
The Ivory Tower of Primitives in Second Life
‘Architectural education is built upon analogic reality: the student is given a problem and asked to pretend that it is real. To pretend is to make believe, or construct fiction, and schools construct, pretend or analogue worlds on two levels: first, projects are inevitably hypothetical, a surrogate for the real world; second, there is complicit agreement that students be only expected to produce a pretend or artificial product, so-called “student work,” while professors produce the real academic article—publishable, credible, and contributory work.’¹
Over the past four centuries, pedagogical approaches have developed design knowledge from four perspectives: 1) academic pedagogy emphasized the importance of compositional and formal design theories (e.g., Beaux Arts); 2) craft training stressed the achievement of proficiency in building (e.g., Bauhaus), 3) technical schools focused on the pragmatic application of scientific principles to specific problems (e.g., Bartlett) and 4) social pedagogy stressed the social and contextual implications of architecture (e.g., AA). Despite the various approaches attempting to modify design practice, the design studio remains central to creative exploration and knowledge acquisition.
Few serious attempts have responded to the lack of research on design pedagogy. For example, until the mid 2000s, only three notable instances are referred to: Changing Architectural Education: Towards and New Professionalism (Nichol & Pilling, 2000) looked at how students prepare themselves for changes in the profession; Architectural Educational Today, Cross-cultural perspectives (Salama, O’Reilly, Noschis eds., 2002) called for architectural pedagogy to respond to the contemporary societal needs, and The Redesign of Studio Culture (Koch et al., 2002) focused on how values integral to studio pedagogy may stimulate effective engagement. Design Studio Pedagogy: horizons for the future (Salama & Wilkinson eds., 2007) is the most recent attempt to advance the debate by examining ‘how studio teaching invigorates the attitudes of future architects and designers, and how it may contribute to the creation of better built environments’.
Yet such critique is surely not the reserve of academics or designers, or indeed bounded by the design studio alone. In a networked economy, creative exploration and knowledge acquisition extends far beyond traditional spheres of expertise. How academia negotiates the distribution of educational technology would seem imperative if the profession has any chance of a bright future.
1. Miller, Robert, ‘The Analogue and the Real: Two Paradigms for Architectural Education,’ in Carpenter, William (ed), Learning by Building ,New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1997, p. 86.