ABSTRACT

Architectural education has been in a constant state of revision since its inception as an academic practice in the early nineteenth century. The discipline remains uncomfortable with its traditional associations with either the fine arts or engineering, while the introduction of digital methods of representation and production has perpetuated a sense that the only possible alternative is an education geared to instrumentality: the transmission of applied science and methodologies, with a vague expectation of subjective creativity on the side, usually understood as the production of novel and striking forms. Today, in the wake of our problematic yet ongoing project of globalisation, and more specifically, after two centuries have witnessed the failures of instrumental theories in architecture to build a more human world (one that may not merely reflect back our nihilistic tendencies), I believe the central paradigms of education canonised in the 1800s should be radically questioned, and not merely modified, as has usually been the case throughout modernity. The introduction of philosophical positions drawn from Continental phenomenology and hermeneutics during the last four to five decades has opened other possibilities that have yet to be fully realised. Particularly problematic is a historical myopia concerning these issues among architects and critical theorists, including an almost total disregard of a critical mode of practice that emerges as early as the eighteenth century with the philosophy of Giambatista Vico (and the work of Piranesi), and is made explicit insightfully by Charles-François Viel just after the inception of the new paradigm. It is particularly upon Viel’s sharp critique of Durand’s dominant position that I will found my initial argument. 1