ARQ, n. 61 La Profesión / Practice, Santiago, december, 2005, p. 17-24.
READINGS
Juan Ignacio Baixas *, Alberto Sato**, Juan Román***, Albert Tidy****
* Director Escuela de Arquitectura, Universidad
Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
Baixas & del Río arquitectos, Santiago, Chile.
** Decano Facultad de Arquitectura y Diseño de la Universidad Nacional
Andrés Bello, Santiago, Chile.
*** Director Escuela de Arquitectura Universidad de Talca, Talca, Chile.
**** Director Escuela de Arquitectura Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
Profesor Escuela de Diseño
Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile.
Abstract
Schools of architecture are spreading all over Chile. How can these institutions outline their specific operative field, ensuring a space in society for their graduates? These topics are part of the definitions set by the chairs and deans of four Chilean schools of architecture.
Key words: Architecture, practice, schools of architecture, architecture studios, architects.
About the
formative process of architects
Juan Ignacio Baixas
When confronting the problem of the formative process of architects, two main
questions come up to my mind:
The first is: Which aspects of the architectural profession should students
acquire during their university training, considering that the complexity of
this profession demands an expertise that can only be acquired in the course
of a lifetime devoted to it, and that in Chile university training does not
only lead to an academic degree but also to a professional title?
The second is: How can architecture be learned, keeping in mind that it is a
profession that combines the utilitarian focus of technical and scientific skills
with the purposelessness of artistic occupations.
In answer to the first question, I believe the main thing about the university
training of architects is the acquisition of an ethics related to creativity
and the determination to transform reality through their work.
An ethics of creativity and the determination to transform reality are
two of the main premises on which our school’s instruction has been founded.
Throughout the years, we have attempted to consolidate and preserve these two
principles as the center of the school’s spirit.
The first of them has to do with the fact that architectural works are always
created in response to a commission and to a particular set of circumstances,
i.e. with a given time, place, and potential users in mind, and so they are
necessarily original works. This originality aims at the creation of a possible
cultural future, and thus belongs to the realm of creative work.
This originality, however, must also have as a result a potentially habitable
construction, and so it must consider all of the conditions required to produce
that habitability. This is often difficult in an increasingly specialized world
where crucial matters are often overlooked, a world that, as Heidegger has put
it, is threatened by the concealed essence of modern technique: a production
no longer conceived under the model of Greek poiesis but rather as
unlimited exploitation of the planet, with all the risk such an attitude entails.
In this world, our university, guided by its commitment to Christian ethics,
attempts not only to follow the basic ethical principle of justice, but also
to complement it with an ethics based on charity, together with a fostering
of the greatest talent given to us by our Creator, creativity destined to the
production of beauty, utility, and habitability.
The second of our guiding principles, the determination to transform reality,
has to do with the fact that our teaching methods require a great degree of
abstraction: even though our ultimate goal is the construction of actual architectural
works, our academic activity as instructors does not include it as part of the
formative process of future architects due to the time and resources such a
commitment would require.
A consequence of this gap between architectural instruction and actual professional
practice is that, even though innovation and creativity have a central place
in this and other schools, these qualities are not always observable in the
architectural production that determines the quality of life in our cities.
We should, therefore, attempt to maintain links to the professional reality
and the actual conditions of its exercise in the outside world: our ability
to reflect on these conditions and abstract them should always be tempered by
a strong determination to transform reality. This determination should be present
in all of our academic tasks, and it should have as a result a strong grasp
of building techniques in all of their delicate details, a commitment to the
use of environment friendly energies; a good command of structuring and management
techniques and of all the other aspects involved in the generation of architectural
forms. These aspects cannot be taken for granted nor can they be considered
as simple “extra features” that can be added later to an architect’s
training. Much to the contrary, they are part of the productive process of any
architectural work, and they give it the richness and density that characterize
an accomplished work.
Architectural form thus conceived is not entirely representable through
bi- or tri-dimensional models, since it includes many much more complex aspects,
including for instance the entrepreneurial impulse that made it possible, or
the energies that make it perceptible to the senses. When we speak of our determination
to transform reality, we refer to this concern with the totality of the
factors that result in the true architectural quality of a constructed work.
In response to the second of the aforementioned questions (how to teach this
to architecture students), I believe the two key points are a gradual approach
to the transmission of skills that characterizes all educational processes,
and the transversal perspective that distinguishes modern university instruction.
The emphasis on the gradual acquisition of skills, however, must not
be taken to mean that from the first day of their studies on, students should
not face all of the challenges of their future profession in all their complexity.
In other words, the familiarization with architecture must be gradual in the
sense of a slowly increasing degree of depth and intensity, not in the sense
of being incomplete. Just as a living being develops, not as an inarticulate
set of separate limbs and joints, but as a whole, architectural training should
be all-encompassing from the beginning on.
For this global scope, architectural workshops are fundamental. Even though
sometimes it is convenient for a workshop class to focus on a particular aspect
of the architectural profession, it should always give room for the consideration
of all the aspects that contribute to the realization of a complete architectural
work.
As for the transversal perspective, our profession requires it on several levels.
One of them is the size of the objects it focuses on: from small objects to
buildings, from cities to huge extensions of territory; another are the diverse
degrees of abstraction with which it is possible to engage in it, from theoretical
reflections to concrete constructive work.
In relation to the first of these levels, our Faculty of Architecture, Design,
and Urban Studies encompasses all the possible ranges of this problem, and that
should make it possible for students to embrace them in their years of training.
The second of these levels (the varying levels of abstraction with which we
address the problems of our profession) requires an effort to relate the academic
realm (characterized by the rigor of its theoretical reflection) with the professional
realm (characterized mainly by reflections derived directly from experience).
We attempt to keep these diverse levels related through the participation of
highly qualified professionals in our workshops as well as the option of a project-centered
thesis as the final task in our Graduate programs. These instances, together
with a further development of our Graduate programs, will allow the improvement
of the level of theoretical reflection while keeping it closely related to professional
practice.
This perhaps too short text is an attempt to present in an orderly manner what
I take to be the main aspects of the formative process of architectural professionals.
Learning and practicing architecture
Alberto Sato
In the Western world, the systematic teaching of the architectural discipline
dates from 1675, with François Blondel’s famous Cours d’architecture
at the French Royal Academy of Architecture. Since then, the permission to practice
the profession of architect, due to the civil responsibility it entails, has
been granted not by the Academy, but by authorities that assess and certify
the adequateness of the candidate’s skills.
These authorities emerged from a varied set of historical and social realities,
ranging from professional guilds, town councils, states, central governments,
kings, queens, and princes. Their common characteristic is that they all differentiate
between the knowledge of the discipline and the authorization to practice it.
A significant moment in this history of the profession was the creation of the
Institute of British Architects in 1834, which in 1836 received from Queen Victoria
the title of Royal. From then on it has been known as RIBA. From its inception,
its goal has been making possible “...the acquisition of knowledge about
architecture in order to promote the many branches of science related to it,
as well as establishing uniform and respectable standards for the exercise of
the profession”. This emphasis on unified and respectable standards implied
having agreed on the most appropriate ways to teach architecture, even though
someone like John Ruskin could still be strongly opposed to the idea that architecture
was susceptible of being taught within a university (a position that remains
legitimate). In 1863, the Architectural Association was the first academic institution
to include in its curriculum a course designed to prepare the voluntary exam
needed in order to become a member of the RIBA. That was the first time a university
offered a systematic preparation for the professional habilitation through an
exam. In the United States, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology –MIT–
was the first academic institution to be authorized by the American Institute
of Architects to give the special exam in 1865.
Thus, a certified exam was instituted in many Western countries as a requisite
to obtain the professional title of architect. In Latin America, however, in
contrast with the rest of the world, it was the Universities that took upon
their shoulders the responsibility of granting professional titles, without
resource to any external supervising instance. One could perhaps venture the
hypothesis that this did not happen as a consequence of deep theoretical of
pedagogic reflections, but rather as a result of the state of the institutional
structures of our continent. Thus, the university became one of the main ethical
and moral references of Latin American societies, and so it was not only responsible
for the transmission and production of knowledge. As a consequence of this tradition,
architecture has remained enclosed within the narrow circle of the university
disciplines, with the effect that its exposure to the so called real world is
always mediated by its position as part of the academy. Universities can grant
a lifelong permission for the exercise of the profession because no institution
is in charge of determining the conditions for the actualization or renewal
of this authorization. This model of learning is presently in a state of crisis
made evident by the many voices who complain about the alienation of the universities
from the rest of reality, and more in particular the enormous distance that
separates the skills acquired during university training from the actual demands
of professional practice. What can be called “professional” or “instrumental”
tools are, in fact, introduced to the students during the first years of their
training, inflicting the university’s focus on relevant knowledge towards
a preoccupation with operational efficiency that too often remains blind to
its own conceptual basis. In terms of the discipline’s demands, the acquisition
of relevant knowledge must be complemented by experience in architectural projects
as a form of knowledge. On the other hand, professional practice requires mastering
skills and techniques that enable an architect to deal with the actual demands
of the market, but in a university the transmission of this know-how is complicated
by theoretical reflections that distort its true instrumental character. This
is the result of the overlapping and mingling of two different goals, each of
which would require its own set of contents and methodologies in order to be
effectively transmitted. As a result of this hybrid approach, several important
architects declare that their most important experience during their university
training was not any particular curriculum but the exposure to some relevant
personal influences. In this sense, it is still possible to share Ruskin’s
opinion about the teaching of architecture.
Spending five years in college is obviously different from, let us say, spending
them in the streets. In the same way, it is different to exercise a profession
than to study it as part of a university curriculum: the university is supposed
to provide tools for a future professional practice, but must not necessarily
take that professional exercise as its pedagogic model. It may seem a truism,
but we should not forget that university education is less a transmission of
ways of doing certain things than a transmission of modes of thinking; thus,
it is less about acquiring certain specific sets of knowledge than about figuring
out how knowledge works; less than about becoming informed of certain facts,
than about understanding the way information works. In other words, if we simply
attempt to translate professional practice into the academic setting we could
teach it for four, six, or twenty years, as in a medieval apprenticeship training.
Instead, what we are supposed to do is transmit in four or five years some intellectual
skills, and it is with that goal in mind that we have to transform some features
and rhythms of the outside world, but also must continuously transform the ways
in which we teach and learn (Morin, 1999). As Novak-Godwin puts it, true education
changes the meaning of human experience. This is the difference with life, which
also teaches us many things, but without the systematicity and the periodic
structure that our university years demand.
Producing knowledge.
The university’s mission is not only to produce professionals, but also
to create new knowledge. Doubtlessly, the progress of any given discipline requires
this constant production of new knowledge, and it is even better if such a growth
takes place as the result of the interaction between teachers and students in
an academic context, that is, if the transmission of knowledge through teamwork
and experimentation results in new, significant insights about the profession.
This conception of the university’s task is radically different from the
traditional modes of teaching wherein professors merely pass on a set of notions
in the production of which they did not play an active role, and which thus
could also be easily acquired through textbooks or other sources. Of course,
universities cannot be expected to be producing new knowledge during every single
moment of their work, but they are expected to generate it on the long run,
and so our ways of conceiving the pedagogical approach for the training of professionals
in a given area should contribute to the fulfillment of this goal by creating
the conditions it requires. Architecture is a discipline that creates new knowledge
through experience and research -as in Le Corbusier’s recherche patiente
-, and thus it must engage enthusiastically in the search for new pedagogical
paradigms, as part of an epistemological approach that acknowledges the fact
that the experience of architectural projects based on problems and questions
does constitute a mode of innovation and knowledge.
Where do
I teach architecture?
Juan Román
That evening in the COAC at Barcelona(1), the central place
given by Josep Quetglas to the question “where do I teach architecture?”
helped me to put in perspective the work that we, the students and instructors
of the School of Architecture at Talca University, have carried out in the central
valley of Chile over the last seven years, to the extent that this site has
become the main foundational ground of our academic endeavours.
The pleasurable memory of that talk is a good starting point for the following
reflections, an attempt to contribute from the region of Chile where I work
to the discussion of how to teach architecture in our country.
I. The question “where do I teach architecture?” taken
together with the question “to whom do I teach it?” were
the two basic foundations starting from which we designed our curriculum for
a school that would be situated in an area where architecture had never been
taught before. These two questions allowed us to define the profile of our future
incoming students and to contrast it with the projected profile of our future
alumni(2), so as to be able to determine the main tasks to
carry out during the following years for the creation of our school.
We also believed that in carefully addressing the problems posed by those two
questions, we would be able to design our own particular way of teaching architecture,
as it had been already done by schools such as the ones of the University of
Chile, the Catholic University of Chile, and the Catholic University of Valparaíso.
Thus we could in time become the fourth important school of architecture in
the country.
II. The Marika-Alderton house designed by Glenn Murcutt, which I got to know
through a publication in 1996, served as one of the main referents in the task
of bridging the gap between the profile of our incoming students and the projected
profile of our alumni. Murcutt’s ingenuity in turning a completely ordinary
commission into a major work of architecture was the ability that we needed
to transmit to our students. (Melhuish, 1996)
III. We conceive the architect’s job in a dialectic movement from the
territory to the detail(3). Thanks to such a conception the
site ceases to be conceived as the mere context of an architectural work: this
has allowed us to conceptualize architecture as a non-specialized field and
in turn generate a non-departmental organization for the faculty of our school.
This, together with the great flexibility of our project for the school, has
allowed the good development of this school situated in a distant region of
the country, at a moment when there are not enough architecture professors to
fully respond to the demands of the more than thirty schools of architecture
presently operating in the country.
IV. These days, changes in the professional and institutional market happen
at such a fast pace that the typical university professional trainings have
ceased to be the stable entities they used to be(4): because
of this evolution, the model of an architectural training as mere projection
of buildings has become obsolete.
This new situation has also transformed the traditional social responsibilities
that we as architecture instructors have: on the one hand, making sure that
our students are qualified to respond to the demands our society places upon
them (being able to project buildings); on the other, training those students
so they can have access to a well paid job in the future.
These demands have lead to the organization of our curriculum in the three following
domains:
Operational know-how, including the acquisition of the necessary skills for
an adequate professional performance in a competitive world.
Professional training, including the tools required for the conception, projection
and supervision of the construction of a building, understood in the widest
possible sense.
Innovation, a set of tools destined to enable the students to transform their
knowledge in material wealth.
We believe that a good training in these three domains will give our students
the ability to insert themselves in the diverse professional contexts (including,
but not limited to, the projection of buildings) that require an architectural
perspective.
V. The combined problem of where and to whom de we teach architecture has resulted
in a pedagogy that centres in the formulation and solution of problems through
intense and persistent work, an approach that, combined with the diverse procedence
of our faculty, guarantees the originality of our academic project.
As I final remark, I would like to recall Ernst Jünger’s notion of
“the woods” as an analogy to our conception of what a school of
architecture should be: for him, the woods are a symbol of freedom of the individual
living on his or her own means, of the person whose actions are not perceived
because they do not take place in the open space, the one that knows when to
wait and when to act, the one that understands processes and their results,
and thus knows what to hope for (Jünger, 1993).
I believe Jünger’s metapor is a good image for what we have been
trying to do in the School of Architecture at Talca University: for him, life
in the woods was an option; for us it is more of an assumed condition.
Note
1. I am alluding to the Conference “Barcelona –
Madrid: a Seminar on Architectural and Urbanistic Initiative”. Third day,
May 5 2005: Teaching Architecture. Architectural Association of Catalonia, Barcelona
chapter.
2. The project Creation of an Architecture School for the Talca
University was approved by the Comisión de Autorregulación Concordada
of the Consejo de Rectores of all Chilean universities in July 1998.
3. The idea of a dialectic between the territory and the detail
had its origin in a conversation that took place in one of the sessions of Peter
Zumthor’s workshop at the Architecture Academy in Mendrisio, Switzerland,
July 2001.
4. Flores, Fernando y Varela, Francisco: “Educación
y Transformación: Preparemos a Chile para el Siglo XXI”. http://www.atinachile.cl/pdf/educacion_transformacion.pdf
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