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WHAT IS AN ELEPHANT?

You’re a prospective architecture student because you’re fascinated by buildings and towns, spaces and materials, organizational puzzles and mysterious forces that buildings must convey into the ground in order to keep from falling over.  You enrol in an architecture school at a university, expecting to learn virtually all you need to know in order to design buildings or towns.

What do you encounter in most of the current curricula?  A presentation of how the architecture trade is organized in your own country in your own time.  (Was it always like this?  How was it years ago?  How might it change in the future?)  A design philosophy which verges on a dogmatic theology.  (Do you dare to be a heretic?  Who determines this design philosophy anyway?  Does it quicken you?)  A very limited introduction to the forces which run through buildings.  (How high should you make this beam?  If you make it higher, won’t it change your elevation?  Can’t you just leave this to the construction engineer?)  A smattering of architectural history.  (So that’s the way people built in the past, but you’re concerned with the future.  What in the world can you learn from the past?)   

Unless you’re exceedingly motivated and highly aware, you’ll learn to think and design according to the wishes and prejudices of your teachers. It may not even occur to you to ask quite obvious questions--such as:

Whom or what does the architect serve?
Who determines the style the architect designs in?
What is the meaning of that style for the human psyche?
How do builders, materials, and building methods affect your designs?
How do--or did--other people, other cultures, build?
What is a building besides a functional object?
What generates a design?

The more questions you ask, the more you realize how little useful knowledge you’ve acquired.  You feel yourself blindfolded, like the men in the parable of the elephant:  each one runs his hand along a part of the elephant, but no one can recognize it as a whole elephant.

After years of practice, you look more and more at the work of your colleagues.  You try to learn how they orchestrated a progression of rooms, how they designed a roof detail, how they made a doorway worthy of entering.  You learn from concrete buildings rather than abstract principles.  And then it occurs to you:  Why not design an architecture curriculum based on a deep study of actual buildings?  You take off your blindfold and look through the glasses of a phenomenologist.  The questions that lead you to useful knowledge begin to flow by themselves. 

You begin to design--not a building this time, but an architecture curriculum.  You imagine three streams of study and practice running concurrently.  The core of the curriculum is the study, in depth, of a limited number of buildings and towns throughout history.  You settle initially on twelve examples.  Each example is an elephant, an elephant to be discovered and interpreted and compared with other elephants, past and future.  And each elephant will challenge you with unlimited questions that long for your own creative answers.  You look for examples that will yield their secrets of the architecture and building trades, secrets which form the building blocks of any building in any time or place.  Your intuition leads you initially these examples:

--a Dogon hut and village
--an atrium house in Herculaneum
--the Erechtheion
--San Miniato al Monte, Florence
--San Martin de Fromista
--Fontenay Abbey
--Santo Spirito, Florence
--Villa Poiana
--the town of Comayagua
--Maison La Roche
--Lever House, New York
--St. Benedictusburg, Vaals

Studying the Dogon hut and village leads you to parallels with the nests apes make, with early Greek temples, and with the thatched huts our European ancestors lived in.  The atrium house crops up throughout history, even at the scale of town planning.  The Erechtheion is small but complex:  the nature of holy spaces and how we made and make them throughout the world is the obvious theme.  San Miniato unleashes a study in tectonics, in inherited and new decoration, in building and design traditions that link the Ancient World with the Romanesque world.  San Martin introduces the barrel vault to the study, lending it for comparison with more complex churches, world views, and techniques of the Romanesque and Gothic periods as well as with Roman and Byzantine precedents.  Fontenay illustrates the emerging Gothic tradition, brought to life more by itinerant builders than by architects as we now know them.

Santo Spirito and Villa Poiana open the world of proportion and polite details borrowed from a living vernacular tradition--not just in the Renaissance but in contemporary times as well.  The Honduran town of Comayagua encourages a study of virtually all planned towns, with or without Roman roots and encompassing even streetcar suburbs and Garden Cities.  Maison La Roche serves as an example of the Modern Movement, with its distrust of history and its love of abstract geometry:  it leads you to study the roots and consequences of the Bauhaus vision, of Le Corbusier’s town-planning dreams, of Rietveld’s attempt to combine theosophy with inhabitable space, of the myth of the Zeitgeist.  Lever House addresses the issues of urban space, how building materials age,  meaningful façade patterns or their lack, and the architectural, technical, and social questions involved in building skyscrapers.  Finally, St. Benedictusburg returns the focus to proportion, to spatial definition and decoration, not just in the work and theories of Van der Laan but in the work of virtually every other architect who has ever searched for objectivity in human perception.

The twelve examples, which could be augmented or replaced by another collection, do not serve as a collection of useless knowledge.  They invite you to ask how they came to be built, who determined what they looked like, what role the building trades and materials played in their construction, what their general social meaning was or is, whether there are recurring spatial compositions which seem to suit us better than others, and which aspects were inherited and which were apparently new.

Each building or town, each culture or age, invites architects to discover what their role was or might have been had they lived at the time the buildings were built.  Knowing the past, including the recent past, means liberating yourself from automatic conclusions:  you begin to acknowledge that architects have often been unnecessary, that architects cling to their relatively recent power as professionals and style-mongers, and that how a building gets built results at least as much from the organization of the building trades as from the tectonics of the design.  There is no inevitable development from building with your hands to assembling building components:  this is an economic, political, and cultural question, not without interests which people in power strive to protect.

The twelve examples are, in effect, elephants; and elephants have objective identities and anatomies and habits.  An architecture curriculum that studies buildings and towns as elephants could help transform architecture students into professional researchers and interpreters who would be looking for objective and useful knowledge just as medical doctors, psychologists, and anthropologists do.  The questions that arise with the presentation of each new elephant would serve to liberate the aspiring architect from assuming that the profession can be reduced to materialist, functional organization alone, or to membership in an esoteric club of trendsetters.        

Each building serves automatically as a laboratory for learning about the forces in buildings and building materials, stability, aging, and technical installations. If auxiliary technical courses were needed, the theory would come alive because you’d have real elephants in your mind next to the abstract moment lines and diagrams and formulas.

The elephants are an enduring source of knowledge--useful knowledge-- because the questions they engender apply to each new design as well.  But how do you put that knowledge into practice?  And how do you gain new knowledge through your practice?  By playing:  playing at designing and playing at building.  Design and building studios are the other parts of an architecture curriculum that helps students become creative architectural researchers and researching creators of architecture.

Play forms the most creative emphasis in design projects.  The projects need not be related directly to the study of elephants because you learn more by doing, even if you do it poorly the first time, than by applying knowledge which you may not have integrated.  Design projects could run concurrently with the research elephants, increasing in complexity together with the elephants.  The key emphasis in designing should be on play and on discovery--in light of meaningful spatial stories and the material boundaries of those spaces.  Design tutors themselves would have to be well acquainted with the questions which the elephants present; a phenomenological attitude would liberate them and their students from trying to be endlessly innovative artists rather than professional, even spiritual servants.

Play is the chief rule in the game of building as well.  And building is the source of architecture.  That’s why an adequate curriculum should include studios of building materials and components, giving students the opportunity to build at full scale.  An alternative for modest architecture schools would be several experiences in the existing construction trades, preferably in more than one country and with a diversity in building techniques.

What, then, is an elephant?  What, actually, is a building or a town? What, truly, are buildings and towns for human use, for the human psyche, in terms of joy and enduring beauty?  These questions form the foundation of an architecture curriculum with a playful, phenomenological structure.  Would it work?  Take off your blindfold and see!

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