Foregrounding the Student's Lived Experience in Architectural Education

Charrette Foregrounding the Student’s Lived Experience in Architectural Education Karel Deckers Katholieke Universiteit Leuven ABSTRACT How are students naturally linked and inclined to a specific place and time? How do their personal experiences create a heightened awareness and connection to time and place? And how can educators implement these experiences in a coherent pedagogical strategy? By focusing on lived experiences – both ordinary and extraordinary – in architectural education, I will investigate whether or not these experiences and memories, rooted in time and space, are viable aspects for students to learn but also to become aware of Bildung or the ability to construct their future self through formative events. The strategic inclusion of a disconcerting and travelling concept, such as the uncanny, in the educational environment may strengthen the present day and future position of the architectural apprentice. In so doing, the concept of the uncanny and Bildung can unlock an existing threshold of lived experiences through which the students can be foregrounded. KEYWORDS Bildung, formative events, lived experiences, uncanny, travelling concept 145 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 Foregrounding the student’s experience Le Corbusier’s epic and well-documented journeys in the world showed his interest in travelling as a way to learn about architecture more than anything else. Whilst alive, Le Corbusier had repeatedly reiterated his preference for learning through travelling for any architect, apprentice or not, beyond the traditional ways of learning about architecture. For him, the true formation of the architectural apprentice lies in undertaking journeys to see relevant sites, buildings and landscapes. In a similar way, Wilhelm von Humboldt pointed to the notion of Bildung or broad cultural formation as developed in the nineteenth century. According to him, an apprentice learns through formative moments and general interest. Formative moments can manifest themselves in visiting buildings, travelling and in general through engaging with places and cultures. The question therefore is how can the Bildung move into the foreground of architectural education? Until recently, the traditional educational focus of many design schools has been to work within the studio environment, to conceive novelty and in so doing, deliver excellent individual designers with strong design skills. In other words, conventional pedagogy was geared at developing artistic ideas within a school environment predominantly through formal manipulation. The pedagogue and architect Ashraf Salama notes in his book New Trends in Architectural Education: Designing the Desgin Studio, that this conventional pedagogy (Salama uses the term ‘artistic paradigm’) – by virtue of all – knowing master teachers has drawbacks: ‘Students […] should believe in the power of design educators, assuming that teachers know how to design, and how to respond to particular problems, based on their experience’.1 However, this approach to architectural education depends too much on the authority and set of beliefs of the educator. Moreover, conventional teaching adheres to techniques that do not necessarily coincide with the growing complexities of societal demands: Variables such as political, social and ethical aspects are typically ignored, as the conventional studio considers those aspects as avoidable because many educators in architecture believe that they have nothing to do with design.2 As an educator of interior architecture, I often find an unexpected degree of maturity coming from students who engage with design through reliving and reconstructing personal and foremost formative moments. Recalling on experiences from memory in addressing a design problem although ordinary, facilitate another reading of the experience that connects the personal experienced past with a broader appropriation and appreciation of space displayed by society. I have been looking for ways to structurally sustain these observations. Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020|146 freespace Figure 1: Through a series of research by design studios, i.e. the Studio Onheimelijk, Memory of my grandfather’s that I co-organised between 2008 and 2013, I have investigated design house (Celine Poissonier, 2012). strategies starting from a threshold of uncanny memories that dwell within the students which are strongly connected to real life situations. Its central method is bringing back personal memories that have affected them because of its formative power but have largely been left unnoticed, untouched and hidden for some reason or another. The uncanny memories urges students to confront their personal past in order to meet future challenges; it strategically brings on existential questions into an architectonic project, dismissing conventional problem solving design strategies. Deliberately abstaining from imagining novel projects for a future scenario, students were asked to go back in time, retracing and recreating personal moments of doubt and wonder but now in connection to a specific architectonic space, a corollary event or encounter. Celine Poissonier, a student of Studio Onheimelijk chose to return to her grandfather’s house, recreating an eerie presence of her grandfather by staging an interior filled with billowing cigar smoke in black and white settings (Fig. 1). In this process of looking back, Celine inspected her own interior with weak and fragile memories and ensuing emotions and realise its particular value. This 147 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 introspective look allows her to start with her own design research. Her research successively mapped the old town centre of her grandfather’s place of birth, its surrounding and an old shop interior where her grandparents used to work. Next to the existential recollections of her grandfather, Celine’s work ultimately led to an extensive reflection on housing and working places for elderly and strategies on refurbishment in rural Flemish villages. In one of the first publications on the subject – ‘Das Unheimliche’ – Sigmund Freud identifies the uncanny in terms of that what ‘tends to coincide with what excites fear in general’.3 The uncanny is a concept that connects human experience to feelings of uncertainty. This associative concept creatively binds things that at first instance fit together (such as the similarity between twins, for instance) but in second instance become frightening and suddenly unfamiliar (such as the unreliable double in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde). Oscillating between familiarity and unfamiliarity, the Freudian uncanny (re)emerges through a number of powerful experiences such as superstition; the occurrence of involuntary repetitions; the appearance of the uncanny double; the inanimate becoming alive; omnipotence of thoughts. These concepts define the workings of the uncanny and how they occur in everyday life but also artistic manifestations such as literature, fine arts and music, for instance the works of Franz Kafka. The term Onheimelijk (Dutch word for uncanny), is an ambiguous term; it is derived from the German adjective heimlich, meaning homely but also concealed or hidden while its antonym unheimlich (or un-homely) also means concealed. Following Freud’s assertion that what is hidden, wants to become unheimlich in the open, the Studio Onheimelijk has a main objective to import the uncanny into education and bring out what is hidden to the open as a way to become engaged in the design community of interior architecture. Unpleasant memories from students, once hidden away from public eye, are being discussed in group. These memories are part of a transformative and lived experience that can be considered uncanny: for instance some stories reveal painful recollections like stories of abuse, or perhaps sufferance from spatial anxieties. Is a creative activity such as designing interiors and its architecture a way to come to terms with these uncertainties? Can exploring unsettling experiences become a specific pedagogical approach? The central pedagogic approach in the Studio Onheimelijk is to put each other’s vulnerabilities on the table. This procedure fathoms and encounters the source of the learner’s uncanny dread. To this end, it takes everyday yet disquieting memories, experiences and (pre)sentiments of the learner as a point of departure and not as a goal, where underlying emotions become a central and primary resource Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020|148 freespace and working tool. In the process of unlocking strong yet shelved emotions, connecting them with space and society, reliving them, re-experiencing them, the Studio Onheimelijk investigates the possibilities of real spatial issues drawn from the student’s experiences but connected to societal realities. The inclusion of unsettling past memories from past events which have affected students could then also provide a valuable resource for learning. By eliciting and defining these experiences both individually and collectively as a starting point of a design process, apprentices navigate the design track and learning process themselves within a larger group. This renewed sense of cooperation opens up the perspective of the uncanny as a social praxis. The formation of bonds between students generates a sense of sociality that is needed to surmount moments of anxiety amongst students. By finding an interrelated family of persons with their shared respective aspirations, objects (such as models and publications), knowledge and skills

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