It is almost no longer only a speculation: The
freelance architect figures as a species becoming extinct among the very keen on building.Yet,
it is this misery a matter of education? Can schools for architecture deal with this? Is
resistance to enslavement of architects possible "right from the start"? Like a
euopean wide extensive fire? Like a fundamentally changed education for architects?
This exactly meets my understanding of what urgently and practically is needed right now
in this let´s call it indeed ´european´ - moment of change. At this stage it is
certainly still utopian to expect even one of our architectural institutes, aiming at
performance and functional efficiency, to offer architectural students of their own accord
an educational background of two semesters.
In fact this is my idea and conviction: today a sustainable education for architects
should include at least one year preparation. In order to avoid any mistakes they should
not be called "pre-course" or "pre-education". I would rather suggest
a BASIC TENETS. Based on these an education in architecture would today make sense and be
future-oriented, whatever the individual content and prioritization.
Like that it would become possible, so I hope, that the professional group of
architects would regain its internal and political strength, which right now seems to be
lost. This basic tenets will increase the competence before and beyond building.
This beacuse the student has for two or three semesters experienced what it childhood
means, what the little human being needs in his small world, that he still has to
discover.
The student has learned to objectively consider what he, as just grown up young person,
experienced or missed himself. It happened right in front of his eyes, how so called
professional life is hard on adults, both women and men.
The student just tried to sell small life insurances in neighborhoods with more than 20 % unemployed
people. For a couple of weeks he dealt with the seriously ill, for two weeks he
visited dying people in old people´s homes, because being ill and dying away
can not be measured in any other way than reality or imparted by any translation.
In a few words, the designated architectural student has during his first year of studies
experienced extraordinary tensions: Ways of living, living contexts, life stages, life
goals had been experienced, discovered, understood, put into relation and into the
objective world. This with the aim that later, during design processes, classification
will make sense and be sound. For one year the beginner had to face it all.
In fact this basic tenets could be differentiated into well known courses like
anthropolgy, psychology, physiology, medicine, pedagogics, linguistics, biology, ecology,
hygieny. So I also have to add philosophy, in order to not be mistaken.
Yet I don´t talk about the ´courses´ but the their content, focussing on the processes
of dwelling, working, recreation, feeling free. As strict and precise as possible, without
at the same time codifying life. At least "continuity within change" should thus
be demonstrated and experienced: This is us, that´s how we live; today and, if it can be
foreseen already, tomorrow as well.
Consequently appears a totally different question for the now following building-education
than in what style we should build eventually.
The first and primary question is
- from the perspective of the one who feels driven to become architect: For whom will I
build one day?
Here it can remain open if this implies the client, the contractor, or the ones who will
later be the users of the building.
- from the perspective of the teachers the question, ´for whom will their supported
students build one day´, includes a long train of continuing questions. And most of them
end up with questions at oneself.
Even with this first approach it becomes rather appearant, that following my ideas
right from the start, even before conceptualization and design, construction and details
are considered, architectural education will find itself on political terrain an surely
will call state security into action.
One will have to tell them that the science of the human being cannot be thought of nor
practiced without political implications.
One will have to tell them, that the adrenalin-tests i.e. of the urine of people who in
1974 just moved into the Märkisch Quarter in Berlin showed up misguided urban design
politics as well as questionable housing politics. Unfortunatley only because of a lack of
the most simple physiological fundamentals the nakedness of the city politics had not been
effectively processed. It should not be assumed that by now this knowledge has increased.
However, is it bizarr to expect that at leat architect and urban designer know, why and
how and where and when they scare their fellow human beings?
Thus a topic: fear. Almost a topic for a whole semester.
Besides another wide topic which I will call here with Erving Goffman behavior in
social situations.
By the way, published already in 1971, a quarter of a century ago, and long
out-of-print and forgotten. There was the preparation, the educational background, for
which I plead here, already literally- in the street.
What about this social behavior: strolling, sauntering, a crowd of people, a cluster, a
summer night play, passing-by, standing in the corner? What about ´with one´s back to
the wall´, and what with open arms and accidential or intended body contact? What about
collective chants like ´ Warum ist es am Rhein so schön and Wer soll das
bezahlen...?
After all this topic would be worth a main lecture series and two seminars, one
adanced course.
Anyhow this BASIC TENETS is asking a bit much of the faculty with no tools nor
curriculum. At most they will have definitions of what should be taught, and there is a
goal. Yet it shouldn´t be compared to completing the school year successfully.
Because:
The work quota of the students and the work of of the faculty should in my mind develop
out of the recent situation and needs. Thus from semester to semester there will be quite
different topics, tasks and contents. Such an expectation is linked to a, I agree, rather
risky thesis: The world can be explained with a few points, one must only stand at the
crossroads of two main city highways for about two hours in order to understand the
forces, the energies, the internal climate, the experience of live, and the social state
of the place.
These were a few illustrations in the matter. I hope I stressed what the BASIC TENETS
in its central lines, its complexity of the content has to teach.
Yet for the beginner this is not it. Parallel to this there will further be two also
important instructions. One is an introduction into the outlines of cultural history,
which is not the same as teaching art- and architectural history, that can still remain
within the actual building studies. On the other hand, so that the "intelligence of
the hand" doesn´t come away empty-handed, the training of representation, ranging
from scetches to CAD, as well as a continuous training of the sensibility for material,
surface and colour.
In fact there is the difference between the architect and all other professions, dealing
with the well-being of our community, or with the social body in general: He is de facto
working for the physical aspect of the social, the buildings of society, and in doing so
he is interfering with this physical aspect, forming and designing it.
Yet the crucial point is, that those designing interventions by renovation, changes,
multiplication or by urban planning, urban and regional development, are as a matter of
fact at the same time translations of a mostly hard to see collective strong
wish.
It is hard to see because vitality like infirmity, unbroken self-understanding like
surviving not being in the best of health, show themselves in behaviors, that resemble the
so-called market behavior and make believe it is all about markets. However, those marktes
of architecture and urban planning are only apparent markets. They don´t come out of a
quota, but they are made, they are arranged: By commercials? Does advertizing set
life-goals? This only by the way. It is our by now deep-rooted, internalized ´market
conform´ situation. If I may ask mocklingly: If everything is art, as many diletants, but
also established artists proclaim, why should not everything be market as well.
In such situations it should rather be asked, what could be meant by
situation"; and then: How long can a three dimensional situation if such
a thing ever exists survive itself if it is changed. How fast does the memory of a
building, a place design, a street lined with houses disappear after it doesn´t exist
anymore? War, fire, demolition, reconstruction, changes. How long does a situation in the
urban space remain present as it has been before its demolition?
The same question can be asked at almost every place. And my generation had to ask it
often enough as a question of conscience.
Why not making that question curious as we are a cultural historical
subject? In what times did existing buildings have to make place for new buildings? Why?
For what reason? Against resistance or without effort? How long was the old image
remembered? And how long did it take for the new building or the new urban space to be
accepted?
What is remembered in fact? What is forgotten? Are there times, that keep and avoid
changes? How do the differ from ´revolutionary´ decades? By religious convictions and
ritual activities? The catholic church for example demands for the founding of all altars
grown ground or rock.
Does the judgement of the higher regional court count, which does not allow the
reconstruction of a forestry office as bed and breakfast, which had burnt down two years
ago; the reconstruction of the forestry office for other purposes would fall among the
prohibition of building outside; Also, after two years, the public would not anymore have
an idea of a building standing at this place, nor would they know what building type it
was or what appearance it had.
With this example I only want to show that we do not know a lot about the memory and what
we remember. However quite amazing. After all, the nine muses came out of the nine days of
Zeus with Mnemosyne, the godess of ´memory´.
Well, what do we remember? This would be one of the cultural historical and at the same
time anthropological subjects that could be dealt with.
I will name another more practical one: On what floors did the people of different social
positions dance and with what shoes at this or that time? What dances were these? And what
musical instruments had been used? Fast, stamping, walking, jumping, rocking?
Should the the running-baseball-hiking boot, this allround and all weather shoe, be
considered an impoverishment or liberation? In that context could be added an observation
of ´movement spaces´, of touching and non-touching distance areas and how close delling,
working and recreating people are allowed to approach each other, without perceiving the
smell of the other. Although this again rather has to do with behavior it shows how
closely linked psychologically based characteristics are with physical expressions. Key
word ´body talk`.
Sense of touch and skin could also be trained in other ways; e.g. trying out the
writing for blind people and experimenting under which conditions, in what light, from
what distance a surface appears smooth, greasy, harsh, like velvet, like bark, spotty,
like scab, porous
Dose experiences of the hand nourish experiences of the eye? When
is the eye sure about not being mislead without asking the hand? You see, some fragments
of preparation that come to my mind.
Or this for example: We never make it enough clear to ourselves that a pure material
never exists naturally but only as compound. Materials appear, and they appear as they
are, in this or that condition. We find them and make something out of or with them. By
cleaning, isolating, destilating etc. we thus create abstractions of that material, come
up with a term, a first step of virtuality of something actually not existing in reality.
Marble would be the material, lime its pure term.
Talking about lime: This really exists purely, without characteristics in certain
stages of an impressing metamorphosis, not copied by any other mineral.
Lime: Creating many sorts of stone, unprocessed as well as processed and used for
building. Yet, solved in water, building material for dishes, cases, cartilages and bones,
because of its organically organized essence. But burned, grinded, put out building
material again, now in other ways and functions, within living memory. And then the most
shining whitewash, not sticky, not corrosive, not sealing. But the youngest lime is called
chalk: can be rubbed off and following the lime of the jurrasic period it describes the
end of the medieval ages of the earth.
Such a knowlegde is not of great help of the architect at first. But this is exactly what
I am aiming at: The immediate, and I repeat: the immediate use of the knowledge
experienced within the basic tenets needs not to be given.
It is not primarily about acquiring knowledge but recognizing. For example, -yes, most
important! - of hermetical and occult relationships. And this doesn not have to do with
esoterics at all, yet with the art of hermeneutics, a method of understanding human being
in the world. Therefore no one should even think it is about an early course in buidling
material, if we talk about the metamorphosis of a mineral like lime.
After all the designated architect should learn to see in this basic tenets. And
this he can do best by permanently trying to say what he actually sees. This means: by
describing, by reporting. I don´t think there is any other way to come across the
increasing process of illiteracy in the context of digitalization.
Its unacknowledged result is the spelling reformation: written language as easy to handle
user-interface.
Talking with LeCorbusier: "saying what one can see and especially which is
much more difficult seeing, what one can see." This sentence actually already
includes the whole subject of instruction Architecture.
I will leave it to those hints about possible contents of such a basic tenet. Your
fantasy will easily pick up the threads and continue to tie a more dense network of life
relationships
A TENET would not be a tenet without a final exam, showing where it lead to, so to
speak as a transition-exam to architecture. I think about this exam as a dispute between
students, thrown together to small groups by their teachers. The topic will spontaneously
be given for discussion. It might be comparable to a public hearing. There will be no
grades. The basic tenets will end with the permission for the actual course in
architecture.
Now it is time to ask: Who is teaching? And where? With what tools? And where, after
all, does the time come from?
Let´s start with the time. As outside observer I would imagine that both junior and
senior classes should be shortened by one semester. This might lead to other specializing
optional courses. On the other hand learning by doing could become more important.
I think that we need more students who interrupt their studies for 6 months or one year
when they consider it the right time to work in a well known freelance office.
Coming back they will know more precisely what they need to specialize in and learn more
about during their senior classes.
What type of teachers does basic tenets need? Surely no more life long professors.
Basic tenets need urban indians on the average side with hearts curious about life.
Today they sit between all kinds of chairs and should be picked out with some talent.
Social workers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, urban researchers, journalists, etc.
both women and men. Those people, as experienced and also incessently continuing in their
quest, have the task to bring the students into situations where they themselves can
search for and make experiences.
Because we know what it is like with experiences: Only few can be transported or
transferred; most of them have to be made be oneself and alone. And this exactly is the
goal: Making experiences and even more experiences, to start with; yet sustainable
experiences that can later during the architectural studies come to fruits.
Those urban or also countryside indians as I call them- as mediators, track
experienced, investigators, have to give themselves and the students work quota and
processes.
This implies a precise organization or self-coordination, having to accept virulent
group dynamics. The teachers have a small room in the university, a clever secretary and 3
telephones, internet access and their own information data base.
The students will during basic tenets hardly be inside the holy halls of their Alma
Mater. Mother is giving her gifts outside, let´s say in temporarily empty apartments,
unused calssrooms, canteens of civil servants, warehouses, backrooms in restaurants. In
short, on the spot, on the spots. Some years ago the subway university had been intensely
criticized: Buildings along the public transport system, no more or only temporarily used,
as places for drifting instruction. Such an idea could revive in a century of urban fallow
land and unoccupied buildings.
Much could be thought of.
I mentioned that basic tenet is ending with the permission of extraodinary life
experienced joung people to study architecture and urban design.
This is what is seen from the outside, yet only from the outside. Because that I
hope indeed it will continue as a pre-knowledge about the essentials of any
building task. It will offer the architect an almost uncompeted advantage: He does know
binding criteria understanding binding as experienced and discussed that he
can bring into account, which is comparably influential as economic, or better
economic-speculative criteria.
The architect is no longer playing the (minor) part of creating taste of different
sorts. He is inviolved in more than pleasant fassades, introducing so called intelligent
house technics and coming on strong with self-projection. He is designing a in all parts
sensibly serving work.
Although trust in architects as designers of cities and villages as well as of a
´considerable´ society had been lost during postmodern ´as you like´, it is
nevertheless coming back. Brussels civil servants can let go of their absurd security
measures for contractors. Also state and economy will soon and in their own interest
refrain from pulling the wool over the architects eyes.
Yet, however: the sucess of an invention, a new perspective, a new method, can only
appear if it is put into action. There is nothing coming out of nothing. Videant consules!