The received wisdom embodied in Victorian materials and 20th century ways of doing things is tyrannous. Architecture students need to be taught in a different way, to help them free themselves and seize opportunities says Neil Spiller
I have often said ‘it is a good time to be an architect / designer’. The world is our lobster as us Surrealists say! Change is good and currently changes are happening in the creative arts at a pace. Technology is changing, objects and buildings must transverse the schizophrenic boundaries between the actual and the virtual. Media culture and social media are pushing at the envelope of what constitutes decency and privacy. We walk the tightrope between liberation and subservience. Finally, the design world has no modernist compass any more, with which to navigate the waves and often the pretty but deadly sirens of fashion deploy their seductive but ultimately vacuous charms on us simple matelots as they sing their refrain.
Storm clouds gathering
Schools of design are buffeted in storms of league tables, fluctuating reputations and uncharted waters; here be dragons. Many architecture schools, for example, cling to an old model of architectural education already established and concretised by 1915 – that of the master, the rows of drawing boards, the crit as key teaching method, the shelter of the fledgling designer from the vagaries of capitalism, red in tooth and claw. Designs are honed in a make-believe world of imaginary clients who act like popes or doges in a landscape of cultured and aesthetically aware users who have yet to be blighted by the contemporary psychosis caused by man’s consumption, media immersion and greedy, short-sighted stupidity. The ocean is deeper than it seems.
Lead me to a distant shore
So the old model does not work. It produces turkeys voting for Christmas. What of a new model? Students should see design and the act of design as political, social, cultural and proactive. Cedric Price always said the first big design question is what to design. Simply receiving the endless sophist wisdom of what is around has got the world in the mess it is in. I don’t need to run through the litany of global ecological, social and community damage we have fostered with this view of economic ubiquity. A new vision is required that is predicated on specialness, exceptions and peculiarity. We need to encourage students to look at the received wisdom embodied in ubiquitous Victorian materials and 20th-century ways of doing things and see them for what they are: tyrannous. We need to encourage students to rejoice in the new spaces that are created by the virtual infiltrating the actual and the vital. We need to encourage students to fully understand and enjoy the differences in it all whether that is sites, objects, contexts, people and cultures.
Seven Seas of creative life
Architectural education in the future will be inter- and pan-disciplinary. It will not make a distinction between learning, teaching and research and will encourage students to have the mental and creative dexterity for the many changes that are to come. My own school, Greenwich, must creatively position itself at the centre of the Earth again. We must be critical personally, creatively, corporally and societally.
You control your destiny
Architectural education will encourage students to see opportunity everywhere, whether formal, ethically entrepreneurial, professional or personal. We will not let students drift alone, all hope gone in the morning tide. A tide mourning for a lost mythical time. We will encourage students to fill their pockets full of dreams, so they can spread their wings across the sky.
Professor Neil Spiller is the head of the University of Greenwich’s School of Architecture, Design and Construction
