Educating Architects

Neil Spiller

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780500772447
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This is the first book to consider comprehensively the role of architectural education in the 21st century.

Includes essays by the world's leading architectural educators; practical insights into what young architects need to learn and know; over 300 illustrations and contributions by some of the top names in architectural practice and education.

The wide range of pedagogical philosophies and practical lessons, set out here create a fascinating picture of how our ideas and practices of architecture are formed and built.

The author is Dean, Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory, School of Architecture, Design and Construction, at the University of Greenwich.

250 things an architect should know

– Michael Sorkin, Distinguished Professor of Architecture, Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design, City College of New York, and Principal, Michael Sorkin Studio

1. The feel of cool marble under bare feet
2. How to live in a small room with five strangers for six months
3. ... with the same strangers in a lifeboat for one week
4. The modulus of rupture
5. The distance a shout carries in the city
6. The distance of a whisper
7. Everything possible about Hatshepsut’s temple (try not to see it as ‘Modernist’, avant la lettre)
8. The number of people with rent subsidies in New York City
9. ... in your town (include the rich)
10. The flowering season for azaleas
11. The insulating properties of glass
12. The history of its production and use
13. ... and of its meaning
14. How to lay bricks
15. What Victor Hugo really meant by ‘this will kill that’
16. The rate at which the seas are rising
17. Building information modelling
18. How to unclog a rapidograph
19. The Gini coefficient
20. A comfortable tread-to-riser ratio for a six-year-old
21. ... in a wheelchair
22. The energy embodied in aluminium
23. How to turn a corner
24. How to design a corner
25. How to sit in a corner
26. How Antoni Gaudí modelled the Sagrada Família and calculated its structure
27. The proportioning system for the Villa Rotonda
28. The rate at which that carpet you specified off-gasses
29. The relevant sections of the Code of Hammurabi
30. The migratory patterns of warblers and other seasonal travellers
31. The basics of mud construction
32. The direction of prevailing winds
33. Hydrology is destiny
34. Jane Jacobs, in and out
35. Something about feng shui
36. Something about Vastu Shilpa
37. Elementary ergonomics
38. The colour wheel
39. What the client wants
40. What the client thinks it wants
41. What the client needs
42. What the client can afford
43. What the planet can afford
44. The theoretical basis for modernity and a great deal about its factions and inflections
45. What post-Fordism means for the mode of production of building
46. Another language
47. What the brick really wants
48. The difference between Winchester Cathedral and a bicycle shed
49. What went wrong in Fatehpur Sikri
50. What went wrong in Pruitt-Igoe
51. What went wrong with the Tacoma Bridge
52. Where the CCTV cameras are
53. Why Mies really left Germany
54. How people lived in Çatal Hüyük
55. The structural prop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Contributors
• Other titles of interest
• INTRODUCTION – Paradoxical simultaneities: Architectural education at the edge of the 21st century (Neil Spiller)
• Timing is everything . . . or is it? (Sir Peter Cook)
• 250 things an architect should know (Michael Sorkin)
• Alvin’s AA: A panorama (Peter L. Wilson)
• Architectural anti-realism: The AA School in 2013 (Brett Steele)
• A prime meridian (Nic Clear)
• Introduction to the Department of Architecture and Landscape, University of Greenwich diagram (Mike Aling and Mark Garcia)
• BUILDING ARCHITECTURE LEARNING – Library and Department of Architecture and Landscape, University of Greenwich (Roísín Heneghan and Shih-Fu Peng)
• The architectural mixing desk of the Surrealist city (Neil Spiller)
• Defining your own horizons: Unit 19 (Neil Spiller)
• Convergence: Architecture as integrated spatial design (Nic Clear)
• Design animated: Unit 15 (Nic Clear)
• A user’s guide to the anthropocene (a short passage through a brief moment in time) (Simon Herron)
• The salon of lost content (the refuge of misfits): Unit 16 (Simon Herron and Susanne Isa)
• Working the realities of landscape (Ed Wall)
• The digital generation (Bob Sheil)
• The imaginarium of urban futures (C. J. Lim)
• Audacious encounters (Nigel Coates)
• School of thought (Mark Morris)
• BUILDING ARCHITECTURE LEARNING – Milstein Hall, Cornell University (OMA)
• BLENDscapes: In support of a new era of transdisciplinary exchange in architecture (Evan Douglis)
• Instigations: Reimagining better futures (Mohsen Mostafavi)
• BUILDING ARCHITECTURE LEARNING – McCormick Tribune Campus Center, Illinois Institute of Technology (OMA)
• Just about enough (Perry Kulper)
• Some thoughts on pedagogy (Nanako Umemoto and Jesse Reiser)
• The education of breathing (Mark Wigley)
• The art and science of design at the Cooper Union (Anthony Vidler)
• Wot got left out (Ben Nicholson)
• An experimental history, a history of the experiment: 1964–2013 (Neil Denari)
• Robotics in architecture (Greg Lynn)
• What is SCI-Arc? (Eric Owen Moss)
• Pretentious and incoherent thoughts on architecture – right now (Hernan Diaz Alonso)
• Building the Berlage: Notes on a continuing educational project (Salomon Frausto)
• Three-year relationships (Klaus Bollinger and Reiner Zettl)
• The question of questioning (Hani Rashid)
• Hadid masterclass: A laboratory of design innovation (Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher)
• BUILDING ARCHITECTURE LEARNING – Kings, Queens and Broadways: Two projects for a new University of Applied Arts Vienna (Wolfgang Tschapeller)
• Towards new aesthetics and new culture: Architecture and landscape programmes at Peking University (Kongjian Yu)
• Implications of architectural education: Yesterday, today and tomorrow (Li Xiaodong)
• BUILDING ARCHITECTURE LEARNING – Sharp Centre for Design, Ontario College of Art and Design (Will Alsop)
• Making a difference: Embedding academic research in practice (Mark Burry)
• Bibliography
• Biographies
• Directory
• Copyright