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AHO WORKS STUDIES 2012-2013
Architectural Studies
More Real
they considered the banality of real practice, demoting
even the word ‘building’ to the status of a pejorative.
During the 90’s and 00’s a rekindled interest in every-
day life and the architect’s ability to engage meaning-
fully with it pushed academia ever closer to the efficacy
of professionality. But it sometimes seems as though
academia truly hopes to find that goldenmean between
the two, and to once and for all found architectural
education at a determined locus from whence the pro-
duction of creative, innovative, technical and socially
responsible architects can be reliably produced.
But this is to be asking the wrong questions and
supplying bland answers. For the real question facing
architectural education is rather: How can we expand
the realm of the real by challenging it with imagination?
How can the academy use its hard-won freedom to de-
velop architects that can push the discipline forward,
beyond the demands of the legally mandated status quo
of today? And how does the school expand the reality of
practice without envisaging it as some sort of adversary.
We might first start by acknowledging that it is the
very distance between the real and the imaginary that
holds the greatest promise. In this we can discover a
space of distinctions, or a field of potential innova-
tions. I would argue that the place most situated to
explore this expansion of the discipline is the school
of architecture, through focused explorations of areas
that present real intellectual interest but whose com-
plexity do not recommend them to the profession. Such
a school is a place where the massive economic, legis-
lative and social pressures of professional practice are
relaxed and exploration can be conducted in a space in
which it is possible to fail gracefully.
Although there are very fewwho question the needs
that underpin the myriad demands that press in upon
architecture: energy compliance, universal accessibil-
ity, or profitability, equally few are they who think that
our buildings are meaningfully better for it. We know
that architecture is most effective and humane when
it appeals directly and generously to the body in space,
and when it presents an interpretation of the society to
the mind, but as a society we insist on subjecting it to
a bureaucratic regime of control and specification that
sharply limits its power and regularizes its expression.
We need to preserve design as the province of positive
change. Understanding the space between the real and
the imaginary can organize and structure the way in
which we explore it. For the goal must be to expand
the real, not to explode it.
Here are three areas in which the school might con-
tribute to the expansion of the possible.
The unashamed moral certainty of discussions of
sustainability and the future of the planet is happily
dissolving as the complexities and trade-offs of de-
signing within a sustainable context become clearer.
But the hopes of sustainability include as much fan-
tasy as they do reason. Conceptually, there remains
the ill-considered attitude that architecture can be
zeroed-out, so to speak, and integrate peacefully with
a world in which consumption is no longer a driving
force. This ignores the very violence of evolution, and
masks the basic features of human life and death. And
it is becoming increasingly obvious that both our every-
day building technology and the way we conceptualize
the built volume in world space are very primitive. We
need to move past a static conception of ecology and
try to learn from the world that brought us forth. Con-
ceptions such as biomimicry, which in its widest sense
means to find in the evolution of life the lessons that
environmental pressures have produced, is especially
promising as its initial fascination for the formal quali-
ties of life forms wears off and the search for functional
principles is underway. But it is equally important to
acknowledge that technological rationality is a part
of nature, and it is its insights that have given us the
clarity to see our global conundrum. And to realize that
zero does not exist in nature.
In tandem with this renewed interest in nature as
model, an idea whose origins are as old as the Aristote-
lian sense that art should imitate nature as it should be,
the recent rise of algorithmic design suggests that we
may be at the cusp of a quiet revolution in the creation
