<<

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 , 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 more than anything else. Whilst alive, Le Corbusier had repeatedly reiterated his preference for learning through travelling for any , 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 schools has been to work within the studio environment, to conceive novelty and in so doing, deliver excellent individual 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 .

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 (coming from defining methods and building models), a sense of togetherness is created. These bonds help students withstand a natural tendency towards estrangement.

At the beginning of each Studio Onheimelijk, students make conscious choices about what to do with their own research and their communal research work. As a way to collect data, they recollect and reflect upon their own uncanny experiences, which are then shared in a plenary session. By agreement and interest, learning groups then form around common themes. Each of these groups is expected to formulate a common research question. Furthermore, students discuss this research question in front of a larger group. Because they have to perform both individual and collective tasks, students are expected to function under time pressure in a multi-task environment. As these research subgroups are formed, the parallel organisation of the studio takes on unexpected directions, often with contradictory responsibilities and conflicting interests. In conclusion, at the heart of the research design studio is the combination of both collective and individual efforts. Associating the individual with the collective reflects a growth of particular and generic expertise.

What is regarded to be collective is the shared task of students, such as developing a public exhibition, excursion or publication. Through conducting this extracurricular work, the collective body of work, consisting of small groups of no more than three students, is generated by the force of many. Perhaps more significant than the individual trajectory, the collective endeavour contains implicit forces as driven by common aspirations, affects and memories.

As personal anxieties and anguish potentially thwart the students’ progress, students do the reverse and expose their weaknesses to each other. Sharing unpleasant events and designing through remembering unpleasant experiences implies skills that go beyond the personal and the emotional.

149 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 It implies developing a sense of empathy for other opinions, viewpoints Figure 2: including assessing strengths but also weaknesses. In time, dealing with these A dilapidated ‘Maison Citrohan’ by Le Corbusier, Cité Frugès, disquieting (pre)sentiments, emotions and memories, aspirant designers Pessac, France, 1924 (Karel strengthen their self-confidence, accommodating them in emotional issues as Deckers, 1993). a resource for design. Figure 3: A restored ‘Maison Citrohan’ Uncanny experience and Bildung by Le Corbusier, Cité Frugès, Pessac, France, 1924 (Google As a first year architecture student in 1994, I cycle by coincidence past the Maps Street View, 2020). Cité Frugès designed by Le Corbusier in Pessac, France. Bernard Tschumi’s ‘Advertisements for Architecture’ comes to my mind in which he portrays a ruinous Corbusier’s Villa Poissy, and claims the following: ‘The most architectural thing about this building is the state of decay it is in’.4 An environment like the Cité Frugès, although inanimate, conveys a sense of unease upon me. I am wandering through a Modernist iconic garden city designed by Le Corbusier in Pessac, France in the 1920’s. While wandering and taking photos in order to document my sense of amazement more adequately (Fig. 2), I expect a kind of open air museum which would pay tribute to this famous Modernist architect. In reality, a deprived garden city materialises. Still, I discern a distinct beauty in the strangely disfigured Maison Citrohan with its shoddily built pitched roofs and faded polycarbonate panels shielding off spacious loggias.

Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020|150 freespace

Experiencing this kind of decay makes me aware of the often stark difference between how buildings appear in architectural publications and how mundane they can become in reality. The whole transformation is quite extraordinary and casts me in doubt about my own future perspective as an architect. The conventional narrative of natalism whereby the architect is eternally reborn through his or her material work has lost its meaning. Since the beginning of 2000, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the Cité Frugès is gradually being restored into its original state, consistent with the official intentions of the architect. A local French architecture office, CPDL Architectes, was one of the main studios who were in charge of its restoration that started in 2003. In so doing, unfortunately, the extraordinary and uncanny experience was erased and the whole garden city became – in appearance – canny again (Fig. 3). Is this an uncanny experience? Seeing a Le Corbusier building both surprises and confuses me and links me to this place and time.

In terms of unexpected temporal and spatial perceptions, I am affected by seeing this edifice. The uneasiness of seeing a ruinous Le Corbusier building and its posterior restoration perplexes. It provokes a sense of uncertainty to me as a viewer but also as an aspiring architect. I can also empathise and imagine it is upsetting to anyone who remembers or expects it to be different than a ruin. Depending on time, authored edifices, such as Le Corbusier’s Cité Frugès, could be perceived as heritage, mundane or as redundant. A historic place can seconds, days or centuries later transform from monument to an everyday like building and ruin and back again.

By virtue of the uncanny, specific places such as these seem to have the capacity to embody and incubate a ‘fictive experience of time’ as Paul Ricoeur identified it in hisTime and Narrative.5 It is as if a non-demolished built artefact continuously travels in the broad spectrum between decay and being restored, between memory and amnesia. In this sense, the Maison Citrohan becomes an unreliable triplet in terms of time: the new restored version almost never succeeds in becoming this previous better and authentic original, while the third ruinous version turns into something radically different and unknowable.

Seeing the Cité Frugès in such a state – imperfect yet fascinating – represents a learning moment: an instant of Bildung. A process of demystification and letting go takes place, discarding and confirming Le Corbusier as a fixed point of reference for me as an apprentice. The whole experience induces a strong formative moment, independent from manuals, tutors or schools. I would like to define this experience as the formative workings of the uncanny. Through these formative workings, architecture (and its interior) powerfully links people to times and places of both delight and dread conjuring questions and curiosity: What are the living conditions and standards in the late 1920’s? Which ideals of living are crystallised in this housing units? Why did these ideals fade away? What does it communicate about my own future as an architect?

151 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 Instead of considering the uncanny as a negative experience – a ruinous Le Corbusier building that needs to be restored – one can investigate the uncanny as a positive agent of change in design and education, as a force that energises all concerned. Also, the uncanny is not a new concept; it has been established widely and since long in academia. In the following section, I will briefly monitor the workings of the uncanny in various disciplines demonstrating its relevance in the humanities and architectural history in particular.

Uncanny as a travelling concept For Freud, the uncanny is a ‘subject of aesthetics’6 that infatuates and bewilders the human psyche and its perception. In his analysis, the uncanny cannot be warded off through reason. He presents the uncanny as a primitive force, triggered by an unprocessed experience of one’s past. Having no precise object, the uncanny experience existentially and unpleasantly foreshadows one’s sense of mortality.

After Freud, the concept of the uncanny continues to move to other disciplines and authors. Interestingly, the uncanny in time mediates in between a range of authors - such as , builders, musicians, authors such as Franz Kafka, Camille Saint Saëns, Daniel Libeskind and their respective works and audiences. Moreover, in all their artistic endeavours underline the workings of the uncanny: torment becomes reciprocal to art, and vice versa. In the process of the resurgence of the uncanny, an intriguing state of ambiguity grows between author and audience, where the respective roles of beholder and author become increasingly uncertain: What does a building do? And who or what affects who or what? Is the experience programmed by the architect, or does it lie in the imagination of the beholder?

Transposing this puzzling concept of the uncanny to architectural design and space, a significant publication sheds light on the uncanny. In 1992, the architectural historian and theoretician Vidler introduced the uncanny to architecture. In his book The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely, Vidler considers the uncanny as a metaphor that is to be connoted to pertinent architectural issues: ‘As a concept, then, the uncanny has, not unnaturally, found its metaphorical home in architecture’.7 Through several case studies, he describes the uncanny as a ‘discomforting’ cultural phenomenon that manifests itself through arts, literature, architecture, psychology, phobias and archaeology and others. In light of the resurgent interest in the uncanny at the end of the twentieth century, Vidler interprets contemporary buildings and projects as a kind of harbinger for a fundamentally unhomely modern condition. Apart from these artistic and architectural associations, a large number of authors have dedicated time for a more structural and theoretical approach to the uncanny. Scholars such as Martin Heidegger,8 Hélène Cixous,9 Bernard Tschumi,10 Anneleen Masschelein11 and others were consciously involved in activating the potentialities of the uncanny within their respective disciplines.

Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020|152 freespace

Authors, such as Edward Hollis, have demonstrated the workings of time in interior architecture. In his article, ‘The House of Life and the Memory Palace: Some Thoughts on the Historiography of Interiors’, Hollis states that ‘interiors are temporary arrangements: the meeting places of building, lining, furnishing and occupation’.12 Quite apart from stylistic issues, he claims that the interior and its history may only be apprehended through finding traces and secondary sources. All interiors are made out of the remnants of preceding ones: ‘Interiors are, of their nature, historical devices: momentary memory palaces that narrate their own stories and those of their antecedents’.13 Hollis brings forwards an idea of an ever-changing interior, a constant reshaping of the interior given the personal memories of its inhabitant.

Hollis also points at the significance of the non-unique interiors; they are mundane and familiar for the user, yet unfamiliar for the outsider. These non- canonical interiors are often disregarded by art historians but remain important in terms of daily experience and understanding the uncanny. Heterogeneous in style, interiors integrate a complexity of many styles whereby personal future, design objects and inherited furniture pieces are assembled in a personal composition:

The interior I inhabit as I write will be familiar to many of us, who live amid a similar jumble; but it is the sort of interior strangely absent from the history of the interiors’.14

In ‘Building-in-Time’, Marvin Trachtenberg examines the notion of time in architecture through two distinct concepts building-in-time and building-outside- time. 15 ‘Building-in-time’ was dominant until the Middle Ages, when the medieval building master, responsible for the design of cathedrals, was not concerned with fame, but rather worked and lived on site, together with the workers, witnessing the ever-changing and demanding hardship of building. As the builder seldom lived to see the fruit of his labour, he ‘built-in-time’. It meant accepting time not as an obstacle, but rather as a condition to build. In this sense, building-in-time, suggests a tolerance towards incompleteness that one typically witnesses in unfinished edifices such as Gothic cathedrals. If a building master died before the building’s completion, the work would stop for an indefinite period of time, and then another one would take over, seldom continuing in the predecessor’s style. ‘Building-in-time’ then suggests, per definition, a heterogeneity of styles and a design made by a collective. It proposes a flexible and collective attitude towards the workings of time.

In contrast, ‘building-outside-time’ is linked to the instantaneous ingenuity of a singular who focuses on novelty. From Renaissance onwards, the architect was supposed to dedicate his time and energy in the making of an artistic oeuvre. Through making novel and autonomous , the Renaissance architect became a kind of inventor, retreating inside a secluded studio. Within his lifetime, he would aspire to project his own art in building designs. Precisely by evading the workings of time, the Renaissance architect is rescued from

153 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 oblivion but engages into self-realisation. He overcomes his own mortality by realising the impossible: living to see his own authored edifice in line with his own artistic preferences. In Renaissance, the act of building is no longer regarded as a collective endeavour but becomes a singular act of ingenuity and perhaps vanity. Renaissance building becomes a quest to freeze time, a chronophobic testimonial set outside the wears and tears of time.

The above mentioned authors seem to voice a profound inner emotion driven by the force of the uncanny which upsets and undesirably crosses many minds, places and periods. Judging from the erratic shifts in time and space as described above, from psychoanalysis, philosophy, phenomenology to postructuralism, the uncanny is a travelling concept, a contagious idea that is transmitted throughout time and geography: ‘Travelling concepts continuously move between disciplines, minds, periods and places’.16

Its complexity, the movement and rate of speed demonstrates the capacity of the uncanny to blend human with the non-human, the temporal with the spatial, the physical and the mental. The workings of the uncanny curiously articulate them as allied together.

Approaching the uncanny in practice and education The journey of the uncanny in space and time can be transposed in an educational context. The central scope of the uncanny in education is to foreground the student and to focus on collective sharing. Again, my personal experience as an educator comes in view. Being an educator is foremost a vocation that I dread. I regard my educational practice as driven by a personal and internal voice that urges me to ‘do that what you are afraid to do’. Regardless of my own anticipated dread of speaking in front of large groups of people, it seems that I have to be in a position to educate in order to bring out the most or best in people, myself included. Instead of deeming education a form of work or routine, I regard it as an inner conviction, a moral duty. However, this vocation is nourished not only by dread, but also by a feeling of gratitude. I am indebted to a number of predecessors whose teaching has brought out the best in others. For me, educating is an existential and liminal activity that magically pushes the limits of both student and educator. Therefore, educating and learning share the same aspirations – they are intrinsically linked to each other. Separating educating from learning potentially derails into a strong dichotomy between strong educators and weak students. It also implies that only students are prone to learn, and educators are not.

Through the associative workings of the unheimliche, this stark distinction between supreme teacher and inferior pupil loses its significance, and is replaced by a continuous mediation – a re-looking, re-searching, re-actualising – between the one who teaches and the one who learns. In a pedagogic

Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020|154 freespace context, if all students and teachers are open to a learning experience, all of them are students.

This implies that all engaged in a pedagogic experience are considered students from the start. In other words, from being subjected to instructive teaching methods, the status of the student improves and is relatively strengthened – as one learns through mediating various experiences such as the unheimliche, the student becomes emancipated.

As a shared threshold of uncanny experiences become the starting point of a learning experience, metaphorically, students are no longer burdened by their own shadow but rather appreciate its value. This awareness also changes their status. For the students involved, it is an uncanny realisation that one’s erratic movements, behaviour and thoughts can also provide a basis for learning. Recognising one’s own dark corner implies a curating or taking care of the intrinsic substance that already dwells within any student. It allows the student to realise that he or she already potentially owns knowledge and skills. Pursuing this logic, the students become appropriators and interpreters of their own shadows.In line with Crysler who states that the so called ‘affective turn’ 17 has become relevant in architecture, one could argue that affective issues such as memories and personal narratives should be incorporated in the educational cycle as well.

In Gianni Vattimo’s wake, one can consider education as a ‘complex conversation of discourses, minds and events’18 whereby the fragmentary but significant ‘weak thoughts’ of the learner are central to understanding the architectural experience. By sharing vulnerable experiences such as unsettling memories, inferior learners are emancipated from the superior educator. As they go through an uncanny experience, it brings forward a specific learning experience that potentially foregrounds them in this process. Accepting one’s weakness, requires a specific pedagogic strategy that is not new. Authors such as Jacques Rancière (The Ignorant Schoolmaster),19 and Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed),20 have both explored the value of deliberate ignorance in education, or the value of not knowing or being uncanny. A historical and radical educational experiment in the nineteenth century by the French professor Jacotot, is the starting point for Rancière’s book. Jacotot taught at the Catholic University of Louvain. Despite having no prior knowledge of the principles of French grammar, his pupils (native Dutch speakers inexperienced with French) soon managed to write and understand French texts. This learning without explicating, fascinates Rancière and leads him to introduce the notion of the ‘ignorant schoolmaster’ which presents pupils as being able to achieve mastery without being explained what to do.

Rancière continues that if a superior educator would explain or instruct the inferior pupils, it would actually slow down the learning process, arresting the student’s intellectual growth. Instead of depending on a dominant and instructive educator, students should reach their own conclusions

155 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 independently. According to Rancière, the ignorant master does not propagate equality as a goal to be reached, but rather the equality between student and educator stands as a point of departure: ‘Equality was not an end to attain, but a point of departure, a supposition to maintain in every circumstance’.21 By treating all actors (students and teachers) as equals, all are considered to be learners and not as consumers of knowledge. In other words, all stakeholders are implied within a ‘reason between equals’.22 With this plea to treat all actors as equals, Rancière suggests to shift from instructive teaching to collective learning. Building on authors such as Rancière, Vattimo and Freire, the uncanny as a specific approach in education attempts to read and detect the often unsettling signs students emit. One’s own fragile experience and memories can potentially enrich interior architecture and its education. By internalising these emotions and injecting them into interior architectural education, it pursues the students into learning and unlearning from ordinary and extraordinary experiences.

Conclusion How are students naturally linked and inclined to a specific place and time? How does their experience create a heightened awareness and connection to time and place? And how can educators implement that in education? Apparently, the idea and experience of the uncanny touches upon a threshold that pre-exists in the mind of students. Once unlocked, it tends to shape actions, influence writings and guides one’s perception and conception of edifices – it becomes a guiding force that emancipates and transforms one’s personality, i.e. the notion of Bildung.

From psychoanalysis, sociology, history and literature to the creative arts of architecture and cinematography, the uncanny continuously travels to continents and minds, surfaces, disappears and resurges. As the meaning of the uncanny and its reach differ according to different periods of time, the theme of the uncanny persistently moves.

As an academic theme in many disciplines, the uncanny can be implemented as a viable strategy for the discipline of interior architecture and its education. By focusing on both beauty and the abject experiences, the uncanny legitimises architectural practices in society as a proper cultural practice, rather than being a mere prelude to professional excellence or a warrant for economic prosperity.

It fosters the emancipation of the weaker whereby students learn to navigate their design trajectory themselves. Beyond a mere reliance upon excellent talent or artistic intuition, it is valuable to foreground all participating learners and their experiences and background, allowing them to become co-creators of a design track in time.

The uncanny emphasises the power of raw inner emotions as a force rather

Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020|156 freespace than a weakness. Instead of inventing novel solutions or leaning heavily on the virtues of creativity, learners can focus on re-creating the pre-existent, focusing upon the urgency of reusing existing edifices. In the avoidance of bold designer’s statements, purposefully weak and humble and almost invisible interventions become more relevant. By consciously ignoring architectural , the uncanny in interior architecture safeguards a legacy that is already there.

In this respect, the uncanny resonates with the ethical vocation of interior architecture as a discipline that goes beyond vanity. Beyond designing novel and beautiful objects that often serve to glorify the designer’s ego, the uncanny is foremost a strategy for learning from both ordinary and extraordinary experiences. Whereas interior architecture is usually regarded as a cultural activity, it is also driven by affects or darker and ‘natural’ experiences over which no observer or designer can exert full control, that but are nevertheless pedagogically relevant.

By drawing on, and (un)learning from these affective issues, observers, students, readers, and aspiring designers do not hide but rather share their vulnerabilities and weaknesses. In so doing, the uncanny drives the making of an affective turn. This process of revealing and retracing affects –such as undesired memories – can foreground students in the search of their future self.

157 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 REFERENCES 1 Ashraf Salama, New Trends in Architectural Education: Designing the Design Studio (Raleigh, NC: Tailored Text and Unlimited Potential Publishing, 1995), p. 71.

2 Ibid.

3 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (London: Penguin books, 2006 [1919]), p. 619.

4 Bernard Tschumi, Manhattan Transcripts (London: Academy Editions, 1994), p. 64.

5 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), III, p. 100.

6 Freud, p. 619.

7 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny. Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 11.

8 Martin Heidegger, Sein Und Zeit ( Halle: M.Niemeyer, 1927).

9 Sigmund Freud and others, 'Fictions and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The ‘Uncanny’)', New Literary History, 7.3 (1976), 525-645.

10 Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (London: MIT Press, 1996).

11 Anneleen Masschelein, The Unconcept: The Fruedian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth- Century Theory (New York, NY: State University of New York, 2011).

12 Edward Hollis, 'The House of Life and The Memory Palace: Some Thoughts on the Historiography of Interiors', Interiors, 1.1-2 (2010), 105-18 (p.105).

13 Ibid., p.115.

14 Ibid., p.106

15 Marvin Trachtenberg, Building in Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2010).

16 Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 24.

17 C.. Greig Crysler, ‘Time’s Arrows: Spaces of the Past’, in The Sage Handbook of Architectural Theory, ed. by C.Creig Crysler, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen (London: Sage Publication, 2012), pp. 289-307.

Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020|158 freespace

18 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p. XLV.

19 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. by Kristin Ross, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).

20 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. by Myra Bergman Ramos, 2nd edn, (New York, NY: The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd, 1993).

21 Rancière, p. 138.

22 Rancière, p. 45.

159 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020