When did research cease to be a sedulous, nerdy, gray activity undertaken in fluorescent-lit laboratories and dusty archives and become a fetishistic activity carried out in design studios? How and when did it overtake theory and history in the architecture school curriculum? This lecture will raise some questions about the ways architectural research and its curation are related to a contemporary digital-global society and will contrast the intellectual culture of architecture schools today and in the past.
Joan Ockman is an architectural historian, critic, and educator, currently teaching at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. Previously she taught architectural history, theory, and design at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation for more than two decades and served as director of its Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture (1994–2008). In addition to Columbia and Penn, she has held teaching appointments at Harvard, Yale, Cooper Union, Cornell, Graduate Center of City University of New York, the Berlage Institute in the Netherlands, and elsewhere. She began her career at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, where she was an editor of Oppositions journal and was responsible for the Oppositions Books series. Among her many edited publications are the award-winning anthology Architecture Culture 1943–1968 (1993); The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking about Things in the Making (2001); and Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America (2012). She is currently completing a collection of essays titled Architecture Among Other Things, due out from Actar next year, and collaborating on a major new history of modern architecture, to be published by Thames & Hudson.
ARE WE ARCHITECTS? ON EDUCATIONAL, ARCHITECTURAL PROFESSION AND INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE
In the last fifteen years or so the architectural education has seemed to be increasingly under double pressure. One set of criticisms stems from the recalibration of institutional frameworks and is linked to the so-called “research turn” to which architecture schools and other design disciplines reacted with vaguely articulated approach of research by design or design by research. This subterfuge clearly signals epistemological divide between architecture and other methodologically more grounded sciences. Second set of problems seems to orbit around “eternal” wrestle between theory and practice and such criticism is typically pointing at disconnectedness of architectural education (and by extension academic research in architecture) from the “real world problems” and its relevance to the “real life”. Relevance is precisely the sore point that connects all the anxieties arising from the relation between academia and the architectural profession and by extension from the relation between the profession and the “Society”. By this vector of thought the epistemological question becomes an ontological one: How do we, as architects, relate to the world?
The lecture series “Are we architects? On Educational, Architectural Profession and Institutional Critique” is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Statutory City of Brno.
JOAN OCKMAN: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH
The Faculty of Architecture at the Brno University of Technology, in cooperation with the Brno Gallery of Architecture, the Student Organization of the Faculty of Architecture and the VI PER gallery in Prague, cordially invites you to attend a lecture “A Brief History of Architectural Research” held by Joan Ockman which is part of the lecture series “Are we architects? On Educational, Architectural Profession and Institutional Critique”. The event will take place on Thursday 2 May, 2019 at 17:00 in the lecture hall A310 at the Faculty of Architecture, Poříčí 5, Brno. The lecture will be held in English.When did research cease to be a sedulous, nerdy, gray activity undertaken in fluorescent-lit laboratories and dusty archives and become a fetishistic activity carried out in design studios? How and when did it overtake theory and history in the architecture school curriculum? This lecture will raise some questions about the ways architectural research and its curation are related to a contemporary digital-global society and will contrast the intellectual culture of architecture schools today and in the past.
Joan Ockman is an architectural historian, critic, and educator, currently teaching at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. Previously she taught architectural history, theory, and design at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation for more than two decades and served as director of its Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture (1994–2008). In addition to Columbia and Penn, she has held teaching appointments at Harvard, Yale, Cooper Union, Cornell, Graduate Center of City University of New York, the Berlage Institute in the Netherlands, and elsewhere. She began her career at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, where she was an editor of Oppositions journal and was responsible for the Oppositions Books series. Among her many edited publications are the award-winning anthology Architecture Culture 1943–1968 (1993); The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking about Things in the Making (2001); and Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America (2012). She is currently completing a collection of essays titled Architecture Among Other Things, due out from Actar next year, and collaborating on a major new history of modern architecture, to be published by Thames & Hudson.
ARE WE ARCHITECTS? ON EDUCATIONAL, ARCHITECTURAL PROFESSION AND INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE
In the last fifteen years or so the architectural education has seemed to be increasingly under double pressure. One set of criticisms stems from the recalibration of institutional frameworks and is linked to the so-called “research turn” to which architecture schools and other design disciplines reacted with vaguely articulated approach of research by design or design by research. This subterfuge clearly signals epistemological divide between architecture and other methodologically more grounded sciences. Second set of problems seems to orbit around “eternal” wrestle between theory and practice and such criticism is typically pointing at disconnectedness of architectural education (and by extension academic research in architecture) from the “real world problems” and its relevance to the “real life”. Relevance is precisely the sore point that connects all the anxieties arising from the relation between academia and the architectural profession and by extension from the relation between the profession and the “Society”. By this vector of thought the epistemological question becomes an ontological one: How do we, as architects, relate to the world?
The lecture series “Are we architects? On Educational, Architectural Profession and Institutional Critique” is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Statutory City of Brno.
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