On Education: The Challenges of Instrumental Thinking

Olaf Recktenwalk is an Adjunct Professor of Architecture in the University of Oklahoma.

"But let me tell you a little something about your graduates. When they arrive at my office, I have to spend up to six months training them how to draft and how to letter correctly. What are we teaching them if they can't perform these basic skills?" A recent comment at the gallery exhibition underscores the continual pressure on architecture schools to provide for real-world preparation. Is a good education not one which promotes skill-related problem solving driven by the demands of the workplace? Are such demands not evidenced by how major offices have recently begun to rank schools according to the productivity level of their graduates? Students that have been intent on exploring alternate modes of architectural knowledge and craft beyond those established by professional authorities are often marginalized in such an environment of production. Faced with an elective course, will a student explore "philosophy of Mannerist Architecture" or "Skill in Drawing Management?" If technique appears to be the outcome of the so-called pre-office years, why engage a liberal arts university at all in this process?

The question of current curricula's ability to address the challenges of specialization cannot be clearly understood by elaborating on the divergence between practice and academia. Applicable in certain areas of science, the separation of theoretical and practical knowledge is not possible within the sphere of humanities. Based on a humanitarian discipline, an architecture studio requires communication and learning at all scales of making and therefore an interaction with architects, designers, and engineers who have those practical skills to offer. Yet it also needs poetic voices that can nurture a cultural and ethical environment in which students can formulate appropriate boundaries with which to work. The richer and more intense that environment, the less likely ideas are to get lost later on in the realm of productivity. Practical skills are to be absorbed over the lifetime of an architect's career, and are much more efficiently dealt with in practice than in an educational context where the simulation of the theatre of reality is an ineffectual surrogate. Pushed to become a project with research based qualifications, architecture education draws its models more and more from the hard sciences. Swelling suffers defeat to housing, matter to material performance, and the creating of communicative environments to space planning. Hypotheses and frameworks of investigation provide a methodology of approach wherein raw material or ideas are never understood holistically, but inasmuch as they are useful to the objective model brought to bear on them. Conclusive instrumental knowledge becomes prioritized over what might be perceived as being feeling-based, idiosyncratic, or perhaps personal. Yes, at what cost to the material being dealt with, to the process of investigation, and to the concerns of the human beings involved in the creative act does such research come? Coming to the table with a pre-defined project in search of a definitive conclusion is much like seeing the world through a perspective drawing - the reality beyond is manipulated so as to be coherent, accessible, and even useful. As evident in the drawing technique, interpretations cannot masquerade as truths. Regardless of the strength of the description, the full richness of the world cannot be exhausted by any one perspective. Must such an objectifying move the thought of in opposition to the sensuous reality and the temporal conditions that got one there? If such thought takes us beyond us, must it do so at our own expense? What would it take to transcend without relinquishing the journey through material? In the middle ages, something got in the way of our experience of matter qua matter - namely significance. Matter was not considered to be a blank receptacle for external "research" projections, but came with its meaning already in place. Just as in the case of perspective, no projective techniques can lay claim to the concrete reality of real space. In subjugating the uniqueness of human creativity to a universal condition, the explicit advantage of an instrumental thought process becomes a clear disadvantage in the context of human-based architectural space. Only on a level of abstraction, where in the original situational nature of the world is translated into a system, does such an approach appear useful.

Current architectural education focuses almost exclusively on applicable technical subjects, while most of these matters are firmly in the hands of those better equipped to handle them. Surely architects should be home in such an environment, but they don't have to imitate engineers or to claim authority in the subject. There exist concerns and areas of knowledge very specific to architecture, such as its cultural, poetic, and social role, that are seriously underrepresented in current curricula. Architecture education should confront what it is that uniquely presents itself within the discipline in lieu of a more dire understanding of the field as a form of applied engineering. Architecture is fundamentally a human discipline, rooted in practical life and characterized by typical human situations such as dining, walking or reading. That the weakest part of our current academic studies is in humanistic research, presents a significant paradox. Unfortunately, most schools of architecture, due to a lack of apprehension or of fundamental leadership, are in little position to take on such a task. Nevertheless, in many parts of the world there exist environments that continue to nurture an understanding of the unique cultural role of architecture.