It was The Architectural Review’s Education issue [1] that made me pick up bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress [2]. In The AR’s editorial, which sets out the issue’s focus on un-institutionalised spaces of learning, Manon Mollard, Eleanor Beaumont, Ellen Peirson and Kristina Rapacki write, “Such alternative spaces for learning resonate with hooks’ liberatory politics. Formal higher education, however, is increasingly policed, shrunk and squeezed. Today’s universities are deeply marketised, having been laid bare to the forces of neoliberalism. What ought to be a lifelong project is reduced to the preparation of productive members of capitalist economies.”

Robert Mull, who was leading the Free Unit teaching initiative at the Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design in London suggests similar tendencies in his essay “The Free World” in Architects After Architecture. The Free Unit supported architecture students to structure and deliver projects in difficult contexts of deprivation, displacement and political uncertainty. In contrast to the values shared in the Free Unit, he writes about self-interest, competition and mistrust that dominate the contemporary architectural practice and also permeate architectural education. Since 2015, Mull has been involved in education, research and practice in the refugee crises. He writes, “In all the places I worked the generosity, common purpose, collective action and mutual support I witnessed represented exactly the opposite values to those that worried me about architectural practice and education.” Amongst the most important benefits of de-institutionalising the Free Unit and turning it into The Global Free Unit, he highlights the benefits to students’ wellbeing and sense of purpose, “Education is no longer a rehearsal for future practice or a space apart from their everyday lives but a part of it.”[3] 

Even though I too see and have personal experience of alternative spaces for learning having huge potential for liberatory practices, and I agree with the observations of marketised universities, it seems to me that teaching a relatively small group of students within a design studio context still entails underexplored opportunities for progressive pedagogies. Doesn’t the art, design and architecture school still hold hints of communitarian learning that might have been more easily lost from other HE departments because of a difference in dominant teaching methods? 

Mull’s observations on The Global Free Unit’s benefits to students reflect bell hooks’ writing in Teaching to Transgress, where hooks emphasises the importance to bridge teaching with students’ everyday. It reminds me that in the classroom there should be space for valuing students’ as well as teachers’ experience outside of academia, like their commitment to different kinds of activism. It should be our aim to engage students so that they have the opportunity to contribute to the classroom with their experiences. Contributions are resources. Bell hooks, “…we all bring to the classroom experiential knowledge, /…/ this knowledge can indeed enhance our learning experience.” In her essay “Theory as Liberatory Practice”, hooks discusses her stance on the theorising-practicing split. Her thoughts on the importance of intellectual work for collective resistance and the production of theory as a potentially liberatory social practice evoke possibilities that lay in the formal studio space or classroom. Learning in this context can still inspire ways to change our current reality. It inspires me that hooks insists, “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.”[2] 

I will finish off with a few quick but concrete ideas for undertakings that could help with building a learning community:

• Taking time and space for shared experiences, such as visits to inspiring projects and meeting with activist groups, and reflecting on them.
• Creating space for sharing experiences outside of academia, as well as how what the students have learnt impacted what they experienced.
• Making use of London as our shared site for teaching and learning. Architecture is ubiquitous here and it is a waste to disregard that. Going for site and project visits together, reflecting on our day to day experiences in the city might help to build a common ground.
• I could bring the reflective journal more deliberately into my teaching methods. Currently journals are mostly token. Again inspired by bell hooks, reading and showing journals to each other in each class might solidify that everyone’s contribution matters.

References:

[1] The Architectural Review: Education, September 2022.

[2] hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress. Educations as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

[3] Mull, R. (2021). “The Free World”. In: Harriss, H., Hyde, R., Marcaccio, R. (eds.) Architects After Architecture: Alternative Pathways of Practice. Eds. New York: Routledge, pp. 302-311.

In the interview with Gielen and van Heusden, Richard Sennet calls for avoiding “the Romantic notion of the little genius who pushes through his innovation” in education. He claims that innovation is collective activity. [1]

The artist-architect-designer Pieterjan Ginckels is probably the first teacher who inspired me to re-imagine architecture design studio teaching as collective practice. He teaches at the Department of Architecture at KU Leuven in Brussels where he is the Professor of Visual Literacies and Provocative Practices. In his design studios, he sets up polemical briefs with the aim to fundamentally question the role of the contemporary designer, to enable critical thinking (towards critical thinking) and to critically engage with shared lived experiences in a speedy compartmentalised world. Having followed his practice for some years, I can identify two main methods in his teaching:

1. Continuous use of oversaturation. For example, his teaching is deliberately overloaded with popular culture notions and terms that are likely to link directly with the students, such as Snowflake, speed trip, anthropocene (misanthropozine), car tuning, avocado culture etc. In contrast to the dominant way of using these terms carelessly and often with an aim to insult, Ginckels’ teaching encourages a critical approach and opens them up as possibilities. [2][3]
2. Explicit collectivism. For example, Paradigm Weekly, a Master studio Ginckels teaches, focuses on what he calls ‘collective experiments’ with visual architecture culture [3]. I have witnessed him going on so-called speed trips with his students, which involve yoga sessions in public realm, gaming in internet cafes, setting up a lifestyle shop and handing out self-branded energy drinks [4]. These unconventional activities are thought up together with the student group and involve a shared project production experience, dressing up in a group uniform and performing together. Speaking from my experience of having participated in one of such events, it was the intensity of the experience that resulted in a loss of a sense of self and in inventing a new persona who is completely and explicitly intertwined with the rest of the collective.   

Ginckels’ approach is certainly experimental, if not radical within European architecture schools. During the course, the students along with Ginckels create a collective experience that challenges the usual master-apprentice hierarchies of a design studio, they might feel encouraged to test out an alternative persona during the performative speed trips and ultimately to re-assess their designer-selves. What I admire most about these methods are playfulness, plea for togetherness and a meaningful step away from glorifying the individualistic creative practice.

I enjoyed finding a direct link between Sennet’s take on learning outcomes as expressed in the interview and Ginckel’s setting out of his design studio ethos. Sennet says, “Often you’ve done your best job with an art student just as with a scientist when he or she comes out asking questions, rather than saying ‘I know how to do this’.” [1] This is not dissimilar from Studio Snowflake’s ethos: “STUDIO SNOWFLAKE believes we are critical agents, and produce questions rather than answers.” [2]

A common thread in Sennet’s, Ginckels’ as well as bell hooks’ works is that of building strong relationships between teachers and students. Such strong relationships form the basis for a ‘learning community’ as hooks calls it, and can help students become more motivated and engaged to learn. [5] This point resonates with my own teaching experience and I have clear ideas of methods I can implement to develop this aspect of my teaching. What I struggle with is finding the balance between pushing a more radically communalist agenda which I do believe to be beneficial, whilst making sure students manage the individual obligatory department-wide deliverables. 

References:

[1] Gielen, P. J. D., & van Heusden, B. P. (2012). “A Plea for Communalist Teaching. An Interview with Richard Sennett”. In P. Gielen, & P. De Bruyne (Eds.), Teaching Art in the Neoliberal Realm. Realism versus Cynicism (pp. 33-47). Valiz.

[2] Ginckels, P. (2022) Studio Snowflake. KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture. Available at: https://www.blog-archkuleuven.be/studio-snowflake-22-23/?filter_department=28 [Accessed 21 March 2023]

[3] Ginckels, P. (2022) Paradigm Weekly. KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture. Available at: https://paradigmweekly.com/ [Accessed 21 March 2023]

[4] Ginckels, P. NoBullFaster. Pieterjan Ginckels website. Available at: https://www.pieterjanginckels.be/index.html [Accessed 21 March 2023]

[5] hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress. Educations as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.