Thomas McQuillan, Head of Institute
of Architecture
More Real
Thomas McQuillan
Architecture is conceived, built and inhabited in the space be-
tween the real and the imaginary. On the one hand, the world of
buildings is very concrete and persuasive, but the ideas that shape
them remain often surprisingly notional and abstract. It is one of
the hallmarks of architecture as a discipline that it has throughout
its history maintained this doubleness as the basis of its power,
from its brute physical force to the loftiest of its cultural preten-
sions. But the success of a work of architecture is dependent upon
its immersion in its own world, its own reality, whether this is one
borrowed from everyday convention or one created almost wholly
by the work itself: architecture is successful to the degree that it
broadens the scope of what we consider real, to the extent that it
injects into the world of the real what earlier belonged only to the
realm of the imaginary. Great architecture gives us more of the real.
This is one of the reasons that we celebrate as iconic buildings
that by others measure would be considered failures, such as the
Villa Savoye, which through leakage and cold forced its inhabit-
ants to abandon it in less than ten years or the Farnsworth House,
which reversed the concept of shelter. It is because buildings such
as these introduce a large dose of new thinking into the world of
built form and change forever the scope of the possible. But the
continuum between the real and the imaginary is in constant flux
in the world of architecture, and over time the weight of interest is
shifted from one pole to the other. This is especially clear in archi-
tectural education, where the simulated character of design gives
academic discourse a greater flexibility than that of the profession.
Discussions within architectural schools often revolve
around the question of where the education of the architect
should be situated in this continuum. Sometimes it is closer to
the imaginary pole of unfettered exploration, other times it’s
fixed more closely to the unavoidable demands of a real and vi-
able architectural practice. The radical academic milieus of the
1970’s and 80’s sought to liberate themselves entirely of what
