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READING LIST
LIST CREATOR
Benjamin Smith
Tulane University
Architecture and Pedagogy
Education is a negotiation, not only between student and teacher, but also between the
content covered and the institution’s mission. Fusing design with critical thinking,
architecture schools teach students to have confidence to put their ideas and their
results into the world. Schools challenge students to respond to dynamic cultures and
interrogate difficult questions with the aim of producing confident, engaged, and
sensitive work. Through design studios, seminars, and lectures, students experience the
practice and theory of architecture and encounter the cultural concerns and
methodological paradigms that give shape to the discipline.
The following selection of texts represents a brief reading list on the topic of institutions
and pedagogy. While many of the texts relate to architecture and its history, several of
them engage this theme more broadly. The different points of view expressed in these
examples address salient issues on the attributes of architectural education, the ways
students learn, and how institutions function, as well as the relationships between these
areas. I expect that most people reading this list share in the legacy of its content, as
students and educators, and my hope is this: by curating texts that reveal a glimpse into
what, how, and why design education matters, we continue to question and grow the
methods, knowledges, and frameworks that make understanding possible.
Experience and Education
JOHN DEWEY
FREE PRESS
Dewey's book proposed a progressive model of education with a basis in experience
intended to rethink traditional top-down learning models. The text suggested that
experience, and appealing to one's experience, encouraged participatory learning with
more freedom to engage the academic process, as long as the role of experience created
an integral relationship in developing pedagogy and content. However, Dewey remarked
that a “gulf” of experience between mature adults and adolescent learners can
complicate learning environments, and in those situations educators should recognize
their maturity, working to provide understanding that bridges differences.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
PAOLO FREIRE
BLOOMSBURY
Freire’s account of the social dynamic between students and their teachers suggested
several concepts to consider dissemination and reception in learning environments.
First is his critique of the “banking” concept, which he articulated as a narrative function
of control that he believed created an oppressive atmosphere stifling creativity and
engagement with the subject matter. As an alternative approach, Freire suggested a
dialogical method to transform the teacher's role toward a “student among student”
relationship. The humanist approach Freire proposed established an environment
characterized by participation, exchange, and co-creation to “decode” and investigate
subject themes.
International Design Conference in Aspen: The Invisible City
MILDRED S. FRIEDMAN
DESIGN QUARTERLY 86/87
A focus at the International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA) in the summer of 1972
was alternative pedagogical structures. Session topics included "Students on Learning,"
"Experimental Urban Schools," "Education and Politics," "Conversations: School
Programs," and "The City as a Classroom." One of the speakers was John Bremer, author
of School Without Walls. The title of Bremer’s book established a popular pedagogical
concept in the 1970s. At the conference, Bremer suggested the importance of a school’s
social climate with regard to effective teaching, and explained it as “an invisible and
private curriculum” that required significant managerial effort.
Big Shed Syndrome
REYNER BANHAM
NEW SOCIETY
The British architectural theorist published this essay in New Society in 1972 about the
recently occupied warehouse building leased by the Southern California Institute of
Architecture (SCI-Arc), colloquially referred to as the New School at that time. Banham's
argument for his article, titled “Big Shed Syndrome,” emphasized that SCI-Arc’s building
served as a tool for pedagogy. Banham recognized that an attribute of the shed type
promoted an environment for architectural thinking that was "architecture-free."
Banham’s one-page essay used the building to exemplify, raise suspicions, and critique
the shed concept as a learning environment for architecture, remarking that
architecture schools could signify their pedagogy through their design.
The Teaching of Architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts
RICHARD CHAFEE
THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE ÉCOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS
SECKER AND WARBURG
Covering the evolution, curriculum, effects, and political structures of the École des
Beaux-Arts, Chaffee’s essay presented the history of a pedagogical system with lasting
influence on architectural education. Familiar terms like “charette,” “prix de Rome,” and
“atelier” become clarified relative to not only their historical context, but also to their
persistence as dominant themes for methods of working, the competitive atmosphere for
design awards, and instructor to student relationships. Regardless of the Beaux-Arts
style, Chaffee’s account of the École represented a synthesis of profession and education
demonstrating the school’s ambitions toward the production of architecture as an art
form.
Educating Architects: Pedagogy and the Pendulum
ROBERT GUTMAN
PUBLIC INTEREST
In Gutman’s critique of the state of architectural education (and practice) in the mid-
1980s, amidst the disciplinary push of Postmodernism, he questioned architecture’s
efficacy if its scope remained too narrow. He called for a balance between the artistic and
the pragmatic, the humanistic and the scientific, to give architecture greater meaning as
a coherent theoretical product that served its purpose. Gutman addressed these themes
through four areas of focus: first, through the role of design as one of idealism or realism;
second, how architecture creates a dialectic between “aesthetics and objectivity"; third,
the knowledge producing research frameworks of design education; and fourth, how
architecture can increase its capacity to affect policy.
The Texas Rangers: Notes from An Architectural Underground
ALEXANDER CARAGONNE
MIT PRESS
Caragonne’s book followed the Texas Rangers, a group of faculty in the School of
Architecture at the University of Texas, Austin who emerged in the 1950s due to their
belief that the school lacked a clearly defined pedagogical philosophy. Through
collaboration between Austin's young faculty, including Bernard Hoesli, Colin Rowe,
John Hejduk, Harwell Harris, Robert Slutzky, Lee Hirsche, and Ken Nuhn, the book
showed how these architects and theorists spearheaded a neo-modernist formalism that
produced teaching methods influential to many schools of architecture, one of the most
well known examples being John Hejduk's 9-square grid exercise. Caragonne's account
of Colin Rowe's contested document, the “Manual for the Conduct of Design,” which
pitted some faculty against each other, provided a review of notable curriculum changes.
One of the most significant changes was in the junior year sequence that shifted its focus
to Rowe’s interests in the internal logics of form and the agency that form gives to
architecture.
The ASU Architecture Guild Graduation Lecture
COY HOWARD
ENOUGH ABOUT ME
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY
Howard’s address to a graduating class at Arizona State University School of Architecture
urged students to find their passions and values, allowing them to become sensitive
contributors to the field of architecture, to both enlarge what architecture considers as
well as refine its core attributes. He cautioned the students of the “myth of the ‘Hero-
Designer’” and outlined strategies to achieve self-defined success, while recognizing the
breadth of diversity that architecture accommodates. A central theme of the piece
marked how imaginative designers could leverage exploration into qualities of
experience, guided by the discipline of effort, to give motive to their work. Promoting
clear aspirations to channel improvement, Howard’s empowering talk encouraged
students to fulfill their promise.
Departmental Organization
RUDOLPH WEINGARTNER
FITTING FORM TO FUNCTION: A PRIMER ON THE ORGANIZATION OF ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Through a review of academic structures, Weingartner’s chapter examined effective
administrative practices to support successful collegial environments. A
recommendation for communication and trust between administrators and faculty
served as principle skills to avoid three detrimental features of ineffective departments,
which included “mediocrity,” “ideological splits,” and “non-functional.” By advocating
for collaboration, and recognizing the kinds of challenges university colleagues must
overcome, Weingartner’s strategies work toward creating opportunities to achieve
academic progress.
arq: Architectural Research and Disciplinarity
JANE RENDELL
ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH QUARTERLY
In closing her essay, Rendell advised that a territory for architectural research could be
viewed as an interdisciplinary “preposition,” stitching architecture’s boundaries through
its questions and the solutions it produces, becoming a transformative disciplinary act.
She comes to this conclusion after finding faults with the United Kingdom’s Research
Assessment Exercise (which measures research quality in British institutions of higher
education) as being out of touch with values in practice-based research that provide
substantive advancement through interrogating architectural output and process.
Identifying architecture as a subject and a discipline, Rendell demonstrated not only the
complexity of research methodologies in architecture, but also celebrated its unique
formats of knowledge production.
Henry van de Velde and Walter Gropius: Between Avoidance
and Imitation
KATHLEEN JAMES-CHAKRABORTY
BAUHAUS CULTURE: FROM WEIMAR TO THE COLD WAR
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
James-Chakraborty dissected the origins of the Bauhaus by showing the school’s
development through two figures integral to its founding, Henry van de Velde and Walter
Gropius. The essay elaborates on the nuanced relationship between van de Velde and his
successor, Gropius; between the School of Arts and Crafts and its re-articulation as the
Bauhaus; and between two modes of early 20th century production, one characterized by
style, the other by standardization. Although both architects shared pedagogical
ambitions to unify the arts and crafts, and believed in a workshop culture, something
exemplified at both schools, van de Velde's art nouveau idiosyncrasy and Gropius' goals
of universalization exemplified James-Chakraborty's use of the terms “individuality”
and “impersonal” to represent two divergent sensibilities.
Introduction: The Turn of Education
JOAN OCKMAN
ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL: THREE CENTURIES OF EDUCATING ARCHITECTS IN NORTH AMERICA
MIT PRESS & ACSA
Ockman’s essay served as a roadmap to the book she edited, which accounted for the
evolution of architectural education in North America. In her introduction, she lays out
key themes which are covered in more detail in the subsequent chapters, such as roots in
the Polytechnic and Beaux-Arts models of education, the role of Modernism and early
20th century methods of production, and the social, technological, and historicist
principles influencing post-war design. In addition to surveying pedagogical traditions,
Ockman observes the curious position of education being caught “between the past and
the future . . . between production and reproduction,” where schools of architecture can
become reliant on a past that may no longer serve the mission of the discipline's
progress.
ONLINE
Radical Pedagogies
BEATRIZ COLOMINA AND EVANGELOS KOTSIORIS
VOLUME #45: ON LEARNING
Radical Pedagogies was a multi-year project organized by Beatriz Colomina with PhD
students at Princeton School of Architecture. The project produced numerous case
studies on examples of avant-garde pedagogical models tested at architecture schools in
the late 20th century. The research demonstrated the impact of pedagogy to challenge
longstanding architectural learning traditions amidst climates of social and political
change. Previously exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2014, a synopsis of the research
published in Volume announced the exhibition of the project at the 7th Warsaw Under
Construction Festival, and covered 17 examples from schools in Europe, Latin America,
Australia, Africa, Middle East, Asia, and North America operating between 1948-1994.
On Building
MONICA PONCE DE LEON
THE BUILDING
LARS MÜLLER
Ponce de Leon’s essay anchored the ability of architects and their pedagogical
experiments through the design of buildings. The text observed architecture as a creative
process at a distance from traditional research. Ponce de Leon argued for the vitality of
design, through its contingencies, culminating in objects of speculation to direct tools
and their outcomes. Finding seeds of pedagogy latent in a faculty person’s practice she
demonstrated the instrumental nature of architectural education to influence the built
environment in a feedback loop engaged in cultural agency.
LIST CREATOR
Benjamin Smith
Tulane University
TOPICS
Architecture, Ideas
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