Every year, I mark stacks of student essays from several universities on the subjects of architectural history and the profession. It earns a few pennies, but is dull as dishwater, although I do learn stuff along the way from the students (just call me Louis Kahn).
For some reason, the batch I've just finished have been, as a whole, the best I've ever done (not down to me - I don't actually teach said students). However, it's also most evident that they are writing case studies about books of buildings, rather than buildings. I don't know if that's due to my developed thinking on my thesis, or because the improvement in essays makes this more obvious.

It's quite understandable that these students haven't had the chance to visit the buildings they are writing about. However, this means that all their information is taken from books and magazines that other people have written: in other words, other people's opinions, which are almost always monographic or hagiographic and rarely critical. This translates into most of the essays using the word "successful" in relation to the building and almost none criticising it (critical thinking is rare at undergraduate level anyway in architecture, if not in general). Quite a few students are keen to demonstrate how they have learned key lessons about architecture from the building they have studied and how they have developed beneficially as potential architects from these lessons. Strange, that.

A couple of essays had developed their referencing so well, that they'd almost accomplished Benjamin's dream of composing a work entirely from other people's works. I'd rather have it this way than the opposite, but it's left me wondering what and how they are learning and how architectural education is educating architects to believe faithfully in the canon and read architecture from books/magazines rather than buildings.

This is endemic in architectural history and education. How to write about and discuss buildings that are either too far away to visit personally, or have been demolished, or indeed have never been built. For me, this is the architectural mode of thinking that Banham alluded to in his "Black Box" essay that I keep returning to. It's unclear whether this "black box" refers to the black box of electronics - that abstract entity between an input and an output that does something predictable but in a manner unknown to the user. Or, less likely, it could refer to the black box flight recorder of an aeroplane, which is recovered in emergencies to tell the history of what happened until the fatal moment. Either way, the architectural mode of thinking is more to do with representations than the reality of building. After all, builders build, architects design.
I must declare at this point that I myself have visited very few buildings that are in the canon.

These issues have massive repercussions on how architecture is taught and architectural history's role in this education. Most believe in the traditional way of history being taught via lectures and books and examined via essays. This is Freire's "bank depositing" method of knowledge transfer, which I would question the use of. If we assume that history is criticism in the past tense, then architectural history thinking is dependent on architectural criticism thinking. And it is this thinking that turns building into architecture. There is no architecture without architectural history and there is no architectural history without architectural criticism.

It's actually history that makes architecture. Buildings are architectural "events" - the stuff that architecture is made of - just like historical events are the stuff that history is made of. And just like history is written, so is architecture (or drawn, or photographed, or represented and selected and edited in some way by those in authority). Because architects' history is generally so poor and composed of standard clichés, the buildings they discuss and are discussed in the press are those in the canon. And entry into the canon is via present day criticism. This is why it's so refreshing when a critic arrives from outside architecture. The canon can be revised slightly, but the further into history it goes, the more set it becomes. Like jelly in the fridge. And if a canonical building has the good fortune to be demolished, then it's place in history is reassured for ever.

So how should architectural history be taught?
It can, of course, be incorporated into the design studio. However, those who teach design studio are generally the part-time practitioners whose history is generally poor (there are exceptions of course, but it's the full-time PhD academics who give the lectures) and who are generally interested more in the future than the past. So that's no recipe for tasty success.

It can still be book and lecture based, but be open and honest about the historiographic rather than historic mode of presentation. It's architectural histories rather than history that is being presented. The emphasis of both lectures and essays could be more to do with the forces generating the building rather than the building itself, perhaps. That's what interests me, anyway, so I would say that. And I should add that it's years and years since I attended any history lectures, so maybe that's changed everywhere since I were a lad.

And/or history and criticism could be explicitly linked and the essays written be about a building (any building - not necessarily of the canon) that the students have actually visited. This does not exclude the above suggestion, of course, and could be done in tandem.

I can fully understand Gropius wanting to eradicate history from an architect's training, but it's link with criticism and critical thinking is invaluable for an architectural education and why I believe it should hold a key place in the curriculum.
That, and to be able to give me a job soon.

I've been writing a couple of articles recently on my hobby horses (the articles are on my hobby horses, not me!) - architectural mediation and the difference between architectural culture and practice. So I thought I'd expand some thoughts here, as those articles aren't specifically on the topic and just pass through it on the way to somewhere else.

There are two quite different but overlapping domains in the small world of architecture that we occupy - these are architectural culture and architectural practice. This is well known, but rarely, if ever, stated and therefore little understood. Many problems arise when they are confused as the same thing, i.e., just "architecture".

I am aware that architectural practice these days can refer to the production of anything architectural, especially writings or drawings, and I'm fully on board with that. However, for the sake of being "absolutely clear" (as the politicians are fond of saying but unfond of being), I am taking "architectural practice" to be simply the production of buildings. Architectural culture, on the other hand, I am defining to be the production of other architectural projects, specifically, publishing, lecturing, exhibiting, teaching and so on.

Through the study of the magazine Architectural Design from c.1954 - c.1972, it's becoming increasingly obvious that culture and practice are embroiled in a struggle. Initially, it was the case that practice was dominant and culture was a by-product of it. In other words, architecture was about building and architectural culture supported this cause. However, during the sixties, due to various social, economic and technological reasons - one of which was the disillusionment of modernism aat large, this hierarchy started to be reversed. In other words, culture grew more dominant than practice and so buildings became considered a by-product of culture. The mediation of architecture became architecture itself.

Some of the implications of this are:

a) The products of architectural culture are only really bought by architects, whereas the products of architectural practice are predominantly bought by non-architects.
b) The products of architectural culture (documents) are easily copyable and therefore copyrightable, whereas the products of architectural practice (buildings) are not. In the UK, at least before these hyper-paranoid anti-terror laws appeared inhibiting people to take photos of buildings, it was freely permissible to take a photo of any building from the public highway, without the owner's, or the architect's permission.
c) To be a big name in architectural practice, you need to first conquer architectural culture. That does not necessarily mean you can't be successful in practice, just that being a 'name' comes from culture. That is where historians take their source material from.
d) I thought of a d) but can't remember it now.


When and how this transition occurred is something that interests me and something I'll investigate further, looking for clues within Architectural Design. However, I'll have to finish this later...