viii

5. An Undergraduate Voice in Architectural Education

Laura L. \Villenbrock
6. Beyond Cultural Chauvi nism, Broadening and Enriching
Architectural Education
julie Diaz, Shirl Buss, and Sheryl Tircuil
Part U Strategies
7. Cultural Invisibility The African American Experience in
Architectural Education
Brad Grant
8. The Ilidden Curriculum and the Design Studio, Toward
a Criti cal Studio Pedagogy
Thomas A. Dullon
9. Biculturalism and Community Design, A Model for
Critical Design Education
Anthony Ward
10. Introduci ng Gender into Architectural Studios
jacqueline Leavill
11. Rethinking Architectural History from a Gender
Perspective
Karen Kingsley
12. Learning to Teach and Teaching to Learn
Alan Pe.genberg
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Contributors
Contents
97
121
149
165
195
225
249
265
279
289
293
Series Introduction:
Cultural Politics and
Architectural Education:
Refiguring the
Boundaries of Political
and Pedagogical Practice
Henry A Giroux
Voices ill Arcbitectural Education is developed around a number of guiding
principles that rupture dominant assumptions and practices both within its
own disciplinary space and across other disciplinary fi elds. More specifically,
it makes problematic those assumptions that legitimate certain taken-for-
granted relations among knowl edge, power, and pedagogy. Understood in
these terms, the contributors all challenge in different ways the nmion that
architects can remove themselves from broader issues that shape the land-
scape of society. Hence, questi ons regarding urban design cannot be removed
from issues concerning homelessness, environmental decay, urban blight, af-
forda.ble housing, racism, sexism, and economic injusti ce. The contributors af-
firm the primacy of the political in the discourse and practice of architectural
theol)' and education, but they also reveal how politi CS and ideology structure
and shape architectural discourses that shift between effete cul tural commen-
tary and a reductionistic celebration of the primacy of the aesthetic.
As part of a broader discourse of social responsibility, the contributors
attempt to redefine the ethical legitimacy of architectural theory and pedagogy
in a society that subordinates almost every aspect of daily life to the rule of
capital and the logic of the market. This is not to suggest that the intent of
this book is merely to convince people within the fi eld of architecture to
rethink questions of design and planning to undertake much needed internal
x
Series Introduction
disciplinary reforms. Such a position would suggest that architects merely
need to appropriate ethical and pOlitical considerations as part of their Ian'-
guage to refann their disciplinary field. While such a goal is not to be U11-
d,erva.lued, Voices in Architectural Education poims to a much wider project:
situating the theory and practice of architectural education within cultural
politics that challenge not only disciplinary boundaries but also the institu-
tional and ideological borders that shape Western industrial societies. Thus,
o the value of this book lies in part in its willingness to engage the limits of
'" ItS ?wn disciplinary discourse within rather than outside wider historical,
SOCial, and cultural configurations of power.
In attempting to ground architectural theory and practice in cultural politics
that illuminate the field's connections to broader economic and social forces
Voices in Architectural Education reconstructs the meaning, purpose, and
practice of architectural theory and education in multidisciplinary terms. In
this way, political and cultural issues often excluded from the field of archi-
tectural theory and design become central to the definition of architecture
as a form of cultural politics. In addition, the contributors illuminate the Q
importance of making connections between architectural workers and other
cultural workers who produce specific symbolic representations organized
and regulated within and across various institutional arrangements. At stake
here is the importance of defining architects as public intellectuals and pro-
a dlscours.e that them to create a new vision in which to engage
111 the construction of cntlCal cultural and institutional spaces with other 0
cultural workers.
Voices in Architectural Education further extends and deepens the notion
of cultural politics by making the issue of pedagogy central to the discourses
of architectural education. This is an important issue that needs some clari-
fication. Within the last decade there has been growing concern among a
number of scholars in a variety of diSCiplines with the notion and practice
of pedagogy. RefUSing to reduce the concept to the practice of knowledge
and skills transmission, the new work on pedagogical practice has been taken
up as a form of political and cultural production deeply implicated in the
construction of knowledge, subjectivities, and social relations. In the shift
q. away from pedagogy as a form of transmission, there is an increasing attempt
, to engage pedagogy as a form of cultural politiCS. Both inside and outside
the academy this has meant a concern with analyses of the production and
Of. and how these practices and the practices they
provoke are Impltcated 111 dynamics of social power. Unfortunately, the new-
found concern with pedagogy in discipl ines other than educational theo
and practice is often characterized by a refusal to engage the diverse
undertaken in this field by a number of critical educational theorist'). For
example, while pedagogy has become a "hot" topic in French, gender, and
Engltsh Itterature studies, the books produced in these diSCiplines largely
suggest, by vIrtue of thelf theoretIcal gaps and structured silences, that ped-
series Introduction
xi
agogyas a form of critical and political practice is a new theoretical invention
diScovered and developed within the narrow confines of each of these re-
spective disciplines.
1
The resulting work often expresses itself both in re-
ductionistic theories of pedagogy and as an indictment of specialized scholarly
work; at the same time, such work implicates itself in the disciplinary elitism
that haunts the overall structure of academic disciplines. The field of education
becomes the "other," marginalized and displaced as a serious terrain of
theOlY, resistance, and cultural politiCS. This suggests not only a commentary
on the academic status of educational theolY as a discipline but also the fear
and loathing met by any multidisciplinary field that closely intersects with
public life.
The contributors to Voices in Architectural Education do not engage in
thiS form of historical and ideological amnesia. On the contrary, they collec-
tively draw from a wide corpus of work in educational theory and practice
while simultaneously reinventing and rewriting such work within a particular
multidisciplinary structure and space. In doing so, they perform a valuable
theoretical service by articulating critical pedagogy around new problems,
discourses, and practices.
Voices in Architectural Education gives new theoretical and practical mean-
ing not only to the study of architectural education, but also to a theory and
practice of pedagogy, hiStory, cultural studies, and other spheres of academic
and daily life that are attempting to redefine the role of the public intellectual
as a cultural worker and the space of the social as an eminently political,
historical, and cultural landscape. This is an invaluable book not only for
students of architectural education but for all cultural workers interested in
critical pedagogy and cultural studies. Not only does Voices in Architectural
Education offer an example of how critical pedagogy can concretely link D
theory and practice, it also refigures the boundaries between politics and 0
cultural work. This is a book that should be read and re-read.
NOTE
1. See for example, Barbara Johnson, ed., Yale French Studies Number 63
(1982), special issue on "The Pedagogical Imperative: Teaching as a Literary
Genre"; Gregory L. Ulmer, Applied Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1985); Cary Nelson, Ybeory in the Classroom (Ur-
bana: University of!llinois Press, 1986); Patricia Donahue and Ellen Quandahl,
eds., Reclaiming Pedagogy.' The Rhetoric of the Classroom (Carbondale: SOUU1-
ern IllinOis University Press, 1989); Bruce Henricksen and Thais E. Mogran,
eds., ReOrientations .. Cn'ticai Theories and Pedagogies (Urbana: University of
IllinOis Press, 1990); Susan L. Gabriel and Isaiah Smithson, eds., Gender in
the Classroom (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Mas'ud Zavarzadeh
xiv Acknowledgments
My deepest gratitude goes to Marsha Olcon, who transcribed tapes, typed
and retyped letters and chapters, and generally eased the load, all the while
maintaining her sense of humor and flinching only a little whenever I walked
into her office. Thanks also to Catherine Gangale for her help in transcribing
tapes.
I want to thank my parents for their suppOrt and for making me go to
architecture school when I thought I had changed my mind.
l owe a great debt [0 my sons, Nathan and Nolan, for the lime this book
has taken from our reading and playing together.
And above all I want to thank my Wife, Janis, an editor in her own right,
who read evelY chapter and caught things I missed. Thi s book would nOt
have been possible without her loving suppOrt, careful critiCism, and endless
time put in on the computer. Someday I will have to pay her back
Introduction:
Architectural Education,
Postmodernism, and
Critical Pedagogy
Thomas A Dutton
Technology can be used (Q subjugate the people or it Cdn be used to
liberate them . ... And whoever says that a technician of whalever sort, be
he [sicl an architeel, doctor, engineer, sciemist, etc., needs solely [Q work
with his inslrumems, in his chosen specialty, while his coumrymen are
starving or wearing themselves OUl in the struggle, has de facto gone
ovcr to thc Olher side. He is nOt apolitical: he has taken a political decision,
but one opposed to the rnovernel1lS for Iiberati on.
1
Che Guevara spoke these words before the International Union of Architects
(UIA) Congress in 1963. When I first read them ten years later, I was mes-
merized, shocked, and angered all at once. Guevara's words were so simple,
Straightforward, yet extraordinary. They still have power.
I began teaching in 1977, and I have returned to these words time and
again. I look for new wrinkles, trying to unravel new layers of meaning. I
often fiddle with the words so as to achieve new understanding by substituting
certain words with others. "Technology" is one word I have changed fre-
quently, replacing it with such terms as architectural practice, architectural
media, modernism, and postmodernism. More recently, as I spend more time
teaching architecture than practicing it, I have introduced words like e u ~
cation, schooling, curriculum, and pedagogy. The inSight gained from this
latter process of substitution is what has led to this book: to bring together
a collection of voices who struggle to conceive and practice architectural
education in IiberatOl), ways.
Voices in Architectural Education challenges architectural educators to
xvi Introduction
think consciously of their work and experi ences in political terms: to rec-
ognize the fact that the practice of education is cullLlral and poli tical. There
is no escaping this responsibility to account for cultural and political con-
sequences. This book is an attempt to make consequences clear, to hold
(eachers accountable for (heir actions and, further, to strive for certain con-
sequences. To comprehend educational practice in cultural -poli tical terms,
then, enables teachers LO investigate pedagogy in relation to the larger SOCiety,
and to develop practices that advance democracy and work toward alternmive
visions about how life might be organized. To put this in other terms is to
say that all teachers act on the basis of some theory. Insofar as architectural
teachers plan instruction, determine readings, and select programs and build-
ing types for studio investigations, they are implementing theory. Paulo Freire,
arguably the world's most reknown educator bur hardly known within the
United States, puts it this way: "A11 educational practice implies a theoretical
stance on the educator's parr. This Stance in turn implies-sometimes more,
someti mes less explici tl y-an interpretation of man [sic] and the world.'"
Henry A. Giroux says something similar: "All pedagogy ... is essentially a
political issue and all educati onal theories are political theories. Inherent in
any educational design are val ue assumptions and choices about the nature
of humankind, the use of authority, the value of specific forms of knowledge
and, finally, a vision of what constitutes the good life.' The question, of course,
is whether teachers are fully cognizam of the theoretical base of their acti ons.
TheolY, in turn, is never value- free. It always embodies interests and is
grounded in societal forms, again with political consequences. To see edu-
cation and pedagogy as forms of cullural politics is to construct a new terrain
that can invigorate archi tectural pedagogy and focus discussion loward a
needed architecturaVeducati onaVpolitical project. In this way, this book is
not just about a critical examination of architect ural reaching. It is also about
a theolY of society. Taken together, these papers constitute a critical language
with which architectural education, architectural theory, and society can be
understood in thei r interconnections. In other words, the authors comribute
to the rethinking of archi tectural theory and society through thei r cri tical
discussion of architectural schooling and pedagogy.
Architectural education viewed in these ways is sadly undertheorized by
architectural educarors. Work of this kind is almost nonexistent, which in part
explains the necessity of this book Among the myriad reasons for this lack,
two stand out. First, archi tectural education is professionally driven; it is
professional education. The profession and the schools of architecture have
mainmined a dialogue-sometimes cordial, sometimes antagonistic-about
the appropriate level of skills, standards, capabilities, and competencies nec-
essary for gainful employment in the profeSSional office. To be sure, specifi c
skills, both technical and theoretical, must be learned. When taken together,
they comprise the bulk of the curriculum. Primary among these is the design
studiO. As architects and architectural educators already know, students spend
Introduction
Xliii
"derable lime in the design studio learning and practicing design, a fact
conSI ..'
which resul[5 in other pans of the curnculum bemg pushed .to the penph.el.y.
Beyond the studiO, there are usual courses on t.he and activity
of building: structures, mechamcal systems, matenals, construction systems;
courses on electri City, plumbing, and lighting systems; and courses on profes-
sional practi ce in both i[5 production and contract negotiation phases. Ar-
, chitectural programs also include general education, yet the drive to become
an architect is so st rong as to diminish the importance of these kinds of
courses. They are understood as university requirements, courses that "have
to be taken," time to be endured, not really relevant to gain entrance to the
profession. Ironi cally, whil e architecture is wi.dely to much
ahout the character of a SOCiety, students learn little about their society beyond
that which is necessary to function professionally.
A second reason for (he lack of theoretical inqui ry into architectural ed-
ucation as a liberatory practice is simply that architectural programs are staffed
by people (mostl y architects) who see the practice and theoretical devel -
opment of architecture as more important than the practice and theoretical
development of education. This is not meant as a critique so much as it is
to point out the obvious. What architectural educators spend most of their
time debating is Architecture (note the capi tal A): its histories, theories, tech-
niques, practi ces, roles, civic <lnd social responsibilities, political conse-
quences, and so on. Certainly debates around such maners have been
provocative, yet this questioning of architecture is simpl y insufficient. Debates
ahout architecture need to be extended to the realm of archi tectural school-
ing. More needs to be discussed and analyzed about architectural curriculum,
knowledge formation, and pedagogy, especially in terms of their rel ation to
the cultural and political processes of the larger society.
Discussion of this kind has been heavy in the field of education for some-
time, and has picked up in recent years. Education has become one of our
more eXCiting nat ional debates, having been the subject of numerous com-
miSSions, books, articles, television programs, forums, seminars, and reports.
The rush to investigare educat ion has focused attention on such issues as
curricular content and structure, culwral values and knowledge, teacher com-
petence and salary, class size, test scores, reading and technological (e.g.,
computer) literacy, funding strategies and schools' relation to the needs of
husiness, to name but a few. To say that education has really taken it on the
chin is a gross understatement. The nation's schools have not reviewed well
and are characterized as mediocre, as failures, as funnels through which
Students are channeled and who are then "ill -equi pped to work in, contribute
to, profit from and enjoy our increasingly technological society. ,,4 Education
has become the proverbial criSiS, so much so that in his 1988 campaign,
George Bush promised to be the "Education President. "
As this di scussion proceeds, its tone is set prinCipally by the political Right.
Consequently, there is much clamor about "rewrning": to the baSiCS, to
xviii Introduction
excell ence, to Latin, to the classics, to the great books, to national pride, to
the canon of Western cuhure. The socalled restoration of education is based
upon discipline, job skills and vocational training, eIllrepreneurial values, and
economic conformity. If these may seem l audable, understand that rhey are
spun around the political project of cultural uniformity:'5 the restoration of
(supposed) fixed values, the sanctioning of a (supposed) common national
culture, and the providing of students with [he knowledge, language, and
values necessary to revere the essential traditions of Western civilization.
6
These are frightening and reductive prospects that negate the diversity that
is the American condition. Our nation is a multiclass, cultural, ethnic, racial
society, and any pretense to canons, or to common national ideals and goals,
fails to account for what people value, what they desire, and how all these
are constituted in relations of difference. In the words of Mike Rose, "The
canon tend!s] to push to the margins much of the literature of our nation:
from American Indian songs and chants to immigram fiCtion [0 working class
narratives. ,,7
Not only does the return to canons in the name of some national interest
privilege cenain forms of culture over others, it al so implies reductive nOtions
about pedagogy: what has been call ed a pedagog)' of transmission.
S
In the
Right discourse, the great books, the classics, the canons are seen as ends
unto themselves. They are reified. It is a view that suggests knowledge speaks
for itself. It follows that the role of the teacher is to impart this already formed
knowledge. Again, Mike Rose is instructive:
The canonical orientation encourages a narrowing of focus from learning to that
which must be learned: It simplifies the dynamic tension between student and the
text and reduces the psychological and social dimensions of instruction .... Infor-
mation, wisdom, virtue will pass from the book to the student if the sludent gives the
book the time it merits?
The rise to prominence of education as a national (Opic, as well as its swing
to the Right, have to be understood as part of a larger orchestrated political
project begun at the start of the 1970s. Ilerben Marcuse called this project
"counterrevolution,"10 Ira Shor calls it "conservative restoration. ,,11 Shor is
especially compelling in documeming the mobilization of consen'ative forces
to effect a massive critique against the progressivism of the 1960s, through
which they were able (0 articulate and embark upon their agenda for restruc-
turing education. The sting of the 1960s was real: the fight for civil rights and
the Great Society, rhe rise of the New Left, the prOleSt against the Vietnam
War, the rise of the women's and environmental movements, the proliferatiOn
of dissenting publications, the call for alternative ways of life and the ques-
tioning of things in general, all (Ook their toll on the status quo of power.
As Shor characterized the conservative cause, "sornething would have to be
/tItmduction
xix
d ne."I ':! In hindSight, it is sLUnning to see the swiftness of this coumerre
o oence. All tOO quickly, "the excitemem of education in the 1960s became
sur..., . . I "U
mediocrity and austenty III t le .19805. .
There are more than superfiCial parallels between the attack on progressive
education and that which has transpired in architectural education over [he
la'it 20 years. The forces of retrenchment have likewise impacted upon ar
chileCture and architectural education, modifying these realms to serve certain
end.;;. Here, (00, the change was swift, the velocity so sweeping as to blur
vision. In less than a decade the schools and the profession went from a
debate abollt pluralism, social responsibility, and the utility of social science
[0 a preoccupation with what Alex Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre term "formalism,
graphism, hedonism, elitism, avant-gardism, and antifunctionalism.,,14 For
architecture, the 19605 was also a time of great questioning, of criticizing
institutional practices, bOlh from wit hin and outside the profession. Archi-
tecture, too, felt the sting of the 1960s: The rise of populism with its charge
that architects were little more than "professional imperialists,,;IS the discus-
sion attending to user needs and the introduction of environmentbehavior
interaction, environmental psycholo!,')', and social factors into design;16 the
formation of student groups such as The Architects Resistance (TAR) and
Architeaure Radicals, Students and Educators (ARSE) to name a couple; the
proliferation of community design centers; and the rise of advocacy planning
and user participation in the decisionmaking processes of citi es and build-
ings. All these did much to chall enge the prestige and credibility of the
profession. Here, too, the status quo pronounced, something would have to
be done.
And what has been done in architectural education is conSiderable, every-
thing from program structure to curricular emphasis to subject matter to
research foci, has been touched to some degree. Architectural education has
even seen its own return to basics.
There has been the return to principles, evident on one level by the
resurgence of aesthetic formali sm and design exercises structured about the
deployment of formal geometries. Francis Ching's Architecture .. Fonn, Space
and Order, " and Roger H. Clark and Michael Pause's Precedents in Architec-
ture,'" both vely popular books, are cases in pOint here. Though useful, they
present formal principles of architectural design in a manner
dL,assOCiated from their historical, theoretical, and cultural development.
Principles, organizational systems, spatial relati onShips, and the like are show-
ca'iCd as ends in themselves, as value-free tools to be used at will regardless
of CUlture, Circumstance, context.
There has been a return to hislory-mostly the Eurocemric architectural
canon-marked by the use and analysis of precedent, typology, and mor-
.. Debates continue as to the appropriateness of historical elements,
() which ones should be selected, or whether hi storical motifs should be
xx Introduction
used literally or abstractly, or architecturally or popularly. History courses
have been reemphasized and expanded, and studios onen begin with anal -
yses of types, precedents, and ContexlS.
There is a search for authenticity, which can be understood in two ways.
On one hand there are the nostalgiC paths of classicism, the preindustrial
city, the lessons of Rome, paths which try to revive meaning and reassert
stability in a confused and bewildering world. On the Other hand there is
the path of subverSion, the deconstruct ion of established meaning as the only
authentic referent for a world that is uncertain, confused, and indeterminate.
And finally, there is the self-styled promotion of narcissicism, manifested
in the propensity to be esoteric, arbitrary, undecidable, to disavow inten-
tionality and responsibility in the design process, to be enamored with the
blindfold-in a word, to disengage from the world of unpleasantries and
retreat into a world of fantasy as a means to unfettered creativity, pure form,
freedom.
These and other changes in architectural education are generally unrec-
ogni zed by architectural educators as being parallel to (and influenced by)
the national debate on the quality of the nation's schools. Educators and
administrators continue to see changes in architectural education rather par-
ochially, as the resul t of mostl y internal and professional forces. Ilowever,
there are voices in architectural education who situate their work within this
national discussion and the forces of society that fuel it. The voices in this
book understand architectural education to be a site of unavoidable struggle,
a contestati on between dominant and subordinated ideologies, cultures,
knowledges, and forms of power. I n short, these voices recognize the practice
of architectural education as a culwral and political one; who see architectural
schooling, like all forms of education, as a social-hi storical process where
the activities of learning and teaching are shaped by the competing processes
of accommodation, negotiation, and resistance. A major purpose of this book
is to see what these voices articulate as a project of possibi lity, to hear what
they say aboUl curricular directions and structure, course content, cultur-
al values, and societal directions, and how these are tied to architecwral
teaching.
Such a project is all the more necessary given recent trends which suggest
a (re)organizat ion of the material and phil osophical condition of SOCiety. It
is a condition generally described as poslinodern (though not without con-
tention). Though we may be obliged to acknowledge a postmodern condition,
the label defies easy description. My use of the term poslmociemism is to
suggest that we are at a particular historical moment (not necessarily a distinct
new one), a condition that marks the wane of modernism and the forging
of new territories of experience. Just as the modern condition produced the
machine, industrialization, standardization, planes, trains, and automobiles,
the poslmodern condition produces [he world of television, mass media,
information processing, terrorism, space stations, shuttles, and telescopes. 19
Introduction
xxi
The postmodern condition engenders new categories of experience, new
lodes of representation, thought, and politicS. But make no mistake, post-
n odernism is not monolithic. At its very center, the postmodern condit ion
and cultural practices articulate, the multiplicity of difference, the
indeterminacy of language, the rejection of universality and grand narratives,
' nd the breakdown of boundaries generally. Most notable among the latter
:'s the boundary between "high" and "low" culture, where now Shakespeare
and Readers Digest face each other as equal contenders as objects for analysis.
To be more specific, postmodernism's dominant trends can be characterized
in the following ways.
The first is economically. Though some have call ed the economic dynamics
of the present society a "disorganized capitalism,"'" it is really more its re-
organization, marshalled on a world scale. The global rearrangement of cap-
italism is what constitutes the core of raday's society, a fact which cautions
that underlying all the perceived differences between modernism and post-
modernism, there is continuity; the hallmarks of the capitali st enterprise
remain- profit motive, incessant growth, overprodUCtion, wage labor, labor
comrol , private property, alienation, competi ti on, and hierarchy, to name a
few.!
1
This new Structure of multinati onal capitalism concentrates capital in
diversified congl omerates supported by a grid of informational and electronic
networks. De-industrialization marks the landscape by industly shifts, plant
closures, and capital flight to those regions of cheaper and less-unionized
labor. Selective reindustrializmion is occurring in primarily high-tech sectors.
And there is a sharper polarization of labor between high-pay- high-skill and
low-pay-Iow-skill workers (let alone the unemployed)."
From a social perspective, the fallout from this economic upheavel is grave.
It is a siwation of extremes: excess and poverty, space shuttles and homeless
people, skyscrapers and sweat shops. The gap between the rich and poor is
the largest in America's history (and growing) and the condition of home-
lessness is not some aberration that in time will go away; homelessness is
now structural.
25
In urban terms, the City-the principal spatial canvas of late capitalist eco-
experiencing severe spatial and social transformations. Caught in
an tntense rivalry, cities world-wide are undergoing fantastic restructuring to
a.ccommodare new spatial and social relations of production and consump-
tion, to leverage capital for maximum profitability?'
Politically, with the consolidation of the postmodern economy and its social
the state is increasingly burdened to meet its welfare and
SOCIal service obligations. Partnerships between private enterprise and the
state solidify so as to ward off economic and political cri ses, furt hering cor-
porate Interests. As Dutton and Ghirardo put it:
States are find' I I ' .
II)g t 1CI11se ves In contradlctorv roles. On one hand they tty to regulme
Corporate C'tp't' I' h' .
< I a II) 1 e natIOnal and local interest, and on the other hand, they attempt
xxii Introduction
to create a good busi ness climate to induce such capital and developmcnt. This latter
situation is especially debilitating for cities because they become caught in an intense
rivalry, piued against each other by coqxmuc interests seeking incentives and benefits
at public
Such circumstances bespeak the alienation of ordinary citizens from public
life-the crisis of democracy.
In cultural terms, ours is a society where the produclion of meaning is
now equally important as the production of labor. The culture of the image
has become so pervasive that life transpires amidst a "hemorrhage of signi-
fi ers,,;26 cultural texts intersect with other texts, producing more texts. Some
argue that this intertextual weaving produces a life of its own, where people
are immersed in the play of images and spectacles to the degree that the
boundary between reality and unreality is unclear, fuzzy." The mass media,
especiall y through the medium of television-the most prolific image ma-
chi ne in hi stOry-has effecti vely coloni zed the self through the sheer prolif-
erat ion of images (between 15 and 30 images per minute). According to
Stanley Aronowitz, this displacement of the self constitutes /be event of social
hiStory of our time.
28
And cognitively, to state Ulat the post modern situat ion is just a littl e be-
wilderi ng is to state its essent ial character. It is hard to find the handle.
Depending on the author, the postmodern condition is an experience of
aimlessness, depthlessness, superfi ciality, disorientation, or spectacle. With
postmodernism, we have "total acceptance of ephemerality, fragmemation,
di scontinuity, the chaOlic."29 Because "posuTIodernism swims, even wallows,
in the fragmentary,"'" stable categories of lived experiences are blurred,
dist inctions dissolve, and meaning itself seems to fl oat, unanchored, adrift.
The ability to place oneself in the external world is now lost, rendered
unintelligibl e by "postmodern hyperspace" in architecture, and disparate
styles, mannerisms, and linguistic codes in literature.
31
The schizophrenic
experience becomes the postmodern identity.
Transformation is necessary in architectural education. In the face of a
postmodern world that is undergoing enormous economic, social, and eco-
logical restructuring, architectural educat ion seems to be profoundly mute,
unable to voice direction, and worse yet, not even seeing the need to do so.
It is as if there is no language of resistance and that one could not be
const ructed. It is as Peter Mclaren argues, "the fear of uncertainty, the horror
of ambiguity, and the threat of difference ... places us in the thrall of never
being capable of taking a position or speak from a space of authority or
power."32 Being caught in the anxiety of the present, we lapse into a nihili st ic
retreat from life. To counter, this book calls for the restructuring of archi-
tectural education, but as a project that defines itself integrally as part of a
transformalive redefinition of SOCiety. lIence, this book is by authors who
concepruali ze archirecrural education and pedagogy within a critical analysis
,ntrOduction
xxiii
of the larger (postmodern) SOCiety, and who conStruct forms of teaching and
learning experiences that reveal and contest profeSSional and societal dlrec-
(ions.
Within such a project, dle notion of voice is vital, because it places dle
Iitics of narrative in the foreground: Exacrly whose StOry are we talking
in architectural education, pedagogy, and their reconstruction? The
authors represent a multipliCity of voices, includi ng women, people of color,
and students. For these VOices, the process of educati on is part and parcel
ofthe quest for critical consciousness, the coming to voice from silence that,
as bell hooks says, is "an act of resistance." She continues: "Speaking becomes
both a way to engage in active self-transformation and a rite of passage where
one moves from being object to subject. Only as subjects can we speak. Ai;
objects, we remain voiceless---our beings defined and interpreted by oth-
ers. ".B Of course, coming to voice as an act of resistance is not to speak
ordinarily. It is speaking out against oppression and domination, it is the
speech of struggle, the attempt to establish a Iiberatory voice that potentially
can move us all from object to subject. The voices in this book are testimony
to this cause. Many express the rage of having been sil enced, been made
invisible, by the inertia and machinations of dominant ideologies and cultural-
political praaices that favor Eurocenrrism, cultural chauvinism, competition,
indiVidualism, hierarchy, and patriarchy in architectural schooling. All say
much, if at times only by implication, about the directions needed in archi -
tectural education in order to shift the dominant paradigm in such ways that
me marginal might come to occupy the center: to reconfigure the cultural-
politiC'dl terrain to make the experiences of gender, race, and class central
to a reconceptualization of architectural education and pedagogy. More than
a mere list of projects and pedagogies, this anthology is a theoretical inves-
tigation of criti cal practices in architectural educati on that engage the world
in order to change it.
This book contributes to the growing area of critical pedagogy. Buttressed
by critical educational theory, critical pedagogy is concerned with how a
SOCiety re-produces itself mrough its school systems. It is concerned with
how. human consciousness is organized and formed in late capitalism by
makmg problematic the historical condi tions which have produced us as
subJectS. Highlighting the politiCS of the everyday, critical pedagogy unravels
critiques the experiences of students and teachers as they find themselves
m asymmetrical relations of power tempered by class race gender ethnicity
and . . " , ,
. omers. Crlllcal pedagogy understands schools to be cruciallv important
"I
tes
, as places of ongoing struggle, over meaning, power truth
cal i" '
ms, .orms of knowledge, and classroom practices. But above all, critical
:dagogy carri es forth the moral imperati ve of cri tical educational theory "to
by human suffering so as to remOve its causes to give meaning
t e principles of equality, freedom, and just ice and to those social
orms that enable human beings to develop the capacities necessary to over-
xxiv Introduction
come ideologies and material forms that legitimate and are embedded in
relations of domination. "31 The authors of this book, moved by forms of
oppression, seek to critique and extend the project of critical pedagogy as it
pertains to architectural education. That is, they have not abandoned the
ideals of critical thinking, the exercising of social responsibility and the re-
making of the world in the interests of social and economic justice, equality,
and critical democracy; they investigate what constitutes a transfonnative
educational practice, and they invite and challenge educators to develop
critical pedagogies that reveal and act upon professional and societal direc-
tions.
In Chapter 1, "Forms of Resistance: Politics, Culture, and Architecture, "
Tony Schuman traces the changes that have occurred in the social and political
critique of architecture over the last 30 years. He argues that now, with the
project of deconstruction in architecture vying for the modernist throne and
appropriating the cause of resistance, the teaching of architectural design that
takes seriously the workings of daily life, the formulation of program, com-
munity participation, and advocacy is being recast as politically conservative. o
Through a critique of critical regionalism in the works of Kenneth Frampton,
AJex Tzonis, and Liane Lefaivre, and rational transparency in the work of C.
Richard Hatch, Schuman focuses anemion on the social meaning of form and
thereby enlarges what might constitute the formal and social implications of
an architecture of resistance.
In Chapter 2, Lian Hurst Mann situates architectural pedagogy within a
threeparty conversation between the discourses of historical materialism
deconstruction, and architectural theory. As of this writing, the philosoph;
of deconstruction has entered into architecture in a forceful way. Mann's
position is that the philosophical project of deconstruction should be taken
seriously in architectural pedagogy. And when this philosophical project en-
gages the political project of historical materialism, the convergence offers
much to enrich architectural theory and pedagogy in a more expansive project
for social change. Mann evokes the operation of a dream as the form and
content of her chapter, whereby she enacts a would-be exchange of voices
on the problems of difference and differentiation. The dreamwork acts out
the political nature of knowledge formation by foregrounding Mann's inev-
itable rewriting of the other voices as they flow in and out of her text,
appearing at times to stand in their own right and at other times to engage
her text, sometimes in support, sometimes in comestation.
James Mayo looks at what counts as valued research and creative activity
in universities from a political-economic frame in Chapter 3. Much has
changed in this area over the last IS years: the marked growth of journals
based in architecture schools across Nonh America; the mounting pressure
on young professors to publish; the increase in the number of abstracts
submitted to professional conferences; and the expansion of tenure and
promotion processes to include intermediate reviews and outside and blind
IntrOduction
xxv
reviewers-all of which reflect a profound shift in values as to what constitutes
legitimate research and how it might be evaluated. Mayo charts the political
economiC rnotivations behind the efforts of administrators to increase the
"reputatiOnal capital" of their programs by replacing practitionerbased fac-
ulty with research-orienred ones. Mayo argues that such transformations result
in conflict as faculties are pitted against one another, and where the aims of
a competent education are compromised because of an inequitable balance
of researchers and practitioners.
Max Bond, in an interview with Thomas A. Dutton in Chapter 4, begins
with a very simple yet correct perception: in the roughly 50 years since
Bauhaus reforms were introduced into this country, the world has changed
considerably. Despite this change, Bond contends that architecture schools
continue to function in much the same way: curricula is still Eurocentric)
students are still placed in competitive pursuits that glorify individualism,
and course content continues to reify unitary perspectives and the notion of
experts. To Bond, the intellectual and ideological construction of the outside
world by schools of architecture is grossly at odds with actuality. As dean of
a program in which the majority of students are people of color, Bond relates
the st ruggle to implement changes in line with his critique.
In Chapter 5, laura L. Willenbrock provides a narrative of her experiences
in an undergraduate architectural program. She recalls her conversations and
encounters with her peers and professors in the studio and classroom, at
desk crits and formal jury reviews, and in informal situations. As a person on
the "receiving" end of pedagogical intentions, Wil lenbrock reveals the often
taken-for-granted practices of patriarchy and other forms of hierarchy that
envelop architectural schooling.
Whereas Willenbrock's story is about her intellectual growth and self em-
powerment, the narratives of Julie Diaz, Shi rl Buss and Shervl Tircuit in
Chapter 6 are about their struggle for social empowe;ment in o;der to grow
IIltell ectually. As recent architecture graduates of the masters program at the
University of California at Los Angeles the authors describe the Eurocentric
biac; of their experience, and question itS appropriateness given the expansive
multicultural history and environment of Los Angeles. As women, and rwo
of color, they tell how their aspirations, histories, and experiences were often
marginalized) ignored, and even put down. More than a critique, Buss, Diaz,
and Tircuit document the proactive efforts to change school policy and to
get the school to follow through on an Affirmative Action DiverSity Plan,
whICh they helped author, and which provides long-range but attainable goals
to diversify the curriculum as well as the faculty and student body.
Brad Grant's Chapter 7 raises issues about the cultural and political value
structure of architectural education as it pertains to minority and subordinated
Cultures. In "Cultural Invisibility: The African American Experience in Archi-
tectural Education," Grant holds that architecture and architectural education
are c10minared by a Eurocentric cultural canon, which reproduces conformity
xxvi Introduction
to Western ideas, histories, formal aesthetics, and modes of social and eco-
nomic practice. For Gram, this belies the cullural diversity that actually con-
stitutes Western societies, and given recent demographic trends, he
documenrs how it will soon be that so-call ed minority and non-Western
cultures will comprise the largest cultural groups, especially in the United
States. Grant relates his own experiences as a person made invisible by
Eurocentrism, and chall enges educators to pose alternative theories and prac-
tices to the architeclUral orthodoxy. In a manner similar to Karen Kingsley
(see below), Grant lays Out a framework for curricular and pedagogical re-
structuring, and shares what he does in his experientially based course "Im-
ages, Patterns, and Aesthetics of Subcultural Environments" to get his students
to see, intellectually and experientiall y, the roles and contributions of sub-
ordinated designers in their resistance to cultural hegemony.
In Chapter 8, Thomas A Dutton utilizes the concept of the hidden curric-
ulum to analyze the center piece of architecturdl education: the design studio.
The concept of the hidden curriculum is not as familiar in architecmral
education as it is in education generally. Dutton uses the hidden curriculum
as a theoretical tool to bring to light questions about the organization of
knowledge, the orchestration of social relationships, and how these relate to
each other and to the forces of power, ideology, and culture. Dutton holds
that there is a rough correspondence between studio culture and larger
societal practices. Asymmetrical relations of power, the competitive ethiC, the
notion of the expert, and the primacy of individual over coll ective work are
but a few of the qualities reproduced. In response, Dutton posits a critical
studio pedagol,'l', where the attempt is made to investigate not only the many
issues of design, but the politiCS of design education itself, especially with
regard to its organization, its production and dissemination of knowledge,
its structuring of social relations, and its ideological inclinations.
In Chapter 9, "Biculturalism and Community Design: A Model for Critical
Design Education," Anthony Ward takes us into an investigation of studio
pedagogy as it encompasses the participation of people other than students
in the design process. Ward's studio projects alwa)'s incorporate a "client"
from outside the studio environment, and here, he recounts an experience
where students worked with the citizens and civil leaders of Whakawne, New
Zealand, to generate a town plan. Whakatane is comprised of oppOSitional
cultures. Ward chronicl es how the native Maoris of New Zealand have begun
to demand compli ance with the 1840 Treaty ofWaitangi (where chiefs agreed
to an equal partnership with the British Crown). Since signing the treaty, the
Maori have been systematically stripped of their resources and have been
left with a bitterness which has only recently developed into constructive
attempts at self-determination and equali ty. Against this background, Ward
describes how design students experienced first hand the subtle (and often
not so subtle) ways in which dominant and subordinate cultures clash
wherein members of the subordinate culture often find it impOssible to e f i n ~
Introduction
xxvii
their identiti es within the political and cultural codes of the dominant culture.
Ward points to ways in which designers can faciliate ethnic identity among
indigenouS peoples, and shows once again that deSign is never neutral; it is
an intenti onal practice that portrays rhe world in quite specific ways.
Making connections between architecture and feminism is the basis of
Jacqueline Leavitt's Chapter 10. Utilizing the topics of homeless ness and public
housing in her design studiOS, Leavitt explains her attempts to get studenLS
to grapple seriously with women's issues through the design process. Noting
that the insertion of gender issues cannOt be left to chance, Leavitt argues
that much more is necessaty to integrate issues of concern to women into
architectural curricula. Paramount among these include women's increasingly
permanent role in the labor force, [he feminization of poveny, their longevity
in an aging society that will be predominately female, and how these relate
to the economy and the state. Leavin uses "consciousness raising" as the
vehicle for integrating women's issues and experiences imo the design studio.
Because consciousness+raising groups were important vehicles within the
women's movement for translating personal issues into political ones, Leavitt
contends that not only should such a translation occur at the level of the
individual , it should occur at the level of the social or professional. In this
way, the "private" issues and practices of the architectural world can be seen
in light of their political consequences with the outside world.
Karen Kingsley is also concerned with the curricular imegration of feminist
theory, the experiences of women and gender issues, but directs her attention
in Chapter 11 to architectural history courses. For Kingsley, the teaching of
architectural hiStory is very much akin to the teaching of the literary C'dnon.
It has been exclUSively organized around the "great monument-great men"
approach. Kingsley argues that such an approach isolates and objectifies de-
signer and work, ignoring not only the role of women and their contribution
to the buill environment, but also the differences in the way women learn.
To counter, Kingsley analyzes some of the more popular texts in the teaching
of architectural hiStory, shows how they are biased and exclUSive, and suggests
alternative readings. She draws from new scholarship in the history of women
to construCt a foundation to rethink and restruClure the history/ theory por-
tions of the architectural curriculum in terms of course content and pedagogy.
Chapter 12 is Alan Feigenberg's account of the process and content of his
graduate seminar, "Teaching Architecture." Some years ago, feigenberg be-
gan this course with the purpose of creating a forum for architecture students
to reflect upon their experiences in school and to teach public school students
about their environment. The course grew out of Feigenberg's close asso-
ciation with Dr. Mario Salvadori and the Center for the Built Environment,
which Salvadori founded in 1987. A major goal of the center is to interest
underprivileged youngsters in New York City in the benefits of an education.
Interestingly, this is accomplished through the child's study of his or her own
bUilt environment. In this context, Feigenberg's classroom offers an account
xxviii Introduction
of the practice of a critical democracy. Engaged in a sociall y useful project,
he takes his students' backgrounds seriously, as episodes of life lhat are woven
into the practice and coment of the classroom. Education becomes a practice
that allows his students to make sense of, and problematize, their own ex-
periences. This is all the more important given the disadvantaged back-
grounds that most of his students are from. Feigenberg offers much for
teachers to refleCl upon. The teacher in this case is more than a facilitator.
Feigenberg is quite conscious of hi s power as teacher, but utilizes it in
enabling ways, as a means to cr"-dte a space where students feel free enough
to come to voice, and to exercise their learning and teaching in coll aboration
with themselves and the teacher. This chapter is a practical illustration of
Paul o Freire's praxis that to learn is to teach and to teach is to learn.
NOTES
1. Che Guevara, address given to the Internat ional Union of Architects (UIA)
Havana, 1963, quoted from Roben Goodman, After the Planners (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1971), p. 143.
2. Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation (South
Hadley, MA Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1985), p.43.
3. Henry A Giroux, Ideolom', Culture and the Process ofScI:xJOling (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1981), p. 129.
4. Educating Americans/or the 21st Century, National Science Board Commission
on Pre-college Educations in Mathemalics, Science and Technology, quoted from Ira
Shor, Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration 1969-1984
(London, RouLiedge and Kegan Paul , 1986), p. 112.
5. Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, "Schooling, Culture, and Literacy in
the Age of Broken Dreams: A Review of Bloom and Hirsch," Haroard Educational
Review, vol. 58, no. 2 (May 1988).
6. Ibid.
7. Mi ke Rose, Lives on tbe Boundar)': The Stnlggies and Achieveme11ls 0/ America's
Undelprepared (New York The Free Press, 1989), p. 235.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).
11. Ira Shor, Culture Wars.
12. Ibid., p.3.
13. Ibid., p. 4.
14. Alex Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, "The Narcissist Phase in Architecture," !be
Haroard Architecture Review, vol. 1 (Spri ng 1980), p. 54.
15. Alex Tzonis and Li ane Lefaivre, " In [he Name of the People," (Dutch) Forum,
vol. XXV, no. 3 (1976).
16. James M. Mayo, "American Architecture and Social Science: An Uneven Alliance,"
Free Inquiry, vol. 17, 110. 1 (May 1989).
17. Francis D. K. Ching, Architecture: Form, Space and Order (New York: Van Nos-
trand Reinhold, 1979).
IntrOduction
xxix
18. Roger H. Clark and Michael I)ause, Precedents in Architecture (New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold, 1985). .
19. Douglas Kellner, "Boundaries and Borderlines: Critical Refl ecllons on Jean
s:mdrillard and Cri lical Theory," paper delivered at Miami University (November
1987). ,r d I (M d U .
20. SconLa'ih andJohn Un)" 77Je End q, Organize Capita Ism a Ison:
of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
21. David Harvey, 1be Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
22. See Thomas A. Dutton, "Cities, Cultures and Resistance: Beyond Leon Krier and
the postmodern Condition,"joun1al of Architl->clLlral Education, vol. 42, no. 2 (Winter
1989); and Edward Soja, Rebecca Morales, and Goetz Wolff, "Urban Restructuring: An
Anal ysis of Social and Spatial Change in Los Angeles," Economic Geography, vol. 59
(1983), pp. 195-230.
23. Peter Marcuse, "Neutralizi ng Homelessness," Socialist Review, vol. ] 8, no. 1
Uanuary-March 1988).
24. Thomas A. DUHon, "Ci ties, Cultures and Resistance."
2S. Thoma'! A. Dutton and Diane Ghirardo, "See the USA in Your Chevrolet: A
Review of Roger and Me," jatonal of Architectural Education, vol. 43, no. 3 (Spring
1990), p. 59.
26. Peter Mclaren, "Schooling the Postmodern Body: Crilical Pedagogy and the
Polities of EnOeshment," jollmai of Education, vol. 170, no. 3 (1988), p. 54.
27. Jean Baudrillard, For a CrUique of the Political Economy of the Sign (Sr. Louis,
MO, Telos Press, 1981).
28. Stanley Aronowitz, "Mass Culture and the Eclipse of Reason: The Implications
for Pedagogy," in O. Lazere, ed., Amencan Media and Mass Culture (Berkeley and
Los Angel es, University of California Press, 1983), p. 468.
29. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodetnit)' , p. 44.
30. Ibid.
31. Frederic Jameson, " Postmociernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late-Capitalism,"
New Left Review, no. 146 (1984).
32. Peter Mclaren, "Schooling the Postmociern Body," p. 71.
33. bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (BostOn: South
End Press, 1989), p. 12.
34. Henry A. Giroux, "Border Pedagogy and the PolitiCS of Mociernism/Postmod-
erni sm,"joumal of Architectural Education, vol. 44, no. 2 (February 1991), p. 71.
Forms of Resistance:
Politics, Culture,
and Architecture
1
Tony Schuman
INTRODUCTION
In the shon span of a generation the expression of radical social concerns
in architecture has come full circle. The 1960s program of an advocacy ar-
chitecture which emphasized process over product and content over form
has been challenged by deconstruction theory (as used within architectural
discourse) which reasserts the primacy of form and denies both the impor-
tance of program and the idea of advocacy. While an earlier generation of
postmodernists also sought to re-establish a formalist architecture, they did
so in the name of the status quo. The deconstructionists, on the other hand)
claim to endorse a set of radical social intentions (a critique of the institutions
of bourgeois society) that can only be met by moving architectural theory
beyond the failed utopian project of the modern movement. In this light, an
approach to architectural design that starts with the workings of daily life-
the creation of individual and communal place- is viewed as inherentl y
conselVative. As a charter member of the 1960s generation of radical archi
teets, I am asked to turn in my Gird.
The location of resistance in the realm of pure form- repreSentation a"
Criticism-may be seen as the end point of a process in which the ideology
of the modern movement has been stripped of its social praxis by succeeding
generations of architectural theory. In the 20 years between the publication
of the leam 10 primer (1962) and Peter Eisenman's /louse X (1982), the
dialogue between social practice and architectural theory has been ruptured.
Writing from the perspeClive of an academic with a background in community
4
Issues
design and advocacy, I am hard-pressed to explain to my activist fri ends what
signifi cance contemporaI)' architectural discourse might have for them, be-
cause architectural theo'l' has lost its grounding in real-li fe issues of com-
munity development. This essay is an effort to investigate how this divorce
occurred and to reclaim the terri tol)' of social concerns in architecture from
the theoret ical Covenuy to which it has been consigned.
The retreat into form is in part a response to the disarray of contemporalY
society: ule failure of science and technology to produce the social progress
promised by the modern movement and the welfare state. This disillusion-
ment, whether stemming from cynicism after the cruelties of Nazism, Stali n-
ism, and Hiroshima or from despair at the ravages of uneven development,
is invoked to explain architecture's wi thdrawal from social engagement and
into autonomous formal discourse. Thus, for example, Eisenman establishes
as a premise for his House X
an explicit ideological concern with a cultural condi tion, namely the apparem inabili ty
of modern man to sustai n any longer a belief in his own rat ionality and pcrfectabililY.
.. , Of course when one deni es the import ance of function, program, meani ng, tech-
nology, and c1ient---constraillls traditionally used to just ify and in a way support forI11 -
making-the rationality of process and the logic inherem in form becomes [sic] almost
the last "securi ty" or legiti mat ion available,l
With the 1988 exhibition of "Deconstruct ivist Architecture" at New York's
Museum of Modern Art, thi s refuge in form is saddled with ideological im-
plicat ions. In grouping work by an unlikely cohort of architects on the basis
of superficial design affini ties, curator Mark Wigley deni es any ideological
intent-"the architect expresses nothing here"-and specifically disavows any
connection between deconstructivist architecture and deconstruction philos-
ophy.' At the same time, however, his catalogue essay blurs the distincti ons
between stylistic and ideological intentions, notably through his choice of
critical vocabul ary and philosophi cal references. As a result, the MOMA show
contributes greatly to the present confusion in distinguishing among three
concepts merged under the "decon" label: deconstructivism (an architectural
style), philosophical deconstruction (a French poststruclUralist interrogation
of bourgeois philosophy), and deconstruction in architecture (an effort to
synthesize archi tectural form and cultural cri ti cism) ..' My concern in this
chapter is with the third of these.
Does deconstructi on in architecture represent a new cultural front in re-
sisti ng hegemonic authority, or is the social theorizing simply a politi cal gloss
over more traditional aest hetic concerns? K. Michael Hays, who as editor of
Assemblage has conSistently promoted deconstruction as a poli tical project,
is candid in identifying a serious weakness in the translat ion of deconstruction
theol1' to archi tecture;
Fonns of Resistance
5
If an understanding of the affiliations between representational systems and
of power has expanded our concepti on of. architecture's and
these projects have, for the most part, remamed remarkably Silent on specific questions
of power, class, gender, and rhe actual experienccs of subjects in contemporary
SOCiety.4
It is precisely this lack of specific ity which makes the operat ion suspect.
AS long as design intentions are expressed in broad generalities,
in a self- referential theoretical worl d and cannOt be tested or CrItiCized 111
any material sense. This reinforces dangerous habits in the design studiO.
Striking visual resul ts are used 1O justi fy inauention to funcllon, construction,
environment, and so on. Works whose intentions are particul arl y obscure
benefit from an "emperor's new clothes" syndrome: No one wants to admit
that they don't get the point. The implication is that design must look radICal
in order to be radical. Students mistake a visual attack on the f orm of socIety
for a critique of the power relat ionships which provide its structure.
By restricting critical practice to the realm of architectural representatiOn,
deconstruction in architecture triviali zes the experience of daily life and
reduces the scope of social architecture' This paper will argue that social
architecture's concern for cli ent , program, and process also provides a basis
for li nking architectural representation to social practice. Then conditions
wi ll be present for a full -throttle resistant archi tecture that exploits both the
ideal (representational) and materi al (physical ) capacities of architecture 111
the campaign to challenge the dominant power structure.
EVOLUTION OF THE THEORYIPRACTICE SCHISM IN
SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE
The Modern Movement
It was the great invention of the modern movement lhat the task of ar-
chitecture was to address the social probl ems of the age, and its great conceit
to suggest that these probl ems could be solved through architecture. This
invention included both a social practice and a formal theory. TIle practi ce
included a new client for architecture (the working class), a new program
(housing for the greater number), a new patron (the welfare state), and a
new role for architects (as head of municipal building programs). This prac-
tice was born and inscribed under a specific set of historical conditions: the
new social democratiC governments in the Weimar Republic following the
rail of the Kaiser in World War I. In this COlllext one can appreciate
the bursting elan of Oskar Schlemmer's Manifesto for the fi rst Bauhaus
exhibition:
TI1C Staatliche Bauhaus, founded after the catastrophe of the war, in the chaos of the
revolution and in the era of an emoti on-laden, explosive an , becomes the rallying
6
Issues
point of all those who, with belief in the future and with sky-storming enthusiasm,
wish to build [he "cathedral of socialism. "6
It is hard to remain impassive before modernism's ernbrace of this utopian
project, however naive it may appear in retrospect.
7
More problernatic was
their assumption tha[ the egali tarian values of the new society could and
should be codified imo a new architectural language' Even granted wide-
spread suppOrt for the new building program-worker housing- its appro-
priate representation in formal terrns was not self-evident. While standardized
construction was a clear expression of industrialized production techniques,
why should the resulting uniformity of facade be read as symbolic of equality
and social democracy rather than of monotony and centrali zed authority?
The meaning was certainly not inherent in the forms themselves. A style
whose symbolism wa, grasped by German workers themselves only after
extensive propaganda in the form of magaZines (e.g., Das Neue Frank[ul1),
exhibitions (of the Bauhaus, the Weissenhof Siedlung), gallery exhibits, and
lectures was rejected outright in contemporaneous developmenrs in France
(Le Corbusier's worker housing in Pessac) and not even attempted in (he
United States (Clarence Stein's Sunnyside Gardens).
The problematic nature of the representational system, however, did not
necessarily interfere with the quality of the architectural result. By wedding
modern architectural theory to traditional Site-planning theolY (from Camill o
Si[[e through Raymond Unwin to Ernst May), the first decade of the modern
movement produced such triumphs of urban planning as the Siedlungen of
May in Frankfurt, and Taut and Wagner in Berlin. It was only later, when the
drive to rationalize urban planning through functional zoning was codified
in the Radiant City tenets of the Athens Charter, that the normative tendencies
of modernism produced such disastrous effects on urban social life.
Team 10
It is significant that the first critique of the modern movement emerged
from within its own ranks when a dissidem group took over ClAM (Congres
Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) following the tenth congress in Du-
brovnik in 1956. Known thereafter as Team 10, the group focused its critique
on the tenets of the Athens Chaner, with its insistence on separate use zoning
of cities and tall, widely spaced housing blocks, the impact of which was al-
ready visible in the early 19505. They offered an alternative approach based on
patterns of human association (house, street, district, city) rather than func-
tional category. While the Team 10 critique challenged the notion of master
planning for cities and societies alike and the idea of a universal, normative
architectural language to express these social ideals, they did not throw out
the notion of social progress itself as their fundamemal goal. Rather, they trans-
posed the time frame of their operat ion from the future to the present, and its
Forms oj Resistance
7
ale from the City and nation to the community and the individual. The u e s
SC; the group were summarized by Alison Smithson in the team 101!nmer:
~ T h e architect'S responsibility towards the individual or groups he bUIlds for ,
nd towards the cohesion and convenience of the coll ective structure to whICh
:hey belong, is taken as an absolute responSibility:" . . .
Thus while Team 10 abandoned the modermst conceit that architecture
could transform SOCiety, they asserted an equally important, though less he-
roiC role for the profession: "to make places where a man can realize what
he ':'ishes to be. "'" This strategy led to a series of experimenL' with support
and infill approaches to housing design such as the projects of ATBAT and,
later, Habraken, that emphasized the particularity of each individual but .ig-
nored the broader class Structure of society wi th its attendant inequality.
Their approach thereby remains utopian in its suggestion that a supportive
environment, independent of larger political and economic forces, can enable
thiS process of self-reali zation. II
Team 10 represents a critical juncture in the development of social archi -
tecture. Because the group never directly addressed the question of political
organization and tended to express its design approach more as a poetic
methodology than a specific practice, its legacy opened the door to divergent
interpretations: one primarily social, the Other formal. The most influential
Team 10 figure in this regard was Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck. A generation
of student architects was captivated by van Eyck's insistence 011 both the small
details of everyday life and the universal realms which verge on the spiritual-
the in-berween realm of seashore, dusk, and doorstep." It was van Eyck who
first calied attention to the problem of representational form in the face of
the complex heterogeneity of modern society that he called "vast multipliCity. "
"If society has no form, " he asked, "how can we build its counterform'" Van
Eyck's own response to this question was to propose a humanistiC, almost
anthropomorphiC, architecture. "Start with thiS," he offered:
Make a welcome of each door and a countenance of each window. Make of each a
place: a bunch of places for e'dch house and each city . ... Get closer to the cemer of
human reality and build itS counterforrn- for each man and all rnen, si nce they no
longer do il themselves. 13
For some, getting closer to "the center of human reality" meant an im-
mersion in community struggles around issues like housing, education, and
parks. Groups like Urban Deadline in New York, an outgrowth of the Co-
lumbia strike with whom I was affiliated for ten years, offered technical
assistance to community groups on a variety of projects from vest pocket
parks to storefront "street academies" for high school dropouts." We were
part of the advocacy planning- community design movement that began in
New York City in the 1960s in response to the wholesale destruction of
neighborhoods through federal urban-renewal programs." From their initial
8
Issues
goal of helpi ng community groups to understand and intervene in the plan-
ning process, principally in opposition to redeveloprnent schemes, these
groups graduall y became involved in formulaling and irnplementing alter-
native development plans. Where these activities include architectural design
services, however, the scope is generall y restricted to low-cost renovation
and construction programs emphasizing tight detailing and efficiem plans.
Rarely do community design centers have the opponunity to explore the
expressive possibilities of archi tecrure in new construction.
Populism
If van Eyck was significant in pushing some of us toward more intense
activism, his writings also encouraged a formal challenge to the reduclive
norms of modernism, In ComplexiO, and Contradiction in Architecture, Rob-
ert Venturi refers several times to van Eyck's concerns with eternal phenolll -
ena- "threshold," "twin-phenomena," "inside-outsicle"-in suppOrt of his
own rediscovery of precedent and tradition, particularly as expressed in the
formal language of mannerist, baroque, and rococo architecture, The book
also introduces Venturi's defense of the commercial vernacular. "Indeed,"
he argues, "is not the commercial st rip of a ROUle 66 almost all right?,, 16
Although the introduction of popular design sources, as in the parallel Pop
Art movement, reflects a pluralist view of American society, this view is in-
terpreted visually. As Vemuri observes, "true concern for society's invened
scale of values" can be expressed only through the ironic juxtaposition and
interpretation of conventional elements.
17
Through subsequent writings, ex-
hibits, and buildings, Venturi , Denise Scott Brown, and their collaborators
have elaborated a body of work inspired by the "ugly and ordinary" archi-
tecture of mass-market consumerism. Although Lhey have presented their use
of the commercial vernacular as an ironical gesture aimed at moral subver-
sion, it was never clear just what the target ofthis irony was, or what critique
of society was suggested by thrOwing popular taste back at the middle cl ass
in slightly distorted form, Venturi responds to the populist impulse of the
1960s by removing it from the field of social action by reducing it to the
"signs and symbols" of popular culture and turning these to the purposes of
high architecture. In the last analysis, the commercial vernacular si mply pro-
vides more sources for the palette of architectural form. An ini tiat ive which
held the tantalizing promise of seeking a new relat ionship between archi-
tectural design and the structure of daily life failed to deliver. The archi tectural
object was still treated as a purely visual or styli stic object, the acultural
universal norms of modernism simpl y replaced by a more varied represen-
tational system. No new theory of architectural design was advanced.
Forms of Resistance
9
postmodernism
If it was Venturi 's originali ty to reassert a figurative dime.nsion archi-
ure by incorporaring popular culture into the canons of htgh
tect
d
I' strength to exploit thereby the tension between past and present, hiS
an liS . .. . D '
" ' brought in its wake a host of conseIVative Interpretations. roppmg
iJ1illali
ve
'd h' h
the polycultural brief from the debate, high archllecture returne to Ig
, 'ts sources and not only bUildings but whole dlstncts were re-
culture lor I , .
f I
, ed in the image of Greece and Rome, This use of histoncal form
f " I '
, d with it a social message regarding the maintenance 0 pnvi ege to a
carne , d'lU'd
I
ociet)'. It is no coincidence that postmodermsm emerge In t 1e nIte
c asS s d " I 'th I
States during a period of resurgent private wealth an pnvi ege WI t 1e
multinational corporate headquarters as Its emblematic bUlldll1g, ,
If postmodernism's rediscovery of figurative design and street-responsive
urbanism may be described as resistant to the universal norms and spatial
strategies of modernism, its representational vocabulary can only be defined
as repressive, In assuming a universal fealty to u1e lessons of Greece and
Rome, this approach speaks only to the dominant class in our SOCiety, ASlI1gle
cultural tradition emerged as the form giver for a variety of constructlons-
shopping mall s, civic centers, housing complexes, schools, The acultural
norms of modernism were replaced by the monocultural forms of European
classicism. As the African American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote re-
cently of parallel developments in literature, "The return of 'the' canon, the
high canon of Western masterpieces, represents the return of an order 111
which my people were the subjugated, the VOiceless, the invisible, the un-
bl
,, 18
presented and the unpresenta e,
Deconstruction in Architecture
It is in thi s context that deconstruction in architecture emerges. As 1111
Foster explains:
A postmodernism of resi stance, then, arises as a counter-practice not only to the
official culture of modernism but also to the "fal se normalivity" of a reactionary
postmodernism. [n opposition (but notollly in opposition) , a resistant postmodernism
is concerned with a critical deconstruction of tradition, not an instrumental pastiche
of pop_ or pseudo-historical forms, with a critique of origins, not a return to them.
[n short, it seeks to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than
conce-,l1 SOCial and political affi li al ions.
19
The deconstructionist critique is aimed at the idea of a normative repre-
sentational role for architecture. Whether this criticism is of the instrumental
progreSSivi sm of modernism or the hegemonic conservatism of postmod-
10
Issues
ern ism, deconstruction in architecture falls into the same trap by insisting
that the critical power of architecture lies in its form. Having stated that
multiple interpretations of built fonn are possible, desirable, and inevitable,
deconstruction in architecture dissolves into political agnosticism, operating
"to keep in motion the contingent and provisional status of meaning, thereby
preventing any position, radical or conservative, from gaining absolute priv-
ilcge.,,2o
In denying the primacy of both program and context in order to " desta-
bilize" the institUl ions of bourgeois society including that of architecture
itself, the deconstructionists restrict their field of operation. ln their passion
to negate the idea of fixed meaning, they produce work that is exclusively
about meaning, work which is totally dependent for its significance on an
immersion of the viewer in its competing "meanings." The status of decon-
struction in architecture as critical theory is weakened in practice because it
never clarifies just wbat needs to be transformed or how that transformation
might take place. I n the process, the social program has been dropped from
the brief. By defining themselves as hors de calegorie in terms of ideological
content they also place themselves hors de combat in terms of the social fray.
This discussion, of course, assumes that the philosophical layerings which
accompany the built work are the true purpose; and that the real intention
is not simply free play with abstract geometrical form. In the latter reading,
deconstruction in architecture is nothing more than an excuse to mine ar-
chitectural hiStory for the unbuilt projects of the RuS,..,ian constructivists, just
as earli er postmodernists turned to popular culture and the Palladian orders.
In this sense, the social theorizing about the end of utopia enables the ar-
chiten to maintain a patina of social concern, while in reality abandoning
any social practice in favor of purely formal investigarions. Deconstruction
in archi tecture can then be seen as simply a second generation of postmod-
ernisrn, posing as social critique, but retaining the same narrow formalist
intention. As Ricardo Bofill , a first-generation postmodernist, explains, "These
utopias lin the technological or social writings of the 1 960s] destroy geniuses
and masters. In the 1970s, architecture begins to concentrate on itself again.
Architects rediscover the pleasure of creation and their craft. "Zt In abandoning
the social project, "POst-utopian" architecture takes on qualities of the cin-
ematic; and the critique of this architecture might well resemble this capsule
review of a B-movie: ''It's fast , well-acted and completely meaningless. But
it's good meaninglessness. "z2
Deconstruction depends for its validation on the public's willingness to
accept the theory's own terms of reference as context for the discussion. As
soon as we acknowledge the need to situate theory in the world of social
action, the deconstructionist concept of retreat into uncertainty loses its force.
Literary critic Terry Eagleton advances this argument:
Meaning may well be ullimately undeCidable if we view language contemplatively, as
a chain of signifiers on a page; il becomes 'deCidable', and words like 'truth', ' reality' ,
Forms 0/ Resistance
"
I d
.' and 'certainty' have something of their force restored LO them, when we
'knowe ge . . . . ' 1
~ k of language rmher as something we do, as mdlssoCiably Interwoven wll1 our
Ulln . B
practical forms of life.
THE POLITICAL REALM OF RESISTANCE
Hegemony
More than any other art form, architecture is inscribed in the material as
well as the ideal world. Any disCLIssion of resistance in architecture must
move beyond language. The framework for this discussion requires both a
theoretical and practical dimension. Antonio Gramsci's ~ n c e p t of hegemony,
which analyzes the conditions necessary for the exercise of power by the
dominant social class, provides such an analytical structure. He draws a useful
distinction between the coercive (political) power of the state and its con-
sensual (civil) power. The former relies on the legislature, couns, police,
armed forces, and so on to exercise power through domination; the latter
on the ideological function of intellectual and cultural leadership to maintain
class control through persuasion. In the campaign to overturn the bourgeoiS
state, Gramsci thus identifies a crucial role for intellectuals: to develop a
counterhegemonic ideology that can make the oppressed conscious of their
rights and of their own strength."
Gramsci's emphasis on class conflict and class consciousness has bearing
on social conditions in the United States today. Demographic trends docll-
ment growing concentrations of wealth and poverty as the result of structural
changes in the national economy. Whether this concentration is described
in controversial terms like underclass or Third \Vorld or less-charged words
like rich and poor, i[S impact is increasingly visible and dangerous.
2s
Our
response to this uneven development will depend on how the issues are
conceptualized. I-Iere, the historic reluctance of Americans to acknowledge
the class structure of our society is a serious obstacle to recognizing the depth
ofthe problem. In a recent editorial, Benjamin DeMott underlines the gravity
of this deception:
An immense weight of subsidized opinion has gathered on the side of social untruth,
and the means available to those who try to comend against the untruth are fragile.
Social wrong is accepted because substantive, as opposed to sitcom, knowledge about
class has been habitually suppressed, and the key mode of suppression remains the
promotion of (he idea of c1asslessness. , .. We shall not shake the monSter in our midsl
until we take serious account of the idea of difference. . . The task is nothing less
than that of laying bare the links between the perpetuation of the myth of social
sameness and the perpetuation of social wrong. We have all tOO little time in which
to get on with it. 26
12
Issues
Difference
When the idea of resistance is understood in a specific social context and
historic moment (e.g., the United States under conditions of late capitalism
with rhe domination of the national economy by transnational corporations,
increased social and economic inequality by class and race, and the prolif-
eration of drug abuse, Violence, homelessness) it becomes possible to identi fy
specific targets for this resistance. In a deeply divided sociery, the idea of
resistance cannot stop at the recognition of difference but must be appl ied
to challenging the inequities that attend this difference.
This is where architectural deconstruction fails. It celebrates "difference"
in a value-free way that refuses to take sides in the real -life social struggle.
Rather than posing a position of coul1ferhegemony, the deconstructivists take
an antihegemony stance. Theirs is an argument abollt repressed meanings,
not about helping repressed social groups find a voice to articulate their own
meanings. Even the notion of anxiety is removed from the real world to the
intellectual realm. As Eisenman explains, ''The object no longer requires the
experience of the user to be understood. No longer does the object need to
look ugly or terrifying to provoke an uncertainty; it is now the distance
between object and subject-the impossibility of possession which provokes
this anxiety. ,,27
This statement about anxiety reveals the problematic nature of deconstruc-
tion in architecture as a critical practice: How can a symbolic act of resistance
purely in the realm of the cultural apparatus pose a challenge to the political
power this apparatus supports'" When anxiety is aestheticized it becomes
digestible; the angst of the intellectual more palatable than the anguish of
the oppressed. It is easily commodified as one more tidbit in the consumption
of fashion. Commenting on the Deconstructivism exhibition at the Museum
of Modern Art, critic Michael Sorkin noted, "Of course, the institutionalization
of this architecture (is deconstructivist dinnerware far behind?) would seem
to beg the question of just how threatening it can really be: even psychic
structures get etched into the material world. "29 Compare, for example, the
respectful critical attention lavished on Eisenman's Wexner Center with the
furious reaction to lyrics by rap groups like 2 Live Crew and the Geto Boys,
whose menaCing tone reflects the violence of ghetto life. Theirs is the voice
of the underc/ass speaking for itself, un intellectualized and untheorized. It
is not about repressed meanings; it e:>.presses those meanings. In the words
of one reviewer:
Gangster rap is vulgar, violent, sensationalisT. It prides itsel f on bluntness, and it doesn'r
provide consolmion or tie up loose ends. Unlike action movies, the raps refuse to let
listeners oIT the hook. Bmh for what it describes, and for the unquestioned attitudes
the raps reveal, it is often frightening-as well it should be. The world it describes
porms of Resistance
13
'h . and gangster rap distills that terror, not JUSt as exploilalion but as exorcism.
is . . W
. 'f ' It weren't scary, I[ would be a he.
BUll
THE PHYSICAL REALM OF RESISTANCE
Fragmentation
The socio-spatial impact of uneven development .can be at a
I
. \Vrth the growing concentration of economiC power In transnauonal
ofscaes."1 . b .
tl
'ons and the globalization of labor markets, segregation yeconomlc
corpora . I . h' tl
. d conditions of daily existence can be seen 111 1emlsp enc nor .)-
function an ' ..' . d '
h d
'sparl'ties in national and regional shifts, and III urban nelghborhoo s.
sout I. , I" .
it is at the scale of the City that the fragmentatiOn of contemporary "e IS most
. "bl the impact of cycles of investment and diSinvestment most severe.
"d" .
Architectural deconstruction's response 1O the urban VOl IS to mterpret
thiS condition in visual terms and to adopt fragmentatiOn as a design strategy
for new construction. Attempts to reestablish a coherent street and block
cture as a framework for daily living (International BUlldlllg Exhibition
the [IBAl strategy in Berlin) are seen as cosmetic efforts to fill up the
holes. From this perspective architect Rem Koolhas criticized the IBA for
missing a chance "to enhance reality, to adapt to what already existed .... The
historical accidents (Berlin destroyed by the war, and redestroyed by the
1950's) could have offered a metaphoric role very much the opposite of
the one chosen by IBA. ,,"
In opposing the consciousness promoted by simplistic postmodern scen-
ography, deconstruction offers an important critique of the hegemolllc role
of civil society in masking u1e impact of class dominance on repressed groups.
But the particular alternative strategy posed by deconstruction in architec-
ture- mirroring u1e fragmentation of modern society with jarring visual dis-
locations of habitual perceptions-denies the role of the city as the arena for
social struggle. On the contrary, this confrontational approach reproduces
the modernist attack on the urban fabric that was so damaging to the physical
space of collective action.
The City
If the struggle against repressive authority is construed in terms of action
as well as ideology, the starting point must be to recognize the city as the
physical realm of political resistance. As Ilannah Arendt argues,
The only indispensable material factOr in the generation of power is the living tOgether
of people. Only where men live so close together that the potentialities for action
arc always presem will power remain with them and the foundation of cities ... is
therefore the mOSt importam material prerequisite for power.}2
14
Issues
Thi s urban concentration is necessary for a range of oppositional acti vities
from picket lines, petition dri ves, and street demOnStf<ltions to mass ralli es
and armed resistance. The importance of this proposition has been dem-
onstrated hi stori call y from the barricades of Pari s in the Revolution of 1848
(a pOint that was cl early grasped by Haussmann) to (he recent events in
Eastern Europe. Consider, for example, this eye-witness account from East
Germany:
TIle deCision not to repress the large street demonStrat ion in Leipzig on Ocrober 9
was the first major success of the young opposition movement. ... It became the voice
of generalized discontent , and an eloquent voice. The chams, "We are the people"
and "We arc staying here" (to fe-Jet to the exodus across the borders via Hungary)
gOl internati onal attention, and became the slogans for the thereafter-regular Mondav
night marches Lhrough the streets of Leipzig.}} .
Beyond the generic positing of the City as the socio-Spatial realm of res is-
there is a need to give this realm a speci fi c physical form. Arguing
agalllst non-place-based defini tions of the urban realm, Kenneth Frampton
that "the provision of a place-form is . .. essenti al to criti cal practice,
1I1asmuch as a resistant architecture, in an insti tutional sense, is necessaril y
dependent on a clearly defined domain."" Frampton's discussion is focused
on urban bUilding types characterized by encl osure, such as the atrium or
perimeter block. FredericJameson, in di scussing Gramsci's strategy of estab-
lishing counterhegemonic enclaves within the dominant culture, speaks in
terms of larger coll ecti ve ensembl es and is equally emphati c about the spatial
dlmension. When historical conditions prevent the creati on of physical en-
cl aves in the material world, he argues, the notion must be kept ali ve in the
world of ideas. "What is at stake is the meaning of that 'counterhegemony'
whIch oppoSI tional forces are called upon to construct within the ongoing
dominance of the 'hegemony' of capi tal. ... Counterhegemony means pro-
ducing and keeping alive a certain alternative 'idea' of space, of urban, daily
life, and the like.""
TOWARD AN ARCHITECTURE OF RESISTANCE
Theory
There have been few atlempts to codify the parameters for an architecture
of resistance in formal terms, owing prinCipall y to the diffi cul ty in under-
standing the role of symbolic systems in shaping social consciousness. Thus,
for the most pan, the expression of social concerns in architecture has been
either in the domain of politi cal acti vism Or in a community design
concerned with issues of constructi on cost and site configu-
ranon than WIth the ideological content of archi tectural representation.
Forms 0/ Resistance
15
1
The Scope of Social Architecture, C. Ri chard Hatch identifi es the task of
n I ..
. tant architecture as the nunuring of cri tical consciousness. Emp l <L'5 IZll1g
reslS .
h complex character of architecture as equally concerned With process,
e anct content Hatch assigns each a specifi c role in the campaign to reveal
lorm, " ...
the structure of the modern world in order to change It. The arena
for this operation is the City, where social roles, power relati onshI ps, and
. titurional life are concreti zed in built form. Whil e this edited collecti on of
1M ' h
case studies, accompanied by (often critical) commentaries, contalllS a ri C
inventory of social architecrure in practice, the emphasis is more on process
and programmati c content than on formal expression. This is consistent with
the editor's view of architecture as an instrumem in the creation of a more-
fulfilling society rather than an end in itself. For Hatch, the formal issue is
not representation but revelation.
The [ask of social architecture as form, then, is to make legible the insti tutions,
relationships, and values thal are at the heart of social life. These must be expressed
in a manner that makes them avail able to reason, reveals their comingent natllre, and
brings what is accepted without thought into the realm of criLi cal consciousness.
36
The mechanism for this is a "rational transparency," whi ch combines fa-
miliar architectural language with a "radi cal functionalism," through whi ch
buildings reveal their contents and ensembl es express their individual and
collective social realms. As examples, Hatch cites the Infill and SuppOrt proj-
ects of John Habraken's SAR and Lucien Kroll's medi cal student housing and
social center for the Catha I ic University of Louvain. These examples, however,
are still more concerned with design methodology than with the manipulation
of architectural form itself.
The most explicit attempt to establish a formal basis for an architecture of
resistance is Kenneth Frampton's proposal for a "critical regionalism."}7 The
challenge he poses is to resist "world culture" ( the ahistorical forms of the
modernist myth of remaking society) and "universal technique" (the effi Cient,
economic forms of rationali zed construcri on). The key to this practi ce is a
figurative design which relies for its impact not on a presumed set of com-
municative meanings, but on a subtle reinterpretation of local sources that
questions both the technological and cultural logic of late capitalism. Framp-
ton makes a c"'e for a "resistance of the place-form" and he defends the
need for a clearly defined urban domain against the apologists for the "non-
place" urban realm or I V land. But the thrust of hi s argument is on "identi ty-
giving cultural forms" whose sources are in local traditions, rnaterials, meth-
ods of construction, topography, climate, and so 0 0 .
38
Their resistant capaCity
is realized by the architect's abili ty to interpret them indirectly so that they
invite a criti cal perception of the broader social/technical reality. This, as
Frampton acknowledges, requires a high level of critical consciousness on
the part of architect and public alike.
16
Issues
?f the six points toward a resistant architecture of "critical regionalism"
by only one (the place-form) bears directly on the
necessity for architecture to provide the realm for a physical political resis-
tance. The others rely on autonomous elements of architecture. Even sociall
critics like Frampton betray this bias when theorizing about
Insrf,umemal role of architecture. Is the resistance in question that of the
architect to which govern modern building, or that of the public
to the oppressIve stnctures of bourgeois society? It is not surprising the
th I' I ' n,
o at liS examp es draw heavily on well-known architects of signature build-
Ings (e.g., Aalto, Botta, Utzon). It is not clear that the design intentions of
these architects, let alone the social effect of their buildings on their publics,
carry the weight of reSistant capacity bestowed upon them by the critic.
Framp.ton properly Liane Lefaivre and Alex Tzonis with first pro-
p'0smg cfltlcal regionalism as an architectural strategy in their 1981 article
. The Gfld and the Pathway." Curiously, he fails to comment on a point he
lI1cludeS,tn a quote from that article: "No new architecture can emerge without
a new kmd of relations bervveen designer and user, without new kinds of
programs."". By dropping these concerns from his discussion, Frampton
offers a reVISIonist model ,?f regionalism which misses an opponunity
to expand the concept of crmcal perception of reality" by rooting it in social
practICe.
The unfinished task of the 1960s thrust toward a social architecture is to
engage the critical power of architectural language in the project of social
transformanon by linking formal image to material life. To accomplish th'
the derivation of architectural form must be rooted in daily life and soci:;
the architect-client relationship. In this manner the re-
Sistant potential of architecture's symbolic systems may be more accessible
to a diverse public and not limited to academic and professional audiences.
An architecture of resistance that starts with an involvement in the material
world can push the formal boundaries of social architecture beyond func-
tIOnalism and transparency to explOit the cultural force of architectural rep-
resentation. The examples that follow describe a representational strate .
h h . I' k gy m
w . are 10 ed to social practice through a process of community
partlClpatton that expands the palette of critical regionalism.
FORMS OF RESISTANCE: ARCHITECTURE AND DAILY LIFE
The experience of daily life is inscribed across a wide landscape, encom-
passmg the region, the City, the neighborhood, and the dwelling.
Although the architect s Intervention is typically at the building and neigh-
borhood level, recent II1lttalIves such as the "traditional neighborhood d _
I " d h " d e
ve an t e pe estrian pocket" have resuscitated interest in town
plannmg. These proposals focus welcome attention on issues of rational
land use and transportation policy, but in the context of speculative devel-
Forms 0/ Resistance
17
went they do not address broader issues of social equity such as inclu-
op ary access. In terms of establishing a truly public realm, of particular
sian . .'
. rest are several currem efforts 111 the Toromo metropohtan region to
tote
. corporate existing shopping malls into new town centers through a process
"subcentre urbanization.,,41 This planning strategy resists [he power of
-apital to privatize and commercialize public space.
C At the other end of the scale is the "Power of Place" project in Los Angeles
which aims at establishing a multicultural history of the city to honor the
"everyday lives and economic contributions of ordinary people."" Its goal
is to identify, preserve, and interpret sites marking the contributions of
women and minorities to the development of the City. These include oil
fields, truck gardens, fire houses, and other places where Native Americans,
Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Blacks and European immigrants labored to
huild a City. This localized recognition gives visibility to suppressed groups
and challenges the hegemonic version of the city's history. An example is the
homestead of Biddy Mason, a former slave who was a pioneer in the fields
of nursing, midwifery, and child care and the first Black woman to own
property in Los Angeles.
The most critical physical component of daily life is the dwelling. In basic
terms, this means the provision of shelter.
43
In terms of reSistance, the ques-
tion of dwelling addresses the collective as well as individual realm, and the
symbolic as well as physical structure. The two examples which follow, both
built in France in the early 1980s, interpret architectural form and social
program in different ways to embody and promote a resistant social practice.
By anchoring design exploration in social practice, they add depth to the
concepts of social architecture and critical regionalism.
Neighborhood Continuity
In the struggle over urban land, the A1ma-Gare neighborhood in the north-
ern French City of Roubaix is an extraordinary episode. In the wake of massive
industrial flight, this working-class neighborhood was threatened by a slum
clearance/urban renewal program that would uproot the existing population
to make way for the better-paid workers of the growing service sector.
Through an intensive organizing effort the inhabitants mounted a successful
resistance. They won the right to remain in the community and to partiCipate
in the planning process for the rehabilitation of the neighborhood, including
the selection of the architects for the first phase of new construction."
These architects, a Belgian firm known as AUSlA, sought to affirm this
successful struggle by reinforcing, in spatial and visual terms, the links be-
tween the physical and social order in the historic neighborhood. As they
stated in their dossier:
What is important is ... that the new construction have meaning in relationship to the
environment. The whole restructuring plan for Alma-Gare stresses continUity as [he
18 Issues
Figure 1.1
fundamental gUideline (maintaining the population in place and their panicipation
in development is one of the modes of this continuity); the architecture must express
and strengthen this continuiy at its own level , leading to the search which refers to
coml11on understanding, which permits a cominuai frame of r c f c r e n c e ~ ~
In visual terms, they employed an architectural vocabulary incorporating
local traditions, tiled mansard roofs, hand-set mason!)" the rhythm of window
bays on the street front, and forty-five degree corner cuts. Points of ent!)' and
public facilities were celebrated with new materials (metal and glass) and
enlarged versions of traditional domestic elements (arched door openings).
The crux of (he scheme, however, lies in the reinterpretation of elements
from the existing urban structure. (See Figure 1.1.) The new apartments
surround generous open gardens in response to the narrow housing courts
(courees) built in the block interiors to accommodate the influx of rural
immigral1ls in the late-nineteenth cemury. Entered lhrough an alleyway in
the perimeter buildings and equipped with only rudimenta!)' services, the
old courees nevertheless nurtured a strong and vital social web which the
inhabiwms sought to retain in their new construction. An open-gallery cir-
culation system, permiuing each apartment direct outdoor access, reflected
the inhabitants' preference for street-from housing and their rejection of
typical public-housing corridor/stairwell configurations.
Physical cominuity with the existing neighborhood was promoted through
the establishment of a public square on which are located a prima!)' school,
Forms oj Resistance
19
Figure 1.2
an elderly center, day care, and a community workshop. This square is im-
mediatel y adjacent to an existing housing project and is linked to the main
shopping ane!), by a pedestrian street containing offices, workshops, and a
restaurant. (See Figure 1.2.)
The Alma-Gare project was widely acclaimed in France for its political and
architectural achievements. As a consequence, it has received extreme scru-
tiny. A recent postoccupancy evaluati on revealed that aspects of the original
concept ion had become problematic through the allocation of vacant apart-
ments by the housing authority to only the poorest and most vulnerable
households, a form of institutionalized social segregation. Under these con-
ditions the open galle!)' system became vulnerable to vandalism and theft.
The galleries made personal appropriation of exterior space difficult, lacking
the safer intimacy of the enclosed courees. Perhaps, the report charges, the
inhabitants had been "led astray by the mirage of form instead of holding to
a course of calling the entire system imo question." ,6
Alma-Gare provides a modest example of the resistant qualities of social
architecture and critical regionalism: the reinterpretation of the courees, the
Use of hand-set mason!)' street walls (resisting the prefabricated construction
of most French social housing); the gall e!)' access system (resisting conven-
tional stair and corridor construction). In the process, it reminds us that the
real object to resist is a social system, not a formal syntax. In celebrating
through architecture the first successful phase of this resistance-to ren1ain
in the neighborhood and to innovate within the public housing bureaucracy-
20
the hegemonic power of the dominant institutions to withstand this resistance
was challenged but nor defeated.
Kamikaze Urbanism
It is the singular achievement of Belgian architect Lucien Kroll to engage
the power of architectural form itself in a challenge to bureaucratic power
in the renovation of Perseigne social (public) housing estate in the Normandy
town of A1encon." Hired by a new municipal government in 1978, Kroll was
asked not only to perform a poStoccupancy renovation of the cellular apan-
ments of this 2,300-unit project but also to recuperate the dispersed towers
and slabs of its barren plan into a viable urban environment. A tenant research!
action group, working with a sociologist and an urbanist, had established a
rehabilitation program based on providing employment opportunities and a
stronger social and civic center to help the project "cross the threshold toward
autonomous development. ,,f8
Kroll's first interventions were a series of modest landscape improve-
ments--huttes to slow down traffic on the entry road and landscaped parking
areas. lie also designed a group of workshops to provide employment op-
portunities. But his major innovations were the conception for a new junior
high school and the rehabilitation of a housing block.
Instead of isolating the new school in a separate "educational zone," Kroll
brought it into the center of the complex, breaking up the classrooms into
three clusters designed as small "houses" along a winding path slicing through
the geometry of the grid. This path, discerned from observation of pedestrian
movement through the Site, traced the old rural structure that inhabitants
had preserved in the memory of their footsteps. The school corridor is
reinterpreted here as an open pedestrian street. The Siting of the school,
including a community center, creates a plaza opposite the commercial center
to accommodate the Tuesday morning farmers' market. (See Figure 1.3.)
In approaching the rehabilitation of the housing slabs, Kroll rejected a
cosmetic approach that would dress up the existing buildings without trans-
forming their underlying spatial logic or degrading symbolism. Instead, he
advocated a "kamikaze urbanism" intended to provoke the inhabitants to
challenge their social as well as physical milieu: disfigure the object in order
to discredit the bureaucratic paternalism which produced it.
Although opposition within the municipal council reduced the scope of
the project to a single stairwell accessing nine vacant apanments, the reno-
vation of this small section of one building represents Kroll 's most radical
intervention. (See Figure 1.4.) The first rwo floors were remodeled and ex-
panded for a Social Securiry office; six apartments were rehabilitated and rwo
new houselike apartments constructed on the roof, intended for sale to
owner-occupants. The work is designed in Kroll's recognizable style: a com-
bination of vernacular materials and forms whose assemblage resembles
figure 1.3
figure 1.4
22
Issues
more the ad hoc incremental growth of a town than the formal elegance of
the master designer. The effect would be perilously close to kitsch if the
elements were free-standing, but their confromational interjection on the
existing slab imbues them with more substantial meaning.
In this single set of interventions Kroll expands the dimensions of a resistant
architecture. He confronts the rationalized logic of prefabricated construction,
the monofunctional use of the building, and the hegemonical comrol Over
the management of rhe building. It resists the bourgeois state, as represented
by its housing administration, by challenging both the form of its Spatial
production and its control over that production. The political opposition he
aroused resulted in his being fired from the job. As a former Councilman
observes, "If the elected representatives on the whole have not taken the
necessary measures for an effective empowerment of the inhabitants, it is not
through ignorance but because, fundamentally, they do not want this em-
powemlent ... 49
The success of Kroll's work does not hinge solely on a reading of its defiant
symbolism; his interventions support and enhance the quality of daily life.
But while he retains a necessaJY reserve about the power of architecture to
transform social consciousness, Kroll is direct in claiming this as his intention.
His summary of the Alencon experience is a call for a purposeful architecture
in which the architect is obliged to take a stand:
The renovation of a [housing project] is not an innocent act; the role of the architect
is far from neutral. Clearly, the architect's sketches are nOt going to change SOCiety,
but in a cenain sense, they can serve as a detOnator, an obstruction, an alibi, and can
suddenly throw light on hidden mechanisms .... The design becomes as much an
instrument of inSlitutional analysis as the speech; there arc designs that stir things up
and ot hers which (amfan, designs which quietly encourage initiative among those
who have lost the habit and Others who are immobilized.
50
CONCLUSION
Architecture like this and books like Hatch's do not gain a wide audience
in schools of architecture raday. Because their approach to social issues is
rooted in new user relations and programmatiC relationships, they complicate
rather than simplify the dialectic between form and content. They do not
produce a prescriptive code or a series of compositional "moves" because
the object of their search is the good SOCiety, nOt the perfect building. As
Hatch notes, the goal of social architecture is "thar world where aesthetic is
nOt the quality of isolated objects, but of life itself. "so The physical form of
an architecture of resistance must acknowledge that the form itself carries
social meaning only to the extent it is inscribed in social practice. Asked to
address directly the ability of architecture to be a force of liberation or
resistance, Michel Foucault cautions:
porms oj Resistance
23
'berty is a practice. So there may, in faa, always be a certain number of projects
L. 'In is to modify some constraints, to loosen, or even 10 break them, but none
. . "
of these projects can, simpl y by us nature, tilal people have hberty aulO-
. '11v that it will be established by the project uself. . . ,[Architecture] can and does
mallca., fh I' "d'h
od
po
sitive effects when the liberaling inlemions 0 t e arc meet cOJOet e Wit
pr uce .
al
P
raaice of l)Cople in the exercise of their freedom.
the re
An architecture that takes seriously its social vocation must be based on
d
ct contact with the public it serves. Even comedians know this. "If you
Ire 'bfu" JL
d n't interact with diverse audiences, you won tenny, says ay eno.
have to get feedback from a lot of people, and the comedians who
seem to lose it, after a while, are the ones who listen to themselves."53
Thomas A Dutton expresses the urgency of this involvement when the
stakes are higher:
Only by merging with the evel),day can the values, traditions, and aspirations of those
who have been act ively silenced become the central ingredients of our contribution
10 help produce.a subversiveltransformative spatiality, coincident with their efforts to
cons(ruct a counter-hegemonic worldview and a new integrated
The projects at A1ma-Gare by AUSLA and Alencon by Kroll demonstrate the
possibilities for architecture when these liberating intentions coincide, how-
ever briefly, with a community-based movement strong enough to influence
state policy; strong enough to plant the seeds of a counterhegemonic ideology.
The strength of these projects lies in their insistence on both cultural and
political resistance to the bourgeois state. The result is an architecture which
prod, reflection and celebrates solidarity through its form, and which pro-
vides the arena for continuing the resistance through itS spatial configuration
and functi onal relationships. Because the work in both instances is grounded
in the patterns of everyday life, it retains its physical coherence independently
of its symbolic intentions. If the formal imagery is ignored or differently
interpreted, all is not lost. And if supporting conditions permit u1is dimension
to be grasped, then architecture is fully engaged in the social project.
Doubtless other architects wi ll push further the resistant potential of ar-
chitecture as form. In particular this remains the unfulfilled promise of de-
construction in architecture, At the same time, we must be modest in our
intentions and sober about the potency of architecture in the campaign to
transform society. Architects make buildings; people make history.
Resistance is a life-affirming, creative act. In this light, the task of architecture
is to prOVide a broad public the supportive environment which the studio
provides for the artist. This constitutes, in the words of James Baldwin, "a
refuge and a workshop and the place in which I most wanted to be when
the time comes, as it perpetually does, to crouch in order to spring.""
264
Strategies
Women and Design (London: The Women's Press, 1989), pp. 90-105; thi s updates her
earlier chapter in her \'(Iomen Architects: Their Work, (London: Sorell a Press, 1984).
Walker properly emphasizes the impact of social class on women's opportunities. For
landscape architecture see Catherine M. Howell , "Careers in LancisC'dpe Architecture;
Recovering for Women What the 'Ladies Won and Lost,' '' in Diana L FOwlkes and
Charlone S. McClure, eds. , Feminist Visions: Toward a Trans/onna/ion of the Liberal
Arts Curriculum (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, (984), PP- 134-48, p. 207.
29. In Peggy Mclmosh's schema, separate courses foclised on women should be
unnecessary. but other scholars would argue Olherwise. For example, Deborah Ro-
scorch in "What Women's Studies Programs Do that Mainstreaming Can't," Women's
Studies /ntenJationall'0nllll 7, 3 (1984), pp. 167-75, maintains that "the materials,
theories, and perspective (of women's studies) C'J.tlllOl be 'mainstreamed' in a
way that approximates the full complexity and scope of feminist scholarship" (p. 168)
and that autonomous programs are essential.
30. R. L. Reiss, "Henrietta Octavia Barnell and Hampstead Garden Suburb, " Town
and COllntl)' Planning, 25 GuJy 1957), PI'. 277-82.
31. Of their publications the following are espeCially pertinent: Dolores Harden,
The Grand Domestic Revolwion: A Historyl of Feminist Designs for American Homes,
Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981) and Redesigning the
American Dream: ,be Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1984); Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A SOCial HistOfY of J/ouslng
In America (New York: Pantheon, 1981) and Moralism and the /IIodel Home: Domeslic
Arcbilecture and Cultural Conflict In Cbicago, /873- 1913 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980),
32. Isabelle Anscombe, A \Vornan's Touch: Women in Design from 1860 to tbe
Present Day (New York Viking Penguin, 1984),
33. Polly Wynn AJlen, BUilding Domestic Liberty: Cbarlotte Perkins Gilman's Ar-
chitectural Feminism, (Amherst, MA: University of M;:L')sachuselts Press, 1988).
34. Two studies of women architects are Peter Adam, Eileen Gray: Architecl/Designer
(New York: Harry Abrams, 1987) and Sara Holmes BoUlelle,julta Morgan, Architecl
(New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), hut see the review of Boutelle by Gwendolyn
Wright, "The Castle and the Gym," The Times LitercaySupplement (April 6-12, 1990),
p. 379. A two-volume catalog of a traveling exhibit first presented by the Design Center
in Stuttgart, published in German and English, surveys the carccrs and life histories
of women designers in Europe and the United Stales since 1900: Frauen 1m Design:
B!.>rlifsbilder und Lebenswege seil 1900 [Women in Design: Careers and Life 1lisrories
since 1900J. Angela Oedekoven-Gerischer, Andrea Scholtz, Edith Medek, and Petra
Kurz, eds., (Stuttgart: Design Center , 1989). Berkeley and McQuaid's Architecture
contai ns essays by both architects and architectural historians.
35. Denise SCOtt Brown, "Hoom at the Top?" in Berkeley and MCQuaid, cds. , Ar-
dJitecture, p. 243.
36. Thoma') Dutton imroduced me to the book by bell hooks, Talking Back: nJlnk-
Ing Feminist, Tblnking Black ( Boston, MA: South End Press, 1989), which is an ongOing
source of inspiration for teaching pedagogy.
37. Dolores Hayden, "Placemaking, Perservalion, and Urban llistory," journal of
Architectural I:."cll/cation 41, 3 (Spring 1988), pp. 45-51.
38. Leonardo Benevolo, lIistory of Modern Arcbilecture, 2 vols. (cambridge, MA:
M IT Press, 1971).
Learning to Teach and
Teaching to Learn
12
Alan Peigenberg
The official pedagogy constructs them [student,,] as passive/aggressive
characters. After years in dull transfer-of-knowledge classes, in boring
courses filled with sedating teacher-talk, many have become non-panic-
ipanL'i, waiting for the teacher to set the rules and start narrating what to
memorize. These students are silent because they no longer expect ed-
ucation to include the joy of learning, moments of passion or inspi rati on
or comedy, or even that educmion will speak to the real conditions of
their Iives.
1
Education is not neutral, the exchange between teacher and student does
not take place in a vacuum. People bring with them their cultural ex-
periences and expectations. Education needs to take as its starting point
the real life and experiences of people and either reinforces the social
conditions that keep them as passive receivers of informmion and knowl -
edge, or directly chall enges these conditions. Learners enter into the
process of learning not by acquiring facts, but by conslructing their reality
in social exchange with
UNTRODUCTION: AN ACTIVE APPROACH FOR LEARNING
l-Hisroficaliy, architectural education was slructured around the imparting of
rJ>re-established knowledge, facts, and "good design sense" from teacher to
sstudems. This continues to be. The reacher-student relationship is genenilly
COne in which the teacher is regarded as the primary source of knowledge
Ol and the student as the passive receiver. Facts and ideas are deposited by
266
Strategies
teachers into slUdents who are then supposed to ingest, retain, and spew
back on demand for design revi ews and course examinations. When students
do nm adequately incorporate the "correct" ideas and facts given them the
are the ones blamed as failures. Students are viewed as the cause ~ r t h ~
crises in architectural education and faculty seek to redress these problems
through the imposition of more required coursework and stricter require-
ments.
Ideally, architectural eduC'dtion should not focus on students' retention of
facts and formul as, but rad,er on the enhancement of their abili ty to think
critically and to learn how to learn. In architectural education, as in all human
relationships, mutual understanding and respect are primary condit ions for
personal growth and development. In order to achieve meaningful learning,
dialogue between and among students and teachers is essential. This "edu-
cation for criti cal thought" is based on recognition and respect for the unique
composition of each class, as well as the students who comprise that class--
dleir cultural backgrounds and experiences, their ideas, thoughts, and aspi-
rations.
Research has shown that learning best OCcurs when students are in an
environment that accepts who they are. When subject matter is presented in
a manner that takes into account students' prior knowledge and experiences,
conditions are created for them to develop high interest and great investment
in their work. People also learn best when their inherent curi osity and quest
for meaning in d,e world is stimulated and encouraged. Effective architectural
education needs to acknowledge the vast array of complexities and contra-
dictions [hat constitute dle whole person.
My goal as a teacher is to educate future architects and to empower them
to become active citi zens of the future. I want to help them develop not only
the requiSite skills, but also the social consciousness needed to enhance the
human and physical environment for the vast majority of people.
In my classes, an imponant goal is to have students see and feel the disparate
social conditions reflected in the physical environments around them. [ try
{Q inspire and provoke students to rethink society's current priorities, and
to assist them in developing the tools to make meaningful social change.
Unlike traditional architecture classes, whi ch tend to discourage students from
working on projects and aSSignments together, my classroom encourages
students jOintly to investigate, discover, and rediscover through both visual
and verbal dialogue and debate. This dynamic takes place not only between
myself and the students, but equall y amongst the students themselves.
HISTORY AND CONDITIONS AT TIlE CIlY COLLEGE
The City College of New York (CCNY) was founded in 1847 to provide the
personal, intellectual, and financial rewards of a college education to a seg-
ment of the chil dren of New York City's working class. The prohibitively high
Learning to Teach and Teaching to Learn 267
cost of private institutions, along with the institutionali zed class and ethnic
biases of these colleges, prevented dle overwhelming majority of working-
class and low-income students from emering. By the late 1960s and early
1970s, mass mobilizations and actions generated by a politically mot ivated
and increasingly SOcially conscious Hispanic and African American community
forced the City University of New York (CUNY) into a policy of "open ad-
missions." CCNY, the fl agship of the CUNY system, rapidly became a "minority
institution." Not coincidentally, for the first ti me in its hiStory, CCNY and
CUNY began imposing tuition on its students.
Sixty-five percem of the students at CCNY are Hispanic, African, African
American, or Asian. Over 50 percent of dle students are foreign born, and
English is the second language of over 50 percent. They come from over 70
countries, and over 80 percent are the first ones in their families to be able
to attend coll ege. The overwhelming majority come to CCNY because they
cannot afford to attend another college or university, and some because they
do not meet the academic standards of many private institutions. Approxi-
mately 40 percent of our students come from families with incomes under
$12,000 annually. Over 60 percent are eligible for some form of financial aid,
6 percent qualify for and receive welfare asSistance, and almost 1 percent are
homeless. By their junior year, over 80 percent of our students are working
at least 20 hours a week to support themselves and, in many cases, their
families. CCNY provides no on-campus housing. Our students all commute,
some as much as four hours or more, each day.3
Most of our students have graduated from New York City public high
schools and seek a career in architecture for a variety of reasons. Some have
been advised by guidance counselors to pursue architecture because they
exhibit special interest or skills in art or, conversely, because they have
performed poorly in the sciences. Few, initially, enter the School of Archi-
tecture with an understanding of what architecture is and what architects do.
Many are under the misconception that archi tecture is a highly paid field but
an easier profession to pursue than medicine or law. For the mOSt part, OUf
students seek architecture as a way out of poverty.
TIlE SALVADORI CENTER AND TIlE TEACHING
OF ARCHITECTURE
Several years ago I initiated a graduate-level elective course entitl ed "Teach-
ing Architecture. " The course was developed to encourage some of our
architecture students to teach abollt architecture and the urban envi ronmem
to younger students in New York City public schools and encourage them
to pursue a career in architecture. The idea for this was inspired by my work
with Dr. Mario Salvadori, Professor Emeritus of Columbia University. Dr.
Salvadori is an engineer, educator, and author of numerous books on struc-
tures, including Teaching Matbematics and Science 7brough tbe Built Envi-
268
Strategies
ronment and \Vhy Buildings Stand Up, which is used extensively by archi-
tecture schools throughOllt the world. Mario founded the Salvadori Center
on the Built Environment (SECBE) in 1987 as a joint effort by the City Coll ege
School of Architecture and Environmental St udies and the School of Edu-
cation. The main goal of SECBE is to motivate the most underprivileged
students in New York City schools about the need and advantages of an
education. Other goals of the Center are to:
foster a knowledge of the city among children, panicularJy those living in its most
disadvantaged sections.
awaken students' interest in learning, particularly in the fields of mathematics and
SCience, through imeracting with the built urban environment.
motivate students through demonstrations and hands-on work, giving reality to the
abstractions of math and science.
educate teachers in this approach to teaching.
involve parenl'i in their children's learning process.
produce books, manuals, video-tapes, teaching kits, and other materials for the
dissemination of the SEeBE methodology.
At present, SECBE is involved in over 20 public schools throughout New
York City, including two Salvadori mini-schools in junior high schools in the
Bronx. The basis of the center's work in public schools is to support the
intellectual development in young people who are trying to find their own
way in this often confuSing and compli cated adult world. The urban envi-
ronment is studi ed in order to gain an understanding of the interrelat ionship
of all elements of the students' urban existence. Architecture profoundly
affects the quality of our lives, but is not a subject taught in most schools.
The houses we li ve in, the spaces we use and encounter, the design and
conditi ons of our neighborhoods, towns, and ci ties reflect society's values
and directly function in perpetuating social and economic inequaliti es.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE TEACHING ARCHITECTURE
COURSE
Student cemeredness impli es that in a cl assroom power is shared, based on common
understanding that students, as well as the teacher, bring with them goals and objec-
tives for learning, as well as prior knowledge and experience essemial 1O learning
new .. Goals and objeaives are then negotiated in the classroom; pri or knowl-
edge IS IIwlted and validated. Topics to be covered, tasks to be accomplished, and
methodology to be used emerge from these negotiations:'
The interest and enthusiasm generated by our work made it impossible
for Mario and me to keep up with all the requests from schools throughout
Learning to Teach and Teaching to Learn 269
New York City. I initiated a graduate seminar at CCNY to prepare some
architecture students to assist us in this teaching effort. This was important,
not only to alleviate the increasing dernands for this approach to teaching,
but also to provide role models for the younger African American and His-
paniC students who constitute an overwhelming majority of the New York
City public school population.
Because our students, for the most part, are producLs of the public school
system and pri marily people of color, I felt that they could have more empathy
with the younger students and would be able to help them better understand
and cri ti call y evaluate thei r urban environment. A goal in developing this
course was to st ir interest on the part of and minority public
school students to pursue careers in architecture, urban landscape, and urban
design. A second reason for developing this course was to help myarchitec-
ture students develop a deeper understanding of architectural course material
through an active hands-on approach based primarily on thei r own experi-
ences. A third reason was to encourage and prepare some to seek careers
in teaching. A fourth object ive was to help the architecture students, as well
as the younger ones, gain insights into the inequaliti es of our society rnani-
fested in the built urban environment- the contrasts between rich and poor
neighborhoods, luxury and publi c housing, private and public schools.
The course was conceived as a way of enhancing students' visual literacy-
to open their eyes, and other senses, to the environment that has such a
major impact on their lives and their physical, intellectual , and social devel-
opment. But, as the course developed and changed over the last four years,
so did my insights, goals, and expectations. Architecture is the embodiment
of society's values and priorities, and I believed that by studying the urban
environment, students would come to a better understanding of the political
and economic forces that shaped their lives.
Initiall y, in addition to required readings and papers, each student was
expected to develop a series of lesson plans and teach at least three days in
a New York City public schooL Most of the students chose to work in schools
that were in their neighborhoods, often schools that they themselves had
attended. Several taught in schools where their own children or nieces or
nephews were enrolled. If some students registered for this course for a
second time, they were required to do all of the above, but instead of teaching
three sessions in a school again, they were required to teach at least twelve
sessions. To fulfill these requirements, some students constructed lessons
about the physical characteristi cs of TIley developed sessions in
which the younger students learned, through hands-on investigation and
mocleling, about Stresses and strains of materials and building systems. They
also got involved in measurement and mathematical calculations.s
Some studenLs focused their lessons on investigating the structural systems
of the different types of bridges connecting Manhattan. First students would
srudy books and slides about different types of bridges. When possible, they
270 Strategies
would be raken to see many of them. Then, they would conStruct their Own
truss, suspension, and cable-stayed st ructures with tongue depressors, erector
setS, cardboard and st ring. Finally, they would test their structures to failure.
Others concentrated on visual images of the ciry. They had (heir younger
students draw and construct models of exist ing conditions. They then had
them develop and design their ideas for the future.
And still others involved their students in recording and designing open
spaces in their own communities. Some designed parks and playgrounds,
others me::lsured, drew, built, and criticized their own classroom or school
and then redesigned them for their own needs. '
The first several years went well. Of course there was the common irreg-
ularity and inconsistency of students' work and involvement. IIowever , final
evaluati ons received from classroom teachers in whose classrooms my stu-
dents were required to " test out " their ideas and course plans, were generall y
quite favorable. Norma, a first- and second-grade teacher at the Central Park
East School in Manhattan wrote, "The architecture students came well pre-
pared and enthusiasti c about working with my class. It was a joy to see the
younger students and the college students working together."
Each semester at least one of my students seriously considered becoming
a teacher in the public schools. There are now five former CCNY architecture
students who arc teaching in New York Ci ty public schools, and are si mul-
taneously enroll ed in graduate education courses in order to fulfill the li-
censing requirements for permanem teaching positions. Furthermore, there
are several younger students with whom we worked who have graduated
high school and are now enrolled in schools of architecture, including twO
here at CCNY.
TEACHING AS A LEARNING PROCESS
One of the best ways of educating people is to give them an experi ence that embodies
what you are trying to teach ... you provide a setting for education that is democratic.
6
The principal goal of educat ion is to create men [and women] who are capable of
doing new things, not simply repealing what other generJl ions have [and
women] who are creati ve, inventi ve and discoverers. The second goal of education
is to form minds which can be critical , which can verify, and 110l accept everything
they are offered .... So we need pupils who are active, who learn early to find out for
themselves, partly by their own spontaneous activity and partl y through materials we
set up for them; who learn earl y to tell what is verifi able and what is simply the first
idea 1O come to them.
1
As the Spring] 990 semester was about to begin, 1 felt eager to further
develop my course so that my students and 1 could become more equal as
CO- investigators and co- learners. I wanted to create a greater sense of com-
munity in my classroom, to meet with my students around common goals,
Leanling to Teach and Teaching to Learn
271
and to create an environment in whichLhe sludems would find support for
their desires and efforts to l earn and III grow. Envisioning my classroom as
a cOIllmunity for inqui ry and specuJati(ll, 1 wanted ro fashion an environment
that would allow active exploration am investigation of architectural, peda-
gogical, and social issues-a rethinki ll10f society through their own as well
as through the younger children's e<iJcat ion. The Salvadori approach had
served as the starting point. As my unrerstanding of education and our stu-
dents developed, I saw that the proce; and content of the course also had
to change. In the early years I came intodass quite proud of having everything
in its place. I distributed course outli nlS and syllabi that included a week by
week descriptiOn of what was to be what was to occur in the class, what
specifi c activities would take place, and what requirements each studenr was
expected to fulfill. I felt that all thi s preparation clearly showed my keen
interest in teaching and respect for ",y students. But I reali zed that these
unilateral decisions and actions ran C(J.lnter to my stated philosophy of eIll-
powering students to take an active rOc in the content and development of
their education.
In order to implement my views, l osked those students who were taking
the course for the second semester toassist in teaching the course, as well
as to spend additional time in the scbools whe re they had been teaching.
This was embraced with great enthUSJa5m. Three declared they had some
suggestions for the new students in dle class. They felt that some of the
preViously required readings, especially those by the Swiss epistemologist
Jean Piaget, were too difficult, a bit tto "heady" and "not all that helpful. "
It was proposed that the three of them get together, prepare a discussion for
cl ass, suggest readings, and present their ideas of what they would like to
see happen during the semester. My proposal was inspired by Paulo Freire,
who writes about teachers and studerlS collaboratively establishing themes
for class projects that are drawn from the students' own experiences and
backgrounds.'
To illustrate, when I first started te:lching architecture at CCNY I was as-
signed to a final design review for a group of second-year students. They had
been working for eight weeks on the design of a ski resort in Vermont. At
the end of the review, the professor announced to the class that he was very
disappointed with their work and that most of them would never be architects.
Of the eighteen students, one was Afri cm, three were Asian, four were African
An1erican, and five were Hispanic. None of these students had ever been to
Vermont, or had been to a ski reson, let alone skiing. The only experience
most of them had had with snow had been the brown slush that falls in New
York City.
1n contrast, I wanted to create a dass in which my students would be
encouraged to appreciate their own \Vorth as thinkers and intellectuals. It
was important for the students to be encouraged to take an active role in
lhis class, in their teaching, and in their education in general. Together, we
272 Strategies
developed a concept of the cl assroom "as a plastic material al ready shaped
into one thing and capable of being reshaped inLO another. ... This is an
artistic process, uncovering key themes and access points to consciousness,
and then recomposing them into an unsenling critical investigatiOn, orches-
trating a prolonged study"'"
When ule class actually began, [ explained that [ would prefer not to make
unilateral decisions affecting the class, and that opt imally we could come to
a group understanding and consensus through continuous dialogue. I ex-
plained that I could not, and would not, enforce requirements which they
themselves did not understand or mutually agree upon. It was the intenti on
to develop true and meaningful learning, learning that "li es in the quest and
not in the result, that it is a process, that knowl edge is a process and thus
we should engage in it and achieve it through dialogue, through breaking
with the past ,,10 Through our readings and disclissions we were coming to
a deeper understanding of OUf learning processes. We were realizing that
learning should not be standardi zed and resolved into neat formulas, but
rather, we had to be open to trying new and creative ways of learning in
both content and form- ways that come from the unique backgrounds and
understandings of all the students involved.
At the first session of the class, I set out to determine who my students
were and what their prior experi ences and understandings were. Everyone
was asked to introduce themselves, tell where they were from, a I ittl e about
their background, what previous classes they had enjoyed, why they had
decided to take ulis class, and most importantly, what were they expecti ng
to get out it. This opening temporarily fl oored them. "Professors don't ask
those kinds of questions. " We only get questioned for asSignments and tests. "
"Professors aren't interested in what we think. " I explained my educational
philosophies that learning in architecture, as in any fi eld, is a constant process
of change in which there are no givens or absolutes, and expressed my
convict ion that we all shared responsibility for the learning that would take
place in this class.
Current pedagogical research and studies lead me to believe that all people,
and especially younger ones, learn best by doing, by handling and manipu-
lating materials, by actively and criti cally exploring their enVironments, by
discussing and collectively planning projects, and by conducting explorations
and experiments based on their own hypotheses and their own interests. II
Students are best able to learn about ule world in an integrated way, nOt by
simply memorizing isolated facts that have been broken down into different
and distinct subject ma({er. Architeclure, in particular, necessitates this ap-
proach, because of the necessary integration of all subjects--math, science,
arr, sociology, psychology, economiCS, politiCS, hiStory, and so on. I wanted
my students to become aware that architecture, as well as any diSCipline,
involves a cont inuous spiral of learning that always comes back to the same
Learning to Teach and Teaching to Learn
273
issues, but does so each time on a higher and more sophisticated level of
comprehension. . . .
Early in the semester, many of my students were often too 1I1tlmldated to
offer personal opinions in class. They felt that their grades were at stake, and
did not want to appear "stupid" if they did not know the "right" answer.
They needed assurance that there are no stupid questions or final answers,
and that taking risks is an integral part of learning. .
As the semester developed, however, dialogue and debate became a major
aspect of ule class. Students began to talk more frequently about their ex-
periences-their aspirations and their disappointments. The students from
the previous semester offered inSights into what had worked for them, and
what had not. By explaining ideas to their peers, ulese students clanfied their
own thoughts, ideas, and conclusions. They exhibited a much greater insight
into what they had learned and not learned than when they had been asked
to present their views in the required papers previously assigned.
Each week I took a different seat at our long rectalinear table. It took about
four sessions for one of my students to question what I was trying to do.
(Most of the students had nOticed this quirk but felt too embarrassed, or shy,
to comment. A few had nOt even noticed.) This questiOn precipitated much
discussion on the concept of visual literacy-visual and cri tical awareness of
the world around us. It also led to a discussion of the inherent symbolic
meaning, or semiotic message, that was being conveyed by where I sat, and
what this had to do with my role, and the students' perception of my role,
in the class.
This led to discussions about nonverbal messages that we all encounter
daily in our lives, the semioti c messages of power inherent in clasSical-style
governmental buildings and courthouses; the social messages conveyed by
anonymous, alienating, public- housing projects; and the message of dIsrespect
and contempt that the public schools' decaying physical structures gIve to
teachers and children. The focus of these discussions was on the forms and
arrangements in the physical environment which affect our aaions, reactions,
and expectatiOns; the purpose was for students to see the effect their actions
could have on their younger students. It was my hope that students would
begin to break down the teacher-student barriers with their students in the
same way that we were trying to do in our class.
I had to be absent from class one week and so I suggested to my students
to meet without me and continue the work in process. Most of my students
were very unnerved. One woman asked directly, "Do we have to come to
class if you aren't there? Will you mark us absent'" One of the men could
nOt beli eve that there was any reason to meet. "What should we do' What
are we going to work on'" Almost all of the students did show up that next
week, some mainly out of curiosity. Although they found it difficult to begm
(everyone was initially looking for someone else to become the teacher and
274 Strategies
give leadership), several students came prepared to test out their ideas for
teaching on the others. TIle students talked and debated with each other, and
felt that they had accomplished a great deal wi thout my presence (or perhaps,
because of it).
After lhis experience, a significant difference in the student<; became ap-
parent. They seemed to have developed a stronger group sense and identity,
and were more open about sharing ideas, feelings, fears, and aspirations.
Most of them now openly posed questions. Many helped each oUler solve
problems. Although this process had been developing since the first day of
class, it seemed that the concentrated period of time together, without me,
had strengthened uleir sense of their own empowerment, self-confidence,
and self-worth. Strong friendships became more evident as many of the
students sought to work together in other classes despite some faculty dis-
COLI ragement.
Another example of student interaction and active participation in the class
emerged after several students had visited the Staten Island Children's Mu-
sellin in the fall and had written papers about the demonstrations and exhibits
there. They did this because they felt that the museum is a good example of
hands-on learning focused on architecture and the built environment. They
wanted to share this experience with the others and suggested that the entire
class take on a project relating to children's museums.
The class divided itself into five groups. Each group visited one of ule five
children's museums in New York City and developed a method for involving
the reSt of the class in aOively understanding their particular experience.
One of the students from the previous semester postulated that, "If we can't
explain this (the material offered at the museums) to each other, how can
we even hope to effect ively work with children later on?" Another returning
student added, "This will be good practice for us, and a good introduction
for the rest of you in communi cation and hands-on teaching and learning
techniques. "
Sharing experiences from the children's museums was a stimulating ex-
perience. As each group made their presentation, the rest of the class, rather
Ulan sitting as passive observers, actively participated by asking questions and
offering suggestions. An interactive presentation about reversing images with
mirrors turned into a learning experience about light, heat, color, reflection,
refraction, transparency, translucency, and opaqueness. Afterwards, the stu-
dents felt that they had developed a real comprehension of how mirrors and
windows actually functioned. They felt that what they had JUSt learned through
this presentation would help them to make informed decisions when con-
sidering glazing types and patterns in their designs. Several individuals re-
flected on how different this learning experience was from the way they had
previously been taught in other classes. Although many had "covered" several
of ulese issues in their physics and constructi on teChnology courses, they
Learning to Teach and Teaching to Learn
275
had never really understood the basic conceptS because they were simply
required to memorize and spew back the facts.
OBSERVATIONS AND REFLECTIONS
Mental action Gm be enhanced or hindered by the social comcxt of the classroom.
When the teacher holds all the {X)wer of decision-making, children (students) become
mentally passive because they are prevemed from taking a stand, exchanging points
of view, and living with the consequences of their own decisions.
J2
:
We don't all think the same way. We don't all have the same kinds of imelligence . .
There isn't enough lime to learn everything .... In a uniform school these differences
arc ignored because the assumption is that everybody's mind is the same and every-
body should learn the same thing in the same way. I,)
During this course, students observed and gained respect for the variety
of strengths, abilities, and learning styles emanating from the eUlIlic and
intellectual diversity of the group. Since it was their responsibility to choose
and develop a theme for their teaching, they all selected someuling of great
interest to them. Several students, working together, prepared materials for
the study of high-rise buildings-their unique structural systems and their
impact on the urban environment. Two other students decided to concentrate
on alternative energy sources-geothermal and solar-and how these systems
might change the appearance of buildings and the urban environment. One
young man, who was teaching at the High School for Music and Art, focused
on the relationships of patterns, rhythms, and imagery in architeoure and
music. Another student, at the suggestiOn of the junior high-school students
he was working WiUl, prepared to work on redesigning their classrooms to
better meet their needs and desires.
Through the process of role playing, the students Simultaneously became
their own severest critics and strongest supporters. Their discussions would
often delve into ule social implications of the subjects proposed. One student
had prepared slides to initiate discussion about European architecture and
its development. OUler students quest ioned his focus as reinforcing the phi-
losophy of Western superiority and chall enged him to broaden his approach
to include architecture of Africa, Asia, and Latin America and offered to help
him. The students who had developed their teaching around high-rise Struc-
tures were challenged to also address the discrepancies in New York buildings
between the richer and poorer areas, and between the predominantly white
and predominantly minority areas of the City. These sessions began to inte-
grate the process of learning with the content of what was being taught.
Many of the students would refer to some courses uley had formerly taken
as having been "boring," "a waste of rime, " and "insulting to our cultures
276 Strategies
and backgrounds." Ofien, they said, history and theory courses addressed
the achievements of Western architecture while onl y giving lip service to
those of non-Western origin.
Through all of this work it became clear that my studems were most likely
to become interested in, and knowledgeable about, their subject matter if
dley were actively involved in dleir own learning from their own perspectives.
FOR THE FUTURE
There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions
as an instrumenl which is used lO facilitate the integrati on of the younger generation
into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity lO it , or it becomes
the practice-or-freedom the means by which men and women deal critically and
creati vely with reality and discover how to participate in the transformati on of the
worl d.
14
The au of studying, learning, knowing is difficult and above all demanding. But, i( is
necessary for learners (0 discover and feel the inherent joy (hal is always ready to
(ake hold of (hose wbo give themselve..<; to the process of learning. The leacher's role
in nunuring thiS diScipline and joy is
The inspiring and provocative dynamics of student empowerment attested
to by Paulo Freire had come alive. By discussing their own lives and expe-
riences, their own fears and aspirations, they began to assume responsibility,
indi viduall y and collectivel y, to make this semester as exciting and meaningful
as they could for themselves, for ule rest of the class, and for the younger
students.
My role as their teacher Significantly changed in this process. 1 had begun
to function beyond mere facilitator. 1 had tried to provide my students with
just enough material , information and/or provocation to initiate the learning
process, but not tOO much that would stifl e the students' curiosiry, imagination,
and enthusiasm. Together we had begun to break down the barrier between
teacher and student, master and apprentice, expen and novice.
Although my adult students have experienced active involvement and em-
powerment in their own learning, I see that they are not yet facilitating these
same dynamics with their younger students. They are st ill going into the
schools with predetermined lessons. They are nO[ yet involving their students
in the interactive learning process that we had been developing together.
I have learned a great deal and have traveled a considerable distance during
the experi ence of teaching this course. Originally I had been interested in
directly transferring my understanding of hands-on learning to my studeIlls,
and required them to follow ulis approach in their teaching. Subsequently,
I began to focus on empowering my students to think creatively and inde-
pendently, to better (and more consciously) understand the relationship
between needed changes in education and basic political changes in society.
Learning to Teach and Teaching to eanz 277
Their experiences in working with the younger students were instrumental
in this understanding. Experiencing the general physical deterioration of the
public schools, the overcrowded classrooms, and the overall lack of support
for swdems' development and empowerment has begun to make most of
my students more consciously aware of their own conditions and the ethnic
and class biases and prejudices that perpetuate them.
A sense of community had been established in the classroom. As co-
investigators and co-learners, srudems and teacher experienced the joy of
discovelY and learning.
NOW, I reali ze that we have not gone far enough. Only when my adult
swcients can recognize and respect the understandings of their younger stu-
dents, only when they can help them construct meaning out of their own
experiences, only when they can help empower them to take responsibility
for their own learning, and only when they can support their younger students
(0 become active and critical thinkers who can begin to question the priorities
of society and the ways in which they can change these inequalities, will the
lessons of this course be fully achieved.
It has been the teaching of ulis course that has brought me to this under-
standing. Such is the nature of learning. New inSights and understandings
continue to emerge. Next year, we will develop them further together.
NOTES
1. Paulo Freire and Ira Shor, A Pedagogy Jar Liberation: Dialogues on Trans-
fanning Education (South Hadley, MA Bergin and Garvey, 1987), p. 122.
2. Nina Wallerstein, "Probl em-Posing Education: Freire's Method for Transfor-
mation," in Ira Shor, cd. , Freire For tbe Cltmroom: A Sourcebook Jor Liberating
Teacbing, (POrtSIllOUtll , NH, Boymon/Cook, 1987), p. 33.
3. Data was obtained from a sunrey conducted by Professor Alan Feigenberg during
registration for the Fall 1989 semeSler for the City College School of Architecture and
Environmental Studies. Eighty-one percell! of the registeri ng students compl eted the
survey form.
4. Teamsters Loc'dl 237, Consortium Jor Worker Education and the Institute Jar
Literacy Studies Statement of Policy (New York Teamster Local 237, 1987), p. 7.
5. In the beginning we often depended upon material and lesson plans developed
by Dr. Mario Salvadori in his publication, Arcbitoclllre and Engineering: An Illustrated
Manual on WIry Buildings Stand Up (New York: ll1e New York Academy
of Sciences, 1983).
6. Myles I-lorton, Herbert Kohl , and judith Kohl , The LOllg Haul, An Autobiograpby
(New York Doubleday, 1990), p. 113.
7. Jean Piagel , "The Role of the Eclucalor," New Vork Times, 26 May 1968, Section
E, p. C1.
8. I refer ro concepts and practices of Paulo Freire in his work with peasants in
Brasil. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 81h ed., (New York, Seabuty, 1973).
9. Freire and Shor, A Pedagogy jor Liberation, p. 113.
278
Strategies
10. Paulo Freire and Antonio Faundez, Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of Lib-
eration (New York: COlllillllum, 1989), p.32.
. ] 1. While currendy there is a great body of research and literature addressing these
Issues, I understood these ideas bcst through the writings of Connie Williams and
Constances Kamii in"How Do Children Learn By Handling Objects?" Young OJildren,
(November] 986), pp. 23-26; Patricia cari ni , On Value in Education (New York: The
Ciry College Workshop Cemer, 1987);.Iohn Dewey, E.;rperience and /:.(;/uCGlion (New
York: Macmillan, 1938); Jean Piagel, Genetic EpistemOlogy (New York: W.W. Nonon
and Company, 1971); Eleanor Duckworth, Tbe Halling ofWondeifulldeas and Otber
Essays on Teaching and Learning (New York: Teacher's College Press, -1987); Sharon
SUllon, An Urban Design Program Jor Elementary Scbools (Ann Arbor: UniverSity of
~ i ~ h i g a n 1989); and through the workshops 1 have participated in developed by
Lillian Weber and Hubert Oyasi of the City College Workshop Center.
12. Williams and Kamii , "How Do Children Learn by Handling Objects?" p. 26.
13. Howard Gardner, "Hand to Hand," Children's Museum Network 4 (Fall 1988),
p.5.
14. Paulo Freire, Pedago&'Y oj tbe Oppressed, p. 15.
15. Paulo Freire and Ira Shor, A Pedagogy Jor Liberation, p.122.
Selected Bibliography
Abhau, Marty, ed. Architecture in Edu.cation: A Resource oj Imaginative Ideas and
Tested Activities. Philadelphia: FOllndmion for Architecture, ] 986.
Acuna, Rodolpho. Occupied America: A HistOf)' oj Chicanos. New York: Harper and
How, 1988.
Adanl, Peter. Eileen Gray: Architect/Designer. New York: Harry Abrams, 1987.
Agger, Ben. "The Dialectic of Industrialization: An Essay on Advanced Capitalism." In
John Forester, cd., Critical Theory and Public Life. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985,
pp.3-21.
Alberti , Leon Bauista. 011 the Art oj Building in Ten Books. Translated by Joseph
Rykwert , Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988.
Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishakawa, and Murray Silverstein. A Pattern Language.
London: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Allen, Polly Wynn. Building Domestic Libert)': Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Architectural
Feminism. An1herst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
Althusser, Louis. u.YJ'lin and Philosophy. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1971.
Anscombe, Isabelle. A Woman 's Touch: Wonum in DesignJrom 1860 to the Present
Day. New York: Viking Penguin, 1984.
Anlhony, carol. "The Big House and Ihe Slave Quarters." Landscape. 20-21 (1976).
Apple, Michael W. Ideology and Curriculum. New York: Routledge and Kcgan Paul,
1979.
---. TeadJerS and T(!;)."ts. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988.
Argyris, ChriS. "Teaching and Learning in Design Seuings." Arcbitecture Education
Study; The Papers. The Andrew Mellon Foundation and Consortium on Eastern
Schools of Architedure. MA: MIT laboratOry of Architecture and Planning.
164 Strategies
7. Association a/Collegiate Schools 0/ Arcbitect/lre Nell's vol. 18, no. 3, (November
1988).
8. carl Anthony, "The Big House and the Slave Quaners," LaJldscape, nos. 20-21
( 1976), p. 14.
9. John 0' eal "Black Arts, Notebook." In Addison Gayle, Jr. , ed., The Black 1Ies-
tbetic (New York Anchor Books, 1971),1'.47.
10. Michael Brenson, "Black Anist: A Place in the SUIl," New York Times (March
12, 1989), p. H-1.
11. !-Ienry Lollis Gates, Jr., "Whose Canon Is It , Anyway?" New York Times Rei'ierI'
of Books (February 26, 1990), 1'.45.
12. Maude SOUlhwell Wahl man, "Africanisllls in Afro-American Visionary Arts," Bak-
illg In Tbe Sun (University of Sout hwestern Louisiana, 1987), p. 43.
13. Edmund Gaither, "Visual Arts and l3lack Journal of tbe Affairs of
Black An/sIs vol. 1, no. 1, p. 10.
14. Ri chard J. Powell, Tbe Blues Aesthetics: Black Culture and Modernism (Wash-
ingtOn, DC: Washington Project for the AnS, 1989), p. 19.
15. John Vlach, " Afro-Americans," in Dell Upton, ed. , America's Arcbitectural Roots
(WashingtOn, DC: The Prcservalion Press, 1986), pp.43-44.
16. Hassan Farhy, Arcbitecture Jar tbe Poor (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1973).
17. bell hooks, Talkillg Back (Boston, South End Press, 1989). p.49.
18. Paul o Freire, Pedagog)1 oftbe Oppressed (New York: Ilarper and Row, 1971),
p.15.
19. Niambi D. Webster, "The College Curr iculum r-,'!USl Be Made More i\lulli-Ethnic."
Black IsslIes ill Higlx.- Edllcatioll, vol. 6, no. 4 (April 27, 1989), 1'.60.
The Hidden Curriculum
and the Design Studio:
Toward a Critical
Studio Pedagogy
8
Thomas A Dutton
INTRODUCTION
The design studio is the central reature of architectural education programs
across North America. Evidenced by lhe commitment given to it by students
and professors, the ability to integrate skills, values, and architectural literacy,
and the tendency [0 marginalize the reSt of the curriculum, the design studio
has become the "heart and head of architectural education. ,,] Some proclaim
that as a pedagogical moclel , the design studio is incomparabl e in its intensity
and involvement, except perhaps to the internship of medical srudents. 2 Oth
4
ers proclaim the studi O should be the model or choice for education generally
because of its inherem strength to unite knowledge and action in "reflective
conversations. "-"\ Certainly compared to typical classroom scenari OS, studios
are vcry active si tes characterized by drawing, model making, conversation,
and debate, activities which demand analytic, synthetiC, and evaluative modes
of thinking. These attributes attest to the special ness or the sltldio as a vehicle
ror studem education.
Though given these positives, I want to argue that the studi o-actuall y the
onhodox pedagogies employed in the studio-is marked by serious flaws,
flaws thar often go unrecogni zed and actually counter sound teaching practice.
What is often experienced in studio culture is the legitimation of hierarchical
SOCial relations, the choking of dialogue, and the sanctioning of the individual
consumption of "acceptable" knowledge in a competitive milieu. Such in
clinarions speak to a rough correspondence between schooling and wieler
SOCietal processes whereby the selection and organization of knowledge, and
the ways in which school and classroom social relations are structured to
166
Strategies
distribute such knowledge, are strongly influenced by forms and practices
of power in society. That is, chara('l eristi cs of contemporary society-such as
class, race, and gender discrimination and other asymmetri cal relations of
power-are too often reproduced in schools and cl assrooms, including the
design studio. The vehicl e for revealing this analysis will be a concept known
as the hidden curri culum. Though established and debated in other disci-
plines (certainl y education), the concept of the hi dden curri culum is relativel
unknown in architeclUral educati on; a bri ef description is necessary here. Y
The fact that the design studio often reproduces dominant cultural and
politi cal practices demands consciolls and effective coumerpedagogical strat-
egies. This is the basis of my own work. My project is to employ pedagogies
whi ch (J ) make probl emati c the inherentl y conAicti ve nature of society with
its asymmetrical relations of power, ( 2) so that students and teachers can
begin to criti cally understand (heir experi ence within this context, (3) to
learn what it means to be a self- and sociall y constituted person giving mean-
ing to the world, (4) in order to act upon and change institutions, society,
and life. One way to make this explicit is to theori ze architectural education
as a form of cultural politics, to recogni ze that pedagogy always reinforces
parti cular ways of life while making others invisible, that pedagogical pract ice
unavoidably empowets a particular politicS of experi ence, knowledge, and
hiStory. As Ri chard Shaull puts it,
There is no such thing as a neutral educati onal process. Educat ion either functions
as an instrumclll which is used to facilitate the il1legralion of the younger generation
into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity 1O it , or it becomes
'the practi ce of freedom,' the means by which men and women deal critically and
creati vely with reality and discover how [0 participate in the transformation of their
world.'
There are many important points in this passage, the primary one for me
being the need to sharpen architectural pedagogy as a liberati ve projec.t, as
a base for alternati ve culrural and political production. In this way, studems
and teachers can make inroads into the political and cultural nature of the
limits and possibilities of the larger world-of which schools are important
sites-and [Q understand one's experi ence within this context as a means (0
aCl upon iL
To this end, the last part of this chapter presents a criti cal pedagogy for
practice in the design studiO; crilical in the sense that the pedagogy sets up
the condi ti ons to investigate deeply not only the many issues of design, but
the nature of design education itself, especially how knowl edge and meaning
are produced and disseminated, how social relati ons are structured, and how
students and teacher come to see themselves in these activiti es. I am nor
interested in helping students design and build in the world as it is. I see
the studiO as a site for a constructive strategy of counterhegemony, as a
The Hidden Curriculum and the Design Studio
167
gg
le against domination and the stifling of voice. The chapter concludes
stru . . .
with the presentation of a studi o model whi ch utilizes .such a pedagogy, and
a diSCussion of its importance for architectural educati on.
HIDDEN CURRICULUM
Over the last twO decades, there has been a new wealdl of ideas and debates
centering on educational reform. Out of this has emerged a concept call ed
rhc hidden curri culum which has made a significant contribution [0 peda-
gogical theoly. Simplified, the hidden curri culum refers to those unstated
vfllucs, attitudes, and norms whi ch stem taCItl y from the sOClal ./elauons of
the school and classroom as well as the content of the course. Compared
to (he formal curriculum, with its emphasis on knowledge ( i. e., course con-
tent what should be included and its place in the curriculum), the concept
of the hidden curriculum brings into focus questions concerning the ideology
of knowledge, and the social practi ces which struClUre the experi ences of
slUdems and teachers.
6
Using the concept of the hidden curriculum as a theoreti cal tool , one can
begin to recognize that schools are not neurral sites, and thus they are an
integral pari of the SOCial , political , economiC, and cultural relations of SOCiety.
This nexus of relations plays a Significant role in the selection, organi zation,
and distribution of knowledge in schools as well as the formati on of school
social relations and practices. When recogni zed, the hidden curriculum be-
comes a crucial vehicl e dlfough which criti cal analysis reveal s the dialectical
relationship between knowledge, culture, social relati ons, and rorms of power
within society and within the process of schooling.
I lence, through the filter of the hidden curriculum teachers can interpret
the relati onship between knowledge and power , and how classroom knowl -
edge always reinforces certain ideologies, values, and assumptions about
social reality so as to sustain the interests of some groups at the expense of
olhers.
7
Similarly, educators can clari ty the relati onshi p between social praclices
and power. That is, injustices and inequi ties of society are not simply nestled
in the mind but are embodied in forms of lived experi ences and social
relationships that penerrate to the inner-most recesses of human subjectivity-
forms that in thi s society legitimize top-to-down models of authori ty and types
of social control characteristic of most institutions. As one critic put it, the
hidden curri culum "comprises one of the major sociali zation forces used to
produce personality types willing to accept social relati onships characteri stic
of the governance structures of the
In sum, the notion of the hidden curriculum constitutes one of the most
important conceptual tools with which to dissect educational institutions in
terms of the knowledge forms that are produced, and the ongOing social
praClices that are formed to disseminate such knowl edge.
168
Strategies
HIDDEN CURRICULUM AND THE DESIGN STUDIO
Applied to architectural education, the hidden curriculum greatly enlar
the examinati on of the design studio. Situated now in a broader Context
I
d' d ' t le
(esign . 10,. as, a pro lIcer of knowledge and as a social practice, can be
Its LO wider production, distribution, and
legitimation practIces of society, manipulated by governing social, economi
and ,poli tical inst itutions. By focusing on these connections, the subjects
studIo knowledge and social relations are put in a new light.
Studio Knowledge
Knowledge is never a neutral emity. Hatiler, as any commodity, it is a social
construct, produced and distributed accordi ng to particular voices situated
in relations of power for particular ends. To talk about knowledge, then, is
to talk about power (and ideology) and, therefore, the legitimation of some
forms of knowledge over others due {O rheir privileged association with forms
of power. Thusl it is more correct to talk about dominam and subordinate
lorms of knowledge.
To illustrate this, it is telling to examine briefly those forms of knowledge
that have been dominam and subordinate in architecture over the last 15 to
20 years, as well as their ideologi cal consequences. As I stated in the Imro-
duction, the rise of the postmodern condition has reconfigured the logic of
late capitalism so as to reconstitute economicS
I
politics
l
the spatiality of the
cityl all forms of social and cultural organiz.:1tion
l
and inrelleclual discourse
on a global scale. Ours is a society where multinational corporat ions crisscross
nationaJ borders at the expense of communities that once sustained (hem;
where the rift bet\Veen the haves and the have-nots is the widest in American
hiStory, and where ecological catastrophe is closer dlan anyone wams to
surmise.
I low has architecture responded to these postmodern changes' Curremly,
there are two dominant trends is posunodern architecLUre: the hi storicaV
traditional and the poststructuraVdeconstructive. Though claiming to be dif-
ferem, these two trends actually are dialectically quite similar.
It was only a shon 10 to 15 years ago that the historical/traditional track
grew to dominance in architectural discourse. The fascination was historical
allusion, mannerism, deCOration, rypology, regionalism, and archilecture as
language (modernism, late modernism, ad-hocism, and, of course, classicism,
free-style or otherwise). The adherents claimed modern architecture had
failed, especially aestheticall y. It failed to communicate with anyone other
than profeSSionals, and became aesthetically bankrupt-impersonal, sterile,
lacking of ornament, denying of other cultural and visual traditions. Hence,
the desire was to return architecture to the realm of art. There was rhe
tendency for architectural drawings to be considered as things in themselves.
fbe Hidden Curriculum and the Design Studio
169
Much talk, pro and con, was about the torrent .of pa.per architecture.
9

of architectS and critics reacted strongly to thiS SWing for-
lalism. Ada Louise Huxtable was concerned in that the prtmary dialogue
n s among architects, with a corresponding orientation of practice "away
waf 1 sociological to excl usively esthetic concerns."lO Tzonis and Lefaivre
ron d' . f "P II d' . "
ar ued thal underlying the seemingly divergent IreCtions 0 a a lalllsm,
"Jlomskyan linguistiCS," "mannerist ic versions of Le Corbusier and Ter-
rag
ni
," "German expressionism," and the "French Beaux-Arts tradition," there
was a convergence. II The convergence was marked by the anempt to construct
a simple, make-believe ideological world where professional sanity, confi-
dence, and prestige could be salvaged. Architects presumed (and sti ll pre-
sume) that they could roam freely in the realm of mental constructs,
disassociating themselves from the external world of unpleasantries, and
turning "inward for approval to the closed world of peers or of ule office
drawing board, where everything becomes possible.""
It is exactly the "external world of unpleasantries" that motivates the post-
structural/deconstruction discourse and practice in architecture. It is an
architecture that probes the confUSion, fragmentation, difference, indeter-
minacy, and and crash of contemporary life. As Coop Himmelblau asks:
"How should we think, plan, build in a world which is daily becoming more
tattered? Should we fear ulese tatters, suppress them and nee into the safe
world of architecture'"'' Instead of seeking complacency, conciliation, cul-
tural communication, or community through architecture, adherents of this
trend see it as "progressive to generate new forms that produce an estrange-
ment or dialectical shock in the strategiC struggle to renew perception within
a context of cont inual cultural commodification. "14 In Coop Himmelbau's
work specifically, we are offered an "aesthetics of violation," a "poetics of
desolation, " "destruction instead of unification," and "explosions instead of
integration."l " Other terms bandied about to qualify the poststructuralist bent
are nullity, void, absence, rnean.ingfree, arbitral)I, and positive nihilism (now
there's a;l ox,),moron!). All of these terms connote an objective to generate
an architecture beyond the "imperialism of unity, "16 to make an architecture
of undecidability, I'" an architecture that provokes "an uncertainty in the object,
by removing both the architect and the user from any necessary control of
the object. The architect no longer is the hand and mind .... The object no
b I d
,,"
longer requires the experience of the user to e un( erstOO .
It is odd that the poststructuralistsideconstructionistS have appropriated
the terms critical and resistan.ce to explain their project. I t is a specious
appropriation, the terms have been emptied of their political wordl and value,
robbed of their full power for transformative strategy. As Lian Hurst Mann
writes, "this strategy of negation is a resistance (noL LO bourgeois social life
by means of social praxis but) to bourgeois philosophy by means of the
formal subversion of architecture's language as a foundational metaphor for
the bourgeois philosophical order."" rormal manipulations alone are inept
170
Strategies
to the task of social transformation. Indeed, in this riveting time of I
. I' .. I ., ate
Glptta Ism, Il IS no onger ule case that formal aesthetic subversion prom'
. . . Ises
anythmg subversIve, because the penchant for novelty has become pan and
parcel of the eCOI.lo1l1iC mac,hinery to turn over more and more goods. As
MacCanneJl , echolllg Frederic Jameson and others, Slales it, "Aesthetic r
duction, which in an earlier time might have provided a critique of
has become full y integral with commodity proc!uclion ... 20 Formal
has become mainstream, it supplies hegemoni c commodity culture with COn-
stant renewal in time of market saturation and economic stagnation. Lian
Hurst Mann sums it up well:
Rapid srylist renewal is no signal of opposition to the status quo, only a sign of the
infinitesimal within which newness can be approprimed, within which Shocking
meta.phors of rcwa3nce can be rerurned to the conslruclion of dominam unities. Any
reJauve ;:llltonomy that appe'Jrs to exist is a momentary shirr or rupture within the
of struggle and. reconsolidation of the bourgeois global estate. And the op-
positional strat egy at rhls moment of rupture cannOI be further dis-oriemarion.21
Though different in their prescriptions for architecture, there is much
shared dialecti cally by the two tracks of histOrical/traditional and poststruc.
tural/deconstruction. While the traditionalisL'iihistoricists regard their project
as a search for authenticity in a time of fragmentation, the poststructuralistsl
deconstructionists hold authenticity suspect and, hence, any search for it
to be a waste of time. The traditionalists rush headlong into the good old
days as a means to dress up the bad new ones, while the poststructuralists
SLart from the bad new ones but do not move beyond them. In thi s sense,
and this is the signifi cant pOint, both tracks are reifications: the traditionali sts
try to revive an order for a confused world, the poststructuralists articulate
that confusion. Neither of the tracks are constructive strategies for the trans-
formation of society. Rather, they are social retreats, wallOWing around in the
playground of formal and artistic manipulation, abetting the interests of the
status quo.
Ilence the commonality between these two tracks is the submersion of a
much needed critical architecture of social transformation and responSibility.
It was not so long ago that such an architecture (in uleory and practice) was
more central to architectural discourse. Now within academia and the profes-
sion, the voice for the social agenda of architecture is weak. Of course, the
silenCing of a truly critical architecture is no accident. Part and parcel of
corporate retrenchment after the sting of the 1960s, the explanation for ar
chitecture's directions is to be found in the nexus of forces that connectS
architectllre to societal institutions and forms of power. Architecture, in itself,
is not capable of totally reproducing its own existence because it is an object
of those pressures and practices of prominent insLitutions that bear on the
profession to influence its direction. As these institutions necessitate physical
The Hidden Curriculum and the Design Studio
171
manifestation, uley seek forms and languages through which their power will
be communicated and legitimi zed. . . .
Schools of architecture are likewise integral to these
ds
Th
us while architecture is intimately related to SOCietal relations of
, . . .
wer it is important to judge what effect thiS relationship has on the edu-
pO n of future architects. As professional predilections and dispositions
fd' d" .
become manifest in schools, and become the content eSlgn stu. IDS, It IS
clear that studiOS are just as steeped in ule complex 1I1terplay of Ideology
and power, within which knowledge is shaped and dIstributed: What IS Laught
in design studiOS plays a strategic role in the political SOCialization of students,
a socialization that toO often reinforces and sustains the dominant interests
of contemporaty SOCiety.
It bears repeating that knowledge is always based upon ideological con
siderations. [t is not neutral. Knowledge either maintains the status quo, or
in the service of alternative interests, it becomes a weapon of resistance with
which the constellation of interests and ideologies underscoring the status
quo can be interrogated and challenged. In recognizing that all pedagogical
work is political work, the task is to understand and act upon the IdeologIcal
dimensions of knowledge in a manner to resist hegemony. Closer to home,
ulis suggests ulat architecnlral educators, in their critical appraisal of the
interrelationship between ardlitectural schooling, the profession, and the
wider society, need to illuminate the political nature of recent currents in
the profession, to render intell igible how recent trends in architecture have
tended to serve dominant interests and institutions instead of overcoming
them. This in turn can reveal those histori es, cuilures, and voices--alternative
ways of knowing produced as knowledge in the design studio-that can be
useful to a project of reappropriating the social agenda of architecture.
Social Relations
There is much in the structure of studio cuilllre that mirrors the structure
of contemporary workplaces. Characteristics that have come to be common
in modern workplaces also take form in some way in the design studio. These
include systems of hierarchy which requires a strict division of labor, "rig
orous obedience," and orientalion to means rather than ends,22 and the ethic
of competition to ensure work compliance and imensity.
Hierarchy. The presence of hierarchy in studio organizatiOn, though com
monplace, is an experiential condition that cannot be taken lightly. Hierarchy
is completely antithetical to dialogue. Dialogue here is more than simple
conversation or discussion. As a fundamental precondition, dialogue requires
an equality of participants--an equal distribution of power- which by defi
nition is lacking in any system of hierarchy. Gregory Baum writes clearly
aboUl this position:
172
Strategies
True dialogue takes place only among equals. There is no dialogue across the bo
ary berween masters and scrvams, for the master will listen onl}' as long as his und_
remains intact and the servant will limit his communication to utterances c PO\:cr
I

1C cannot be pUnished. In fact, lO recommend dialogue in a situati on of ,.
. .. nequality
of IX>wcr IS a deceptive Ideology of powerful , who wish [0 persuade the powerless
that harmony and mutual understanding are possible in society without an ch
in the Status quo power.l3 Y ange
Dialogue rarely exists across ule boundary between teachers and Studen
even the design studio. Usually structured in vertical relations,
speak In ways (often unconsciously) that legitimize their power, and stude
. I I d nts
onent llelf speec an work to that which is approved. Such a setting is
marked by persuasion, however subtle, as the principal tone of diScourse. J
the spirit of Paulo Freire, "The mark of a successful educator is not skill
persuasion-but the ability to dialogue with educatees in a mode of reci-
procity ... 21
Competition. Competition is often regarded as indispensible to studio cul-
ture; it is considered the major motivator to urge student5 to excel. As in a
market economy where competition is considered the means to improve the
product by pitting one producer against all others, the force of competition
is supposed to bring out the best in people. I think it also brings out the
worst. Not only generating needless emotional pressure and antipathy among
peers, compeulton promotes the belief that ideas are unique, to be nurtured
indiVidually, to be kept closely guarded and heavily protected from theft.
Ideas are a personal matter, nOt meant to be shared, lest someone else gain
a competitive edge.
One significant consequence arises out of this view. Students come to
believe that they must work alone, or with those who see the world similarly
to ensure the "purity" of ideas. Design in this view is legitimi zed as a self-
indulgent activity where cooperation and compromise, as possible vehicles
for good design, are actively negated. Frequently, a severe ranking develops
among ule students which forecloses any desire for collective work: evidently
good cannot come from others who are "less qualified" than oneself"
Hierarchy and Competition. Recent research supports these claims about
me effects of hierarcllY, competition, and self-interest as they are manifested
in the design studio. In his contribution to the Architecture Education Study,'"
Chris Argyris has accomplished some important work which focuses on the
design studio primarily in terms of the behaviors and verbal exchanges be-
tween teachers and students, and secondarily on what was taught as content.
The study encompasses professors exhibiting widely differel1l styles of teach-
ing, in different universities, and in different year-levels of the architectural
program. Four pOil1ls became clear in this study.
b?rrOwing from prior research on the interrelationship of theory and
pracuce 111 educational settings (conducted with Donald Schon), Argyris
Tb
e
Hidden Curriculum and the Design Studio
173
t,
"ually found a distinct mismatch between "espoused theories" and
con .
.lheories-in-use" on the part of bodl professors and Apparently thIs
incongrui ty is a common occurrence, as Argyns and Schon pOlm out:
\X'hen someone is asked how he would behave cenain the
"l1s
wer
he usually gives is his espoused l.heary of for that suuauon. ThiS IS the
I
ry
of action LO which he gives allegiance, and whICh upon request he commu-
"CO II I . . . h h
niClles to others. However, the theory that actua y governs liS actions IS IS t eory
. use which mayor may not be compatible with his espoused theory; funhermore,
tl
ln
. 'individual mayor may not be aware of the incompatibility of the twO theories.
le ed I .
But as our research progressed, we learned that people often espous t 1eonCS
action different from [hose [hat actually governed their behavior. 27
When applied to the studiO, Argyris found that what was described in com-
parison to what transpired in studiO settings were quite different,
resulting in teaching consequences that were essentially unsound, and cer
tainly not in line WiUl what me espoused theories purported.
Second, the interaction between teachers and students was characterized
by both groups "striving to control ule learning environment";' but given
the power differential , students typicall y lost This set up a competitive win-
lose context between teachers and students, and students themselves, re-
sulting in nondialogue, and attempts to persuade and transform. Argyris
writes:
Students do not utilize each other as resources as much as they could. One reason
is the common fear that other students wi ll steal their ideas. An unwritten rule among
sludents is that they Slay away from each other's work, at Ie-LISt until its authorship is
established .. .. We do not mean [Q imply that students never talked to each other
their work. ... However, in all schools, discussions usually concerned lechnical
or engineering problems, building rules, and the like. Srudems worked alone during
their creative
Third, the studiO setting became a teacher-centered experience, where the
learning of design was productive only to the extent that students understood
and accepted what professors taught. Consequently, dependency upon pro-
fessors remained high with students trying to make connections between
their own problems and ule teachers' expectations.'"
Founh, professors and students rarely questioned the assumptions and
values underlying their meories-in-use. Over time, a kind of "mastery/mystery
game" tacitly evolved, where "mystery began to be taken as a symptom of
mastery."" Argyris found that rarely did professors "help the students rec-
ognize the ideas and meories that were embedded in their work or make
expl icit their own ideas, or reflect about uleir own work and minking in a
way that would help the students understand the discovery-invention-
production processes. ,,32
174
Strategies
Argyris' analysis is more than a littl e sobering. Especially from the viewpoint
of voice, it seems that the dominant practices of slUdio culture--competition
teacher dominance, student dependency, mastely/myslel1'--do more to
lence and repress than the opposite. Actually, more than juSt silenCing, such
practices "can be explained as strategies for gaining hegemony in studio
culture. By challenging students to 'suspend belief and have fa ith that mastery
of the creative process is inherently mysteriOUS, a process of uninformed
consent to the dominant culture of me pedagogue is institutionali zed in
architectural eci ucation. "33 It is clear that to recover anything close to edu-
C'ation as the practice of freedom, a precondition of any cri ti cal pedagogy
will be the creation of a space where students can come to voice and be
empowered by what they say, singularly, and coll ectively.
TOWARD A CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
The thrust of the above analysis shows that through the means by which
knowledge and SOCial relationships are structured, the hidden curricula of
schools and design studi os playa sizable role in reinforcing cenain voices
and ways of life whil e making others invisibl e. Herein lies a more profound
understanding of curri cula (both formal and hidden): that they introduce and
affirm social practices and forms of knowledge which legitimate particular
directions of SOCial life." That schools do this is not a matter of debate. They
do it, and the task remains for eduC',ltors to recognize this and act consciously
to structure knowledge and practices in ways very different from those which
tend to reproduce the authoritative and competitive patterns of American
schooling and society.
Schools and studios are contradictOlY Sites, composed of conflicting dis-
courses berween dominant and subordinated ideologies cultures knowl -
edges, voices: a struggle berween reifi cation and reSiStance: Educato;s would
do well to interrogate curricula and the contestation between rei fl cation and
resistance-to decode, analyze, and critique the ideological dimensions of
those texts and practices that serve to legi timate hegemonic interests at the
expense of authentic forms of communi ty and democratic life. This does not
mean thm teachers should neglect course content to "politicize" their
dents, but rather to realize that knowledge is a narrative to construct , a story
of potentially immense meaning and power when the lifelines of students
are weaved into the story itself. Knowledge should never be viewed as some-
thing Out there to "get" or "take" or "cover. " In this way of accounting for
the hi stories, viSions, meanings, and lived experiences of students themselves,
schooling becomes empowering, it helps to reclaim the authorShip of lives.
It is only when students' subjectivities become central to pedagogy can ed-
ucators make these problematic and critically engaged, so that snlClents and
teachers can see how their subjecliviti es are const ilUted, promoted, or
Tbe Hidden Curriculum and the Design Studio 1 75
strained by configurations of power within class, race, gender, ethnicity, and
(uirure.
srudio Model
With these issues in mind, I have been experimenting for some years with
a studiO pedagogy that attempts to respond to the analysis I have set forth.
The studi O project is about Housing and Mixed-Use Development in the
Urban Envi ronment. Typically, I structure the studio into small manageable
groupS of 5 to 8 persons. The task for the student, is to develop an urban
site coll ectively, devoting a significant amount of space to residential use. The
project fill s a semester. Two stipulations must be followed: (I) each student
must be responsible for an individually designed component of a larger group
scheme, and (2) in all decision-making matters there must be a group con-
sensuS. Unlike typical group projects, then, where many individuals work on
one scheme, this model has individuals working on their own schemes which
muSt combine to form a larger whole. Beyond these stipulations, each group
generates it' own program and focus of knowledge, determines its social
structure and mode of operation, sets its own due dates, and selects its own
site from a preselected set.
These sites are not chosen arbitrarily. First, at the scale of a downtown
block they ensure a close proximity berween individual projects, necessitating
students to collaborate about the interfaces. Second, the area of the ciry my
students investigate most often is along the border berween the central busi-
ness district (CBD) and the city's largest low/moderate-income community.
This community, called Over-the-Rhine, encompasses 365 acres and is still
essentially a nineteend,-century mixed-use fabri c. It is listed on the National
Register of Historic Places and has all the consequences one would expect
of a "run-down" community. But there is an organized community, addreSSing
not only its internal problems but the external ones as well: the threatening
forces ofCBD expansion, gentrifi cation, displacement, housing abandonment,
the neglect of absentee landlords, and the call ous disregard of some City
planners and offi cials. Placing my students in this kind of context-a way of
life of which they know little-propels them to engage community leaders,
city planners, local nonprofit neighborhood-development corporations, pri-
Vate developers, and od,ers that can shed light on the scope and definition
of the problem.
I believe this studio marks a different pedagogical stance regarding how
COntent and social relations are structured to facilitate effeaive learning
among students and teachers. This is illustrated by dle following four pOints,
all of which speak to the dynamic of power, which must be central to any
discussion regarding pedagogy, critical or otherwise.
First, there is the attempt to affect a democratization of the studio. Though
full democratization will likely never be achieved, any attempt at democracy
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Tbe Hidden Curriculum and the mesfgn Studio
193
NOTES
Ve rsions of this chapter appe'dretd as "Design and Studio Pedagogy," Journal of
Arcbileclll
rtli
Education, vol. 41, no). 1 ( Fail 1987); and " !l ousing Design and Studio
Pedagogy," Proceedi1lgs of tbe 741b Annual A1eeling oj Ibe AssOCUlfion oJ Collegiale
scbools of Architecture (Wa<;hingtom, DC: A'isocialion of Collegiate Schools of Archi -
ICClure, J 986), pp. 472-79.
I. Dcans of the Consortium of Eastern Schools of Architecture, "The Challenge
to Schools of ArchileclUre, " ArdJiletClUre Education Study: Tbe Papers, The Andrew
Mellon Foundation and Consortiunn of Ea.:;tern Schools of Architecture (distributed
by the MIT LaboratOry of Architeclture and Planning, Publications Program, 1981),
p. R26.
2. Ibid.
3. Donald A. Schon, Tbe Design 51udio (London: RJBA Publications Limited, ]985).
4. Richard Shaull , "Foreword. " In Paulo Freire, Pedagogy oj Ibe Oppressed (New
YOlk The Sellbury Prcss, 1970), p. ns.
S. For c1iscus-')ion on the hidde'J1 curriculum, see HenI)' A. Giroux, Theory and
Resl:'itcl1Ice in Edllealion (Soum II;adley, !vIA: Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1983),
especially Chap. 2; IlenI)' A. Giroux.:: and David Purpel , eel"., 71Je Hidden Cuniculu1J1
(ll1d Moral Educalioll (Berkel ey: Publishing, 1983); and Samuel Bowles
and Herbert. Giotis, ScJXXJling in Capilalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
6. While the hidden cur riculum is invaluable in unraveling the ideological as-
sumptions of classroom knowledge, it seems that most of the critique of schooling
from viewpoint of [he hidden curriculum has stressed the day-to-day social prac-
tices of schools and classrooms in their role in impaning ski ll s, knowledge, and bel iefs
which are intcrnali zed by student')" By focusing on the everyday experiences of the
cl fl",sroom-the Slruauring of the learning process, the modes of producing and
reproducing knowledge, the routi lnes of students and tcachers, and the rules that
govern their itllerrelarions---cducational cri ticS have argued that these practices, at
the very Icast, are equally as influenttial as any formal curriculum. While thiS is certainl y
so, what must be given equal emprnasis is an investigation intO classroom knowledge
in terms of its ideological inclinations and it'i sanctioned " legitimacy" due to its
relationship to the distribution of power in SOCiety. Sec Ilenry A. Giroux, Ideology,
Culture and Ibe Process oj Scboolfng (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ] 981 ),
pp.63-89.
7. Lindsay Fi tzc1arence and Hen ry A. Giroux, "The Paradox of Power in Educational
Theo,y and Praaice," Language Arts, vol. 6J, no. 5 (Seplcmber J984), p.462.
8. Il cnry A. Giroux, TbeOl)l and Resislance in J:.(;/uCOlioJl, p. 198.
9. Alex Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, "The Narcissist Phase in Architecture," 17Je
ifan. 'tIrd ArcJJiteclllre Rel'iew, vol. I (Spring 1980), p. 55; 11)oma') A. Dutton, " From
Modernism to Postmodernism: A RepC"J.l Performance," Proceedings oj/be ACS'A 671b
AnNual Meeting, ed., Michael Bednar (Washington, DC: A'i:sociation of the Collegiate
Schools of Archilecture, 1979), pp. 154-58.
10. Ada Louise Huxtable, "The Troubled State of Modern Architecture," Arcbilec-
llIra! Record Oanuary J981), p. 79.
11. Alex Tzonis and Liane LefaiV're, "The Narcissist Phase in Architecture," p. 54.
12. Ibid., p. 58.
194
Strategies
13. Coop Himmelblau, "Capluring Archi[ecture in Words" Arch j
banism. no. 226 Guly 1989), p. 26. ' I ecture and Ur-
14. Lian Mann,.Architecture As' Social Strategy: Structures/or Knowled
Change, unpublished dissertation for the Doctorate of Philosoph (U' . ge Jor
ifornia at Berkeley, ]990), p. 202. Y I1IVersny of Cal-
lS. Coop Himmelblau, Architecture and Urbanism, pp. 21-25.
16. The phra'ie "imperialism of ulliry" is from Paul Rieoellr j -j- t
(E
- - IL h , IsoryandTr i
v<ll1ston, : Norr western Untversity Press 1965) quoted' B d Ut,
d
'- h' ' , In oton Bognar "1'
war an n{C Itecrure of Critical Inquiry."journal of Architectural Ed . '0-
no. 1 (Fall 1989), p. 23. ucalion, vol. 43,
17_ Jeffrey Kipnis, Contendere, " Assemblage 11 (April 1990).
18. Pelel Eisenman, En Terror Firma' In Trails of Grotextes "A i
D
. , rC'Jltectural Desig
econstrUCtlOn II, vol. 49, nos. 1/ 2 (1989), p. 43. n..
19. Lian Hurst Mann, Architecture As Social Strategy, p. 202.
20. Dean MacCannell, "Introduction to [he 1989 Edition," in his The Tou. . (
York: Schocken Books, 1976), p. ix. nst Ne\V
21. Lian Hurst Mann, Architecture As- Social Strategy, p. 204.
" 22. See Alvin W. Gouldner, 77Je Dialectic of Ideology and Tedmology (New Y k
1 he Seabury Press, 1976), p. 252. or .
23. Gregory BaUln, Troth Beyond Relativism: Karl Mannhehns Socio'om' o"K I
d (M I k "OJ" now-
e 'ge I wau ee: Marquene University Press, 1977), p. 43-44.
?4. Denis Goulet, "Introduction," in Paulo Freire, Education for Cn'tical Con-
sCIOusness (New York The Seabury Press, 1973), p. xiii.
?5. on effects of see Thomas A. Dutton and William B.
Stiles, I rocess IS the Product, CELA 84: Teaching on the Crest of the Ibird Wave
(proceedll1gs), (University of Guelph, School of L1ndscape Architecture 1984)
pp. 292-99. ' ,
2.6. Chris Argyri s, "Teaching and Learning in Design Seuings," Anbitecture Edu-
catIOn Study __ The Papers, pp. 551-660.
27. Argyri s and Donald A. Schon, 'flJeory and Practice (San Francisco: Jossey-
Pubhshers, 1974), pp. 6-7. -
28. Argyris, "Teaching and Learning," p. 560.
29. Ibid. , pp. 657-58.
30. Ibid., p. 582.
31. Ibid., p. 575.
32. Ibid. , pp. 589-90_
33. Lian Hurst Mann, Architecture As SOCial Strategy, p. 52.
34, Henry A. Giroux and Roger Simon, "Curriculum Study and Cullural Politics,"
jOllrni1 oj Education, vol. 166, no_ 3 (Fall 1984), p. 231.
35 .. Henry A. Giroux and Roger Simon, eds., Popular Culture, Schooling and Evel)'-
day Life (South Hadley, MA Bergin and Garvey Publishing, 1989). .
Biculturalism and
Community Design:
A Model for Critical
Design Education
9
Anthony Ward
In March 1988, a group of undergraduate students in a community design
studio at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, in consultation with
local Citizens, developed a town plan for Whakatane (pop_ 30,000). The stu-
dents worked collectively, producing reports, design guidelines, and design
proposals. This chapter is about that experience and its theoretical basis and
practical conclusions. It offers a vehicle for developing ideas for a critical
theory of design education.'
The students in the Whakatane study used an expanded and modified
version of A Pattern Language to establish a means of communication and
expression with local citizens.
2
Patterns are discrete prescriptions of geometry
and planning which respond to social and cultural forces. The pattern-
language process attempts to isolate and articulate design and planning var-
iables in a direct way conducive to everyday discussion, Patterns presume
that the physical arrangemenr of the environment constinttes a nonverbal
language system which expresses and helps form the social life of a com-
munity. The patterns are the vocabulary and syntax of a culture's language
system. Whereas the original pattern language work assumes that patterns
can be described archetypally across cultures, it soon became clear during
the course of the study that the conceptions of space, geometry, program,
and value which the patterns tried to articulate were Significantly culture-
bound. This has implications for designers who would engage in design or
programming which involve contested values and practices across cultural
boundaries.
One point revealed by the study was the politically and culturally based
nature of knowledge itself Much has been written about ule relationship