VIRTUAL: Applying Education
Abstract
When Charles W. Moore took over the School of Architecture at Yale in the 1960s, his ambition was to bring design teaching outside the studio, reacting to a beaux-arts atavism that survived modernism, where design is taught in-vitro within the walls of their ivory towers. Initiated by investigating the New Haven social and urban conditions, this pedagogical project will climax with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s urban design-inspired studio in Las Vegas in 1968 and Levittown in 1970. These systematic explorations of America’s backyard, from railways, dockyards, and factories to industrial edges and vernacular monumental, through sketching, painting, photographing, filming, and reading, aimed to steer design education focus away from architectural forms and toward political space. The ambition was to address the “rapidly developing problems of the urban environment” and relate architecture to a broader culture. Venturi and Scott-Brown’s seminal publication “The Significance of A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas” will lead to a series of “site-specific manifestos”: Alan Boyarsky’s “Chicago A la Carte, the city as an energy System, O.M. Ungers’ “Berlin: A Green Archipelago” or Rem Koolhaas’ “Delirious New York.” In the 21st Century, more than fifty years after Moore’s pedagogical project, mutating globalization, and after three years of online and hybrid teaching, we are investigating the relevance of site-specific education and how these practices are changing with new mediums of instruction and mapping. Is context still an operative design concept? Can we still learn from the road’s vernacular landscape? Can architecture still be political?
Vincent Peu Duvallon is an Assistant-Professor and Executive Director of the School of Public Architecture at Wenzhou-Kean University. He received his professional degree at the ESA in Paris, France, and did his apprenticeship with Christian de Portzamparc and Frederic Borel in Paris. In the last decade, he has maintained an active professional practice in Asia with built works in Korea and China. His work in Wenzhou and Shanghai has been recognized for adapting antiquated factories into new mixed-use. His research focuses on contemporary vernacular environments and landscapes.
Linnéa Moore is an Architect and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Wenzhou-Kean University and has taught courses in the USA, China, Italy, and France. She received her B.A. in Art History from Uppsala University, Sweden and completed her architecture education at the Architectural Association and Pratt Institute, where she received her M.Arch in 2016. She is co-founder of the architecture practice MOOSA. She is the editor of Live/Work for the Workforce, published by the Institute for Public Architecture in 2019 and Infrastructure and Landscape, published in 2021. Her research focuses on forgotten public typologies.
9:00 am - 10:30 am
Wednesday 26th April, 2023