Subject
2000_2

Ulrich Conrads

No Education without Educational Background

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!

(translated by Anette Sommer)

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