The Architectural Project

CHAPTER 3 Design Education

41 Design Education CHAPTER 3 Design Education In schools of architecture we find subjects called“Architectural Design,” “Design,” or as was usual in the past, “Architectural Composition.” All these course titles point to a single although varied reality: the design studio. The design studio is where the student learns to design; and design is considered the key activity for an architect. Therefore, the studio is the most important piece in the set of subjects; the essential activity,offering the main chance for the future architect to become a good designer.Other courses in a school of architecture are usually termed theoretical. This means that studio is deemed to be practical: the student will “feed” on the other subjects in order somehow to translate this wide spectrum of knowledge into the only thing that matters, design. The design studio can be a single unit that accompanies all the other subjects throughout the whole curriculum: this is the “vertical studio” that brings to the present the traditional atelier of the Ecole des BeauxArts . In the Beaux-Arts, the student entered the atelier of a“patron”and usually remained there during all the formative years.1 The student’s designs would bear the imprint of that particular master; the hope was that this would lead the student to win the coveted Grand Prix de Rome, which would assure a career as a designer of state architecture. In modern schools this continuity is rarely the case. The student goes through a succession of studios, sometimes spanning one or two years of the period of schooling but more usually only a semester. Simulation However, the practice itself is very similar in all cases. The student— sometimes a group of students—produce a simulation of a real design for a building. This will happen time and again in successive studios. The same professors and assistants who guide and follow the development of the design conduct the evaluation of it. In some cases ad hoc juries decide on the value of the design, evoking the Beaux-Arts prix 42 The Architectural Project d’émulation. Gaining the favor of the jury or obtaining a good mark from the professor gets the student promoted to the next level.Juries and evaluations take the place of theoretical exams, of which there are none in the usual design training. Studio is considered an essential part of the architect’s training. The key activity of the architect is represented in the studio where he or she designs buildings. In spite of this, seldom do we find a specific doctrine expounded in the studio. It is a case of learning by doing, because you learn to design objects by designing objects. That is, you learn about something in the exercise of that something.2 What matters in the studio is not having knowledge but being able to deploy that knowledge (which often remains implicit) in the design product.It is not a discursive knowledge but one that experts identify in the product and approve of when acting as a jury. Design knowledge makes its presence felt in practice, or rather in the simulation of practice.It is an incomplete practice in which design and construction are “naturally” separated, still following the Renaissance conception of architecture. If we believe that architecture resides in every building and can be identified in the project, it follows that in the process of making that project,everything meaningful for architecture will somehow happen in the design studio.Through the minds of the students and over their drawing boards must pass everything that is relevant for architecture. It is not enough to learn the routines of a practice the student still cannot master .Students must also learn there,and through the same medium,what architecture is or should be.The autonomy of the project as a substitute for “live” architecture reaches a maximum in schools of architecture. Students are set apart from the environment in which they live, from that with which they are familiar. This is judged to be “bad architecture .” Experience cannot overcome the good examples of modern architecture . After graduating, students have a mission: to impose upon reality a parallel world of Architect’s Architecture, which they know mainly through representations. If they fail, they become skeptics: they have not succeeded in imposing the Good. If they are successful, it is because they have imposed over their own environment an exotic product that is perhaps rejected even in the land of its origin.Instead of knowing...