The Future of Architectural Education

The future is currently the most uncertain thing to think about. But present is not easy to understand either: what is going on right now has become a matter of experts, no common sense stuff. Education is not an exception, and architectural education even more.

The best idea to get a glimpse of how future architects will be taught is to ask the experts. The link takes to 5 very short essays by educational experts (click on them and they will open) that predict future architectural education.

The point of view of this blog is that, in the near future, architects will become aware of the fact that they have been self-teaching themselves for more than a century now, so they will have the opportunity of starting doing it better, much better. This is the reflexive (r)evolution ahead in pedagogical terms, not only in architecture but especially in it.

Teaching creativity

A page from the manuscript “La speculazione edilizia” (‘Building Speculation’; 1957)

Creativity is a mystery. How to teach something that is a mystery? Business people have their idea, like in this Stanford's video. The Institute of Creativity and Educational Innovation, University of Valencia has a more artistic idea: it relates perception to action. The latter is closer to the atypical action that produces new perceptions which is art. By the way, art and business is the theme of Italo Calvino's novel Building Speculation written in 1957. It tells the story of a writer that fails in becoming a business man. On the other hand, much later, the same Calvino wrote Six Memos for the Next Millennium which is certainly one of the best creative clues for the future.

At the Reflexive Architecture Laboratory (check the LAR tag) we did the other way round: after doing we started theorizing. Still it looks that Reflexiveness is at the centre of creativity.

Reflexivity and transformative action (Margaret Archer)

Clear speech on various interpretations of reflexivity, but artistic. Archer defines reflexivity as:

mental capacity of normal people to consider themselves in relation to the social context, and the social context in relation to themselves.

Her patient review of other sociologist's definitions is worth spending 45' listening to her coherent and beautiful structured discourse. Wikipedia gives a rather comprehensive view of reflexivity in the social sciences.

Formalism and reflexivity in Economy, not in Architecture

Krugman, by Alan Cordova, Flickr

Georges Soros, adam kesher2000, Flickr

A good thing of current global financial crisis is that it promotes attention to how the world is ruled. Last century John Maynard Keynes said that "little else" than Economy and Political Philosophy does (General Theory, 1936).

It has always been obvious to me that Art and Aesthetics is lacking in this list. Actually, I find surprising that "formalism" and "reflexivity" are terms of great interest in economical debate. Brand new Nobel Prize Paul Krugman and George Soros defend each concept in that arena.

At the end of his book "The Enlightenment´s Wake", John Gray bases his hopes for the future of "western cultures" in the introduction of "some varieties of poetry and mysticism" in modern modes of thinking. Wouldn´t be easier to re-shape our idea of modernity and to include the third aspect of human constituttion Kant discovered in his third Critique: the aesthetic autonomy againt reason and ethics?