THE CYCLE OF THEORY AND PRACTICE, LEARNING AND TEACHING by Ben van Berkel

From Gaudi’s suspended constructions to Le Corbusier’s five points of the new architecture, architects have sought to formulate new models that encapsulate and consolidate into one bold statement aspects of construction, occupation and context in the broadest sense - always with a view to immediate implementation. It is much harder for academics to come up with new models, just as it is difficult for an educational institute to be a laboratory for cultural experiment in the way that Andy Warhol’s Factory was. Research and experimentation have to be based on real needs, a real drive, and real questions.
Yet, the academization of architecture has become relentless, with more students prolonging their studies, more universities offering more and higher degree courses, and more practising architects supplementing their income and status by teaching design. The next important question therefore is: how to teach?
DIGITALIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION
Since the architectural practice has transformed rapidly and profoundly due to digitalization and globalization, architectural teaching has necessarily changed too. In the offices the drawing tables have gone out, the staff has become international; in the universities and academies the same shift has occurred. The architectural project has changed; most often it now consists of a multi-functional hybrid of urbanism, infrastructure and various public and private programs, and this is what we teach. Architects have become hyper-conscious of the economic ramifications of their work: rising ground values, commercial potential, investment values, these are phenomena that were meaningless and unfathomable until the client, in collusion with the economic news media, enforced a new awareness of their importance. In response, architects have earnestly begun to try to incorporate economic principles in their design approach. Students, never having known a world without the pervasive echo of the media, have been quick to respond.
THE PITFALLS OF DESIGN
This is the Beaux Arts all over again: architecture has become restrictively academic once more. But how could this have happened? There is nothing intrinsically sterile to this technique. The only reason for the lack of evolution of computational design techniques is that they are taught and exercised in a hermetic way that is impossible to sustain in the actual practice of architecture, which is profoundly complex. It simply is not possible to foresee and to register in your computer all the real parameters that you will be working with as you engage in the long process of architecture as a practice that begins with an early vision, not necessarily that of the architect, and ends with a ruin in progress.The conclusion? There is nothing like teaching to open your eyes to the pitfalls of design. Seeing twenty to thirty projects unfold similarly and ineffectually every few months must be one of the most efficient forms of early warning system. It tells you that no further time must be wasted. Architects had better learn to apply more intelligence, more planning, and more strategic planning to design!