Not Built in a Day

Architectural Agents: The Delusional, Abusive, Addictive Lives of Buildings  (2015) by my undergraduate architectural history professor, Annabel Jane Wharton, is an imagining of what it means when we say that buildings "act" or "do things" in the world.  Architects and architectural historians like to think that buildings are active -- taking roles in the built environment, shaping human action -- but if pressed, we might not be able to say exactly what we mean by that.  Of course buildings don't move or act in a traditional sense, we'll say.  But they can enable, or conversely, proscribe limits to, human action.   In her introduction, Professor Wharton goes further, exploring the agency of buildings as grounded in their unique, embodied, historical characteristics, which allow them to have distinct social and political effects.  Wharton writes, "Now, as in the past, buildings may be immobile, but they are by no means passive.  [...]  [M]ost bu...

[This post was written in spring 2013, but I was too busy to finish it then - so here it is now!] Architecture for architects? Architecture for humanity? Architecture for the elite, the masses, the academy, the developer? In thinking about my experiences at architecture school, I realize that our professors have done a great job incorporating principles of "sustainable design" (design and construction that minimize energy and materials use, carbon footprint, etc) into the curriculum, but that we have learned little or nothing about the (emerging?) field of " public interest design ," design for social justice and the public good.  Perhaps architecture professors think that this is such a basic tenet of architecture, that we design for the public good, that they don't think it's necessary to make it explicit.  But I think this is far from true.  I only stumbled upon ideas about design in the service of social, economic, and ecological justice through m...

In which will be discussed architectural pedagogy and its bizarre relationship to the real world, with the caveat that apparently all architects love talking about themselves, so I can't help it. Studio.  I wish I could say it's not usually this messy, but that would be lying. I can't speak to the long and surely interesting history of the studio model, which I expect is a holdover from the days of medieval mason's guilds, but I can speak to its practical effects on my life.  And having survived almost two  three years of it [this post has been a long time in the making], I'm ready to make a few remarks.  (For those without any experience in this mode of instruction, this pdf gives an excellent outline of the recent history & current structure of the typical architectural design studio.  Ignore the weird characters - I think something went wrong with the pdf generation.)  Since I spent at least one semester in an "experimental" studio setting, ...

As I finish my last day of classes ever (I can hardly believe it!), I've been thinking about what have been my most valuable and/or memorable classes here at GSAPP.  They might be a bit surprising.  Here they are in no particular order, but divided into theory-based classes and technology-based classes. History/Theory: Philosophy of Technology with Bob Silman ( Robert Silman Associates ):  Bob is both a real structural engineer and a real philosopher, having had John Rawls as a teacher and having run a structural engineering practice for decades.  Although this philosophy class seemed to rest a bit uneasily within the context of GSAPP, drew a number of students from outside the school, and had to accommodate many students who had no prior philosophy coursework, I really appreciated this chance to think through some of the philosophical background to and implications of technology as used in architecture.  The kinds of arguments we discussed are going on im...