Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

The education of the Architect occurs alternately from two consecutive dissociated learning spaces; the university design-studio and the professional design-office. A nexus of education and practice, design and research, discipline and society, is little negotiated or constructed between these two places of learning. For the western university there is not the history of a space combining architectural education with research and design production, in part due to institutional concerns over conflicts of interest in amalgamating education provision with research, design, and practice, as well as the polysemous nature of architectural research. In contrast, Chinese schools of architecture have traditionally been unbounded and syncretic, establishing university-based design institutes as a nexus of practice, research and teaching. For 500 years western universities gathered systematic collections of artifacts to aid teaching, and after the Berlin model of 1810, as a research core. The worlds first public ‘museum’ was a university museum (The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1683). From 2004, western joint-venture universities established in China and created a small number of sino-foreign university architectural research and design labs. From around 2010, university research evaluation frameworks acknowledged the research-teaching and third-mission significance of design schools exhibiting their own knowledge-artifacts publicly. This paper discusses the third-space holistic, synthetic, entangled, and liminal transinstitutional, transcultural, and transpedagogical between-spaces that are two distinct sino-foreign university architectural research and design labs— the American-Chinese Wenzhou-Kean Design Lab and the British-Chinese Nottingham Ningbo Urban Memory Lab— and asks are they models for a research-teaching nexus appropriate for architectural education and how it is they further, embed, platform, exhibit and make public, architectural education outside the classroom.