ABSTRACT

What kind of architectural knowledge was cultivated through drawings, models, design-build experimental houses and learning environments in the 20th century? And, did new teaching techniques and tools foster pedagogical, institutional and even cultural renewal? Architectural Education Through Materiality: Pedagogies of 20th Century Design brings together a collection of illustrated essays dedicated to exploring the complex processes that transformed architecture’s pedagogies in the 20th century.

The last decade has seen a substantial increase in interest in the history of architectural education. This book widens the geographical scope beyond local school histories and sets out to discover the very distinct materialities and technologies of schooling as active agents in the making of architectural schools. Architectural Education Through Materiality argues that knowledge transmission cannot be reduced to ‘software’, the relatively easily detectable ideas in course notes and handbooks, but also has to be studied in close relation to the ‘hardware’ of, for instance, wall pictures, textiles, campus designs, slide projectors and even bodies.

Presenting illustrated case studies of works by architects, educators and theorists including Dalibor Vesely, Dom Hans van der Laan, the Global Tools group, Heinrich Wölfflin, Alfons Hoppenbrouwers, Joseph Rykwert, Pancho Guedes and Robert Cummings, and focusing on student-led educational initiatives in Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, the book will inspire students, educators and professionals with an interest in the many ways architectural knowledge is produced and taught.

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

A passage to material hermeneutics

part I|65 pages

Objects on display

chapter 1|19 pages

From wooden blocks to Scottish Tartans

Dom Hans van der Laan's reconciliation of rational patterns and spatial experience

chapter 2|15 pages

A walking exhibit

Alfons Hoppenbrouwers's visual pedagogy

chapter 3|15 pages

Clashing perspectives

Joseph Rykwert's object lesson at the Ulm school of design

chapter 4|14 pages

Pancho's passages

Framing transitional objects for decolonial education in 1980s South Africa

part 2|63 pages

Hands-on

chapter 5|21 pages

Planning problems

Data graphics in the education of architects and planners at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the 1940s

chapter 6|20 pages

The Cambridge collage

Dalibor Vesely, phenomenology, and architectural design method

chapter 7|20 pages

Little living labs

1970s student design-build projects and the objects of experimental lifestyles

part 3|55 pages

Bodies in space

chapter 8|15 pages

The body as an ultimate form of architecture

Global Tools body workshops

chapter 9|25 pages

Parallel narratives of disciplinary disruption

The bush campus as design and pedagogical concept

chapter 10|13 pages

Revisiting environmental learning

Cities, issues and bodies

part 4|46 pages

Learning by technologies

chapter 11|16 pages

In the eye of the projector

Wölfflin, slides and architecture in postwar America

chapter 12|14 pages

Wireless architecture

Robert Cummings's early radio broadcasts

chapter 13|14 pages

The captive lecturer