ARTS
Architecture
Looking after the human spirit
Alan Powers suggests that a training in architecture should include some manual skills What is architecture and how do you get it? These questions are invoked when- ever the education of architects is dis- cussed. Since their answers have been much in dispute lately, the nature of archi- tectural training has been changing too. The profession has just successfully defend- ed its five-year course from governmental scissors, and seems to have prevented an assault on the protected title of architect which the long training secures. This is at a time when many potential clients prefer to entrust their scarce projects to Design and Build contractors rather than risk the uncertainty a qualified specialist. Does the latter imply that something has gone badly wrong with architectural train- ing? Since architecture began in earnest to become a degree subject in the early years of this century, theoretical and applied knowledge have been hard to balance. Articled pupillage, which came before architecture schools, was weighted towards practical expertise and manual skill. Profes- sors who aspired to train great minds in architecture were accused of producing incompetents who had to start learning again in the 'real world'. That 'real world' now seems to be taking its revenge, with unfortunate consequences for the quality of the environment.
Just how diverse it now is became clear at a symposium recently at the Portsmouth University School of Architecture, held in the fine but dilapidated Theatre Royal designed by the greatest Edwardian theatre architect, Frank Matcham, whose faded plush detracted well from the academic seriousness of the occasion. Portsmouth is a school which prides itself on pluralism. If you design classical buildings you will not be failed in exams, as you would be at vir- tually all other schools, and you might even get distinctions, alongside deconstruction- ists and other varieties of modernist.
Modernism now has at least 57 varieties, since each year brings a new fashion, usual- ly based on the adoption of an existing out- side discipline which architectural theorists will feel free to cut and paste at will. A greater change than that between Beaux Arts classicism and Modernism in the Thir- ties has been the change in America after 1968, when architectural theory meant no longer a set of mathematical formulae loosely based on sociological presumptions, but became a speculative body of philo- sophical knowledge, mostly unconnected with building. Just as in the Edwardian years, the preferred route for ideas is from France via America, where every school of architecture from coast to coast now must have its resident experts on Walter Ben- jamin and Jacques Derrida. Students at South Bank University use 'sampling' by photocopier to generate designs faster in order to 'undermine the taste regimes' which their tutor sees as oppressively domi- nating other schools. Architectural Associ- ation students can spend a week on site at a disused Cornish tin mine making wheeled vehicles whose most useful function is to transport a block of stone. As C. H. Reilly, the Liverpool professor at the beginning of the century said, this is the time of your life to have some fun and let the imagination free, although his version was rendering shadows over monumental classic eleva- tions on vast sheets of Whatman paper.
An exercise Reilly would have recog- Learning by doing: Brickwork for West Dean Visitor Centre nised is that taught in Vienna to the first year students (usually 1,000 in number) by Rob Krier. Like his brother Leon, Krier believes in the virtue of the traditional urban forms that modernism set out to destroy. His students begin their course by drawing doorways, corner treatments and other parts of buildings, relishing the orna- ment found in turn-of-the-century Vienna rather than rejecting it. Perhaps the most enlightened aspect of Krier's course is that less than 10 per cent of these beginners qualify as architects. The others, as he points out, may have the opportunity to become informed clients for architects in their other professions. This is what already happens with American architec- ture courses, and is effectively what Roger Zogolovitch, a founder of CZWG Archi- tects, did in becoming a developer extraor- dinary, better placed to achieve the changes of which architects dream in frustration.
To connect architecture to the real world through a different method of training was the intention in setting up the Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture, now in its second year. Its director, Brian Hanson, spoke at Portsmouth of a more transcen- dent level of reality, present in buildings of humble status in the past and recognised by theorists such as Ruskin. While most archi- tecture works from the broad conception down to the detail, a project of Institute students with Christopher Alexander, for a visitor centre at West Dean, showed an opposite process of deriving the total form from a detailed exploration of its con- stituent parts, something closer to the learning process of pupillage which archi- tecture schools cast out a hundred years ago. During this century, architectural styles have changed while the assumptions behind teaching have not. Assessed against Reilly's criterion of having fun, the stu- dents clearly enjoyed building sections of flint wall and timber window.
As Robert Maxwell, recently returned after 12 years as professor of architecture at Princeton, said in his opening speech at the Portsmouth conference, the emphasis on the practical at the expense of the aes- thetic is a British tendency found at 'pro- gressive' and 'conservative' ends of the spectrum. `A great deal of what I see in design studios today, on both sides of the Atlantic, is trying to be conceptual art, using ideas that were high in conceptual art some 15 years ago. This may be good for the ego, it isn't good for the human spirit.' He concluded, `To be able to teach it requires first of all that we recognise what architecture is'. This may be more difficult than it sounds, but remains fundamental to the enterprise.
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