Radical Pedagogies in Architectural Education
"Pedagogical experiments played a crucial role in shaping architectural discourse and practice in the second half of the 20th century. In fact, the key hypothesis of our Radical Pedagogy[1] research project is that these experiments can be understood as radical architectural practices in their own right. Radical in the literal meaning from the Latin radice, as something belonging or relating to the root, to its foundations. Radical pedagogies shake foundations, disturbing assumptions rather than reinforcing and disseminating them. This challenge to normative thinking was a major force in the postwar field of architecture, and has surprisingly been neglected in recent years. ...
Architectural pedagogy has become stale. Schools spin old wheels as if something is happening but so little is going on. Students wait for a sense of activist engagement with a rapidly evolving world but graduate before it happens. The fact that they wait for instruction is already the problem. Teachers likewise worry too much about their place in the institutional hierarchies. Curricular structures have hardly changed in recent decades, despite the major transformations that have taken place with the growth of globalisation, new technologies, and information culture. As schools appear to increasingly favour professionalisation, they seem to drown in self-imposed bureaucratic oversight, suffocating any possibility for the emergence of experimental practices and failures. There are a few attempts to wake things up here and there but it's all so timid in the end. There is no real innovation.
In response to the timidity of schools today, the Radical Pedagogy project returns to the educational experiments of the 1960s and '70s to remind us what can happen when pedagogy takes on risks. It's a provocation and a call to arms."
(Beatriz Colomina with Esther Choi, Ignacio Gonzalez Galan and Anna-Maria Meister, 28 September 2012, The Architectural Review)
1). Radical Pedagogy is an ongoing multi-year collaborative research project by a team of PhD candidates in the School of Architecture at Princeton University, led by Beatriz Colomina and involving seminars, interviews and guest lectures by protagonists and scholars. The project explores a remarkable set of pedagogical experiments of the 1960s and '70s that revolutionised thinking in the discipline. Each student is working on one of these experiments and collectively mapping the interconnections and effects of these experiments towards a major publication and exhibition.
Fig.1 Tournaments in the Course ‘Culture of the Body', at the Valparaíso School, 1975. Courtesy of Archivo Histórico Jose Vial, Escuela Arquitectura y Diseño, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso
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Lou Loeber: childrens picture book illustrations
"Prentenboek met 18 platen met geometrische gevormde figuren van een van de 'constructivistisch gerichte experimentele schilders' met plaatjes die gemaakt lijken 'met behulp van de tangramdoos' (S. de Bodt. Prentenboeken). Bevat onder andere gedichten en prenten over een vlinder, kippen, spreeuwen, een geitenbok, speelgoed, een varken, de sproeiwagen, een watermannetje, de vuilnisman, lammetjes, spelen met een tol, een interieur met zonnestraal, een kwikstaart, koe en schaap in de wei, een lezend meisje, regen, sneeuwpret en Sinterklaas."
(The Memory of the Netherlands)
Simon Franke (1927). "Gouden Vlinders" picture book illustrated Lou Loeber.
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Shugo Tokumaru's Katachi: an animation of PVC silhouettes
Director, Concept, Animation - Kijek/Adamski, Production - Katarzyna Rup / Ab Film Production, Cast - Artur Cetnarowski, Gaffer - Heliograf, Blitz, Studio set - PlumArt Marcin "Śliwa" Śliwiński, Arek Szot, Joanna Kijek, PVC cutting - Dawid Krzyżanowski/ My-Art myart.com.pl, Thanks - Studio Las, Paweł Reyman.
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Dieter Rams: lasting principles for good design
"Tom Dyckhoff meets up with Dieter Rams, whose designs have found a permanent home in museums over the world."
The Culture Show, Episode 17, broadcast on Thursday 3 December 2009 23:20 BBC Two.
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Kazimir Malevich: non-representational, non-painterly abstractions
"In the early twentieth century, Suprematism represented a leap into a totally non-representational, non-painterly, tarantella-like dynamic. Basic geometric shapes, isolated or in groups, were being energized, propelled into an optimistic ideal soaring from lower left to upper right, the vector alone suggesting time. The limits of perception and understanding are being questioned. An aura of simultaneous ecstatic concentration and idolatry of the will pervades these works.
Experienced 'in flesh,' these formidable abstractions look 'humanized': slight wavings in texture and color, the crackled paint of the Black Square on white, the subtlest of whites upon off-whites, transport the viewer into a higher, supremely charged, inspirational state of mind."
(Ileana Marcoulesco, Art Lies)
Fig.1 Kazimir Malevich (1915) "Black Circle", "Black Cross" and "Black Square"
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