A few weeks back I shared my first childhood awareness of buildings from an age when I didn’t even know it was somebody’s job to design them, or that there even was such a thing as architecture. I became curious and started asking other people when they first became aware of buildings and their environment. Here are […]
In the commercial world it matters little if the people who can speak most convincingly about a project aren’t those who know most about it. I’ve watched people present projects while seeing the drawings for the first time across the table from a client going through them. I’ve witnessed people with no knowledge of a […]
“Is something a clever solution if it’s to a problem you made yourself? You see, I really like thinking out of the box in order to solve problems and as long as it does not break any design rule my instructor has set then I think these solutions should be appreciated as effort by the designer […]
What exactly is a concept for a building? How do I get one? And how can I know if it is a good one? Dear Student, Thank you for asking. These three questions are really one and the same as they always occur together and in that order. I’ll do my best. “What exactly is […]
I’m having a bit of a time in my current BArch course. On the one hand I love design, I love the built environment and studying it. On the other hand this course is giving me the shits. It’s not so much the course is hard or the workload is high. It’s more the point […]
It’s been more than a few weeks since Indexed Memory and my promise to give this blog a problem-based thematic index. The first iteration is now live but it’s still very much a work in progress. It was much more than the re-tagging I anticipated. I re-read many of the posts and checked their tags and keywords […]
😀🙂😐🍋☹️😬👎🗑🔥 For architecture instructors, the interval between end of classes and end of semester is a time for reflecting on what they’ve taught and on how to evaluate and document the outcome. Teaching and learning objectives are invariably attained but what of those famous intangibles architecture is supposed to have? If they can’t be taught, […]
“a cultural tour of Europe formerly undertaken, especially in the 18th century, by a young man of the upper classes as a part of his education” … is as good a definition as any. Such tours would begin with The Louvre in Paris and perhaps take in a couple of the French cathedrals such as […]
We all know what The Canon is but no longer know whether it’s taught because it’s important or important because it’s taught. Even the teaching is iffy if it refers to the perfection of ideas rather than the messy and imperfect realities of the buildings that represent rather than physically embody the grandiose claims made […]
In my sophomore year I decided to learn properly how to play the piano. A music student in the same dorms recommended her teacher who lived nearby. I rang the doorbell. To me at nineteen, Mme. Alice Carrard was as old as only piano teachers can be and, after we chatted for a while, she […]
LinkedIn and Lynda have cornered the market for delivering software credentials to job-insecure technicians [c.f. Learning Curve] but the delivery systems for architectural design skills remain primitive. This is because nobody’s really sure what architectural design skills are, let alone how to teach them. It’s not for lack of trying. The Beaux-Arts Over the centuries, many worthy architects received their education […]
Introducing Architectural Theory [issuu, amazon] is a book that gathers together pieces of writing on various themes in architecture for the purpose of getting people – mainly architecture students – to do the following. The first two, a. and b. – are absolutely necessary. So are the next two, c. and d. and must be passed through in order to […]
This one has to be about architecture school – a general survey of the role of architecture education. Pondering through another letter-swamp of project placement on archdaily I found myself immersed in a mass of architecture school-yak links. Architecture media talks about schools a lot. Isn’t architecture the discipline that pumps its education the most? I’ve never heard of aerospacedaily or carpentrydaily or jurisprudencedaily. Marketing […]
If Architecture itself is a myth then what are architecture students supposed to believe in? Architectural education is often thought to be reactionary and unresponsive to market forces but my perception is that it’s attuned all too well. There’s no shortage of digital students who’ve picked up on image and perception management being everything. For them, architecture is an endless learning curve […]
