Learning to wear the third skin.

[garethace]

The confusion or mess of different issues associated with doing a very long course in Architecture does impose enormous stress on both the individual student and the system of education required to teach Architecture. I think the senior years in Architecture School aught to be about laying foundations for good practice later on in life. Part of that foundation should for me include learning to cope with all the current mess and confusion of issues an Architect must deal with.

 

In my late twenties, I am still young enough to incorporate many new and difficult ideas into my understanding of Architecture. Yet I am old and experienced enough to learn those ideas much better than someone much younger. Things such as pedestrian movement and other phenomenological aspects of Architecture indeed do form the backbone of many a good design scheme. Yet I have devoted very little of my effort until very recently toward studying these reality-based phenomena for myself. In short I needed to work toward an integration of many different phenomena in Architecture. But do so in a manner that avoided confusion and wasted effort. So I could speak about Architecture like a third skin I can wear, or conceptualise independently for myself.

 

In college or work experience I would normally find myself doing incubation work for a design concept, or working on the earliest, broadest brushwork stages to an Urban Master Plan project. One must learn to appreciate Architecture first as a third skin. In order to design Architecture and urbanism, one must first feel comfortable in Architecture and urbanism. To design anything in Architecture requires one to have good understanding of peoples’ everyday interaction with their environment. Developing the project is ultimately about refining its diagrams on many levels.

 

Unfortunately I believe the Studio environment in Architecture college, or the office environment in work experience can be too studio/office based. An experience of Dublin city in the cold, damp month of November or December doesn’t make the best third skin I will admit. But imagine if by some miracle the Architecture Studio program in the colleges could be run over the summer? Though often perceived as an opportunity to ‘get away’ from the worries of doing projects, etc, I must be understood that summertime is the best time to experience much Architecture, cities, spaces and places. Especially as one can experience the built environment, and observe how the cities inhabitants manage use the city as an amenity. The streets, parks and public spaces become spaces for availabilities.

 

I think it is all too easy to build up a negative perception of the urban environment, from spending too many cold winters merely ‘holed up’ in a warm college or office environment somewhere. During summer months, people will tend to move greater distances in the city and more frequently. It is important to appreciate the environment as a place connected together by strands of transport infrastructure, walkways, cycle ways and bus lanes. I know it is not that common a practice, for a University student to study the environment in so much detail. But in fairness, how many other courses do require a student to design the built reality?

 

Students of fashion design will spend long hours making and constructing the clothing concepts for their models to wear. Architecture students are not so lucky having to depend upon the diagrams they draw to illustrate their meaning. The trouble with my development of awareness of the built environment is having to devote more time as I get older to reading the observations of experts like Lynch, Jacobs, Bacon and others. I have found the Local Area Master Plans produced by County Councils and City Councils a god send. Because I can experience those environments myself on bicycle, on foot or by automobile transport.

 

It is very hard to advance towards becoming an Architect, if one does not possess the coherent framework of human perception necessary to organize the huge amount of knowledge, awareness and learning a Student does over the years in Architecture school. Architecture has become more than ever before, a confusing mess of Computers, Graphics, Projects, Clients, sabbatical years, repeat years, changing college staff, aging college staff, personal study and experience of Architecture. The class trips, the class walks around town, the wonderful design projects, the very interesting discussion, freehand drawing exercises, development of observation, site analysis and lectures on urbanism. I see Architecture as a real opportunity to get badly confused, disorientated, sidetracked and even mislead.

 

As if drunk on the weight of information and learning the Architecture student receives, confidence and motivation can quickly slide into disorientation and apathy – in a New York minute. The widespread success of the third level education system in my country has much to do with the quality of secondary school education. Without a good foundation, it would be very difficult to manage all the challenges presented by Third Level. I think studying Architecture in third level is similar to starting without that foundation – since very few of the skills developed in Secondary school are useful in Architecture School. In short the young Architectural student has been deprived of the most basic form of independence they possess – a good secondary education.

 

Architecture is about the only third level course, out of the whole panorama of courses, that hasn’t become firmly bolted onto the back end of the secondary educational system. Without that necessary connection, I feel students of Architecture are left hanging in the breeze without much substitute. Without any foundation, I feel it is hard to develop an independent awareness and self-confidence – the most essential attributes of any successful practicing Architect.

 

Brian O’ Hanlon.

 

[ October 14, 2003, 11:10 AM: Message edited by: garethace ]

[garethace]

 

[wda]

Brian,

 

A few, some what disjionted thoughts on ...

 

Architecture is about the only third level course, out of the whole panorama of courses, that hasn’t become firmly bolted onto the back end of the secondary educational system. Without that necessary connection, I feel students of Architecture are left hanging in the breeze without much substitute. Without any foundation, I feel it is hard to develop an independent awareness and self-confidence – the most essential attributes of any successful practicing Architect .

I personally believe that building the FOUNDATION is more for after formal training and education, the excavation. It would be nice to have the confidence and direction you speak of. But that really implies conformity, to be a functional element of education. Or more like a self help course in confidence- I believe I'm great so I am. The reality is your given the tools to communicate, design and shown how they work, through education. It's up to you to figure out what the foundation will support and how to configure the elements for your ultimate design -- yourself ---.

 

When in college we are all wet behind the ears, in contrast of our future professional lives. Even if you had first hand knowledge of design with in a known firm, would you have openly accepted what you know it to be now? Did you really believe that experiencing architecture was the foundation to good design? That meaning; actually getting out and being there, seeing it and not through the pub window. Even on those nasty November and December days.

 

In addition to the experience of architecture the pragmatic issues are management of information, people and resources all inside of a business structure at odds with great design. That Firm environment inside of a changing socio-economic dynamanic that can only be understood and quantitatively defined decades later, if at all. With this in mind teaching success and confidence inside of the defined environment may just be dis-service.

 

College level education should grant access to the tools to be successful. The nature of it, being abstract in application. Trade schools try to teach successful skills and methodology. Even a carpenter that has been taught how to build a set of stairs is really not ready for volutes, upeasing goose necks in the real world right out of school. Many think they can - not! The skills need to be enhanced and developed over time. This type of work is not for everyone. Just as achitecture and the different sub-disciplines that must be enhanced. It can only happen in a diverse real world setting. Nothing in school can prepare you for reality and the confidence to and of finding your place in it.

 

... it's the angst of an abstract profession- trying to corral your professional life and feelings - growth that created a sense of lacking. But it's the education that gets blamed. The same education also gave you the sense of where to look and the abstact skills to find direction.!!!

 

rgrds

WDA

[garethace]

Quick story, when i was in school, there was one guy who had no shoes, no proper clothes, no food or lunch money - and himself and many brothers were all raised up by their teenage sister. The mother went on benders for weeks at a time. No one in this school had anything to do with the young guy - so he became a terror in the school yard, the bully and gained respect that way.

 

One day, I decided i would be the first to 'stand up' to the bully. The fight lasted two seconds, and my right eye was turning from black to purple, yellow, green, etc for about a month afterwards. But playing sports with this guy afterwards, he always respected me.

 

I think Architecture is that school yard bully, it is the guy everyone avoids if possible and goes around rather than through. But if you tackle that bully, no matter how poorly, it will respect you. Architecture I believe is dog rough, something that will belong in future to the poorest of the poor, not the rich-ass people who currently claim to own it.

 

 

I honestly think that the Arch Institutes responsible with educating their own, should really have a specialised professionally paid department properly trained and capable of teaching.

 

While the Arch Insitutute is a wonderful world wide org, I don't think they ever really got professional about teaching.

 

Unless you can afford to go to one 'of the best colleges' etc, etc. Everyone I knew in college felt inferior or something to the better schools, as if the students of those schools were any better, as if the practice of architecture had anything to do with any school.

 

Just because an Architect, could be the best architect in the whole world like a Tschumi, it doesn't necessarily mean that person knows squat about teaching youngsters in the best way possible. Most of my family were priests, nuns and schools teachers from a backward part of rural Catholic Ireland, but they travelled the whole world preaching and teaching, chalk and talk.

 

Or more like a self help course in confidence- I believe I'm great so I am.

I think that is important for an Architect, simply because an architect leans so heavily on themselves - there is no book to throw at the problem or client, and say that is what the great book has said.

 

... it's the angst of an abstract profession- trying to corral your professional life and feelings - growth that created a sense of lacking. But it's the education that gets blamed. The same education also gave you the sense of where to look and the abstact skills to find direction.!!!

The best Architects, a lot of them have no formal eduation or training in Architecture. And yeah, you could have a point, Frank Gehry did a thesis in 1958 and now look at him held up to be the young Architects role model. All of many decades after he was a young arch himself.

 

I just think that somewhere Architects really did forget what they were drawing. You mentioned the cornice on the drawing, and the cornice the builder makes. I would extend that argument to include the street, space or courtyard the Architect makes should relate to real ones he/she already knows and has real experience of. Not something they explored in 3DS VIZ.

 

I think quite simply that Architectural education must establish a central point from which you can hope to appreciate the huge amount of design and work (on paper, built etc) that Architects are doing. The critical central point to start your journey into practice as an Architect has effectively been lost, since Architects do experience the world they are designing from the point of view of maps and drawings.

 

Yeah, I have learned to use maps and drawings too, but in relation to real experience. Remember the first person ever to draw a map, for the Bourge family in Renaissance Italy was Leonardo da Vinci. I believe in doing so that Leonardo became the first architect of the modern world. He didn't have any equipment, he just kept walking the city until he figured it out and drew the plan of the city. Bourge was delighted and proclaimed whoever owns this map has total control over the city defensively.

 

Because up until that point, no maps existed of cities, and it was by pure chance one successfully defended the city at all. Hausmann cut huge boulevards through Paris, having discovered by using a map, that Paris needed to ventilate it's sprawling mess of slums. This is what Architects have to do today, to become like Leonardo, Hausmann and all of these people.

 

I don't feel any particular need to criticise the Architectural education system as such. But if as a system, it is entirely useless, then why hold onto it like an old man clutching a blanket? After all, it is the young, strong, energetic and ambitious people Architecture should encourage most of all. Even if they don't have all the money, knowledge, respect and responsibility of older architects, they are much better in some respects.

 

Brian O' Hanlon.

 

One of my favourite films is 'On any given Sunday'. Which is about the team work, leadership and role Architects should play - but instead they choose to go around the real problems rather than face them directly. Like the charachter 'Steam'in Beamen' in the film, who starts out looking for the money, but realises the sport of football is really what it is all about. Architects never, ever learned to be true quarter backs in my view.

 

I have worked for Architectural firms who stressed individual reward over team reward. Like for instance, an individual is given a copy of 3DS VIZ and a new DELL workstation, if he/she works harder and does 'better' design work than their colleagues. Sure, it is a way of keeping disipline within an organisation - but it is not really dealing with the real problems.