Beginning Architecture: Contextualising Thresholds in Architectural Education

Where do we begin? Architecture is a profession riddled with many orientations, directions, and perspectives. How one favours what to signify in representation is equally open in processes, methodologies and approaches to form-making, spatial ordering, material choices, and so forth. The educational process is similar; it is riddled with conundrum after conundrum. The education of the architect was not unique; it developed through the artists’ guilds into academies wishing to elevate the discipline, and the mechanical arts, which was a subset of armatura. Carl Goldstein’s Teaching Art traces not only the growth of academies but the shifting issues with craft and thought, noting that both the disciplinary art and their education were always responsive, and often confrontational.1 The Florentine academy, which privileged disegno over Venetian colore, had a responsive curriculum. As soon as the papacy allowed dissections, life drawing and the study of cadavers were not only included, but mandated at the Accademia del disegno. The elevation of the arts with European royal support led to what Goldstein refers to as ‘triumph of the academy’, a consolidation of processes and methods as de rigueur, inadvertently creating strict doctrine and prescribing inflexible methods and values.2 The response to this was, of course, reactionary, and the dialectical confrontation repeats itself many times, over many decades, as a confrontation between mainstream and avant-garde. Other themes that occur and recur in the academies over the centuries are issues of mimesis and exemplars, the antique, art and science, style, originality, craftsmanship, and in the last two centuries, questions of modernisation, modernism, and modernity. The latter aligns with the territories of contestation: modernisation with process, modernism with establishment, and modernity as condition. In our current climate crisis, political shifts, and recent global pandemic; architectural process, establishment, and conditions are again re-examined.