occupied territories

(Image stolen from)

A local irony of the protests about higher education funding* is that architecture courses are already taught along quasi free-market lines. This is most extreme at the Architectural Association which is, of course, a fee paying, private school. The AA is an inadvertent model for the Browne Report, which is not to knock it out of turn but to point out that versions of the self-financing higher education model proposed by Browne already exist.

Not only that, but the unit based teaching system, pioneered by the AA in the 1970's, and now adopted by most schools of architecture, is itself an example of market forces operating within education. There are many things to recommend the unit system and I'm personally a product of it. But, the unit system explicitly positions the student as a consumer, choosing a product that most suits their interests from an internal market of competing design studios. These studios exist as hermetic tribes operating a fierce rivalry with each other to produce the best work. Unpopular or unsuccessful units risk being unceremoniously dumped at the end of the academic year. 

The theory is that this pluralistic approach promotes diversity and encourages a wide range of study. A more centralised teaching model couldn't hope to cover the broad range of approaches active in current architectural practice, or have the space to invent new ones. Inadvertently though, this approach also marketises the teaching process by defining value through competition and a subtle form of commercial success. In other words, an eminently neo-liberal model.

As a commenter on a previous post here pointed out, the AA has also been the host of some of the most 'radical' architectural discourse of the last thirty years. Bernard Tschumi's speculative writing on the politics of space grew out of the unit he taught there in the 1970's and early '80's, for instance. Note though that the term radical in architecture is a largely hermetic issue, bearing no particular relationship to radical politics.

The Bartlett School of Architecture students who are involved in the current occupation of the University of Central London, have cited Tschumi as an influence. Now, this might strike you as radical chic masquerading as political engagement or, even, totally beside the point. But the activities at UCL (and other occupations around the country) also seem genuinely experimental from a spatial point of view. An initial, seemingly spontaneous, act of occupation has now evolved into a kind of parallel university, one both part of and outside of the host institution. A diverse range of speakers and visitors have become involved in an expanding curriculum organised by the protesting students. These seminars are interspersed by participation in wider protests and marches.

To be clear, this is interesting and important not because it fulfills the vague hopes of previous generations, or even that it might borrow bits of theory from them. It's important primarily as a protest against the Browne Report proposals. But a theory of space and the social and political territories involved in it seems central to any form of organised protest.  I'm not sure if I'm guilty - in the words of E&V's Douglas Murphy - of aestheticising protest here, but after a period when architecture has been utterly conventional in its understanding of space and programme (all those white walled galleries and bland public piazzas), these occupations pose provocative spatial/political questions?

I agree that the recourse to the radical posturings of previous generations may be of little use here. And may also seem beside the point given the larger issues of how education is funded in the UK. The possible eviction of the occupying students over coming days though might reinforce the issue of control and power over space in the most uncompromising and literal way. I also wonder how much the current way that we educate architects encourages a disengagement from the politics of space. This disengagement, it seems to me,  is being confronted in the most positive way by the current occupations.

* No apologies for a third consecutive post on this subject.