DISCIPLINE BUILDING

Princeton University

April 2-3 2004

"Learning and Doing in Architecture: Some Issues and the Minutes of Some Meetings."

©Denise Scott Brown  April 2004

The following excerpt from Architecture as Signs and Systems locates the arena of my discussion. Then see below for more.

"As makers and doers, our process is triangular: we look and learn; write and theorize; design and build.  We jump from one to the other in no good order and need all three to produce our work.  I have been a circus horse rider between my two professions, architecture and urban planning, most of my life. This position has its ups and downs, and I have perhaps needed a shot of Mannerism to interpret its contradictions, but delving for ideas in areas of planning where architects seldom go has been fecund for me and instructive and invigorating for our architecture.  In my essays I match planning thought, particularly urban social and economic theories, against some traditional notions of architecture, to see what richness the one can bring the other.  I offer the combination as a portfolio of ideas that can contribute to humane and creative design, and I try to show how they have informed our architecture.

Riding the horses of practice and education as well, I've been intrigued by the differences between academic education, taught in much of the university, and professional education, taught architects and planners (also engineers, lawyers and physicians). Practitioners use academic knowledge for purposes different from those of academics -- to do things, to recommend policy -- in general, to take part in a world of action.  The professional gets the fun of both learning and doing and, if lucky, the reward of seeing the results.  Therefore I'm addicted to practice where this mainly happens.

"In this book, I try, by professionalizing the academic, to broaden the repertory of thought available to architects in designing, and to share some tools I have found valuable.  This is difficult.  Architects are as scared of the social sciences as social scientists are scared of the arts, and each stereotypes the other as lacking relationship with their interests.  I have found one way to help architects get beyond this barrier is to personalize the professional -- to tell the story of pertinence through showing how those ideas crept into my own history.  I think the students felt, "If Denise likes it maybe I will too" -- at least they seemed to want to share the images I enjoyed. So when I draw on my work and experience to illustrate my themes, it's not rambling reminiscence; my saunter through my life is to make the content of my thought understandable and palatable."

(Harvard University Press, expected publication date, 2004)

I've had a long life in architecture and education and seen a lot.  Some things seem to me to have happened at 180 degrees to the way they've been described in history.  I should tell historians about those -- give the "minutes of the meetings" as I saw them. (And at least one thing I mis-saw.  I can tell you about that too.)

Then I've formed opinions on the roles (many) of historians in relation to architecture and to education in architecture, and about the relation of academic and professional education and the value of each.  And about the place of academic scholarship in a professional program. And about the enormous value of studio education, including as a visible alternative model in academe.

Also I perceive many issues in the PhD programs in architecture, related perhaps to the "rules of hospitality' you mention - if I understand what this means.  What constitutes a discipline?  This discipline? What is the penumbra of knowledge that supports it?  How should rigor in this discipline be defined? As the social scientists define it?  Or scholars in the humanities?  Or PhDs in urban planning?  How does the discipline define a theory? A principle? A philosophy?  How does it differentiate between fact and opinion?  Is and ought?  Can it handle material statistically to get at facts?

What is the difference in architecture between a historian and a critic? A historian and a theoretician?  Between a pacemaker and discoverer for the profession a la Giedeon, Banham and Scully, the "big macher" roles, and the role of a Donald Drew Egbert, a searcher in his own, unvisited (till much later) vineyard?

Professional schools of architecture have experience in handling the collateral subject matter of history and structures.  Are there models here for the teaching of other materials, eg in the social sciences - subject matter lacking in architectural education?

Bob and I taught the first theories (note the plural) courses at Penn (in 1961). I think I can tell you how they originated and what they achieved for the students at the time.

When we teach, it's as practitioners, who "professionalize" academic knowledge for architects' purposes.   When we research, it's learning and looking, and near the applied end of the research spectrum.   When we write, it's about ideas derived from our 3-part careers designing, learning/looking, and theorizing.  The writing is a letter from a front line (practice)  - except when we write the minutes of the meetings.

Our personal experience with historians is that many of them don't do their home work.  We are still alive, a useful resource, but few check their facts by asking us or by reading widely in our bibliography (on our website these many years). Critics are worse.  Some want to create a big splash by dropping their brick in a large pond.  This is bad physics.

One thing about architecture's burgeoning academics, especially the young ones: they find my articles, even those obscure ones that don't make it into the indexes.  This is most heartening for me.  One hopes the PhD programs will cause the level of rigor to rise in successive generations of architectural academics.

And the women's movement helped.  What is the role of sectional interests in "upending prevailing ideologies" in our field? How should today's PhDs relate to these?

Do today's architecture PhDs want out of the professional schools and in to the body of academe?  If so, beware!  Note what happened to the planners.

If architecture is far from a discipline, urban design is even further -- vide the New Urbanism.  Can historians help urban design divest itself of architecture's hand-me-downs of the last two decades?

...and I've hardly started.  I hope some of the issues I've raised can come up in discussion during the conference.

Relevant Writings by Denise Scott Brown
www.vsba.com

"Teaching Architectural History," Arts and Architecture, May 1967.

"Team 10, Perspecta 10, and the Present State of Architectural Theory," Journal of the American Institute of Planners, January 1967, pp. 42-50.

"A Worm's Eye View of Recent Architectural History," Architectural Record, February 1984, pp. 69-81.  (Reprinted as "Neuere Baugeschichte aus der Froschperspektive" in Jahrbuch Für Architektur, 1985-1986, pp. 141-158, Braunschweig/Wiesbaden: Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn, 1986)

"Between Three Stools:  A Personal View of Urban Design Practice and Pedagogy," Urban Concepts: Denise Scott Brown, London: Academy Editions; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990, an Architectural Design Profile, Architectural Design 60:1-2:90. (Translated in to French L’Architecture et la Ville, Ecole D’Architecture, 2000)

"Paralipomena in Urban Design," Urban Concepts:  Denise Scott Brown, London: Academy Editions; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990, an Architectural Design Profile, Architectural Design 60:1-2:90.

"Breaking Down the Barriers Between Theory and Practice," Opinion Section, Architecture, vol. 84, no. 3 (March 1995), pp. 43-47.

"Activities as Patterns: Lessons About Architecture from Planning," MetropolisMag.com, February 2003.  (DSB's "In Your Face" lecture, given September 2001 - only available online)
http://www.metropolismag.com/html/vsba/index.html#activitiesaspatterns

Architecture as Signs and Systems, with Robert Venturi, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, expected publication date, 2004.