Architecture Addiction, The Official Blog of

In my last post I quoted a book I just read about Jersey Devil called Jersey Devil: Design/Build Book by Michael Crosbie.

This morning I finished another, called Devil’s Workshop by Susan Piedmont-Palladino and Mark Alden Branch, which likewise has a quote about the place of architectural education that continues to be relevant.

The question of whether it is theory or practical experience that forms the primary knowledge base of architecture has remained one of the central dilemmas of architectural practice and education since the Renaissance. During the nineteenth century, France and England exemplified this dilemma in the divergent ways in which they educated architects. France, where architects were educated at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, considered theory primary; England, where education tended to rely on apprenticeships, considered practical knowledge primary and thought of architecture as a trade than as a learned profession. For most of the nineteenth century the United States followed the English model, as it had during the colonial era. American architecture in the eighteenth century had relied on pattern books written expressly for the owner-craftsman who found himself “in the remote parts of the Country where little or no assistance for Design can be procured.” While the more theoretical treaties of Vitruvius or Palladio were available in colonies, they were expensive. The pattern books were popular and contained details, elements, and entire buildings that could be “executed by any Workman who understands Lines…” Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, American education abandoned its craft-based tradition and turned toward the Beaux Arts model as the path to professional legitimacy. Consequently, the values of apprenticeship, such as construction and craft, were marginalized by a curriculum that emphasized delineation, history, geometry, and engineering principles. The knowledge gained from making buildings became peripheral to the professional definition of the architect, and so remains today.

The professional internship, which would seem at first glance to redress the division between theory and practice, in fact reinforces it. The internship derives from the recognition that a theory-based education has certain limits, yet even here the novice architect is rarely offered field experience, and never actual construction experience, but rather the chance to apply to a “real” project the same abstract design skills learned in the academy. Those design skills, developed and refined on monumental and idealized studio projects, are more often than not applied to the proverbial fire stair and bathroom details. Students who look to the internship as the time to learn finally “how things go together” find that budget and expedience often conspire to limit their access to the construction process. More than that, however, the segregation of the architect from the activities if the building is endemic to a professional culture in which practice is defined as the rendering of a service, The internship is dedicated to training, some might say indoctrinating, new professionals in the “how” of serving the client, rather than the “how” of building the building. The perceived loss of respect for architects throughout the construction industry can be seen as one of the inevitable results of this situation. The increasing interest in design-build in the part of many architecture students (and the media) might be said to be another, though the design-build studios now offered by a number of academic programs are still seen largely as supplements to a theory-based education.

For our first studio project of the spring semester here at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, we’re to design a structure that relies on compression. It should include a portal and a place for two people to sit. And it should be made completely out of brick.

Michael Meredith, who is leading studio this semester, supplied us with copious pdfs of precedents.

But I find myself turning to Jersey Devil for inspiration.

I checked out both books on Jersey Devil from our library, and in each I was struck by how well their ethos resonated with me.

This is how Michael Crosbie, author of Jersey Devil: Design/Build Book describes it:

Much of early America was built by architects who operated similarly to Jersey Devil. They were called “architect/builders” and often traveled through a region designing and building houses, churches, stores, and schools. They too would begin with some basic assumptions about the building required, develop designs, and then execute them, making adjustments to meet the demands of the site, materials, program, and climate.

It was during the Industrial Revolution that this relationship between architect and architecture began to disintegrate. Mechanized production, the division of labor, and the sheer demand to build more structures faster affected architecture by forcing a wedge between designer and builder. Architects set themselves apart as a professional class that was quite different than mere tradesmen. Buildings were (and still are) designed in their entirety down tot he last detail before ground was broken. Then drawn and written instructions were given to the people who would assemble the structure – the builders – who were required by law not to deviate from the plans in any way without express permission from the architect. Any changes necessary were communicated back from the building site to the architect in the office.

This divorce was ultimately institutionalized by the American Institute of Architects, which, in 1909, adopted a code of ethics that explicitly forbade architects from engaging in building construction. Thus the hand and the mind were severed in the creation of the built environment. Certain trends in architecture today reflect the malignancy of this separation. Technological advancements is bittersweet: it often makes our lives easier by placing buffers between us and the real world of raw experience. The fabrication of built reality fir the architect is not unlike eating synthetic food or engaging in telephone sex. Meanwhile, the ethics of architects who chose to build their own designs are suspect while others receive public acclaim for their unbuilt (if not unbuildable) designs. We live in strange times.