Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

We exist within a contemporary condition that is fearful of ideas and agency and where the general public have been conditioned to believe that architecture isn’t really something for ‘them’ but an often-alien concept concerned with either lifestyle or spectacle for those that can afford it or profit from it. In the UK our development system has become a dysfunctional bureaucracy that breeds a culture of mediocrity amongst the disciplines of planning, architecture and urban design. Who is it then that architecture serves? Those that pay for it or all of those that are required to endure it? As architects, from whom is it that we seek both patronage and endorsement? Within architecture schools, validation, acceptance, and recognition is often obtained through participating in behaviours, use of language, visual conformity and theoretical dogma that is disenfranchising and marginalising for those not from academic, financial, social or cultural privilege. We believe in a pedagogy that is committed to learning-through-doing and thinking-through-making, limited not only to the production of physical artefacts. Architecture is the art of assembly, and to make is also to care. This pedagogy is about creating accessibility and participation in the conception, creation and communication of architecture and the architectural idea, and we argue that an active participation in the act of making forces one to simultaneously care about oneself, the places within which we exist, and the people that we share ourselves and our places with.