On Teaching

As architects we find ourselves consistently drawing upon our own experience as the basis for any building proposition. Of course in time one has a greater body of knowledge and experience to draw upon. The starting point however is to recognise that this is valuable and that, at the point that one starts questioning what one sees when looking at something, a beginning has been made.
This paper draws upon a series of recollections that have proved instructive to the architects we have become. Chance has played a part here and given another set of circumstances it is not inconceivable that another intellectual framework would have.
On looking
In the second year of architectural studies, my construction lecturer encouraged us to make a mental survey of the different ways that windows were detailed in the buildings on the walk from the school to the city centre. I remember being excited by the implicationsof what we were being encouraged to consider,. that as architects we should start by knowing what already exists before thinking that we can invent from scratch. That mankind has for centuries been exploring a parallel set of questions to the one that I had been considering, as a student of architecture designing a window. What should the window look like? How should it be proportioned and how should the fenestration be detailed? How big should the opening in the wall be and at what height in relation to the room? Should the position of the window be at the service of the room or the overall composition of the fa∫ade? Should the plane of the glass be to the front, rear or somewhere in the middle of the reveal - because the result of such a decision would have a fundamental impact in the modelling of the elevation?
If I am honest I cannot say these were questions I was asking myself at the time when drawing an elevation but they are now. The seed of questioning that my tutor had sowed was to look and question all that lies around me, not just the high architecture of the masters, and to recognise that our own research into architecture should be an everyday occurrence. This lesson was instructive at the time but it has taken years for it to be truly useful. It is one of the greatest encouragements we now give to our students - that we begin to deal with architecture when we start to question what we see. Looking and copying is the basis for pedagogy and I do not believe architectural education is so different from any other discipline. It also explains the unease with an encouragement made in contemporary liberal art education to experiment freely, implying that all production is interesting. I believe that in most cases, without a body of experience to support experimentation the result is undisciplined and inevitably prone to failure. It is interesting to reflect on the history of architecture and how most great architects truly found their voice after years of careful work. Unlike with most art forms, architects tend to be at their most original at a point where they are no longer aware that the search for originality is the motivation behind their creative impulses.
On scale
Before I started my formal education in architecture, a student (whom I recall as being in his fifth year) advised me that it was important to know the size of things. At the time this seemed an obvious statement but on reflection I realised that I only had a rudimentary understanding of the real dimensions of any building component. This has become an important component in the way we work . We are always pacing out the dimensions of a space or measuring the height of a door handle, verifying if the walls of a room are parallel. We are constantly on the lookout for a physical set of conditions or building elements that could be useful as references to our own building projects. Certainly this behaviour must come across as a little eccentric to an innocent witness.
ave been construct On drawing
When I began my studies in architecture I was not taught how to draw. It was assumed, then as now, that you would learn what you needed along the way. This still seems tough and to a degree unrealistic. Fortunately I had previously spent a year in a drawing office where I was taught by some extremely expert and experienced draftswomen how to draw with ink pens on tracing paper. How to treat the surface of the paper with chalk so that the ink would bite, how to draw one's breath when tracing a long (but not too long) line, how never to leave the sheet on the board overnight so as not to lose its flatness. This was not so long ago but it now seems like a dead art form.
I have never learnt to draw on the computer because I find that the physical act of drawing on paper allows me certain freedom. When one draws by hand it is an effort to repeat an element and in fact it is not possible to draw two elements exactly the same, however well you may draw. In this respect there is a connection between the drawing and the experience of the building. For example a bricklayer will never be able to form openings in the exacting way shown on a computer drawing. This is why it is important to design with an understanding of the tolerances that the ideas of a construction can permit.
When drawing by hand one feels one's way through a plan. The scale of the drawing is a constant. You cannot zoom in and out in the manner permitted by a computer. A hand drawing is physical and charged with doubt, allowing for certain elements to be contingent until such a time as they have become resolved. When one draws by hand, paper has value - it holds on its surface the effort that has gone into making the drawing. If it is damaged it cannot be reprinted. It can be redrawn but it will never be exactly the same, it will acquire its own different value.
I am not advocating a romantic movement return to the past. I recognise that my own inability to produce drawings on computer would make me unemployable on the job market. Our own office works on computers and the possibilities they hold is not in question. I am arguing for a broader exploration of architecture and in my own experience I have never seen a great design that was developed exclusively on a computer.
During my time as a student at the Architectural Association in the late 1980's, computers had not yet made the impact they would a decade later in terms of drawing possibilities. Manual drawing skill had become an essential component of producing the body of work considered necessary for your portfolio. Quantity did matter, to the extent that you needed a considerable amount of help from friends to make it to the diploma committee assessment panel. More often than not students took two years to pass their final year, sometimes longer.
My tutor Rodrigo Perez D'Arce had an unusual approach in the school at that time. He was interested in building programmes and a version of critical regionalism that was far from popular then. He encouraged me to look at Alvaro Siza's drawings (we visited Porto in my fourth year and this first exposure to his work was of fundamental importance for me). My tutor argued that Siza's drawings had a direct relationship to the buildings and were a tool to enable him to explore spatial qualities. While the plan, section and elevation drawings were cool and a little dry, they were also disciplined and rigorous. Siza's sketches 'explained' the ideas that a project attempted to investigate. The artistry of Siza's architecture can be really understood through his sketching and has had a profound influence on the way we now work.
Indirectly (because I was never one of his students) Peter Salter taught me the value of strategy and detail. I was aware of a method that he taught his students, where observation and detailed material investigations produced extremely sensitive drawings. It was only years later, through our interest in the work of Alison and Peter Smithson, that I understood Peter's Salter's method had come from his experience of working with them. It explained the importance of drawing simultaneously at large and small scales. Drawings at a small scale would describe the idea behind a project and those at a large scale would investigate how the building is concretely put together.
On modelling
When developing a project we draw upon two conventions: drawing and model making. Drawings are useful to understand order and composition but reveal limited things about spatial properties and the qualities of a form. Model making gives freedoms not found in drawing, especially in the way it is direct, immediate and revealing. Sometimes a model is the first thing we make when we start work on a project ,with only a few sketch guidelines. We enjoy the way we can make adjustments directly and freely.
We also recognise that a model is an abstract representation of a building. It cannot substitute the real experience of a form or space. I think it is for this reason that Siza's models are always white and abstract. Like his buildings they are less about material and construction, instead they explore the sculptural properties that he is pursuing and, as a very mature architect, is able to interpret these qualities through the model. Peter Zumthor works in a very different manner, where his model making is firstly a material investigation and often the model is made in the same material as the building. A model is however only an abstract intention, like a sketch or the written description of a building. Nothing can substitute the experience of a completed project and the lessons it holds in its finished form. As first year tutors at the AA we recognised this deficiency in architectural education - the distance between students' intentions and the lessons they could learn from experiencing the real consequences of what they were proposing. In 1998 we asked our students to design and construct a full size room. The students worked in pairs to design a space using a very limited pallet of materials (plasterboard, plywood or polycarbonate). Each room was arranged within an agreed overall spatial matrix and the students agreed the manner in which their space would connect to its neighbours. We also stipulated that the rooms would need in some way to respond to the warehouse space they were to be situated within. The energy and co-operation this project generated has never been surpassed in my years of teaching. We also ensured the construction work was careful. The students attended rudimentary carpentry, drylining and plastering courses at British Gypsum. When completed, the spaces were photographed under the tutelage of Helene Binet.
This project holds a number of lessons that have a direct bearing on my position as a teacher as to the demands of architectural education:
To acquire skills and to be able to investigate and communicate ideas, to know how buildings are made.
To understand the value of time in one's own production and finish things so that they can be judged and learnt from.
To look, enquire and learn from what lies around us in terms of cultural influences, as well as the physicality of the space we occupy in the World.

Jonathan Sergison and Stephen Bates, April 2004