Emergence. Student Architectural Design Works

Author: Neil Lynch
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-09-01
Features: Bernard Tschumi once described architecture schools as laboratories for various explorations. In recent years, many of the most exciting developments in architectural culture have originated from the classrooms of architecture schools. Many of the world's most avant-garde architects have devoted themselves to architectural education, and this phenomenon is by no means accidental. Teaching is a two-way process, and both teachers and students can learn a great deal from each other. Therefore, we should not underestimate architecture schools. We should not view them as merely providing a "low version" of external "real-world" architectural practice. Instead, we should recognize that architecture schools are not just teaching institutions but also highly unique experimental spaces. The history of 20th-century architecture can be interpreted as a history of various schools of thought and styles—in other words, a history of how architecture schools have influenced professional practice. This is because architecture schools have become the source of various innovations and breakthroughs in contemporary architecture. The Bauhaus School can serve as a typical example of this. Since the mid-20th century, the influence of the Bauhaus School has far exceeded its geographical boundaries and the actual time of its existence. Many Bauhaus teachers, such as the original director Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, later moved to the United States and continued the Bauhaus spirit at institutions such as the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Illinois Institute of Technology. As an institutional entity, the Bauhaus School was forced to close under Nazi rule. However, as a school of thought, it continued to have an impact in various ways. The core concept of the Bauhaus spirit—that architecture schools are places for experimenting with science and technology and for depicting utopian social ideals—was embraced by many schools in the second half of the 20th century. The most famous inheritors of the Bauhaus spirit were the Architectural Association in London. The 1960s were an era filled with the Beatles, Mini Cooper cars, mini skirts, Concorde jets, and the Archigram movement, among other novel things. Under the leadership of its most famous chair, Alvin Boyarsky, the Architectural Association became a truly international avant-garde architecture school in the 1970s, amidst this dazzling environment. We need only look at the architects who studied there—Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Ben van Berkel—as well as the inspiring teachers who taught there—Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Elias Zangwill, and Peter Cook—to understand the immense influence of the Architectural Association in the field of contemporary world architecture. This led to a second proliferation of these ideas in the development of avant-garde architectural education—embracing infinite architectural imagination and transforming the concept of avant-garde architectural education into a global business operation. Many teachers from the Architectural Association—Ron Herron, Peter Sotter, Nigel Coates, and Peter Cook—became leaders of other architecture schools in London. However, perhaps most importantly, it was in the United States that the influence of the Architectural Association was widely disseminated through former teachers such as Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas: they played a leading role in redefining the essence and structure of architectural education. In 1988,