Architectural Education Through Materiality
Pedagogies of 20th Century Design

What kind of architectural knowledge was cultivated through drawings, models, design-build experimental houses and learning environments in the 20th century? And, did new teaching techniques and tools foster pedagogical, institutional and even cultural renewal? Architectural Education Through Materiality: Pedagogies of 20th Century Design brings together a collection of illustrated essays dedicated to exploring the complex processes that transformed architecture?s pedagogies in the 20th century.

The last decade has seen a substantial increase in interest in the history of architectural education. This book widens the geographical scope beyond local school histories and sets out to discover the very distinct materialities and technologies of schooling as active agents in the making of architectural schools. Architectural Education Through Materiality argues that knowledge transmission cannot be reduced to ?software?, the relatively easily detectable ideas in course notes and handbooks, but also has to be studied in close relation to the ?hardware? of, for instance, wall pictures, textiles, campus designs, slide projectors and even bodies.

Presenting illustrated case studies of works by architects, educators and theorists including Dalibor Vesely, Dom Hans van der Laan, the Global Tools group, Heinrich Wölfflin, Alfons Hoppenbrouwers, Joseph Rykwert, Pancho Guedes and Robert Cummings, and focusing on student-led educational initiatives in Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, the book will inspire students, educators and professionals with an interest in the many ways architectural knowledge is produced and taught.

Introduction: a passage to material hermeneutics Elke Couchez & Rajesh Heynickx Section 1: Objects on Display: Learning Through Looking 1. From wooden blocks to Scottish tartans. Dom Hans van der Laan’s reconciliation of rational patterns and spatial experience. Caroline Voet 2. A Walking exhibit. Alfons Hoppenbrouwers’s visual pedagogy Elke Couchez 3. Clashing perspectives: Joseph Rykwert’s object lesson at Ulm School of Design. Paul James 4. Pancho’s passages: framing transitional objects for decolonial education in 1980s South Africa Hannah le Roux Section 2: Hands-on: Learning Through Manual Work 5. Planning problems: data graphics in the education of architects and planners at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the 1940s. Anna Vallye 6. The Cambridge collage: Dalibor Vesely, phenomenology, and architectural design method Joseph Bedford 7. Little living labs: 1970s student design-build projects and the objects of experimental lifestyles Lee Stickells Section 3: Bodies in Space: Synesthetic Learning 8. The body as an ultimate form of architecture. Global Tools Body Workshops Silvia Franceschini 9. Parallel narratives of disciplinary disruption. The bush campus as design and pedagogical concept. Susan Holden 10. Environmental learning revisited: cities, issues, bodies. Isabelle Doucet Section 4: Learning by Technologies: Audio-Visual Transmissions 11. In the eye of the projector. Wölfflin, slides and architecture in postwar America Rajesh Heynickx 12. Wireless architecture: Robert Cummings’ early radio broadcasts John Macarthur and Deborah van der Plaat 13. The captive lecturer James Benedict Brown Index

Elke Couchez is an FWO Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Hasselt, Belgium.

Rajesh Heynickx is a Professor in Architectural Theory and Intellectual History at the Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven, Belgium.