ABSTRACT
I am not an architect and during the five years that I have been teaching full time at the Architectural Association I have watched architects and I have listened to them, and you have no idea what a strange experience that is. So in this text I want to try to formulate some of that strangeness. It is a strangeness that is compounded by the fact that I run the General Studies programme, which provides the historical, cultural and theoretical elements of an architectural education not directly addressed in the design units at the AA. I think that I am now even more unclear than I was five years ago as to what an architect should know. But perhaps as we progress we will see that the very idea of what an architect should know is an intrinsically complicated issue. It is not a question of taking one side or another in a set of arguments.
