Bad Teaching Examples

The link takes to an article with three videos about what you never ever should do when you teach.

Model I of Donald Schön scheme is profoundly illustrated here through three different cases.

The publication is Inside Higher Education.

Master de Arquitectura de Michigan Nº 1

El Máster de arquitectura de Taubman College ha desbancado a la GSD de Harvard, y su decana, Monica Ponce de León está en la lista de las 25 personas que mejor enseñan y dirigen en USA.

La GSD no se ha dormido en los laureles y ya había contratado a Moshen Mostafavi, cabeza clara donde las haya, para enderezar el rumbo de la coleccíon de estrellas de Cambridge. Todo esta información proviene de Designinteligence, que habla de la "promesa por confirmar" que es la nueva IE School of Architecture.

Está claro que la competencia en el ámbito académico, como el dinamismo, se demuestra andando.

Arquitectura sostenible

Antonio Lamela ha dicho en esta segunda Bienal que no hay arquitectura sostenible, sólo hay buena o mala arquitectura.

Buena arquitectura hubo en la Bienal, la de Lamela y la de Cesar Ruiz Larrea, quien atacó a la arquitectura de protesis y mostró su brillante rehabilitación del Instituto Nacional de Estadística en la Castellana de Madrid.

El proyecto de Richard Rogers para Bodegas Protos fue presentado por un subalterno del despacho de Barcelona que lo hizo con brillantez, debido a la ausencia del ponente programado. No hay mal que bien no venga. El proyecto, por cierto, es muy interesante y paisajísticamente impecable.

The Price of Globalization in Architecture

Some new buildings of Barcelona that do not "construct the city" was the theme of the tertulia. Agbar, Auditori, Gas Natural, Dwellings by Clotet, etc. are isolated buildings that do not pay any attention at all to inmediate public space.

The thing is that those buildings "construct the Metropolis", which is the useful unity to participate in the global scale, as the last two posts of this blog sustain. The public space in the global scale is the media: newspapers, magazines, TV, etc.

Let's hope we have had enough Forums and this sort of mediatic buildings and get back to the kind of architecture that has elevated the quality of life of Barcelona and its citizens so much in the last two decades. Real, material and everyday architecture and luxurious public space is the only way talented people from around the world will come to live here and start new businesses.

Metropolitan and Global

Barcelona's "Vision 2020" matches with this video of the London School of Economics. Competitiveness in 21st Century is going to be among metropolitan areas more than (or at the same time as) Nation States. As in the last post: it is going to be exciting the try.

Do it in Barcelona

The new Metropolitan Strategic Plan has been presented yesterday. The Mayor, J. Hereu, said that it can be among the best global metropolises at the end of next decade. One perceives enough enthusiasm in the street to get there. It is going to be exciting.

Smart Power

This 18' talk of ex-dean of Harvard Government School is cheering up. We need certain amount of optimism also to keep us going. The main message: yes we can do something.

Mercat de Mercats

This last days the city centre of Barcelona became a huge market place, "El Mercat de Mercats", a truly market not a virtual one. Lots of food and natural products in the public space. No wonder, the word market and the word square means the same thing in peninsular Spanish as markets began in the main squares of cities like Barcelona. The text and the audio is in Catalan, the beautiful language of Catalunya that has literature and poetry of great quality.

Consumerism and Architectural Pedagogy

Image from deviantART

To check how hyper-capitalism influenced architectural education in the UK in the middle of 20th century is a good idea, now that globalization is going to push even harder in that direction.

Personality, consumption and architectural pedagogy in the UK, 1958–1968

Alise Upitis (2008).

Architectural Research Quarterly, Volume 12,
Issue 3-4, December 2008 pp 325-335

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?aid=4399504

Public Luxury in Barcelona

Sometimes the simplest things are the most important. Bicing, the almost free service of bicycles in Barcelona is able to change the way citizens use the city. It is not intended to be an entretaintment: it is an alternative mean of public transportation.

Yesterday, at two in the morning, it was fantastic not to take a taxi or a night bus back home. As a friend said: that is a truly luxury.

Crisis in Slow Motion

Crisis is not over, it does not matter what politicians keep on saying around the world. For example, banks are going to give the biggest bonus ever: after all, their executives made them win tons of money without big punishments from the government or the public. The news at The Guardian confirms this.

On the other hand, the bests universities have also their responsibilities in all this madness. Larry Summers is an example of the connexions between Academia, Wall Street and Government: the news at The Chronicle confirms this too.

Neither universities, nor great business schools, have given any explanation about their complicity, maybe because it is taking place right now, almost in slow motion.

The Architecture of Barcelona

Great opportunity for visiting the new and good old buildings of Barcelona.

48HOPENHOUSE BCN is an event that takes place the whole weekend and there are several architectural visits. It is going to take place the 16th and 17th of October, so next weekend. See you there...

El manifiesto del Diablo

En 1975, José Agustín Goytisolo escribía sobre arquitectura y urbanismo en términos perfectamente vigentes hoy en día. No es nada raro, ni un caso de premonición poética, que haberla haila.

Ya en 1972 el Club de Roma hablaba de la imposibilidad del crecimiento ilimitado. Al año siguiente la OPEP lo demotró. 30 años después la cosa va peor de lo previsto: vamos para 8.000 millones de personas en el mundo y el consumo de recursos y la contaminación se suman a la aceleración en la destrucción de la selva tropical.

No queda duda que con este panorama por delante, es proporcionado desear que por lo menos no se diga que no teníamos imaginación y sentido del humor.

2010 Ranking of Doctoral Programs in USA

A very interesting tool that compares doctoral programs in USA has been launched by The Chronicle of Higher Education. It is extremely easy to compare how long does it take to get a doctoral degree in architecture at Columbia and compare it to Cornell or Harvard. The link takes strait ahead to the tool.

Mariscal at the Pedrera

Mariscal is one of those artists that after his death everybody is going to say he was a genius. To have a taste of his talent visit the wonderful exhibition at the Barcelona's Pedrera, Caixa Catalunya. It is going to be opened until January.

Festa al Cel 2010

Amaizing what technology can do when it is about killing other human beings! Well, it is true that the Airbus 380, at the same hight as the F18, it is remarkable too. All these are part of "Festa al Cel"

Lo bueno de Facebook

Eric Schmidt, CEO de Google, predice que en el futuro los jóvenes de hoy "exigirán el derecho a cambiar sus nombres para escapar de su pasado en Internet". Supuestamente, como todos cambiamos de opinión con el tiempo y nos hacemos más templados (¡ a mi me ha sucedido lo contrario!), no resistiremos leer cómo pensábamos dentro de nada.

Yo creo lo contrario. Es bueno comprobar que no hemos tenido la verdad cojida con la mano nunca, ni antes ni ahora. Esto es bueno, y además es estupendo mesurar las cosas que les decimos a nuestros amigos ya que nos ayuda a mesurar lo que pensamos: no hay diferencia entre lenguaje y pensamiento.

Creo que las redes sociales mejoran a la sociedad y a los individuos. Lástima que sus inventores no crean en el potencial humano en el fondo como demuestra Schmidt. El artículo vale la pena. La entrevista también, del Wall Street Journal.

Mèrce Global

Uno de los espectáculos más multitudinarios (1.4000.000 personas inundaron las calles de la Barcelona durante La Mèrce, según El País) fue el concierto de Abrar-ul-Hak, pakistaní que mezcla la música tradicional de su país con el pop. El contraste con esta maravilla de experiencia global lo dieron los supuestos anti-sistema a los tres dias en la Manifestación de la Huelga General. De todas maneras hay que ir acostumbrándose a estos contrastes: han llegado para quedarse.

Barcelona Beaches

Simón Bolivar, Barcelona (foto by Rafael Mendez)

Oriol Bohigas, the chief architect of the urban transformation of Barcelona'92, disagreed on the idea of “fabricating” the beaches of Barcelona at the end of 1980’s.

The thing is that the sand of the beaches of Barcelona are naturally taking away by the sea some kilometres down the coast and deposited at the river Ebro’s Delta. To maintain the beaches as they are right now (well, as a matter of fact they have lost a lot of the sand already) the Municipality has spent this year 400 million €, 750.000 m3 of sand and lots of work. There is an article at El Pais, a video and a link to the Municipality that has information (in Spanish and English).

The effort is good business, anyway: the beaches of Barcelona are the most visited in Spain with 14.000.000 tourists. Just as Simón Bolivar once said, in a total different context, “If nature opposes us, let's fight against it and make it obey us”. By the way, Bolivar (his statue) is staring at the sea in the Barceloneta Beach.

Global Inspiration

An excellent example of a delicate attention to the context while satisfying modern-global requirements is the new building of Pei for the Lombardy Region in Milan (under construction). It is undeniable the benefits of Pei's experience at the Hancock Tower (1976): the new complex is much better integrated to its immediate context.

It could not be a better heir of the Ponti's Pirelli (1958), which is the building where the Lombardy Region is right now, and it is the one that inspired Mitjans' Banco Atlantico (1969) in Barcelona. Certainly, a chain of global inspiration.

La lección magistral

Lección de Anatomía, Rembrandt, 1632

Se supone que la renovación pedagógica en las universidades españolas empieza este curso, pero no parece que eso vaya a ser factible.

La apatía frente al cambio lleva a demonizar algunas prácticas docentes. Si bien es cierto que es un anacronismo basar toda la enseñanza exclusivamente en lecciones magistrales, tampoco hay que demonizar esta técnica educativa. En medicina, derecho, arquitectura el uso estratégico de la lección magistral es más que recomendable.

Los periódicos son los que más están discutiendo este tema al que permanecen ajenos la mayoría de los claustros de nuestras universidades. El link lleva a un artículo de El País. En él se explica, por ejemplo, como la lectio magister se justificaba cuando no había imprenta y el acceso a la información era escaso o nulo, o cuando había que ser fiel a a las sagradas escrituras en la enseñanza religiosa.

Art in the street

The image is form La Vanguardia, and the rest of the album is worth watching

At the quarter of Gracia, in Barcelona, they decorate the streets in their anual celebration week. Modrian would have been delighted to walk down this instalation.

Revolución universitaria

Ilustración de CollabrATEC de la Universidad de Texas

Estos son los cuatro puntos de la revolución educativa en marcha:

• Educación centrada en el alumno
• Educación para toda la vida
• Educación por competencias
  
• Aprendizaje colaborativo
  

A los académicos españoles esta revolución los está dejando atrás. Su supuesto blindaje laboral (son funcionarios) les genera cierta apatía natural frente a la exigencias de cambio. Pero este blindaje puede estar a punto de resquebrajarse .

En Inglaterra, donde ocurre todo primero, el gobierno de coalición ha tomado la delantera y está revolucionando sus universidades, que ya están entre las mejores del mundo y aplican el nuevo paradigma educativo desde hace años. Mr. Cable, el equivalente al ministro de economía, ha dicho que vienen tres cambios fundamentales:

• Más universidades privadas
  
• Que paguen los que puedan
  
• Dejar quebrar a las universidades insolventes
  

Así como suena: las universidades con exceso de deuda tendrán que quebrar y sus alumnos serán rescatados por el estado. El gobierno calcula que caerán unas 20 universidades. The Guardian, ha publicado la noticia sobre el futuro de las universidades en UK. Mucho me temo que en España acabe haciendo lo mismo pero apremiados desde Bruselas y/o el FMI.

Public Space and Traditions

Royal Tracks, Spain

The first thing that defines public space is its legal condition: it belongs to everyone.

In Spanish cities, since 1273, many of those spaces have to allow that flocks of transhumant pasturage pass through them. All this traffic is organized in the so called "Royal Tracks" (Cañadas reales). The one that crosses Segovia has 500 km long and starts in León and ends in Extremadura, close to Portugal.

The use of public space for this purpose, as an exercise of old rights, is the only way we urbanites realize this traditional lifestyle still exists. How many of our own urban traditions depend on the existence of public space? Probably the majority.

Do not miss the video: the sheep at the centre are at a standstill while the outside ring turns around.

Open City International Summer School

In the birth town of Giorgio Armani, there is going to take place the Open City International Summer School of the Politecnico di Milano.

During three weeks, 6-23 September, this design workshop will gather together people from all over the world to work on public space, a specially important theme in the era of globalization. It will be a good occasion to test the validity of our five years old proposal of the Welfare Space.

Naive Realism

Population density. Data from the G-Econ project, Yale University

There are innumerable recommendations for surviving current crisis. I propose naïve realism.

Think for a moment that there were 2 billion people in the world in 1940; that we are now 6 and will be 8 billions inhabitants in the world in 2050. Sum to it that our planet can not possibly feed that amount of “animal spirits” (Keynes). John Gray insists (see “Homo Rapiens and Mass Extintion”, 2002, in his last book Gray’s Anatomy, Allen Lane, 2009) that the “plague of peole” is not going to reach the “Era of Solitude” (Wilson), when humankind would be alone because all the rest of animals have been killed, nor the eradication of humankind (Lovelock): The future is going to be a combination of genocide, war, epidemic, natural destruction and the sort of generalized social collapsed that has taken place in post-Comunist Russia.

Just as we do everyday, that we live knowing that we are going to die, we have to choose what kind of life we want to lead in a world that is condemmeded to change radically and violently in the next future. I call it naïve realism, adapting slightly Keynes' “naïve optimism”. Gray puts it this way: "From a human point of view, this may be a discomfiting prospect; but at least it dispels the nightmare of an age of solitude".

What architects and artists should do in such a situation?. Well, maybe to preserve the aesthetic as a value, as some of them have always done: the harmony of the aesthetic experience is the only way humans experiment their subjective unity authentically. There is nothing more we can do, but we should not do either anything less.

Collaborative Education or Eco Buddhism?

An image from Avatar, the film, taken from the Eco Buddhism Blog

The RAL (Reflexive Architecture Laboratory) is a design studio like any other but collaborative oriented. The result is that for the first time students start talking about ethics, tolerance, objectiveness in judgement, etc. Design itself has been even better than before at the RAL. It is incredible that this pedagogic technique has been ingnored for so long. The Chronicle ofHigher Education puts it this way:

Distributed and collaborative learning, with its emphasis on mindfulness, attunement to others, nonjudgmental interactions, acknowledgment of each person's unique contributions, and recognition of the importance of deep participation, can't help but foster critical thinking skills and greater empathic engagement. In that sense, collaborative learning transforms the classroom into a laboratory for empathic expression, which, in turn, enriches the educational process.

The article is by Jeremy Rifkin, the same author of The Empathic Civilization (this links to a good article extracted from the book) . I have no doubt about the effectiveness of collaborative applied to architectural education. In a wider political scope I am not so sure. John Gray, for example, thinks Rifkin's empathy becomes naive when it gets too green.

By the way, Rifkin says it was "Jane" Abercrombie at the University College London Hospitals who started this kind of education in 1950's. What about Vigotsky then?

El valor de la arquitectura

La dificultad mayor que tiene la economía para dirigir el mundo es su incomprensión sobre la naturaleza humana. Todos sus gurús expresan su desconcierto acerca de la "human nature", como por ejemplo Alan Greenspan (ver post anterior).

La arquitectura conoce a la raza humana mejor que la economía. Ozenfant, que influyó mucho sobre Le Corbusier, hablaba del arte como la integración de las contradicciones internas del ser humano: las tres coordenadas las llamaba.

La autonomía de la arquitectura se refiere a esto. Por supuesto que es la más dependiente de las "artes mayores" ya que se hace con recursos ajenos al autor/a. Pero siempre se puede dar "liebre por gato" (Alejandro de la Sota) y después de satisfacer todos los requerimientos sociales, técnicos, etc. se integran todos en ellos en un todo armónico que nos habla de la riqueza subjetiva por encima de todo. La autonomía de la arquitectura tiene que ver con mantener lo estético como valor en la sociedad actual, una sociedad tan equivocada que tiene su mirada puesta en cada telediario en la Bolsa de Valores.

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.