E |▼| | | | | | | | F

For a while, the working title of this post dealing with what architectural education has shed over the years was Architectural Education Reductions, in the spirit of Architecture Reductions (2015) and Final Reductions! (2018). Strictly speaking, when cooking, a reduction is the evaporation of superfluous liquid to arrive at something more concentrated and closer to the essence of something. I don’t get the sense that’s what’s happening with architecture education. There’s definitely less stuff, but unless something new and essential ingredient is added, it doesn’t look like there’ll be much of substance left.

But where to begin documenting this? Beginning every enquiry with a reference to Alberti its one thing that’s stuck around for longer than it’s useful life but, now I think about it, who taught Alberti (in any sense we’d recognize today)? Perhaps the first thing the education of architects did away with the practice of transmitting knowledge to apprentices? Isn’t commercialized education simply the mass outsourcing of that to third parties? So perhaps we should begin with the first institution dedicated to education in the arts, architecture included – the Académie des Beaux-Arts founded, I learn, in 1648 to provide education in “drawing, painting, sculpture, engraving, architecture and other media.” The sentence has a ‘citation needed’ alert but it might just be seeking clarification on what those ‘other media’ could have been? Bookbinding? Illumination? Stained glass? Anyway, in 1863, Napoleon III made Académie des Beaux-Arts an independent school that changed its name to L’École des Beaux-Arts. Befitting a progressive institution, women were allowed to enter from 1897 although, once again, a citation is needed. But what would we have done without ‘The Beaux Arts’, as we know it in English? The only way to react against Eclecticism is to impose a dogma but we’re here to talk about education, not the aesthetics of Beaux Artsy eclecticism or Bauhausy design for production by machines. At the time and ever since, we understood ‘machine aesthetic’ to be design somehow inspired by machinery but for our aesthetic benefit rather than designing to exploit the manufacturing capabilities of machines and so, in turn, us. I suspect some similarly grimy driver has propelled every aesthetic revolution since. It’s not an aim of this post, but the pattern of absences where topics and skills have disappeared from architecture education might not be indicative of progressiveness but rather an ongoing continuity. To paraphrase Lampedusa, “Everything must change, if we want everything to stay the same.”

Learning from the ‘masters’

This is either understood or misunderstood as copying. A Beaux Arts education has come to be regarded as synonymous with the copying of architectural details. The first drawing below is by Shepherd Stevens Ėcole des Beaux-Arts in Paris 1905-1908 while the other two show the level of perfection required. Say what you like about the content, but it requires more than just skill to produce drawings like these. Could it be that it was never about copying the work of others, but of improving observation and instilling a love of drawing? It might just be that observation and a love of drawing were superfluous to the grand flow of architecture and it was more effective to misrepresent these endeavors negatively as “uncreative” and “copying”? Not that it matters. It’s gone now.

Life drawing

Similarly, a course in life drawing was once a staple of an education in architecture and, I can attest, continued in some architecture programs into the 1970s. In my case, the medium was charcoal on A1 paper set on an easel. Our artist mentor instructed us in still life in acrylic, took us into the garden to sketch trees and leaves in pencil, and to Rottnest Island offshore to draw seascapes in pastels. Life drawing is different form of observation and notation but, once again, the point of it might have been the same as that of learning from the masters. Gone.

Descriptive geometry

For people such as carpenters who needed to know how to make things, descriptive geometry was part of a technical drawing courses well into the 20th century. [c.f. The Notebooks of Ludwig Kurz] These drawings are all beautiful because they show us the attitude of a craftsperson. At the same time, descriptive geometry taught students the relationship between the thing that needs to be made, and how to document the process of its making. It’s not really about the drawings. Once again, perhaps a love of the craft was redundant as soon as design came to be about designing for the capabilities of machines? Cheers Grope!

Projections

I’m not going to upset myself over this. The following two drawings are typical of what I did in a Thursday after-school high-class circa 1972 because the math-science stream for intended architecture students didn’t include the technical drawing I thought might be useful. Our final project was some machine part axonometric shaded in pencil. There was an introduction to orthographic projection, isometric and axonometric as well as the dimensions used to construct them. Needless to say, I’ve never drawn a machine part since, but it did teach me that regardless of the projection, the object of the drawing remains the same and that how to draw it isn’t really what’s being taught. There’s a pattern to all these things so far. The thing being taught is not about the skill itself but about some attitude acquiring the skill engenders. It’s a broad definition of education if you like. These pencil-drawn projections might have been teaching me about line accuracy and this was a good attitude to have towards CAD when it finally arrived. I quickly learned that, despite the various cursor snap points, CAD didn’t do it all for you and that, just like a pencil, you had to push it.

Perspective drawing

In that same after-schooI ‘technical’”’ drawing class, I also learned about one-point and two-point perspective. I don’t remember what I drew\, the Horizon Line, Vanishing Points, Picture Plane, and Point of Observer translate an imagined three dimensional object into two dimensions fairly well and, once their functions are understood, it’s possible to do away with the set squares and T-squares. But even with perspective drawing, the object remains the same and the proportions between the various elements still exist. The fact that a perspective drawing can be constructed mechanically is not the important thing. You can forget how to construct them, but you can’t unlearn the principles and how things ought to look when seen from certain angles, positions, and fields of view. The knowledge will always be unconsciously applied in sketching.

Sketching

For decades, the works of Frank Ching have set an unrealistic bar for student sketches but sketching buildings had been a part of an architect’s education since the age of The Grand Tour. Le Corbusier and Michael Graves merely continued the tradition of sketching buildings in picturesque and preferably foreign locations when one has the time. The importance of observation and hand skills continues from the Beaux Arts but the levels of penmanship and detail didn’t because architecture was now all about massing and light. The premise is that looking at something and representing it in two dimensions can be somehow reverse engineered when a two-dimensional sketch needs to become some future three dimensional reality. In other words, the sketch is used to communicate an idea.

Ideas

On the basis of nothing but my own memories of looking at architectural news media, ideas began to become irrelevant in the mid-1990s when I became slowly aware of the stylistic variation in the outputs of offices such as Jean Nouvel or Herzog De Meuron. This was of course, the birth of the intern farm as a generator of ideas and, even then, mainly ideas of massing. Most of these offices fared well in an era that demanded novelty of form enabled by contrivance of structure. I may have even gone to an exhibition (at Tate Modern in London, no less) of the many models produced by HdM. At the time we – well, I – took this to be evidence of some sort of rigor, although the problem and how all these possible solutions were evaluated remained a mystery. Later, it was to be much the same with parametricism that exponentially increased the number of possible solutions to a problem that remained as vague as the criteria for its solution. Now we have text-to-image and sketch-to-image AI that allow an exponentially greater number of possible solutions to the problem of how a building could look. As long as the criteria for the evaluation of all these possible solutions is not made explicit it, it won’t be about to use AI to evaluate them and architects will retain the appearance of agency.

All this is justified as providing architects with more design options from which to choose those to show the client. This all rests on the big assumption that design is all about providing clients with options and no-one has actually questioned this. But just think. Once clients get their hands on text-to-image software and sketch-to-image software, they’ll be able to generate their own design options and then all they need to do is come to what’s left of an architect and say “I want something like this” much like some people might take a photograph to a hairdresser. When that happens, everything in this post will have gone the way of life drawing. Sketching and such won’t be outlawed. We’ll still be able to enjoy them, and we’ll still be talk endlessly about them and together shake our fists against the forces that made them superfluous. t

Context

Site contours

History

Anything below the ground

Criticism

Self-reflection

It doesn’t look like there’s going to be much left to teach except how to keep a practice afloat. It makes no difference if multiple design options are generated parametrically, artificially intelligently or by an intern farm. That mysterious and irreplaceable creativity we attribute to architects is already reduced to (and accepted as) choosing from a plethora of options but, if it were given all the data, AI could probably make better decisions because they’re essentially cashflow and PR ones. 2025 looks like being an Interesting year for architecture.

Cashflow and PR decisions influence architectural design more than we think. Clients have been known to bring their own ideas to architects even without their personal AI architectural option generator. In one office I worked at, an extremely wealthy and influential client called my boss to say he had a great idea for a building. As my boss later recounted, the client had drawn a 70-or-so storey mixed-use tower with what looked like a ghutra – the traditional Emirati headdress for men. Boss took the sketch, said he said he’d have a look and come back next week. A week later, he went back with a more developed design but minus the ghutra. The client said, “Great, but you’re missing the most important part” – the ghutra-like element. “Got it,” said boss, “I’ll come back next week.” Next week, the design was still lacking a conspicuous ghutra so the client said “You’re still not getting it,” or something like that. And so, one week later, boss returned with a design with some ghutra-esque shape as the dominant design feature. He’d read the room at last, and knew there wasn’t going to be any third chance. Many people say that building is their favorite of all buildings in Dubai.

• • • 

Models of Instruction
The Demise of the Idea