Decent Proposal

This rant is a response to an invitation to contribute to Tongue and Groove, an architectural magazine published by Nottingham Univesity architecture school. Probably not what they wanted but.....

How We Teach Today

In the unintentionally hilarious early ‘90’s film Indecent Proposal there is a scene where Woody Harrelson, playing a penniless architecture tutor, delivers a stirring address to his students. Harrelson portrays the architect as dreamer and romantic loser. He keeps a polyboard model of his dream house under his bed. He can never afford to build it. Occasionally he shares with his wife, played by Demi Moore, his most intimate thoughts about space and structure. On their honeymoon he takes her on a study tour of his favourite buildings. In the classroom he holds up a brick and quotes Louis Kahn and his students look on in rapt awe. Harrelson is the architecture tutor par excellence: inspired, charismatic, a lone voice in a sea of philistines and moneymen. He stands for the architect as symbol of artistic integrity. He works alone, unencumbered by staff, builders, engineers or, if he’s really lucky, client interference. He turns to teaching because the world is too cruel, too venal, too ignorant to take him seriously. Bizarrely, this myth is the basis on which most architectural education is currently set up.

Partly as a result of post-modern attacks on both the orthodoxies of modernism and the plausibility of the disinterested professional, educational teaching increasingly favours subjective and personal approaches to education. Post-Structuralist inspired critiques of architecture’s mono-cultural value system have resulted in a belief in a pluralism of value systems. The unit system of teaching that most architecture schools use today was popularised at the Architectural Association in the 1970’s. This system replaced the previous monolithic mode of teaching where all students studied the same course with a fragmented one built around the individual interest areas of charismatic design tutors. Their chosen thematic – the Po-Delta, concrete, Brechtian theatre, the mating habits of bees etc – are set to students as the basis for individual study. The most popular tutors are those that have already cultivated a level of fame within the profession, but increasingly the system itself can be used to gain notoriety. Individual student’s work within their group becomes a kind of personal and experimental research wing of the tutors own ‘practice’. Units, or interest groups, develop into a personal fiefdom whose territory is aggressively defended against intruders.

After a while the tutor becomes too famous or successful to have time to teach at which point he or she bequeaths a successor to the throne. This is invariably a promotion from the ranks, almost always a favoured student from the previous few years. After a short initiation period when the former student is invited to attend crits in order to rubbish the work of their former colleagues (an important test of character this and an indicator of whether he or she is able to make the transition to the ‘other side’), the young pretender will be handed the ropes. This new tutor, fluent in the arcane interest areas and stylistic quirks of the previous one can manage an almost seamless transition. The second-generation tutor is obliged to invite their benefactor to return at various points to monitor the progress of ‘their’ unit. After another five or six years this process is repeated and a new successor is found. In this way the ‘gene pool’ of new ideas becomes every more shallow. The area of study is drawn from an increasingly incestuous genealogy and the unit becomes a strange kind of oligarchy.

All of this is championed under the banner of personal research. This is the leitmotif of current teaching ideology. The increasing lack of history and theory lectures (frequently dismissed as so much stodgy academism) means that this narrowing of focus is unaccompanied by any structure to give it meaning in a wider sense. The successful student absorbs the value systems of his or her tutor through osmosis and is not required to articulate its wider significance. Demystification is avoided at all costs.

This process is placed in direction opposition to the professional requirements of architecture. Studying is seen as a period of experimentation and research based on an explicit critique of normative practice. The student is inculcated into a belief system based on the idea of the singular genius of the individual and the star system of architecture, reproduced in miniature at unit level.

I can’t help thinking that increasingly education leads students into a dark forest without a map to get back out. Is there a way for architectural teaching to re-engage with the realties of practice? Or, to turn it around for a moment, is there a way for the possibilities of architectural practice to reengage with the realities of education? For surely, the cliché of the individual genius propagated by the unit system is a pretty hackneyed one. What was once excitingly open ended now seems increasingly doctrinaire and prescriptive. In order to do this, to liven things up a little, some things might need to change: the cult of the tutor, the anachronistic theatre of cruelty that is the ‘crit’, the internecine mock warfare between units, the idea of the architect as lone gun, the lack of collaboration or teamwork between students, the distrust of other related professional such as engineers, surveyors etc. In short what might have to go might be Woody Harrelson and his idea(l) of the architect as dreamer and romantic loser.

All The Chickens On The Kingsland Road

Inspired by Ed Ruschas's seminal artwork All The Gas Stations on the Las Vegas Strip, only more glamorous, this is a series of photographic portraits of the chickens that adorn southern fried chicken take aways on the lovely Kingsland Road. It will at some point in the future be joined by All the Fish In Boaters On The Holloway Road, a similar selection of the cheery and debonairly dressed Cod on fish'n'chip shops.

Stuck Inside the Design Museum with the Memphis Blues Again

Review: Ettore Sotsass - Work In Progress, Design Museum, London.

The publicity photo for this exhibition of the work of Italian designer Ettore Sottsass shows him wearing a pair of enormous circular sun glasses, sporting long hair and an impressive moustache, cigarette smoke billowing around him. Such iconic ‘60’s grooviness is in shortly supply in the exhibition itself, which is disappointingly sober.

Titled Work in Progress - presumably to confound any assumption that this retrospective marks the end of his career – the exhibition nonetheless covers Sottsass’ work to date. It is loosely divided into decade based periods starting with the early industrial looking pieces of the 1950’s, moving through the landmark ‘60’s designs for Olivetti, the ‘70’s and ‘80’s Memphis years and ends with the current work by Sotssass Associati.

Sottsass has undoubtedly been a hugely influential designer. This can be seen most clearly in two phases of his career; the 1960’s period when he incorporated pop art influences into the industrial designs he did for Olivetti (most famously in the iconic bright red Velentine typewriter) and the 1980’s when he was instrumental in setting up the Memphis design group. Whilst the Olivetti work sits pretty comfortably within the history of design, the latter has proved more problematic, and, for me at least, more interesting. Memphis’ designs were a fairly bracing combination of kitsch patterns (leopard print, fake wood grain), tasteless colours (gold, silver and primary shades) and everyday materials (formica) combined with exotic neo-primitive forms (ziggaruts, totem poles). The resulting objects, part abstract and part figurative, were very strange indeed. Apart from having a fairly cavalier relationship to function, they combined high design with deliberate bad taste. Memphis, like the post-modern architecture it mirrored, is now synonymous with the 1980’s, a skeleton in design’s closet.

Despite this I found the exhibition strangely underwhelming. There are relatively few pieces but the serpentine route created by the layout makes it seem cluttered and deny the larger objects - like Factotum (1979) - much room to breathe. There is very little visual context provided and no attempt to create an atmosphere sympathetic to Sottsass’s aesthetic. Some period advertising for the Valentine typewriter is exhibited including a poster showing a woman carrying one whilst running along an empty beach - presumably to a spot where someone’s conveniently left a few reams of A4 paper – but that’s about it.

Somewhere along the line, the exhibition seems to run out of steam. Perhaps it’s not helped by the fact that the recent work of Sottsass Associati seems pretty unremarkable. This is by far the driest section of the exhibition and consists of large scale boxes showcasing light fittings and furnishings. It looks like a trade stand at 100% design and even the curators seem to have given up the ghost by this point.

Sottsass’ career is, taken as a whole, incredibly impressive. Throughout its formidable length, he has managed to combine a sharp design sensibility with a sense of humour and a willingness to avoid the suffocating effects of too much good taste. The show however has no such qualities and represents a thin and largely colourless profile of a remarkable career.