Constructing Perspectives: Architectural Pedagogy as an Act of Architectural Design

Abstract

Design is a process that never looks the same in any two applications. If this is true, then what constitutes an effective design education? What elements may be standardized, and what should remain open for interpretation? Further, what skills are gained from an architectural design education? The medium with which architects work is often contested, but this thesis makes the claim that the fundamental medium of architecture is structure. Looking at the work of John Hejduk, Cecil Balmond, and Sol LeWitt, among others, the concept of spatial relationships as a guide for form rises to prominence within various strategies of design beginning in the mid 1950s through to the present moment. The framework of openness in a creative work, as proposed by Umberto Eco, becomes a useful tool for recognizing the ways in which the design and methods of an architectural education are highly structural, just as in the built work. In the examination of pedagogical precedents through the lens of openness, this thesis delineates the operation of an architectural curriculum in three parts: infrastructure, structure, and unstructure. The first considers the importance of making visible the systems by which we learn to think; the second foregrounds the architectural drawing as an exemplary form of structure that is defined in full, but still with a degree of openness to be elaborated upon by the agent of design; the third asserts the space of the critique within a studio-based curriculum as unstructure—its openness manifests in the way that its structure reaches full definition through the act of participation in the system. Ultimately, this thesis is a proposal for greater precision in defining what it means to practice architecture—perhaps unexpectedly, the result reveals the potentials of openness that exist within an appropriately closed system.