digital aptitudes - Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 - 4:00PM - 5:30PM
Teaching History in the Digital Age
Carla Keyvanian, Auburn University
Building Socialistic Architectural Schools: The
Transformation of China’s Architectural Education
from American Beaux-Arts Model into the Soviet Model
Xiao Hu, University of Idaho
The professional education is a vital component of the architectural
profession. It not only offers special training to obtain the required
basis of architectural knowledge and skills needed for the
professional practice of design, but also ensures the stable development
of the profession by excluding other competitors through
a monopoly of knowledge and skills. The required formal training
of architecture provides a cultural and social legitimation for architects’
responsibility and importance.
The formation of the modern architectural profession in China was
the product of political and social change – the falling of China’s
imperial system and the rising of Western capitalism in the end
of 19th Century. The introduction of modern Western capitalist
forces of production had undermined and transformed much of
China’s traditional economic order, and the onslaught of the Western
model disintegrated China’s traditional architectural practices.
However, the architectural profession in China was not refashioned
in the image of the Western professional world. Although Chinese
architects shared the similar, if not the same, professional criteria
and social distinction with those practitioners in the West, the
changeable ideological structures, repeated foreign interventions,
and constant revolutions significantly changed the nature of the architectural
practice in China. In the 1950s, China’s architectural education
underwent a significant transformation under political and
ideological orders. Within a few years, the American Beaux-Arts
model was wiped off and was replaced by the model borrowed
from the Soviet Union. This paper focuses on how the Chinese
Communist Party effectively implemented its plans and policies
step by step to complete this transformation.
On the Use Value of History
Amir Ameri, University of Colorado
The digital information revolution and the economic globalization
it has greatly facilitated have brought diverse cultures into unprecedented
proximity and a precarious dialogue in both actual and
virtual space and time. This cohabitation is transforming world cultures
at a scale and a rate that is impressive, if not unprecedented.
The question and challenge this change poses architectural education
is how to educate the next generation of architects to meet
the unique demands of a plurality of cultures in a state of flux and
change? To meet this challenge architectural education has to instil
a heightened understanding of the complex dialogue between
architecture and culture, along with a spirit of critical exploration,
experimentation, creative thought, and innovation. The history of
Architecture will have an indispensable role to play in any curriculum
that seeks to meet these challenges. Yet, to play a pivotal role
in fostering the requisite spirit of critical exploration and innovation,
architectural history has to engage and exert a critical impact
on studio pedagogy. Since secular institutional building-types are
the core focus of design studio instruction, architectural history
has to more directly engage the history of their cultural and institutional
development. Such genealogical studies can establish a direct
link between history and design pedagogy as complimentary
practices. To demonstrate, I focus on the history of the library and
point out how a critical re-evaluation of its ideological underpinnings
can form the parameters of a new context for design, within
which the link between the formal/architectural properties of the
building type and its institutional/cultural presuppositions could
neither be restated nor discarded. This new context will require
students to not only think analytically and critically, but also to wilfully
manipulate the language of architecture as opposed to faithfully
re-produce its various speech acts.
Transparency: Literal, Phenomenal, Digtial
Newton D’souza, University of Missouri-Columbia
Bimal Balakrishnan, University of Missouri-Columbia
James Dicker, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Our proposal consists of a reframing of digital tools that moves
away from its current usage as ‘tools for design’ to ‘tools of design.’
Using a prominent historic example in the architectural discourse,
namely phenomenal transparency (Rowe and Slutzky 1963; 1971),
we will demonstrate how this reframing might be possible, and illustrate
the affordances of digital tools in the pedagogy of history
and design.
We recognize that the current digital tools were born in disciplines
outside architecture and thereby divorced from its intellectual core.
We believe that intellectual core consists of moving away from the
practice of architecture as an expressive content (fabrication and
manufacturing), and moving toward the practice of intrinsic content
(visual vocabularies, ‘what-if’ design scenarios, and a corpus
of mutually dependent representative network). Digital tools can
be reframed to facilitate such an intellectual core because of their
affordance of a shared, holistic, structured and replicable environment.
This has implications to the pedagogy of history and design and
more importantly to strengthen the history-design studio axis. It
will comprise of an approach that conceptualizes history as a problem-solving
domain, and one which becomes available for a shared
scrutiny. Rather than a mere accumulation of explicit knowledge,
this approach allows for dissecting the process in varied ways, facilitating
cross-comparison, learning how recurring problems were
solved in the past, and revealing hitherto hidden elements. These
historic lessons can then be extended to design studios through
exploratory exercises that allow designers to launch with conviction
creative and intellectually stimulating design scenarios.
Digital Apptitutes + Other Openings - Boston, MA - 33