Educating the architect
2012
It is only with Aristotle that theoretical knowledge (episteme) and know-how or skill (techne) assume categorical difference.1 Both episteme and techne involve praxis – that is, acting, doing, performing, exercising. Significantly, praxis is tied to proairesis – deliberation on the implications of conduct and comportment. Praxis is thus aligned to ethos, to an ethical undertaking.2 Yet Aristotle’s categorical distinction between knowledge and know-how sustains much that is problematic with architectural education. For Plato education was a matter of `recollection,’ anamnesis. To be educated meant to be enabled to remember what one already knows; not to `have’ knowledge or be `reprogrammed,’ but to be afforded a praxis of constructive recollection. Aristotle also defined being-human in terms of remembrance. Human-being is mnemonic; humans are beings who remember. By contrast, our word `educate’ is from the Latin: e-ducare – to lead or draw-out, conduce, produce. Implied is a notion that the one to be educated must be `ductile’ – that is plastic, programmable, conformable, and compliant. It is difficult to avoid an inevitable connection between education and `induction’ (or initiation) in every gesture of drawing - drawing-one-out and drawing-one-in. Education is always liberation and incarceration, opportunity and snare. Ultimately what is drawn out is also a way of looking and seeing, a way of `theorising’ (Greek: theorein = `to see’), a disposition to the world, a manner of being-in and being-towards that world. Hence education must develop into an ethical disposition of solicitude and care – towards self, others and the kosmos.3 It is always an attunement, or as some say an `acculturation,’ into some kind of circumambience: metaphysical, philosophical, lexical, musical, literary, academic, disciplinary, professional, institutional, socio-spatial, kinesthetic, psychosomatic, visceral. But it is first and foremost an induction into the praxis of a techne of invention and innovation geared to the transformation of what is already-there (a philosophy, a precedent, an individual, a subject, a client, a community, a site), rather than to the anxious production of spectacle and novelty.
One common impediment to architectural education becoming such an induction is the default attitude that demands symmetry between commercial practice and the academy. Universities cannot replicate the contexts of professional practice, with their imperatives, investments and risks. The design studio is not a lesser version or simulacrum of the commercial design office. It is a fundamentally different, artificial setting; with different registers, structures and potentialities. This artificiality is neither lack nor liability. The artifice of the institution is also its proper artfulness. Indeed, intractable institutional imperatives and constraints (more students, less staff and resources, standardisation, bureaucratisation, marketisation, risk aversion…) must be taken as entrepreneurial opportunities to rethink ambitions, goals, frameworks and practices in radical ways – beginning with the release of architectural education from the debased registers of pragmatics and technology that currently hold sway,4 and that define architectural praxis predominantly in terms of training for building procurement. Yet, in procuring buildings, do architects leave the parameters of architectural episteme and praxis unchanged? Do they maintain the status quo or put it to the test? What lines of inquiry do they pursue and what questions do they put by way of architecture? Architects do not only use ideas to develop formal propositions. In the best of worlds, they produce ideas and intellectual capital in and through the designs they produce; and do so in distinctive ways, unavailable to other kinds of practitioners. For example, they might construct lines of inquiry that put into question how human beings frame and deal with the world and their place in it; reconfigure how creativity is defined and enacted; devise new ways of critically working space and materiality according to a kind of innovative architectonics; elaborate hybrid programs and disciplinary alliances to construct new knowledge and trajectories of research through architectural speculation; or expand the field and remit of practice to transform conventional architectural engagement and production.
Any radical rethinking of architectural education as a setting for transformative praxis must radicalise the pedagogical structures, conditions and procedures currently in place. The radical is not apart, but structural and in relation to the root (Latin: radix) – hence foundational. Several routings for architectural education could be ventured around the four main themes raised in these short notes: praxis, episteme, ethos and techne. First, a return to the grounds of architecture as a fundamentally topological and tectonic praxis: a pedagogy of place-making through materialised spatialisation. Second, a concern for transactional praxis that foregrounds the complex trans-disciplinary conditions of the contemporary in which episteme is irrevocably and irretrievably admixed: a pedagogy of engaged, resolutely curious inquiry, accepting the productive capacities of the hybrid, the indeterminate and the unpredictable. Third, an acknowledgement of the ethical registers of episteme, techne and praxis: a pedagogy that shifts emphasis away from the singular genius and the monologues of the demiurgic architecton in favor of congenial, communitarian, deferential and discursive modes of engagement, innovation and production. Fourth, an understanding that human-being is foundationally both mnemonic and technical: a mnemotechnical pedagogy in which technology no longer functions as the instrumental apparatus of capitalist appropriation and production but as the solicitous means by which human-being shows itself and comes into its own.
Notes
1. Parry, Richard, "Episteme and Techne," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/episteme-techne/>.
2. Aristotle, On Rhetoric: 1.1.14; 3.16.8. See Roland Barthes, “S/Z,” in Roland Barthes, Oeuvres Completes III. Paris: Seuil, 2002, 132-133.
3. See my Theorising the Project. A Thematic Approach to Architectural Design. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011, 108-9.
4. The works of philosopher Bernard Stiegler on technics are pivotal in this regard. See his Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998; Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008; Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.