Pedagogies of Problematisation: On the Value of Architectural Intuition

This paper outlines the basic elements that a shift towards a problematised architectural pedagogy entails. Relying on philosopher Henri Bergson, as well as his later appropriation by philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the paper claims that to open architectural pedagogies to practices of problematisation, we need to educate architects and urban designers in a particular method of approaching reality — one that can examine it with a much-needed precision. This method is what Bergson has coined as intuition, standing as the only term that can express a mode of learning that is distinct both from sterile intelligence and propositional knowledge. Such an intuitive mode of learning can effectively cross disciplinary boundaries and enhance urban literacy — understood as the capacity to properly discern and modulate via design the singular elements that determine the technicities of urban life. If we wish to educate architects that can address collective issues and respond to the problems of their era — and this response ability is what at once defines both a dissident intellectual and an ethical professional — then we are truly in need of pedagogies of creative, speculative and precise problematisation.