closing exercise of the first semester was called The fragrance and aroma street (D), requiring the construction of a small shop containing a product characterized by a particular scent, in such a way designs were developed as aroma-driven strategies.

Moving on to the spring semester, a transition in complexity reached the scale of the territory in the exercise In Situ (F). Divided into groups, students were given a specific site to work with, representing typical situations of the school’s surroundings. The First encounter (F1), where each student visited his place individually, was followed by The time of the place (F2), requiring each group to produce a series of 24 documentations of the site – hourly records made with a fixed camera during the period of a day. An intervention on place in 1:1 scale (G) closed Atelier Zumthor’s first year, asking groups to operate a ‘concrete’ transformation in their sites, in such a way to “render visible or perceivable anything of their particularity”.⁴

In what can be read as a condensed depiction of the course’s didactics, students conceived their projects as interventions whose material presence was directly conditioned by a temporal narrative. This is visible in the work produced by Group C on a peripheral plot near to the highway exit to Mendrisio. It took advantage of the steep topography to design an intervention made of 300m of flexible light tube installed over the slope in the shape of a huge heart. The original form, however, could be seen only from a sighting platform on top of Monte Generoso – from the site itself, the tubes were perceived as the chaotic intertwining of light strokes. The design concept was based precisely on the changing perceptions of the landscape, and executed through the temporal experience of an audience that climbed the mountain by night to behold the glowing heart in the valley below.

This sort of ceremonial dimension was evidently present along the atelier, helping to create its own identity as a special, unrepeatable event in itself. In fact, the deep personal involvement required by Zumthor’s approach led students to adhere to his atelier – or to withdraw from it – with much more intensity than the usual experience of an architecture school. The enthusiasm that emerges both from the archive’s documentation and the testimonies of former students and assistants is clearly linked to what Aurelio Galfetti referred to as “the feeling of being part of something absolutely new”.⁵ An important part of this atmosphere of excitement stemmed from the fact that the atelier would exist only during a limited amount of time – as already mentioned, a three-year period. In that sense, the decision of repeating the course for three times had certainly some relation to the growing pace of the school itself – which at the time had not reached advanced years. However, the choice for such a specific structure also contained the ambition to delimit a reality possible to be critically observed.

The second and third years of Zumthor’s primo anno course shared the same basic structure of the first year described above, with conceptual exercises followed by operations at territorial scale. A slight differentiation, however, is visible in the last year, which contains not only less exercises than the others – 5 instead of 7 – but also seems to seek an approach more closely related to the nature of an architecture project. In that sense, while the second year (1997-98) was characterized by performatic exercises such as Blue Reflections (J) and Prototype of a door handle (L), in the third year (1998-99) the central object of most exercises could be identified as a building – as in After work in the silver mine (P) and Monks, refugees, abandoned animals + seven stones (S).

In spite of any parallel between the years, exercises were never repeated in Atelier Zumthor, as they represented the creative instance of the teacher’s work. In that sense, it is important to mention that assistants played a central role in the atelier, not only as operational figures but really as co-authors of the educational project. The original group of assistants of Atelier Zumthor was formed by the sculptress Miguela Tamo and by the architects Thomas Durisch, Pia Durisch and Miguel Kreisler – the latter of which the one officially in charge of the atelier in Mendrisio. As the course started in the Fall semester of 1996, there was no such thing as a preconceived list of exercises. Instead, each of them was collectively conceived by Zumthor and the assistants, observing the interaction between their initial inputs and the response given by students.⁶ Understanding this dynamic brings light to the archive’s value as the record of a progressive reasoning, stressing how much teaching was seized by Zumthor as an opportunity for theoretical reflection. Read in reverse, the sequence of exercises reveal a set of concepts that can be found in the base of his own architecture, such as the assumption of biographical memories as a source of typical images and the use of construction as the primary form-giving process of design.

Certainly, the analysis of Atelier Zumthor as a pedagogical project must take into account the particular conditions from which it emerged. The most defining of these is the fact that Zumthor was in charge of one of the three foundational ateliers of the Academy in Mendrisio – along with Mario Botta and Aurelio Galfetti. This means that the originality of his methodology was a direct reaction to the freedom of experimentation granted both by the school’s humanistic program and by the need for affirmation characteristic of a newborn institution. Looking at Zumthor’s primo anno course from a distance of 25 years, it seems possible to say that its emphasis on the individual dimension of learning is something increasingly hard to reproduce in an educational environment progressively conditioned by standardization. At the same time, the definition of embodied perception as the discipline’s primary interface and the valorization of architecture’s communicative dimension as a condition for its cultural relevance are lessons whose pertinence has only grown over the years. Considering the inevitable pressures to which all forms of education will be exposed in the near future – among which the intensification of remote teaching is only the most visible – the experience of Atelier Zumthor in Mendrisio may very well remain as a half-forgotten memory remembering us that learning is a non-transferable personal act.

Atelier Zumthor AAM, primo anno exercises in sequence:

1996-97

A. The personal construction module
B. 100 steps for a blind
C. An indirect-lightning lamp
D. The aroma and fragrance street
E. Nature, street, house +1. Video-project
F. In Situ
G. An intervention on place in 1:1 scale

1997-98

H. A space that looks at the landscape of my youth
I. A window for my friends, to read by the light of the lake
J. Blue Reflections
K. The typical space
L. Prototype of a door handle
M. A tableau vivant in Laveno
N. Questioning architecture

1998-99

O. A Miniature
P. After work in the silver mine
Q. The love for things, after work in the silver mine
R. Intermediate exercise from 4.2.1999 until 8.3.1999
S. Monks, refugees, abandoned animals + seven stones

 

¹ P. Zumthor, Teaching Architecture, Learning Architecture, in: P. Zumthor, Thinking Architecture, 3rd ed., Birkhäuser, Basel 2017, pp.65-66.
² Atelier Zumthor, description of first-year course, in: Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, Report on Teaching Activities 1996-97, Mendrisio 1997.
³ Stemming from Latin concrètus (past participle of concrèscere, meaning ‘to condensate’), the word concrete relates not only to physical matter, but indicates the quality of an object that is graspable.
⁴ Atelier Zumthor AAM, Assignment of Exercise G, AAM Archives, 1997.
⁵ Aurelio Galfetti, talking about the Academy’s first year in: La Regione Ticino, May 29, 1997.

Rafael Lorentz holds a PhD in architectural composition from Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio and from Università IUAV di Venezia. In 2021, his doctoral research won the Förderpreis awarded by the Swiss Association of Art Historians. He graduated from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS, 2012) in Brazil, the same institution from which he holds a Master’s Degree in Theory, History and Criticism of Architecture (2016). He was teaching assistant to design studios at Politecnico di Milano and UFRGS. As a practicing architect, he is ahead of Atelier Kohlmann Lorentz, a studio based in Porto Alegre since 2021.

“To design… is first of all to structure, and for me the study of structure (in the abstract) is the equal of that which has been known as basic design or foundational studies.”¹

In the summer of 1957, William S. Huff returned to the United States a changed man. At the age of thirty, he had just completed a year-long stint at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) in Ulm, West Germany, then in just its fourth year of operations. Having received his architectural training at Yale under the likes of Neutra, Johnson, and Kahn—having already become a registered architect, in fact—Huff had secured a Fulbright scholarship to go to the HfG to study with the German constructivist painter Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, who had joined the school’s faculty in 1954. His ambition? To discover “a more fruitful means of translating the two-dimensional experimentation of constructivist painters into three-dimensional architecture.”² It was only grudgingly, then, that Huff acquiesced to the HfG’s insistence that he participate instead in the school’s obligatory Grundlehre (foundational course), then in its second year under the direction of Tomás Maldonado, the dynamic Argentinian theorist and designer who would become one of the school’s most influential figures.³ But the rigor of Maldonado’s curriculum, coupled with the intensity of the HfG’s intellectual and political climate throughout this period, proved to be an enormously galvanizing experience for Huff. Only a few years after his return, he embarked on what turned out to be a lifelong career in architectural pedagogy, the bulk of which spent exploring the boundaries of what has become more broadly known as basic design, a designation Huff himself eventually came to regard as something of a misnomer.

—

One would be hard pressed to overstate the impact of the Bauhaus on how design was taught in the twentieth century. Of the school’s myriad pedagogical contributions, the so-called Vorkurs remains arguably the most radical and widely emulated. The obligatory year of preliminary instruction, built around compositional exercises that were at once exceedingly rigorous and radically abstract, evolved with startling intensity over the course of the school’s short, tumultuous existence. The course was taught in markedly different ways by a succession of seminal instructors: Johannes Itten (1919-23), whose approach was rooted in the an unapologetically emotional expressionism and the generation of “contrasts”; László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers (1923-28), who began integrating new tools (notably the camera), a preoccupation with light, shadow, and transparency, as well as a distancing of the curriculum from Itten’s expressionism;  and finally Josef Albers as sole instructor (1928-33), whose tenure shifted the course as close as it had yet come to the pursuit of “form that exists for its own sake.”⁴ Despite these shifting priorities, the Vorkurs nonetheless managed to achieve a certain consistency of effect: to destabilize newly arrived students’ expectations of what it meant to create (“unlearning,” in Itten’s parlance), to disabuse them of previous points of cultural reference, and to disorient them sufficiently that their thinking might be more effectively restructured around form, light, color, texture, and other perceptual concerns.

Versions of the Vorkurs would go on to be implemented by admirers of the Bauhaus’s paradigm-shifting reputation throughout the world, and in some cases even implemented by programs who attested to resist the tenets of the Bauhaus model.⁵ Most importantly, its lessons were also carried forward, probably to more pronounced effect, by many of the instructors and students who were scattered by the school’s closure in 1933, who went on to teach in (and in some cases, to establish from the ground up) forward-thinking programs of design education throughout the world. Indeed, far from being a settled matter, experimentation with the substance of what would, in time, become more broadly known as “basic design” continued at the various self-proclaimed successors to the pedagogical legacy of the Bauhaus (more than one of which had the advantage of being publicly “blessed” by Walter Gropius). Moholy-Nagy built upon his earlier curriculum in Chicago, first as director of the “New Bauhaus” (1937-38) and later at the School of Design (founded 1939, now the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology), where he oversaw a more tactile, materials-oriented “basic workshop” until his premature death in 1946.⁶ Albers, meanwhile, continued what would prove to be a lifelong engagement with basic design—with notably fixations on color theory, Gestalt principles (especially the differentiation of “figure-ground”), and articulated surfaces—first at Black Mountain College (1933-49), and later Yale University’s Department of Design (1950-58).⁷

In August of 1953, Albers (along with Walter Peterhans and Helene Nonné-Schmidt) took up a visiting lecturer position at the newly established HfG Ulm. Max Bill, founding rector of the HfG and a former Bauhäusler himself, had opted to base much of the new school’s curriculum on that of its famous predecessor, and had subtly rebranded their year-long basic course as the Grundlehre. It was the job of Albers, Peterhans, and Nonné-Schmidt to help orient the HfG’s inaugural cohort vis-a-vis a series of preliminary exercises, after which Bill and other HfG faculty took over for the bulk of the year. This system was repeated the following year (1954-55), by which time Maldonado had joined the faculty. He would go on to oversee the Grundlehre curriculum beginning in 1955-56. Though his approach was justifiably most indebted to Albers, whose lessons he had the advantage of observing firsthand, Maldonado gradually integrated lectures on the newest developments in topics including symmetry, topology, semiotics, and ergonomics into the Grundlehre curriculum (though these were always kept separate from the exercises themselves). This was, notably, a break from Albers’s previous insistence that to inject outside bodies of knowledge into the basic design curriculum would undermine the output (Albers famously discouraged his students from reading books during their participation in the Vorkurs).⁸

It was this most contemporary and theoretically rich interpretation of basic design that Huff encountered upon arriving in Ulm in September of 1956. Quite by accident, Huff would locate in Maldonado’s teaching everything he had hoped to discover in the work of Vordemberge-Gildewart: namely, a set of lucid compositional principles from which to attempt to suss out new forms of architecture. It is clear from later developments that Huff’s responses to these exercises must have left a strong impression on Maldonado (more on this later). It is equally evident that Huff became utterly convinced of the merits of his teacher’s pedagogical approach and theoretical position, a conviction that may have owed as much to Maldonado’s leadership through what proved to be the most turbulent year of the HfG’s brief history as it did with the efficacy of the Grundlehre exercises to the teaching, or the production, of architecture.⁹

From 1958 to 1960, Huff worked full time in the Philadelphia office of Louis Kahn, where he dedicated most of his time to developing the headquarters of the Tribune-Review newspaper in Greensburg, Pennsylvania (1958-62).¹⁰ At the same time, he began a campaign to generate interest in the establishment of a basic course in the mold of Maldonado’s Grundlehre in the School of Architecture at Yale, but by this juncture Josef Albers had firmly established himself in the adjacent School of Art, and had even been induced in 1957 and ‘58 by Paul Schweikher, then chair of the architecture program, to teach a course in “structural organization” (which, according to Huff, differed from Albers’s typical basic course in name only).¹¹ Huff’s proposed program may well have been deemed redundant by the school’s leadership from the outset—they already had arguably the seminal innovator of the Bauhaus Vorkurs; why would they need a Grundlehre, too? Not yet defeated, and with Kahn’s encouragement, he developed a Maldonado-indebted syllabus and proposed to teach a basic course himself at the University of Pennsylvania, but was met with indifference from the administration despite his famous mentor’s backing. Finally, in 1960, Huff got the opportunity he had inadvertently sought out: he was contacted by Schweikher, who had just accepted a position as head of the School of Architecture at Carnegie Institute of Technology, in Huff’s native Pittsburgh. An instructor at Yale when Huff was completing his thesis, Schweikher was familiar with the younger man’s thinking, and with the fact that he had studied at an increasingly famous HfG. Now, ostensibly having heard about his former student’s failed proposal for a basic course at Penn, Schweikher offered Huff a place on the faculty at Carnegie, and with it, finally, a chance to bring the Grundlehre to America, though quite contrary to his original intent, and at the considerable expense of his own time and energy. Although Huff would continue to work intermittently for Kahn for another two years (until the completion of his current project), the better part of his efforts would now shift—permanently, it would turn out—towards design pedagogy.¹² “Suddenly, sheer chance had veered me far off the course of my original intent, merely to spread the word in the States about a consequent course of a progressive school of design. I had stuck out my neck; my head was on the platter.”¹³

Huff taught at Carnegie from 1960 until 1972, a period during which he facilitated the invitation of Maldonado, Bonsiepe, and other central figures from the HfG to visit as guest lecturers. Maldonado returned the favor. From 1963 until the HfG’s dissolution in 1968, Huff would also return repeatedly to Ulm to teach basic design. By 1963, however, a number of key changes had occurred. First, the HfG had weathered another storm and emerged intact but yet again transformed. Horst Rittel and likeminded faculty who had arrived during Maldonado and Aicher’s push for the “scientification” of design, and whose line of thinking was above all methodological, had largely dictated the direction of the HfG from June 1960 to December 1962.¹⁴ Maldonado and Aicher fought to regain control of the school, reasserting design, not an ever-more sophisticated methodology (or worse, as they saw it, “methodolatry”), as the intended focus of the HfG.^{15 16} Aicher and Maldonado, now rector and vice-rector respectively, set about adjusting the curriculum to put things back on track. Responding to the lessons learned from this most recent challenge, changes to the curriculum were set in motion that would bring an end to the unified Grundlehre, such that students could for the first time enter one of the specialized departments from the moment of arrival. Instead, they would encounter a modified Grundkurs in their first year that was tailored to the particular mediums, materials, and methods of their chosen course of study. Huff, for his part, taught in the Visual Communication and Building departments. By this time, both Albers and Maldonado had begun to realize the suitability of “basic design,” in all of its complexity, as a potent realm for advanced studies. In other words, there was a tacit admission among the discipline’s innovators that there was, perhaps, nothing especially basic about “basic design.”¹⁷

Huff’s exercises in both schools were heavily indebted to those he had confronted as a student at the HfG, and so Maldonado’s (and by extension Albers’s) concern for Gestalt theory remained embedded in his approach, including exercises using raster modules to produce matrix-like compositions that call to mind the popular Optical Art of the period.¹⁸ Huff would further develop Maldonado’s parquetry assignment into something more sophisticated: the so-called “Parquet Deformation” exercise, which focused on two-dimensional transitional geometry, challenging students to deploy advanced principles of symmetry (twofold- and fourfold mirror rotation symmetry).^{19 20} The parameters of this exercise were so thoroughly conceived that as early as 1961, students were achieving results that were every bit as sophisticated as those executed some thirty years later.²¹ 

Huff taught at the University at Buffalo SUNY from 1974 until his retirement in 1998, focusing predominantly on an optional basic course for “pre-architecture” students, and a thoroughly conceived, collectively instructed first-year architecture studio curriculum that shows strong signs of his influence.²² By 1985, however, Huff had lost his enthusiasm for teaching introductory architecture courses, shifting his focus to a graduate course in which students did exhaustive studies for a “new experimental school of architecture,” documenting historical references including the HfG. Later, seemingly in keeping with Maldonado and Albers’s earlier realization, he established a graduate level basic design course, hoping that these more mature and technically adept students would gain as much from the instruction as he had during his brief stint at the HfG decades earlier. 

Huff’s desire to extract from basic design some manner of organizational values for the practice of architecture, so lucidly expressed in the immediate aftermath of his first encounter with Maldonado, seems to have waned over the years in favor of a conviction that basic design, as an autonomous, syntactic discipline, more than warranted his full attention. Though some echoes of basic design — the Bauhaus Vorkurs, the HfG’s Grundlehre, and others — may still be found in the instruction of architecture today, it is somewhat perplexing that one of its most vocal champions left it to a new generation to focus more emphatically on explicitly architectural outcomes of what Huff himself acknowledge, at its very core, to be a study of structure, not only perceptual, but also physical.²³ Perhaps the challenge of “bridging” the chasm between abstract, non-applied design, and applied design, so central to Maldonado’s thinking in the 1960s, which Huff himself acknowledged, proved to be too much to surmount.

It is not difficult to project how the principles of Huff’s largely two-dimensional exercises—and the structural, geometric, and by extension spatial agility students ought to have extracted from their execution—could have been applied to the realization of remarkable architectural outcomes.²⁴ It is therefore somewhat perplexing, in light of the obvious architectural potential of applying these principles to three-dimensional structures and the resonance such an approach would seem to have with the building systems-oriented pursuits of the HfG’s Department of Building (as clearly indicated by the fact that Huff was among the teachers of that department’s Grundlehre on numerous occasions), that he so stubbornly resisted such a step throughout his career.²⁵ Or it would be, at any rate, if not for the fact that he himself responded to this apparent contradiction.²⁶ 

“I have dealt all along, as Albers put it, purely with form that exists for its own sake, in the confidence that immersion in formal content alone—devoid of cultural, referential, or assistive, even physically characterized overtones—can unleash the sensory capacity. I speak now for myself. My overarching objective has been to elevate, without inordinate distraction, my students’ mastery of their own innate aesthetic acuities.”²⁷

If anything, Huff’s contributions to the further development of basic design, as well as his efforts to serve as a conduit from Ulm to American architectural academia, hint at a fundamental truth: that such innovations as the Bauhaus Vorkurs rarely end with the dissolution of the institutions that gave birth to them. Rather, they scatter and evolve, at times beyond recognition, in response to new constraints. With this in mind, “radical pedagogies” must be understood as a fundamentally recursive phenomenon.

Huff died at the age of 92 in January 2021. In the absence of one of its most vocal proponents, the question persists as to what this often misunderstood field of “basic design,” so central to the foundations of twentieth century design pedagogy, may yet have to offer students of architecture in the twenty-first.

Cover image: Poster for the exhibition “William S. Huff: Products of Pedagogic Processes,” at Hopkins Hall Gallery, Ohio State University (15-26 October, 1974). Designed by the Swiss graphic designer Willi Kunz, then a member of the Visual Communication faculty at Ohio State. The composition includes work produced by students in response to several of Huff’s basic design exercises: “Parquet Deformation” by Peter Silson, “Single Element Raster” by Gerald Weisman, and “Conflicting Depth Cues” by John Hegnes.  MS 139.2, BOX 17, Folder 2, William S. Huff Papers, University Archives, SUNY at Buffalo. Courtesy, University Archives, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. © 2022 Willi Kunz.

1 Huff, Williams S. “An Argument for Basic Design.” From ulm no. 12/13, 1965. p. 25-36.
2 What has [V-G’s] work to offer to architecture? A new dynamism! Symphonic architecture! I do not yet know — but I propose to find out.” From a draft of Huff’s Fulbright Scholarship application essay, 1955. Courtesy, University Archives, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.
3  A series of letters, held at the University Archives of the University at Buffalo, SUNY, to well-connected professors in Ulm and Stuttgart, including Hans Gugelot at the HfG, Huff tried desperately to appeal for some manner of advanced standing at the HfG by merit of his previous education, in order to be given the freedom to pursue his proposed course of study under “V-G.” Despite his objections,, he admitted in one such letter that “I am sure there are many things of value I might learn in the grundlehre.”
4 Guerri, Claudio F. and William S. Huff. “Analyses of the Bauhaus’s Preliminary Course Under Its Three Masters,” VIII Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS-AIS), Lyon, France, 2004. 
5 Huff, Williams S. “An Argument for Basic Design.” From ulm no. 12/13, 1965. p. 25-36.
6 In this endeavor, Moholy-Nagy leaned heavily on the aid of Hin Bredendieck, a former Bauhaus student and eventual founder of the Department of Industrial Design at Georgia Tech. 
7 At the Bauhaus, there was no need for Albers to teach color as part of his Vorkurs, since this was an area of instruction that Klee and Kandinsky had taken upon themselves. At Black Mountain and Yale, he began developing sophisticated studies with his students in tandem that informed later, seminal works like his series of paintings, “Homage to the Square,” and his book Interaction of Color (1963).
8 Huff, Williams S. “Grundlehre at the HfG: A Focus on ‘Visuelle Grammatik.’” From Space Tessellations: Experimenting with Parquet Deformations. Basel:‎ Birkhäuser, 2022. p. 65-89.
9 Spitz, René. The View Behind the Foreground: The Political History of the Ulm School of Design, 1953-68. Stuttgart / London: Edition Axel Menges, 2002. p. 192-278. In April 1956, the founding rectorship of Max Bill—which had been marked by a confrontational style that garnered no small amount of internal friction—came to an end, and leadership of the HfG was assumed by a governing board consisting of Maldonado (chair and acting rector), Otl Aicher, Hans Gugelot, and Vordemberge-Gildewart. Bill continued to direct the Department of Architecture, and the entirety of the 1956-57 academic year was dominated by a bitter dispute between Bill and the governing board together with  Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. Bill left in Summer 1957, after which Maldonado and Aicher redirected the HfG to break away from the existing Bauhaus-based curriculum, and dispense with the heroic “genius artist” figure in favor of a new concept of the designer as a socially-committed, technically-proficient, collectively-driven operator. Amidst the debate over the future of the school,  Huff arrived in September 1956 and became among the most vocal proponents of the “Ulm model” outside of Europe, and a crucial bridge for former students and faculty in North America in the 1960s.
10 The president of the Tribune-Review was a relation of Huff’s, and it was at his request that Kahn accepted the commission and, if Huff’s letters are accurate, entrusted a greater deal of the design work to the younger architect than was typical in the practice.
11 “Grundlehre at the HfG,” p. 85.
12 It is worth noting that Huff was not the only “Ulmer” to prioritize architectural pedagogy in the United States. The Swiss architect Olivio Ferrari, who had been among the eight students to depart from Ulm in 1957 to complete their studies with Max Bill in Zurich  — and could therefore be understood as the product of a very different HfG and mode of architectural thought — went on to be among the most influential figures in the formation of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies at Virginia Tech from 1965 onward.
13 “Grundlehre at the HfG,” p. 84.
14 “Grundlehre at the HfG,” p. 80.
15 Maldonado, Tomás and Gui Bonsiepe. “Science and Design,” from ulm no. 10/11, 1964. p. 10-29.
16 Some have suggested that the HfG could be understood as the birthplace of computation in architecture, and while the methodological impulse underlying this period of the school’s history, as well as the fetishization of complexity that occurred as a result, would seem to support this assessment, it could also be argued that the formal or organizational complexity of the outputs of design computation often slip past a threshold of comprehensibility. By contrast, the results of Huff’s Parquet Deformations, which generally involve more incremental and subtle manipulations, are compelling precisely because they are done manually, and therefore insist upon a productive tension between complexity and control.
17 Ibid.
18  No accident, certainly. After a trip to America in 1957, where Inge Aicher-Scholl had visited Princeton’s Perception Education Center, there was huge support at the HfG to establish an Institute of Optical Perception, an idea that would come to fruition at the height of the methodologists’ influence. Spitz, p. 213.
19  Huff had initially misunderstood these principles upon being introduced to them by Maldonado, but later mastered through an independent study of crystallography—to affect the gradual mutation of the “tiles” across an orthogonal or rotated grid. “Grundlehre at the HfG,” p. 86.
20  Huff’s “discovery” was later the topic of an article, “Parquet Deformations: Patterns of Tiles that Shift in One Direction,” in Scientific American. Penned by Douglas Hofstadter, the scholar of cognitive science, and by that time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), as part of his “Metamagical Themas” column (1981-83), the article brought Huff’s work to an audience outside of the design world, who now approach the exercise from the standpoint of optical theory or programming.
21 Student output from Huff’s teaching of the Parquet Deformations exercise during his first few years at Carnegie Institute of Technology was featured in “An Argument for Basic Design,” an article he contributed to issue 12/13 of the HfG’s journal ulm (1965). 
22 Five “fragments” of architectural performance were emphasized in this “basic architecture” curriculum: “the anthropocentric and the ergonomic (“the body’s relation to itself and to objects in space”); the constructional (the smaller and larger joinery of specific material(s); the formal or syntactic (emphasizing the void of space and involving aesthetic judgment); the environmental (passive control of natural elements—light, acoustics, climate); the contextual (urban and pastoral landscape). Each fragment was addressed by tasks that strictly minimized, during targeted consideration, the involvement of the other four fragments.” “Grundlehre at the HfG,” p. 89. 
23 “An Argument for Basic Design,” p. 26.
24  Huff’s teaching did include a handful of explicitly three-dimensional problems, notably the so-called “trisection of the cube,” in which students were charged with applying a series of sophisticated symmetry operations towards the division of a cubic volume into three identical parts. The HfG-Archiv in Ulm includes a number of exquisitely executed wooden models of this exercise’s outcomes. Yet one could argue that this exercise was fundamentally a “solid-void” operation, and therefore more applicable to lessons about mass than to the sophisticated structural possibilities implicit in the Parquet Deformations exercise. 
25  Beginning in 1957, following Max Bill’s departure from the HfG, the Department of Architecture became the Department of Building. Under the leadership of Herbert Ohl, the department pursued an agenda consistent with Maldonado and Aicher’s broader vision of industrial design, centered on the development of space-frames, panelization, and other prefabricated tectonic systems. One might argue that this preoccupation suggests a clear indebtedness to Konrad Wachsmann, a central member of the architectural faculty during the earliest years of the HfG’s existence. Yet the school was deprived of Wachsmann’s expertise as they set down this new path; he departed in 1957 in protest of Maldonado and Aicher’s plans to establish an Institute of Industrialized Building: an apparatus intended to develop productive relationships with private industry. For a more thorough account of this development, see René Spitz’s exceptional The View behind the Foreground: The Political History of the Ulm School of Design, 1953–1968 (Edition Axel Menges, 2002).
26  There have been some efforts in recent years to use a three-dimensional translation of Huff’s Parquet Deformation exercise (or comparable programs) to spark the (physical) structural imagination of students, by the likes of Werner Van Hoeydonck (lecturer at TU Wien, and editor of a forthcoming book Space Tessellations, about Huff’s discovery and its applications), Tuğrul Yazar (Istanbul Bilgi University), Benay Gürsoy Toykoç (Penn State University), and others.
27  “Grundlehre at the HfG,” p. 86-88.

Matthew Kennedy is a designer, writer, and educator based in Mexico City. In 2020, he co-founded the architecture and design studio Cosa with longtime collaborator Andrés Harvey. Cosa seeks to explore the relationship between local material culture and global economic networks through architectural intervention, experimental preservation, exhibition design, and research. He has previously worked in architecture practices including Frida Escobedo, Charlap Hyman & Herrero, and The Fautory. Matthew is the assistant editor of the architectural research journal Faktur: Documents and Architecture, and alongside Nile Greenberg is co-author of the forthcoming book The Advanced School of Collective Feeling (Park Books, 2022). He has taught design studios and architectural theory at the Pennsylvania State University and has presented at venues including the Center for Architecture in New York, LIGA in Mexico City, and The Berlage in Delft, NL. Matthew holds an M.Arch from Columbia University and, as of Fall 2022, is pursuing a PhD in the history and theory of architecture at Harvard University. 

The critical consciousness about the causes and effects of the Anthropocene can unsettle not only the extensively urbanized mode of dwelling on this planet, but also the onto-epistemic assumptions that structure the discipline of architecture. In short, the root-idea of Nature as a free resource available to the exceptionality of human Culture. However, facing the urgent need of some kind of reaction to climate emergency, architecture, perhaps more than ever, requires redefinition.¹ As proposed by Donna Haraway, “we – all of us on Terra – live in disturbing times,” and as a “necessary resurgence,” our “task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.”²

Nonetheless, a response to the Anthropocene from within the practice of architecture involves a kind of a paradox, the “paradox of action.”³ On one hand, the challenges of turning away from the hegemonic practices and assumptions in architecture can hold in check the possibilities of action by the project (the main tool in the architect’s tool box), construction, or even the contract. On the other hand, action is necessary because it is necessary to do something. After all, as Greta Thunberg would say, “I want you to act as if the house was on fire, because it is.”  

Against the state of paralysis, possibly caused by this kind of paradox, it is necessary to stimulate new forms of “response-ability,” as proposed by Haraway.⁴ In this short essay, I present a mere glimpse of what seems to me as a fertile form of cultivating response-ability based on the idea of lightness. This idea emerges from my collaboration with the Yanomami people from the Marauiá River (Amazonas, Brazil); and also with my understanding of lightness as a fundamental aspect of the traditional and contemporary spatial practices of the indigenous people of Lowland South America. Through this perspective, then, I raise the question of how we – architects – can learn with these practices in order to radically rethink the hegemonic architectural learning and doing. 

 

It is widely known that traditional and many contemporary indigenous architectures of Lowland South America are essentially ephemeral, sometimes highly mobile, and built with natural and perishable materials, such as wood, straw, and vines.⁵ For the same reason, they exceed the monumental-stone-centered comprehension of the colonial and auto-colonial agents – particularly architects and historians – which did not even consider (or considered, historically) these architectures as a valid form of Architecture (with capital “A”). One of the assumptions behind this kind of indifference can be elicited by recalling the Vitruvian principles of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas that structure the classical ideology of architecture. Firmitas, in the sense of “solidity” and “durability,” is precisely what lacks in the kind of architecture presented by the indigenous spatial practices of Lowland South America. However, just like Italo Calvino once wrote, through the “opposition between lightness and weight,” I will “uphold the values of lightness”; not in the sense of “vagueness,” but of “precision.” Or, better said, like Paul Valery (quoted by Calvino), lightness “like a bird, and not like a feather.”⁶

As noticed by Sergio Yanomami, from Pukima Beira Village at the upper Marauiá River, during the first of his travels to the megalopolis of São Paulo, it is exactly the weight of this solid and (supposedly) durable concrete constructions that suffocates the e/Earth.⁷ Asphyxiated by countless apartment buildings, immense viaducts, lengthy highways, and endless kinds of pavements swallowing the soil, it is definitely hard to breathe. Trees have fallen, the e/Earth revenges, and the sky threatens to fall.⁸ Against this planetary catastrophe to come, Sergio Yanomami questions, why not build like the Yanomami, really close to “the ground”, “low”, “light, wooden, for the earth to try to breathe”?⁹

From a complementary perspective, it was during a boat trip down the Marauiá River, reflecting on the architectures of the Yanomami people that I understood how it is exactly this transitory way of building and dwelling that make the perishable, imperishable. In other terms, it is through the continuity of the infirmitas (or lightness) that the firmitas (or durability) is composed. Not in terms of a durable or solid materiality, but, on the contrary, it is by stepping lightly on e/Earth that the continuity of this transitory way of dwelling extends itself since ancestral times, transforming itself endlessly with all its vitality, creativity and resistance.¹⁰ Against the “religion of civilization” and those who “change their repertoire, but repeat the dance” of “stepping hardly on Earth,” these architectures, on the contrary, “step lightly, very lightly, over the Earth,”¹¹ as “a flight of a bird in the sky” in which, in “an instant after it has passed, there is no trace.”¹²

Beyond its light and organic materiality, this transitory way of dwelling is deeply engaged with a dynamic and vital character of architecture. It is fully open to the many movements of life that, varying between moments of more social stability or instability, urges to build, or unbuild, its constructions. Moments of more stability raise the opportunity to build a new house or village. On the contrary, moments of more instability can require to abandon its more durable (yet still organic) constructions, to let them become substrate and then forest again; then it is time to move, to camp in the forest, and to build lighter than before. This variability works as a spatial technology to control the construction’s impact in the forest, the extensiveness and the duration of its architectures. As I argued before, it is through this vital sensibility and dynamic reproducibility that the transitory materiality of architecture can become something lasting, constant, and somehow endless. Or, as I would say, a technology of stepping light on e/Earth.

To affect yourself and to really learn with the Amerindian worldviews and its spatial practices is itself a kind of response-ability. In this sense, cultivating response-ability in architecture opens a kind of political-ontological clearing wide enough, as Haraway suggests, “to being for some worlds rather than others and helping to compose those worlds with others.”¹³ In this sense, an alternative path that cultivates response-ability does not exclude the paradox of action from the scenery, but learns how and with whom to act, react and respond in its presence. Not as a response to the paradox itself, but a response as much to what provoked its intrusion as to its consequences.¹⁴

But how can we expand this ability of learning with the technology of stepping lightly also to our own world – the world of “the people of merchandise,” as postulated by Kopenawa¹⁵ –, which is already severely impacted by the extensive human traces on Earth? My response could not be more than a series of propositions to begin to pave a broader architectural technology of stepping lightly. These propositions, however, should be understood more as guidelines to alternative paths, deepening the practice and the reflection based – always – in plural and situated forms of action, rather than to any kind of ready-made emergency escapes.

First, it is time to seriously rethink the root-idea of nature as a resource. To compose with nature and its multispecies entanglements rather than extracting and exploring it in an unidirectional and anthropocenic way. To cultivate more forests, make more kin, and build less cities.¹⁶ And even to tense the paradigm of the city, by which – following the critique of the indigenous thinker Ailton Krenak – cannot be seen “other than as a harsh incidence of a human way of inhabiting that could be thought of in other ways, but which has been a sameness for the last, perhaps, 4,000 years.”¹⁷ Against this monoculture of the urban, that steps deeply hard on e/Earth, it is necessary to reinvent the city, both conceptually and pragmatically, rethinking the dual opposition between forest and cities, or the separation of Nature and Culture. 

In the naturecultural¹⁸ forestcities to come, climate-adaptive planning tools will be necessary for the creation of socially and environmentally just multispecies entanglements. Besides that, learning with the indigenous architectures of Lowland South America can also bring to evidence how urgent it is to seriously propose alternatives to the solidified, destructive, and seemingly endless cycles of planetary extraction-construction-demolition. These are the cycles that make our cities, buildings and infrastructures, supports our profession as architects and, at the same time, suffocates the e/Earth. However, it is always time “to being for some worlds rather than others and helping to compose those worlds with others.”¹⁹ In this sense, architects can still reinvent themselves by engaging with other worlds. This, however, should not reduce itself by merely reproducing exotic forms of knowledge or construction in foreign contexts, which could, ultimately, reproduce the colonial plunder or even outsource the response-ability to the problems that our own “civilized” world created to others. On the contrary, this change of paradigm in architectural practices can generate and create other forms of acting, collaborating, and seriously engaging within a decolonial and a regenerative perspective.²⁰

After all, as Krenak questions: “Is the only possible continuity of social experience confined to the walls of concrete, iron, cement and glass that our cities have become?”²¹ Could we imagine other architectures, such as the ones “that prospered in periods of the history of some peoples that gently touch the earth’s body (…) landing like birds?”²² At least, we can start by seriously listening to the lessons from “the forest that breathes, that does not produce garbage, that transpires, that inspires, that gives food, where the roof of the house (…) forms a soft fabric that dialogues with the forest, that dialogues with everything, with the birds, with the rain, with the sun, which has a smell, which has humor and which is a dwelling, a shelter, a house – shouldn’t the city be a shelter?”²³ The path of possible responses is definitely lengthy, but there is no lack of pavement to remove and recycle so the e/Earth can finally breathe again. We can start as quickly as a flight of a bird in the sky.

1 The construction sector is among the key drivers of the Anthropocene. As highlighted by Matti Kuittinen: “The global construction sector consumes approximately half of all planetary raw materials, and over 40 percent of the available primary energy is accountable for a third of all GHG emissions and generates over 30 percent of all waste”; “In other words, if we continue to build using the current practices and amounts, then we will seriously overshoot the GHG emissions budget, possibly trigger ‘dangerous’ climate change, and permanently alter the living conditions of this planet.” For more information see: Matti Kuittinen, “Architecture for the Anthropocene: How to build for a better future?”, in Built environment and architecture as a resource, ed. Minna Chudoba (Sverige: Nordic Academic Press of Architectural Research, 2020), 15-38.
2 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2016), 1.
3 The formulation of the “paradox of action” comes from Rodrigo Messina (partner of messina | rivas arquitetos and master’s candidate at the Institute of Brazilian Studies of the University of São Paulo). I am deeply grateful for him for sharing his ideas through several conversations and an unpublished manuscript on, “Architectures to be made – The paradox of action and response-ability in the Anthropocene (Arquiteturas por fazer – O paradoxo da ação e as habilidades de resposta no Antropoceno).” I am equally grateful for the stimulating and careful comments and revisions of Laura Pappalardo (doctoral student at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo).
4  Donna Haraway, Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
5  For more information, see, for example, Sylvia Caiuby Noaves (ed.), Habitações Indígenas (São Paulo: Nobel/Edusp, 1983).
6 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 16.
7 Sergio Yanomami (with Daniel Jabra and Thiago Benucci), “O peso das coisas”, in Contracidades, ed. Felipe Carnevalli and Paula Lobato (Belo Horizonte: Piseagrama, 2022).
8 See, also, the urgent book of Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Cambridge/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013).
9 Sergio Yanomami, op. cit.
10 See Thiago Benucci, “O jeito yanomami de pendurar redes.” Master’s thesis, University of São Paulo, 2020.
11 Ailton Krenak (interview by Amanda Massuela and Bruno Weis), “O tradutor do pensamento mágico“. Revista Cult, n. 251 (2019).
12 Ailton Krenak (interview by Fernanda Santana), “Vida sustentável é vaidade pessoal. Jornal Correio, January 25th (2020).
13  See footnote no. 32 in Donna Haraway, op. cit.
14 This idea is based on the argument of Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism (Open Humanities Press, 2015), 43.
15  See Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, op. cit., chapter 19 “Merchandise Love”.
16 This ideia is inspired by the motto from the article by Donna Houston et al., “Make kin, not cities! Multispecies entanglements and ‘becoming-world’ in planning theory”, Planning Theory, vol. 17, n. 2, 2018, 190-212.
17  Ailton Krenak and Wellington Cançado, “Saiam desse pesadelo de concreto!” (“Get out of this concrete nightmare!”). In Habitar o Antropoceno, ed. Gabriela Moulin, Renata Marquez, Roberto Andrés and Wellington Cançado (Belo Horizonte: BDMG Cultural / Cosmópolis, 2022), 215.
18 “Natureculture” is the onto-epistemic and semantic synthesis of “nature” and “culture” that interrogate the dualisms deeply embedded within the intellectual traditions of the sciences and humanities; and that elicit their inseparability in ecological relationships that are both biophysically and socially formed. See, for example, Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).
19 Donna Haraway, op. cit., footnote no. 32.
20 As a complementary reference related to my experience, see Thiago Benucci, “Architectural Ethnography and Pragmatic Alliances with the Yanomami People”, Jaap Bakema Study Centre – The Observers Observed: Architectural Uses Of Ethnography (Eighth Annual Conference, November 2021). Available at: https://jaap-bakema-study-centre.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/publications.
21  Ailton Krenak and Wellington Cançado, op. cit., 219.
22  Ibid., 220.
23  Ibid., 217.

Thiago Magri Benucci is an architect, graduated from Associação Escola da Cidade (2016) and anthropologist, with a Master’s degree in the University of São Paulo (2020), working on the intersections of Architecture with Social Anthropology, Indigenous Knowledge, Anthropocene and Multispecies Studies.

In a practice whose information is as inaccessible as that of architecture, it is a relative shock to witness the recent proliferation of external resources that pursue the exact opposite effect. This has led institutions to pose the reasonable but fatalistic question: “What is the purpose of the institution and the diploma in the face of this rising tide of change?” What they fail to realize is that extra-institutional, spontaneous acts of learning have always and will always continue to exist, occurring constantly for learners of architecture. It is only that technology has increased the urgency of these acts, while making it easier to meet their needs.

Today a seemingly limitless number of extra-institutional resources exist – from Archdaily for images of built work, to Detail Magazine for construction detail drawings, SuckerPunch for experimental student work, and Instagram for a variety of architectural content. This only scratches the surface of the new world of content; there are also those that aggregate job listings, open calls, and design requests, and those that, like Show It Better, provide educational material for aspiring designers to learn better representational strategies and ways of approaching matters of mental health. Given this condition, immediately two questions arise: one, what sort of pedagogical circumstances does this create for the learner? And two, with this surfeit of content, is this not enough to render the diploma obsolete?

To the first question, we can see that at the moment, studying within the institution often requires the student to search feverishly through YouTube videos, Reddit posts, and the like for tutorials, examples, and information on how to obtain a desired effect in software, how to produce a type of drawing, how to generate clean 3D prints, and so on. In other words, studying within the institution at present often leads the student to search for information outside of the institution. However, this is not a new condition. The generation before them also looked outside – digging feverishly through copies of Detail Magazine for examples of wall sections, copies of articles with tips on model making, and so on. The generations before them as well – whether through monographs and pamphlets, magazines and photocopies, or forum posts and video tutorials, despite how present conditions appear, the compulsion to look beyond the institution for requisite information is ubiquitous and inherent.

This is because the search itself is timeless – there is always a desire to find inspiration, relate to a zeitgeist, and consume examples of contemporary architecture outside of the paywall of the monograph, museum, architectural association, or university. What has changed in our time is the number of resources, multiplied as a consequence of technology’s capability of both meeting and heightening that desire. As such, this intrinsic pull to learn is exacerbated evermore; the plethora of extra-institutional material only serves to make it more frantic. Desire is insatiable and, in psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s words, metonymic; even with a seemingly limitless supply of free information and inspiration, it remains unsatisfied. In this way it persists ineradicably, occurring regardless of the pedagogical context.

Not only is this the nature of desire vis-a-vis learning, but it is also the very nature of the practice of design. Design itself is frenetic and is, in some ways, a long list of problems to solve – problems for which it is impossible to completely prepare in advance. There is always that which is not-yet-learned, and there are always problems that require one to know that which is not-yet-learned. As such, the act of design, like and as learning, is always incomplete, always spontaneous, and always in some way urgent. It is a search at times for outlying information and at other times for an outlying desired outcome. This is design, and, synchronous with the act of learning itself, it is what stimulates extra-institutional learning.¹

Of course, though the desire for extra-institutional material is timeless, this condition still points to a lack in institutional pedagogy itself – there is indeed that which institution is failing to fulfill. However, this lack is not discrediting to the institution – rather, it is immanent. Much like design, education, architecture, and life itself are continuous and unpredictable, and this remains the case whether academia is standardized or lightweight and motile. As such, the necessity for independent forms of learning and teaching will always exist. It is not up to the institution to try to encompass all existing and possible forms of knowledge, nor would it be possible; the organization and hierarchy of the institution make it too slow relative to the development of technology, the needs of each student too particular, and the time and budget provided likely far too small to accommodate every course, tutorial, or instruction that might be useful to the architecture student.

To respond to the second question², this lack does not invalidate the diploma – in fact, it is precisely what sustains it. Independent forms of learning are the outlier, the other that upholds and delineates the whole; they are what allow the institution to exist. As black makes white, and that which is alien delineates that which is familiar, that which is not institutional is exactly what gives meaning to the institution. Speaking simply, difference produces meaning. Speaking in terms of set theory, the establishment of a set requires an other, external term to provide a name and outline. Speaking practically, this idea is demonstrated in three ways. One, extra-institutional artifacts generally give rise to institutions themselves. Some of the most famous published works in architectural history were extra-institutional, and often it was because they were extra-institutional that they were famous, and because theywere famous – i.e. popular – that they were extra-institutional – i.e. popularly distributed. These works generated ideas around which schools of thought formed; later, these schools of thought either developed into new institutions or were integrated into existing ones. Institutionality is ex post facto; existence is predicated upon a clarity of concept and purpose, and death and rebirth are predicated upon a loss of lucidity and an acquisition of new clarity, respectively.

Take Vitruvius’ De architectura – both the first work of architectural theory and the first extra-institutional work of architectural theory in the Western canon. Produced roughly between 30 and 15 B.C., De architectura covers a wide range of architectural considerations, from the identity of the architect, to ideal aesthetic principles, to lessons on building technology. Only some fourteen to fifteen-hundred years later did it reach cultural prominence, appropriated by Renaissance humanists who found in it not only guidelines for building methods and designing with proportion but also the very definition of architecture itself. This document legitimized, structuralised, and affirmed the notion of architecture as a distinct practice; as such, Renaissance architecture as a school of thought flourished, and the first institutions in this tradition gradually emerged. For instance, in Renaissance humanist and Vitruvius acolyte Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, De architectura found a successor – the first architectural treatise of the Italian Renaissance – and in Alberti himself, the extra-institutional treatise found itself heavily influencing one of the most powerful institutions of the time – the Vatican, for whom Alberti was architectural advisor. In another instance, Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, following Vitruvius’ treatise, wrote his own – I quattro libri dell’architettura, a document so influential it established a school of thought (Palladian architecture) that would continue to be sourced for centuries to come in municipal and educational buildings from Prussia to the British colonies.

Le Corbusier is another prominent example of the extra-institutional intrinsic effect on institutions. The Swiss-Frenchman received no formal architectural training; he was more or less self-taught. Coming from a background in painting and watchmaking, Le Corbusier, through extra-institutional enterprises in the founding of magazine L’Esprit Nouveau with Amédée Ozenfant and Paul Dermée, the writing of his seminal manifesto Vers une architecture, and his many residential and urban-planning designs, has inexorably defined how one thinks about and learns architecture within the institution. He is one of the critical standard-bearers of Modernism, his identity as a polymath who dabbles in furniture design, writing, and urban planning defines the image of the ideal “architect,” and his multimedia approach, mirrored by his Bauhaus contemporaries and reaffirmed today by architects like Steven Holl, still defines the architectural curriculum in most American universities today. Like many of his contemporaries, he came from an extra-institutional background, but the establishment of the CIAM, the inclusion of his ideas in schools’ curriculums, and the reception of an offer to teach at l’École des Beaux-Arts reveals that both new institutions emerge from and existing institutions adapt to revolutionary outsiders.

Through Vitruvius and Le Corbusier, we can see how extra-institutional ideas both create institutions and cause profound change within existing institutions. Institutions, however, are not passive affects of extra-institutional ideation – nor is there a 1:1 relationship between the two. Institutions are agents interacting with and appropriating external ideas, attaining not only ideas but also excess content; that is, exceptional status and meaning. The revolutionary other, from self-published manifestos to YouTube videos, does not merely establish the institution; it enriches it and thereby creates it as a remarkable entity. What makes the institution and its experience so edifying, enjoyable, and challenging is the inclusion of and confrontation with external resources. Whether it is the provocation of Vers une architecture, the revolutionary air of 1968, or the rise of computer-aided design software, institutions are inevitably faced with do or die moments; it is in how they confront such moments that determines whether they survive and to what extent they remain significant. Why degrees at Delft, Harvard, or SCI-Arc are important and why such universities continue to exist is largely due to how they and their students engage with extra-institutional resources. Consistently forced to face new external opposition, their relevance is predicated on how they choose to incorporate new ideas. The result of this conflict is what gives meaning to the diploma.³

Two, without the exception, what might we consider to be the difference between the institution supporting the diploma and other established structures like an apprenticeship at a workshop or work at a practicing firm? We might say that the empirical difference lies in how the authority figure demands of the learner. To the apprentice, at least in contemporary situations, the master says, this is how to do this, repeat after me. To the employee, the firm demands, do that for which you are paid; you are welcome to offer your own thoughts only if there is time. To the student, the school asks, given a design prompt and some criteria, what can you produce from the depths of your imagination? In the diploma, the student is given a degree of independence and the ability to work on their own solution to a relatively abstract prompt. Perhaps, then, this is how the diploma stands apart; compared to the apprentice or the employee, the student is freer in the pursuit of a personal design project.

Nevertheless, the student remains ensnared within the institution and what the institution considers good, complete, or otherwise qualitatively superior. Inexorably caught between the freedom offered by the institution’s unique conditions, and the institution’s authoritative “no” – its authoritative evaluation of work and particular preferences – what is the student to do? Perhaps the student should renounce the diploma in the pursuit of total freedom, as plenty of ambitious and/or financially incapacitated students in other disciplines have done. In the case of architecture, however, this nexus on the frontier of total freedom, where the student oscillates between enticing glimpses of a glittering Garden of Eden and the steadfast demands of the instructor, is perhaps the truest position of creative freedom. It is only upon encountering the institution that the student begins desiring for a world beyond the institution; to both reverse and reiterate a previous point, it is the institution that creates the extra-institutional fantasy. It is through responding to the imposed demands and imposed structure of the diploma that the student learns to iterate – to repeatedly attempt to produce proposals that aspire to satisfy the figure of authority. It is in doing so that the student learns to demand in response, “che vuoi?” – “what do you want from me?,” “what more can i do?” Through this, the student learns to struggle, and in struggling, learns to think critically about both their own work and the work preferred by the figure of authority. Whether or not they choose to agree with such preferences is a critical consequence of, though not exclusive to, the institutional process.

Immanuel Kant’s notion of freedom is imperative here: true freedom arises from discipline. The structure imposed by the institution generates the conditions for the acquisition of true freedom; it is in the desperate struggle against and within it that they discover what it is to be creative – that is, to flow, to fly. Through struggle, and as a rejoinder to the instructor’s abstract requests, the student falls upon extra-institutional resources for inspiration, support, precedent, and a competitive advantage – whatever it takes. In struggling to sift among the torrent of material covering the entire qualitative spectrum, the student comes to terms with what they think is good and bad. Thus, the student, through the institution and experience with extra-institutional material, ideally comes to understand their own project and practice – coming to understand what it is to think seriously about architecture. The institution and its other go hand in hand; it is the diploma that makes the enticing world beyond the diploma, and the world beyond the diploma that underlines and bolsters the diploma. Within their gap lies the position to be free, a position that simultaneously conceives of and strengthens both extremes.

The most important figure that the diploma endows is that of struggle, and the most important quality that it incites is that of critical thinking. The niggling question that asks whether a diploma is necessary given the increasing number of readily accessible online learning material implies that the diploma’s value lies in a name attached to a garrisoned quantity of exclusive information. Without such exclusivity, the diploma is reduced to a mere name. This misses the point. A diploma is and remains valuable not for the trust embedded in the name of the institution that administers it; a diploma remains valuable precisely for the struggle that occurs against, within, and beside the institution from which one receives the diploma.

This is the third way in which the extra-institutional other sustains the institutional whole. What is the YouTube tutorial? It is not a group of students crowded around a studio desk in jovial conversation. What is a detail from a magazine? It is not observing an instructor mark up a classmate’s detail. Ostensibly these comparisons are entirely contingent – one could just as easily say a YouTube tutorial is not thousands of dollars per year in tuition or that a studio critique and review is not the extra-institutional ability to decide one’s own hours of learning – but the point remains the same. However sizable the lack is in the diploma, there is an equally sizable lack in the study of external resources. The diploma is as special as its other because of its unique struggle – it is years of work, afternoons spent huddled over a model, pizza parties in studio, rampageous scrawlings in a sketchbook before class, a cry over a project, and a cheer at the end of a semester. It is a fine arts degree, a furniture design degree, a history degree, a philosophy degree, a degree in interpersonal relationships, and a coming of age – it is all of these things. What makes the diploma in this instance is both additive and differential; it is the sum of communal experiences of joy, struggle, and longing – experiences that are conspicuously absent, or at best, desultory, from extra-institutional learning.

This multifaceted experience, this multifaceted struggle, and this struggle against this multifaceted experience is ultimately what produces the architecture student and what prompts them to think critically. As aforementioned, this is what the diploma does by definition, but it must go further – expanding and enhancing this capacity in acknowledgment of contemporary conditions. The struggle of the student against the authoritative Other has always existed, as has the struggle against the qualitative spectrum of the extra-institutional other. The ability to think critically as a point of clarity developed in riposte to the struggle has also always existed. Struggling against the will of the institution and struggling with and against one’s classmates – the degree of this more or less remains the same; however, struggling amidst a deluge of resources and information – the severity of this increases evermore.

As a consequence, perhaps the university, rather than relying on handfuls of youthful instructors (under whom only a select number of students can study), or following the capricious tides of developing technology and academic and aesthetic trends, should revise its pedagogy to include critical thinking as an explicit component. Of course, there is a cap to how much the university can teach, but, imagining if the total curriculum were a loaf of bread, perhaps as a bulwark and a more robust (but nevertheless futile) endeavor to futureproof, the university ought to remove a few slices and replace them with some that guide students through the torrent of information, providing suggestions on how to find their bearings within. If the institution does not intend to follow its natural cycle of birth, decay, and death privy to the genesis and developed obsolescence of extra-institutional ideas, its salvation lies in a balance between the contemporary and the timeless. To survive, the particular institution will appropriate the radical and the new; perhaps more importantly, and more valuably for its graduates, it should also augment its enduring lesson – how to think critically.

In learning to think critically and understanding what it is to struggle through the framework provided by the institution, one learns how to think architecturally. This – architectural thinking – is the summation of the experience and curriculum of the diploma, and is perhaps its greatest enduring endowment; it is precisely that which maintains the diploma’s importance. Even if the student chooses not to pursue a career explicitly in architecture post-graduation, the lesson remains – in fact, more than that, it persists, structuring all thinking, consciously or not. This is evident in both architects and non-architects and in both designers and those who pursue careers in other fields. It is evident in classmates who pivot towards other disciplines but maintain the rigor they learned at university, it is evident in international firms whose design processes seem not unfamiliar from those learned closer to home, and it is evident in the workflows of public figures who graduate with architecture diplomas but choose other paths.

The methodology and immense body of work of the late Virgil Abloh is a prime example of the latter. Because though he may not have practiced as an archetypal architect – working for a prolonged period in a firm, as a professor, or in a traditional capacity of building buildings or writing papers – any cursory reading of his work or watching of his lectures reveals that he is indeed an architect through and through. His designs and his speech exude architectural thinking. In one lecture alone, he discusses developing a personal design language, using an incremental rather than radical approach to new design, and, in the redesign of ten of Nike and Converse’s most iconic sneakers, choosing to maintain the essential qualities of the sneakers’ forms while exposing their materiality and construction.⁴
The notion of a personal design language is so obvious to the average architecture student – from Palladio, to Gaudi, to Le Corbusier – that it is practically assumed. The conservatism implicit in an incremental approach is profuse in the practice – the de facto method in a discipline so immersed in code and context. And maintaining the essential qualities of a thing or setting while exposing materiality is yet another pillar of the architectural education – it speaks of Ando, in some ways of Gehry’s first house, and of Kahn. Abloh spent less than a decade in the conventional architectural discipline. He did not intern without pay for a starchitect, learning code and correspondence, obtaining a license, and rising through the ranks. For this reason, most would call him a fashion designer and few an architectural one – for what are his credentials? What makes him an architectural designer? His credentials are his diploma – not as a rubber stamp, but rather the years of active learning and struggle that constitute and result in a diploma. It is this experience that taught him to think architecturally, providing him with a systematic methodology, a holistic approach, and a beacon through the miasma of interdisciplinary uncertainty. It is precisely this that makes him an architectural designer.⁵

Virgil Abloh is a stellar standard for the future of architectural education for two reasons. One, what is aforementioned as obvious to the average architectural student is absolutely not to the average person; his work makes architectural thinking both more accessible and readily accepted by those outside of the discipline. Two, he reveals the possibility of practicing as an “architect” both beyond the institution and as a result of it. On the one hand, the teenager with a passing interest in fashion design, aware of Abloh’s ties to architecture and through watching some of his interviews, is exposed to architectural ideas, potentially becoming interested in an architectural education. The diploma they may then pursue, although held behind a curtain of high tuition, is – cynically or not – validated by Abloh’s holding of one. On the other hand, the architecture graduate who finds themself embittered at their limited career possibilities and the imposition of ever more time requirements, fees, and other institutional and systemic blockades in the pursuit of a license – perhaps wonders, given the accessibility of information online today, if it was at all worth it after all. The example of Abloh elucidates that, if not financially, spiritually it was indeed worth it, for it holds the potential to be a through line through the pursuit of any possible future interest.

Much as readers of John Maynard Keynes’ 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” may have been reassured by his attempts to counter contemporaneous pessimism in an era of great change, one should neither be paralyzed by nor resent this bewildering time. One should realize that it is precisely this institutional architectural education created and informed by extra-institutional resources that will hold one in good stead, continuing to be relevant in some form or another, and precisely the foundation provided by this education that will guide one through a future of learning and interdisciplinary explorations. Architects, architectural institutions, and students often lack disciplinary confidence because of imposed mental limits to what they are and are not allowed to do and capable of doing, restricted by an implicit agreement on what constitutes “architecture” and “the diploma.” They need not be troubled by this and they need not weep. As independent methods of learning give shape to popularly accepted ones, they need not fear what they do not know, for what they do not know will give shape to what they do know – and what they do not know is in fact what will give them ever more agency.

¹ As opposed to extra-institutional learning as an act of rebellion against prevailing orders and so on, which, though occurring, does not take up the majority of the cause.
² “With this surfeit of content, is this not enough to render the diploma obsolete?”
³ At the time of writing, in March 2022, SCI-Arc is very much faced with such a do or die moment, its relevance put completely in question in the wake of the publicizing of its litany of financial scandals, abuses of power, and other intensely immoral actions, past and present. The fact that this new student movement demanding accountability arose from: 1) A video published by the institution to its YouTube channel as part of its ongoing campaign to maintain media relevance that also attempts to be educational material for its students and the community at large; 2) Student protests, the publicizing of students’ traumatic stories with SCI-Arc faculty, and a student-organized town hall concurrent with extra-instutional organizational work by Instagram meme accounts like @dank.lloyd.wright and a group of SCI-Arc alumni points to the unavoidable interplay and inextricable connection between the institution and its other in the evolutionary process or collapse of the institution.
⁴ “Core Studio Public Lecture: Virgil Abloh, ‘Insert Complicated Title Here’”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qie5VITX6eQ
⁵ And, arguably the kind of drive and personality that led him to pursue an architecture degree in the first place.

Boneless Pizza is a designer, writer, artist, and DJ based in Los Angeles. Their design work blends Lacanian theory, linguistics, pop cultural criticism, and digital media in the creation of parafictional worlds meant to investigate the contingent nature of the built environment.

 

This piece is part of a larger ongoing work to establish a future vision for architecture, one that is grounded in care and eco-feminism. We are indebted to authors Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Adrienne maree brown, Elke Krazny, the Slow Factory, Anna Tsing, Françoise Vérgés, Mierle Ledermann Ukeles, in addition to the ones quoted and/or paraphrased here, and would like to thank Menna Agha, Lev Bratishenko, Lillian Chee, Cynthia Deng, Elif Erez, Silvia Federici, Sarah Nichols, Gabrielle Schaad, Jan De Vylder, Ilze Wolff and many more for incredibly inspiring and enriching conversations.

For the best viewing experience, please open the high-res PDF version of the illustrated essay. 

 

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is Assistant Professor of Urban Design at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Malterre-Barthes’ interests are related to urgent aspects of contemporary urbanization, material extraction and climate emergency, and how struggling communities can gain greater access to resources, better governance, and ecological/social justice. She co-authored among other books Eileen Gray: A House under the Sun (Nobrow), Some Haunted Spaces in Singapore (Edition Patrick Frey), Migrant Marseille and Housing Cairo: The Informal Response (Ruby Press), and recently started the initiative ‘A Global Moratorium on New Construction.’ She is a founding member of the Parity Group and Parity Front, networks dedicated to improving equity in architecture.

Zosia Dzierżawska is a Warsaw-based illustrator & comics author with a passion for storytelling, history and architecture. Her works have been recognised twice at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair Illustrators Exhibition and the Society of Illustrators in New York. She has published with Oxford University Press, Rizzoli, Candlewick Press, and others. Her work on the graphic novel Eileen Gray. A House Under the Sun (ed. Nobrow, London, 2019) marked the beginning of a collaboration with the architect Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, which now continues as an ongoing series of illustrated essays on the current and future practice of architecture.

 

 

Cover image: Space Electronic in 1970 (Archive 9999, courtesy Elettra Fiumi)

In 2018, I started an investigation into Global Tools, a pioneering pedagogic project founded in 1972 by several architecture studios and individual practitioners belonging to the so-called ‘Italian radical design’ movement: Archizoom Associati, Remo Buti, Casabella, Riccardo Dalisi, Ugo La Pietra, 9999, Gaetano Pesce, Gianni Pettena, Rassegna, Ettore Sottsass Jr., Superstudio, Ufo and Zziggurat. Global Tools championed a reinstatement of manual work and the use of simple technologies, placing the body as the ultimate locale for architecture, a nucleus of latent political and creative potential. In response to what the group viewed as a conservative teaching tradition, Global Tools sought to reformulate the field as a political project by means of novel pedagogical approaches. Adopting an abstract, anti-didactic stance, they focused on everyday life with the aim of rediscovering a direct relationship between craftsmanship and product design, while also simplifying the design processes to counter the – then still incipient – production of plastic on an industrial scale.

My year-long research brought me to several cities in Italy to meet former Global Tools members Lapo Binazzi (UFO), Gilberto Corretti (Archizoom), Ugo La Pietra, Gianni Pettena, and Giorgio Birelli (9999), as well as Roberta Meloni, the president of the Centro Studi Poltronova. My approach as an artist differed from that of an architecture historian and delved into the subjectivities that enabled the emergence of the group as well as the reasons behind its short life span. That approach, I believe, is what gave me certain access into some poignant opinions of the protagonists about their own legacy. My starting point was the renewed interest those utopian ideas seemed to be garnering from the contemporary cultural field. The anarchist quality of the group’s experiments and the impact that the advent of interior design had on the discipline in the sixties and seventies became central to me, most particularly the irony of this group of soi-disant Marxists being so comfortable working for the luxury décor market. In fact, studios like Archizoom with their Superonda sofa (1968), the Misura series by Superstudio (1969-1972) and others, are examples of their prolific collaboration with high-end design firms like Poltronova, Olivetti, Zanotta, or Gufram.

Ettore Sottsass was then the artistic director of Poltronova, which was founded in Florence in 1957 by Lorenzo Camilli. The two championed the emerging works of young studios like Archizoom and Superstudio. They also commissioned Archizoom to design the company’s new factory and to program events there, which included a poetry and meditation workshop led by Allen Ginsberg.  The Centro Studi Poltronova is now an archive and a showroom in the centre of Florence that still makes, on-demand, some of the iconic pieces created by the Radical Design movement and beyond. With their support, I designed and produced a modular four-piece sofa, very much inspired by Archizoom’s Superonda. 

My sofa was then used as a prop during a performance at the Space Electronic Club in Florence, which once was the nucleus of Global Tools’ most radical experiments. The Space Electronic club was built in 1969 by the architects Giorgio Birelli, Carlo Caldini, Fabrizio Fiumi and Paolo Galli, under the name of Gruppo 9999, making the most of the Radical movement’s interest in nightclubs and influences ranging from New York’s Electric Circus to the theories of Marshall McLuhan. The club featured performances by US-based Ant Farm and The Living Theatre, among others, and The Mondial Festival included an elaborate programme with an experimental learning centre called S-Space: The Separate School for Expanded Conceptual Architecture, a clear precursor of Global Tools. There I first met Elettra Fiumi, daughter of Fabrizio Fiumi (a deceased member of Gruppo 9999), who was then researching her family’s archives for her future documentary film, named Radical Landscapes. As part of the club’s fiftieth anniversary, Elettra and I conceived an event with a series of installations and performances which set out to reprise the club’s influence on the underground scene of those years.

While working on the prototype of my sofa with the CEO of Poltronova, Roberta Meloni, it dawned on me that she was a pioneer of her generation. She had wilfully gained the leadership of the Centro Studi Poltronova in Florence to bring back some of the radicality that had been lost after Sottsass. She was an inspiration to think about what it meant for a feminist visual artist like myself to re-think the legacy of the radical architects of the 70s, who could mainly sustain their practice due to a solid family support structure (caretakers and inherited wealth) and did not shy away from the infamous God-complex of the architect. During my research, I was not interested in ignoring the fact that Global Tools was an almost entirely white, male, bourgeois initiative that aimed to push architecture beyond design and engineering, proclaiming grandiose loosely Marxist-inspired mantras about society and its need for education. Under that light, I became interested in the motivations behind the recent mystification of 70s utopias and the lack of a critical approach on crucial factors of its emergence, like identity and geopolitics.

Visionary as they might have been, their focus on reclaiming the countryside and their admiration for radical pedagogic practices could be considered a mere aesthetic choice, as the group effectively fell apart carried away by their individual egos and careers before any of those practices were implemented. This is a harsh remark made to me by Gilberto Corretti, one of the members of Archizoom that I interviewed in his home in Florence three years ago. While sitting comfortably on an original Superonda in Corretti’s living room, its lavish red vinyl covered with a humble sheepskin, he invited me to travel back in time, some 10-15 years before the creation of Global Tools. Corretti situated the origin of the so-called Radical Italian architecture at a specific class of their school in Florence. Archizoom, Superstudio, and others were formed after a teacher’s group assignment to design a leisure facility. Amusement parks, resorts, and discotheques came about, and delight in collaborating and dreaming big erupted among the students. Gilberto pulls out a huge colour pencil drawing of a Luna Park with a large ferris wheel. That was Archizoom’s vision even before naming themselves Archizoom. Corretti recounts how the group moved their work to Pistoia in 1962, after a flood devastated the city of Florence, and how they then came together to exhibit their prototypes. 

Even though Global Tools was not officially born until 1972, after several studios were invited to participate in New York MOMA’s emblematic show “The New Italian Landscape”, Corretti claims the flood to be the real origin of the group. Si faceva per noi stessi e ce lo mostravamo fra di noi: We did it for ourselves and we showed it among ourselves, he slurs. When I pointed out the pedagogical scope of Global Tools, he admitted that they ideated a school of alternative design not only to showcase and promote their own work, but to feel they were still alive by being together. Why a school then? I inquired. We made it an academy because that’s where it all started, he snorted, it was not an end in itself. One cannot be young at 30 with the same spirit of a 20-year-old. Because the 70s were already a different time, and during the show at MOMA it became clear that a tabula rasa was necessary. Corretti concluded that the birth of Global Tools “was marked by the end of enthusiasm towards a victorious capitalism.”

The day after chatting with Gilberto Corretti, I visited Lapo Binazzi in his studio in the centre of Florence. I wanted to grasp Global Tools political visions and dissect their understanding of the relationship between capital and society during that turbulent period in Italian history. Binazzi belonged to Gruppo UFO, a group born out of the wave of students’ protests and characterised by using irony and contestation in their public space incursions. While labour activists in Italy saw all of society as being pervaded by the logic and the methods of mass production, Binazzi, who was part of the team behind the theoretical development of Global Tools, turned this idea upside down: “For capital, it is not society that must become more like a factory, it is the factory that should resemble society”. Binazzi related that particular stance to the turmoil that Italy was subjected to during that time. Commonly referred to as the anni di piombo (years of lead), the 1970s have been seen as a parenthesis in Italian history, dominated by violence and terrorism from both extremes of the political spectrum. Those years also produced a vibrant labour movement with prolonged general strikes and the emergence of a unique, Marxist autonomist movement (best known through the Potere Operaio, Lotta Continua, and Autonomia Operaia political parties). In 1969, with the autonomist student movement being particularly active, the protests led to the occupation of the Fiat Mirafiori automobile factory in Turin. Global Tools members such as Lapo Binazzi and Gianni Pettena actively participated in the protests with interventions that later became raw material for the collective imaginary of the group. Gruppo UFO’s urban activities were intended to bring about a spectacularization of architecture, in the hope of transforming it into urban and environment “guerrilla” action. Precarious materials like paper-mâché, polyurethane, clay, inflatables, were given a new protagonism. Their performative analyses of the rural territory greatly influenced Global Tools’ distinct interest in the Florentine countryside, where we can find one of Global Tools meeting spaces: a farm in Sambuca, in the Chianti region, belonging to the family of Roberto and Alessandro Magris (Superstudio).

In 1974, Global Tools organized their first and only seminar in Sambuca, where all members met with their families in a sort of hippie commune, setting the bases of the nomadic school that never came to be. During those days, Remo Buti gave a workshop on clay, and the group constructed home-made hot air balloons, producing the famous cover of Casabella magazine showcasing Sottsass flying up one of them in the garden at Sambuca. Their methodologies establish immediate links to other contemporary countercultural movements such as The Whole Earth Catalogue in the US, for their invocation of technology as a means to reconcile independent living and material knowledge. However, Global Tools’ contribution was largely more radical and performative: the group was divided into working sections that were supposed to produce their own individual laboratories, named ‘The Body’, ‘Construction’, ‘Communication’, ‘Theory’, and ‘Survival’. However, the group fell apart way before those workshops had progressed beyond the first session devoted to ‘The Body and the Bonds’. Nevertheless, the discussions surrounding its formation provided a launching pad for the emergence of studios like Memphis and Alchimia in the 80s. Inspired by the workings of Global Tools in Sambuca, Elettra Fiumi and I decided to temporarily inhabit another countryside house in the Chianti region that belonged to the Fiumi family. There, during the week that preceded our performance at the Space Electronic Club, I gathered with choreographer Matias Daporta, and performers Vincent Giampino, Pablo Durango, and Andrea Dionisi, who would make my Poltronova sofa come alive.

The day after talking to Binazzi, I went up to Fiesole, in the Florentine region, to meet with artist Gianni Pettena in his studio. Permanently holding a half-consumed cigar, Pettena is convinced he is the only real artist in Global Tools. He affirms he always felt like an outsider in the group and produced what became, in my opinion, symbolic evidence of the inherent divisions within them that eventually catapulted their dissolution. During the meeting in Sambuca everyone posed for a group picture, and Pettena held up a sign reading “io sono la spia” (I am the spy), which was met with disdain by Superstudio: You ruined the picture!  Emmanuele Piccardo, a curator and photographer of architecture who was a direct witness of the work of Pettena and Robert Smithson during his American incursion, shares this vision of the group’s dissolution. Piccardo is well versed in the personal intricacies of the group and was my closest accomplice in getting me to meet all of them in person. He is convinced that Global Tools’ ultimate break-up was provoked by an internal division between the Florence-based faction of the group and the other fiorentini who had emigrated to the capital, Milan. The latter were perceived as bourgeois and therefore more concerned with both conceptual and commercial questions regarding industrial design, while the former claimed to be the real ideologues of the group, wanting to maintain their political and artistic essence regarding craftsmanship.  

According to Lapo Binazzi, l’artigianato (craftsmanship) did not know how to renew itself from a conceptual standpoint. Radical utopia and built architecture, he stated, were and always will be in conflict. In that regard, I find the Giro d’Italia (1971) one of the most emblematic performances of the UFO, which in turn serves to illustrate the ambivalent relationship of the group with the rural, while pinpointing to their enthusiastic embrace of an ephemeral, performative architecture. They dressed up with cyclists’ attire and proceeded to tour the countryside, breaking the rules of road etiquette and routes: they would criss-cross over vegetable gardens and climb electric towers carrying their Campagnolo bikes on their backs. Their final destination: The Space Electronic nightclub in Florence, where the cyclists would erupt during the Mondial Festival in 1970. 

 

The Florentine discothèque became the breeding ground for the type of multipurpose and interactive happenings that characterized the Italian Radical movement. Somehow, the club amalgamated all those initiatives in a similar way that the Global Tools project did. If there is one common thing in my conversations with its former members is that they all made reference to their individual practices, and how Global Tools produced a context for them to become pedagogical instruments. In a way, form seemed to precede over content. Or better put: the medium was indeed the message. What astonished me during the interviews I conducted then, is how some of the original members of Global Tools are still now quarrelling about the authorship of the original idea. I wonder if the reason is how in recent years utopian projects from the 70s have gained a new relevance, or the fact that we now lack those grand narratives for future imaginations. Ugo La Pietra was not amused by this utopian revival. In his Milanese studio, he grunted that younger generations are lacking imagination and hinted to certain architecture historians as predators. When Elettra Fiumi and I staged our tribute festival at the Space Electronic Club 50 years later, we attempted to re-propose the spirit of the radicals and what it would mean to our generation. Especially when growing vegetables in a basement, flooding a dance floor, and tossing a sofa in the air appear to still be radical architectural proposals nowadays.

Anna Moreno is a visual artist and works between Barcelona and The Hague. Moreno has recently completed her residency at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (NL) in 2020. She has participated in residencies at SASG (Seoul), HIAP (Helsinki), Salzamt (Linz, AT) and Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto (Biella, IT). Moreno’s artistic work has been shown internationally at MOCAB (Belgrade), SAS Geumcheon (Seoul), Joan Miró Foundation (Barcelona), and 1646 (The Hague), to name a few. She lectured at the San Francisco MOMA, the University of Barcelona, and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, among others. Moreno is also co-founder of the artists-run space Helicopter in The Hague. She taught Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art of The Hague and has designed workshops and seminars internationally. She publishes essays on art, politics, and architecture and is currently working on her first film, co-produced by Acteon Films, and supported by Mondriaan Fonds, Stroom Den Haag, Amarte Fonds, and Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds.