Starting a Free School of Architecture Tessa Forde Free School of Architecture
ABSTRACT The Free School of Architecture was established in Los Angeles, California in 2016, seeking to question the edges of architectural education. This essay recounts and reflects on the events that led to the student body taking over the school while it was still in session. The Free School of Architecture was redesigned and ran again in 2018 as an alternative model of education, collaboration and architectural practice.
KEYWORDS architectural education, tuition-free education, experimental, radical education
121 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 Foundings, fetishisms, frustrations, revolt The Free School of Architecture was founded toward the end of 2016 as a resistance to institutionalised pedagogy, the exorbitant price of education in the United States (with the average out-of-state annual tuition of a four year architectural degree at close to $50,000) and the increasingly prescriptive nature of architectural design studios.
Its founder, Peter Zellner, having penned a passionate letter to The Architects’ Newspaper, lamenting the downfall of the architecture school into ‘various forms of academic cult worship: Digital traditionalisms, faux-art fetishisms, silly mannerist dead-ends, philosopher-shaman worship, and other neoconservative returns’, posited that an architectural education should allow for a slow, fumbling exploration of personal practice, and set up the parameters of an environment where architecture might happen.1 This letter was not just a complaint, but a call for action; an invitation to architects to do something about it. Zellner’s version of ‘doing something about it’, was to establish a tuition- and salary free, non-degree-granting, non-accredited six week architecture school to be hosted in Los Angeles in the summer of 2017.
For a (somewhat reluctantly) practising, recent architectural graduate from Auckland, New Zealand, the lure of the Free School of Architecture was strong. After 18 years of school I felt institutionalised and struggling with understanding the value of my education in the context of working, where I felt deep underwater: Familiar with the theory of how to swim but none of the practice. Pedagogy was something I believed deserved to be under constant challenge, lest it become too embedded in the institutions it was born from. The log line of the school alone was enough for me:
The Free School of Architecture explores the edges of architectural education.2
I had no idea who Peter Zellner was and the information about the school was vague and limited, but I quit my job, moved out of my slug-infested flat in Auckland, packed up my belongings into a backpack and a suitcase, and moved to Los Angeles. I was ready to question.
I had only ever spent a day in LA, but it was a city that fascinated me – a city with a multitude of reputations and facades, most of which are flaunted readily in pop culture, but few of which I really believed. The stifling feeling of growing up in a country where everyone knows everyone (yes, I probably do know your friend from New Zealand or know someone who knows your friend from New Zealand), made LA, a county with more than six times the population of Auckland, even more appealing. There is room to make mistakes because no one is paying you that much attention.
If my first year of university History of Pop Music class taught me anything, that was that Los Angeles is a city built on industries of successive failures. The
Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020|122 freespace entertainment industry is designed around the mass production of projects, good or bad, hoping something sticks: they say eight out of nine recording albums fail and eighty percent of Hollywood productions lose money.3 Making mistakes or ‘failing’ is a visible and forgivable part of creative production and this pervasive culture of experimentation infiltrates the design and education spheres. Los Angeles has a history of educational rethinks and radicalisations - from post-studio arts at CalArts, to smaller democratic education models like the Public School, and critically, to the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), which was founded in 1972 as a challenge to the dominant architecture pedagogy of the era. However, Los Angeles is also a city facing a number of vastly differing design challenges, including rapid and disruptive gentrification, despicably high levels of homelessness, widespread car dependency and the imminent arrival of the Olympics in 2028. The juxtaposition of creative freedom, against the urban failures and spectacle of a large and diverse city make it a great place to start a radical school.
As it turned out, Zellner was not just posing a challenge to education generally, but also to SCI-Arc specifically, where he had recently become disconnected as a faculty member, feeling that the school represented the things he found most frustrating about the direction of architecture and education: the mannerist dead-ends, the cult worship, the academic indulgence, all for the hefty price of $23,246 a semester. In response, SCI-Arc even went as far as to prohibit its associates from teaching at the Free School.
From my perspective, SCI-Arc had descended into the kind of mythic realm reserved for radical schools (consider the often touted myth of the Bauhaus, the famous images of the elephants of the Architectural Association in London, the nostalgia around the experimental days of Beaux-Arts). It was perceived as a place where robots made everything, weird things happened and the students fostered a kind of Southern-California-cool vibe usually reserved for beautiful (yet damaged) musicians. But maybe that was just the sleep deprivation. And perhaps this is a large part of the problem I hoped we would be addressing, namely the strange worship culture within architecture: of egos, of buildings (in many cases irrespectively of the spaces they contain), of the image of the building, and now of the school – not necessarily of the education it produces, but of the image it projects.
So, I recognised that the Free School of Architecture was about frustration and shaping what you want your world to look like when no one else will do it for you.
The Free School of Architecture started on a June Gloom day, on a too- wide, too-grey street of the Arts District in Downtown LA. In classic LA style, everyone who knew what was going on was late, and everyone else arrived early and formed a large and awkward circle. Some of us folded out of cars nearby, one student arrived via skateboard, others rolled bikes along the curb edge, and I, much to the horror of the locals, had walked for an hour
123 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 from Echo Park. We were a mixed bunch of thirty or so people, from around Figure 1: 15 countries, a few more women than men, aged between 23 and forty, and The FSA 2017 cohort curates the space for an exhibition in yet all of us were wearing black and grey. Even in the context of potential The Container Yard (Miriam radicalism we donned our architect uniforms, and against the bright murals Malpartida Salgado). on the buildings around us, we flocked like ravens.
After experiencing a brief sense of abandonment (which we had started to muse might be intentional), Zellner showed up, a few former-student helpers in tow, nervous but enthusiastic, and we braved introductory discussion circles in the dark of our home base for the next six weeks: an old converted ice cream factory called The Container Yard. That summer will always sit in my mind within the context of that dimly lit room, the light from the street silhouetting warped figures in the heat, the air barely moving, graffiti tattooed to the walls.
The school would run as a series of workshops around relatively traditional topics: architectural history and theory, design and aesthetic theory, but also more broad themes such as practical and vocational classes and philosophy. It would offer five to six sessions a week from speakers from a variety of disciplines, locations and backgrounds. There would be no design studios, and no enforced output. The key concepts of the school – as presented by Zellner in a brief rundown of radical schools – consisted of the breaking down of the
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Figure 2: An informal conversation takes place on the streets in Downtown Los Angeles (Tessa Forde).
teacher-student relationship, a freedom of the constraints that money and accountability entail and a freedom to discuss ideas and concepts critical to the architectural field.
The premise seemed good and the schedule, laid out in a small but effective FSA handbook, for most of us seemed impressive. It was clear from our small group discussions that the cohort was passionate, frustrated and ready to embrace the experimental nature of the school. The discomfort of the non-air-conditioned space and the hints of administration chaos could be overlooked; our expectations were high and the city was ours to explore.
When classes started, it quickly became apparent that the school was not set up to deliver on its promise of alternative or radical pedagogy techniques. It seemed that spite, as a motivator, was not enough to encourage the kinds of experimentation and freedom of conversation we had been sold. What this meant for the school was that it began to fall back into the traps of the institutions it was trying to resist and to closely resemble a traditional teaching model – professors (predominantly male) came and talked to slideshows, we sat in rows and were allowed to ask the occasional question or contribute to the conversation at the end, we took notes and let the usual architectural jargon pervade our own responses. Despite being a group of highly trained professionals – many of whom were already teaching and practising architects – we felt lesser as students, and our time not as valued as the teachers who were wined and dined in a mystery location after class.
This set a tone for the school, where questioning education was not as important as airing our grievances about the state of architecture as a whole, and the FSA became a cathartic, somewhat self-indulgent, therapy session for our disenchantment.
125 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 Figure 3: FSA participants lounge in the landscape of Eric Owen Moss’ interventions in Culver City (Karina Andreeva).
But starting a radical school and broadcasting it loudly in the context of a generation finding it hard to grapple with what architecture looks like for them, tends to attract highly intelligent, somewhat alternative and evidently courageous attendants. Ones who are not likely to take any situation for what it is. So fortunately, in spite of our bordering on architectural martyrdom, not helped by a school whose resistance seemed to have transformed into a feeble challenge, we were also self-aware, and perceptive enough to see the potential in the school’s model and in some of the sessions we were attending.
We observed that while we did have some incredible scheduled classes (James Rojas’ Place It! walking tour and session on Latino Urbanism and Mimi Zeiger’s writing workshop, among others, were particular highlights for the group), some of our most rewarding learning was happening from the organic development of the student body as a collective. Self-organised group sessions (usually coordinated on a large and fully-inclusive WhatsApp group) ranged from beach days and desert trips, to rolling through late night downtown on metro bikes, visiting the best of California Modernism and exploring a vast city that keeps her cards close. Not only were we broadening our own understanding of the context of the city we were learning in, but we were forming the social bonds necessary to cement us as a united team. It was in these informal situations that we divided into groups based on three key areas of interest – architectural practice, architectural education and community engagement. We would then frame our conversations around these topics and organise supplemental workshops to explore them. The way that we curated our own learning in this time was becoming as effective, if not far more so, than the learning being curated for us.
At the three week mark, the school took a major turn. The masculine energy had not gone unnoticed and Zellner’s quip of ‘I swear there are some women teachers!’ in response to the unfortunate gender weighting
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Figure 4: of the schedule, did little to console us. A ‘Half-time Club’ event had been A discussion group on organised as a midway critical reflection discussion panel at a nearby brewery, architecture and its relationship between Zellner, one of the teaching staff and his son. The exclusion of any to community takes a casual approach in its facilitation student voice on this panel only added to our growing disappointment. The (Miriam Malpartida Salgado). frustrations associated with the teaching format, and our mounting discontent with how the school had been shaping up resulted in a heated argument between the loudest men from both sides of the school. I ended up with a microphone but no chair to sit on, and the image of me sitting on the floor next to these three men, my contributions being shut down at every turn, became emblematic of the reasons for the events that were to follow.
The student body’s collective position was that what had started with good intentions had become something that undermined those intentions. The school’s intention might have been to be tuition-free, hence supposedly freeing it from the burden of financial accountability. However, the burden of the lack of funds had not been consciously considered meaning that ‘money’ remained a central talking point and a constant area of contention. Zellner’s intention might have been to dismantle the student-teacher relationship, but the hierarchy was still clear. He was at the top, the mystery Board of Advisors, whom we had never met, sat immediately below him, the teaching faculty, who mostly spoke to us instead of with us about their work were somewhere below that and the students, at the bottom, were expected to show nothing but gratitude for all-of-the-above’s generously given time.
127 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 Figure 5: The FSA B[L]INGO card questions the excessive use of jargon in many of the school’s sessions (FSA 2017 cohort).
Following the end of the Half-time Show, in what felt like a demonstration march, the students defiantly crossed the 1st Street Bridge across the Los Angeles river, via their various methods of transport, gathering at a nearby house for tacos, beer and a very crucial debrief. Under a starless sky, darkening like gauze, we decided that it was time for a rebellion.
This marked the beginning of what I like to call a benevolent mutiny against the school’s leader; one that, in a very open and honest discussion, suggested that the student body would run the school from that moment forth.
The large group of us, which had dwindled to around twenty full-time students, reshaped the remaining three weeks. We took over the communication with incoming teachers, agreed with them how the space would be laid out for their sessions, increased the organisation of our own classes and conversations, and continued to learn from each other. We started to manipulate the language of the school, discontinuing the use of the words ‘student’ and ‘teacher’ and unravelling the hierarchies that were unintentionally being proliferated.
The school culminated in a final symposium now left to us. The lack of enforced
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output had encouraged a surprising amount of self-directed making and production, which became a key take-away from the programme. The symposium involved three small circle discussions each focusing on themes we had identified as important from the initial weeks of the school: education, practice and community. These then fed into a full group panel discussion. The conversations were supplemented by a series of 11x17 posters produced in response to the events of the summer.
One of these, a BINGO card that posed a tongue-in-cheek analysis of the jargon of the school, became central to the panel discussion. This soon descended into a heated, fascinating, but wholly chaotic debate that eventually had to be shut down. Zellner took it personally and left without saying goodbye, we all got drunk, went dancing and made emotional promises to stay in touch while the LA mauve sky shrunk to dawn blue.
So you say you want a revolution The first musings of the Free School of Architecture rebellion started at the end of the second week, on the sticky dance floor of a ‘90s hip hop night in East LA. The light was green and distant; we had to lean in to hear each other. Sometimes honesty is easier when it’s dark. Lili Carr and I were drinking beer and cider respectively and talking about the school, about our expectations, about how it could be doing more. About how it had to be better. Our feelings were reinforced by the events of the Half-time Club and cemented in the final planning sessions at the close of the school.
For some of us, the benevolent mutiny was thrilling, a chance to start something completely new, on the back of something already started, but fresh enough to take on new meaning. For others too, it was not what they signed up for at all. I still have the screenshots of an emotional and inebriated 2 a.m. Snapchat discussion with my best friend in New Zealand during the first week of FSA, where I boldly stated ‘by this time next year I’ll be running this school’. I guess I always knew what I signed up for.
Post student body dispersal, a group of us had made it clear that we were prepared to continue the Free School; to run it again in 2018 with similar intentions but with a much more dedicated approach to actuating them. The difficult task of regaining momentum, after about a month of much needed rest, started with weekend conference calls, Slack channel discussions, WhatsApp threads and reply-all emails. It seemed that most of our call time was spent trying to make a decision on how we make decisions, rather than actually making them. The democratic principles we set in place did however become more useful as the group dwindled.
The shaking of the FSA tree – by workload, convenience, and commitment – resulted in four women left hanging on or, I would like to think, comfortably lounging in the branches. The unusual formation of the group, found in that
129 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 Figure 6: Tessa and Lili talk to Elisha remotely over Google Hangouts (Karina Andreeva). we did not specifically choose to work together, made for an interesting but wholly productive dynamic, one we think we were better for. As the last ones left, we had proven our dedication simply by still being there. This unusual partnership, coupled with our complete and utter naivety in almost every aspect of the process, made anything seem possible.
It is also worth mentioning that we were all in different parts of the world. Elisha Cohen, originally from San Francisco was studying at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany; Karina Andreeva, originally from Russia, still today co-runs a small practice out of San Francisco; Lili Carr, originally from London, was at the time free-lancing in Mexico City; and I, originally from Aotearoa, New Zealand, was at the time working for a practice in LA. This physical disparity forced us to get tech savvy quick, becoming masters of the Google Drive, Doc, Spreadsheet, Hangout and Slack channels – all of which were imperative for keeping on top of the mammoth task of organising a school. Setting up the structure and organisational model was a huge learning experience. But our collaboration returned some incredibly powerful results, including a truly non- hierarchical working dynamic between the four of us that enabled unanimous decision-making and open discussion. We shared responsibility for almost every aspect of the organisation. To do this productively took time, discussion and trust.
The reimagining of the school on a logistical level started in September of 2017 through the initiation of the application process, and with it, a reshaping of the language of the school, its hierarchical structure and how it was fronted. To begin with, the Board of Advisors, which originally never really existed,
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Figure 7: Elisha runs through our presentation for a festival at the Bauhaus in March 2018 (Tessa Forde).
would simply be renamed as ‘advisors to the school’, there would be no teachers and students, only participants, with or without teaching proposals. The four of us would take on the roles of coordinators, and the sessions run by participants would be supplemented by sessions with collaborators – people and practices within LA who we thought were doing interesting or meaningful work or operating in unusual ways.
The original log line, which I had found so seductive, was rewritten to:
Free School of Architecture questions the edges of architectural education and explores practice in the context of architecture's expanded field.4
It was important to us to maintain what we had considered successful from the previous session and learn from what had not worked as well. It was critical that the school be embedded in LA life and consider design from an urban perspective. This meant taking the time to explore the city and creating room for the participants to develop their own ways of learning.
We thought 2017’s application format had been successful and only adjusted the wording slightly so that it could include more image-based submissions. It simply asked for a page with no more than 800 words, which would reflect in some way the participant’s interest in attending. This was to be accompanied by a name, the ticking of a box verifying they were between the ages of 21 and 99 and a brief summary of why they were qualified for the school (either by degree, interest or experience). As part of our attempts to unravel the hierarchies of the school, the four of us also participated in the application process, to make it clear that our participation had the same value as everyone else’s.
131 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 Figure 8: The four organisers of the school – Karina Andreeva, Lili Carr, Tessa Forde and Elisha Cohen (Tessa Forde).
The process was two-part. In the second stage, each applicant would receive two submissions by email that they would then respond to in the same format: a single page with no more than eight hundred words. The idea of requiring both a submission and a response was intended to establish a dialogue between the participants before the school was even in session, giving applicants a sense of what their future cohort were interested in. Teaching proposals were sent as additional essays on top of the mandatory application. We had agreed before promoting the school (yet chose not to broadcast it) that everyone who applied would be accepted. We did not think it appropriate for us to make the decision on who or what made a participant valid. We anticipated that the commitment to submitting three applications alone, would keep numbers to a reasonable level. Interestingly, of the 72 applicants in the first round, only two or three failed to submit their responses.
The school would not be accredited or ever seek to be accredited. We were trying as much as possible to maintain our autonomy – we were very careful about the organisations we both collaborated with and accepted help from. It was critical to us that the school only be accountable to its own values and intentions.
In order to receive donations and small grants we had to start imagining how FSA might operate as a legitimate organisation – a process, we learned quickly, exceptionally complicated in the US. This meant establishing ourselves as a Limited Liability Company (LLC), connecting with a fiscal sponsor and hiring a lawyer to help us write an operating agreement. Our operating agreement was one of the strangest our lawyer had ever written. Our unanimous decision-making process was outlined in the agreement along
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with a clause that, should there be a disagreement, a coin would be tossed to fundamentally settle the matter.
Over the course of the coordination months we clarified for ourselves, and for the purpose of describing the school, several key ideas that were instrumental in how we framed the curriculum and who we approached to collaborate with. A key concept, in line with the dismantling of the teacher-student relationship and the premise that anyone who participates can teach, was that our roles as coordinators would be gradually limited over the course of the programme, allowing room for the incoming body to take ownership of the direction of the school. In a similar fashion, we anticipated stepping back should the school continue, and if not, accepting that FSA is fleeting, and not an extension of our egos. This was written into the operating agreement and, should there not be a new group of coordinators to rewrite and sign the agreement by December 2018, the school, as a legitimate organisation, would be disbanded.
We were very much aware that despite being tuition-free, the school was not in fact free in an economic sense. There is significant cost involved in taking time off work, staying in a very expensive city and volunteering labour and skills. As much as we could, we tried to place emphasis on the value of knowledge exchange. To any collaborator we approached, we presented the benefit of the opportunity to explore ideas with a group of diverse, motivated and qualified people. This meant that rather than traditional lecture formats, many of the sessions became collaborative workshops, and often satisfied a need for that individual or organisation. We were also very determined to ensure that the participants would feel that their time is valued, through placing importance on their teaching proposals and giving them as much ownership as possible over how the school progressed.
Further to this, we liked to think of being free as also being liberated from typical constraints of practice and academia. FSA as we imagined it was not necessarily seeking to disrupt the institutions it was questioning, but to operate alongside them by challenging them in a non-combative way and supplementing them as a different way of operating. In struggling to describe the Free School of Architecture, we kept coming back to this idea of a half- way house for architects or those interested in architecture. Not because it is criminal to be an architect (though sometimes it feels like that), but because within a space no longer bound by the pressures of the institutions we felt were restricting us we could offer the architect a relief of their guilt at questioning their existence. Through six weeks of experimenting, testing, questioning and challenging those institutions, FSA might propose a new path to redemption via the best way we thought how: education.
A new school of architecture The Free School of Architecture 2018 started in the backyard of my suburban house in East Los Angeles with pizza and beer and fairy lights strung up
133 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 JUNE/JULY - PHASE 2 WEEK 2 - PRACTICE: How can we tool ourselves to raise objection and make change? What are the different ways of getting things done? WED THUR/ LA FORUM TAKEOVER FRI SAT SUN June 27 June 28 June 29 June 30 July 1
Title: Forget Architecture - Title: Forget Architecture - Title: Forget Architecture - Title: Collegia of Propoganda Practice at Play Practice at Play Practice at Play By: Melissa J. Frost By: Eric Baldwin, Participant By: Eric Baldwin, Participant By: Eric Baldwin, Participant Place: WUHO Place: WUHO (?) Place: WUHO (?) Place: WUHO (?) Type: Workshop 10am-1pm Type: Workshop Type: Workshop Type: Workshop Public/semi-public/privavte: MORNING SESSION Public/semi-public/privavte: Public/semi-public/privavte: Public/semi-public/privavte: Private 3 HRS Private Private Private No. of expected ppl: 30 No. of expected ppl: 30 No. of expected ppl: 30 No. of expected ppl: 30 Required equipment: projector, Required equipment: projector Required equipment: projector Required equipment: projector internet, printer Sessions: 1/3 Sessions: 2/3 Sessions: 3/3 Sessions: 2/2 Time: 9 am - 12:00 Time: 9 am - 12:00 Time: 9 am - 12:00
Title: Site Visit with Bestor Architects By: Barbara Bestor of Bestor Architects 1pm - 3pm Place: Bestor Architects - LUNCH 2030 Hyperion Ave LUNCH Yunhee Min Gallery Tour follow Type: Presentation + up with confirmation of times LUNCH (lunchtime lecture/ Discussion FSA FLASH (1/5) (editorial and schedule discussion 1.30-2.30pm) Public/semi-public/privavte: meeting) (Assume Culver City) 1 HR Private No. of expected ppl: 20 Required equipment: transportation Sessions: 1/1 JAMES ROJAS walk lunch Title: Towards Grumpy workshop - WUHO Title: How to Start an Futures: How our visual and Title: Eco-House Architectural Practice verbal aesthetic has us Place: Michael Tessler's By: see arch. - Sarah Ebner building Dystopia. Prototype - Mount and Michael Tessler, moderated By: Autodesk - Radha Mistry, Washington by Karina Andreeva Guest 3:30pm - 5:30pm Type: Site Visit Place: WUHO Place: WUHO AFTERNOON SESSION Public/semi-public/privavte: Type: interview/conversation Type: Presentation 2 HRS Private Public/semi-public/privavte: Public/semi-public/privavte: No. of expected ppl: 30 Required equipment: Private Private # Exp.ppl: 30 # Exp.ppl: 30 transportation Req. equip.: projector Req. equip.: projector Sessions: 1/1 Sessions: 1/1 Sessions: 1/1 Time: 4:00 pm
4-5:30 Press Preview Title: Happy Hour with Synthesis DNA By: Synthesis DNA, Curious Minds LA, FreelandBuck - Title: FSA Check-In Guests Place: Philippe's (1001 N. Title: LACCLA @ Libros Title: Conversation Club - Trial Place: Synthesis DNA Rooftop Alameda) Schmibros 6-9 pm By: Eleanor Tullock, Simon 724 South Spring Street, Suite Type: Discussion By: The Los Angeles Center for Glaister, Dan Schulz - 1101 6.30pm - 8.30pm Public/semi-public/privavte: Community Law and action SATURDAY DEBATE SERIES Participants Type: Presentation + POST-WORK Private Place: Libros Schmibros FSA x LAF COLLABORATION Place: WUHO Discussion + Drinks No. of expected ppl: Type: Discussion LAUNCH @ WUHO Type: EVENING SESSION 20 Public/semi-public/privavte: Discussion + Dinner 2 HRS Required equipment: Public/semi-public/private: Public/semi-public/privavte: Private Bring: notebooks/mtg. min Semi-Public (TBD) LAUNCH PARTY w/ LA Forum Private No. of expected ppl: 20 Sessions: Weekly Weds No. of expected ppl: 30 Newsletter No. of expected ppl: 20 Required equipment: N/A - they Time: 5:30, direct from eco Required equipment: TBD Required equipment: tables will provide wine and snacks, house 1/1 Sessions: 3/6 us to provide beer, soft drinks, additional snacks if possible Sessions: 1/1 ATTENDANCE LC EC TF KA fly in 3:53 pm Sarah Staying at House Sarah Staying at House Sarah Staying at House Sarah Staying at House # of participants
9pm - 11pm - FUN
HOUSING Sarah Staying at House Sarah Staying at House Sarah Staying at House Sarah Staying at House
LE GE ND negotiated by LC we can enter WUHO from here negotiated by EC negotiated by KA negotiated by TF FSA SUMMER 2018 EVENTS - need to seek out cool venues / drinks and catering, etc Organsied / Led by us or invited guests Figure 9: A Screenshot of the first two weeks of ‘The Master Spreadsheet’, the document used to organise and track the constantly changing schedule.
FSA17 Returning guests / participants / Charretteadvisors 6(1) Spring 2020|134
Regular public Presentation + Debate series - invited guests, collab with LA forum, and cool venues Lunch & Learns (arch office visits)
FSA18s teaching proposals potential events with partners orgs (April LA trip meet-ups) - to be contacted about LOCKED IN! freespace
Figure 10: overhead. The 2018 group was larger, with slightly more men than women, a A cycling tour event in Long wider age range and from a much broader range of backgrounds - including Beach with Roundhouse LA art, urban planning, graphic design and property development. This time the (Simeon Hunter). ‘uniform’ was more varied, the group providing the colourful backdrop against the beige stucco of the house. The garden party, as an unorthodox beginning to a school, set the tone in its relaxed and entertaining way and created the catalyst for the group to bond and begin to understand what they had flown out to LA to attend.
In the wake of an absurd amount of administration to make sure the school happened, we had not had much opportunity to share with the participants what it was we had planned. Our intensive organisational spreadsheet was still in flux just days before FSA18 started, so for a large portion of that year’s group it was a courageous move to put enough faith in such an unknown and to travel across the world or the country to attend it.
Our FSA18 intro session outlined exactly what the school would look like over the course of the six weeks. The programme would run from 10 am to 8 pm, Tuesday through Sunday, with around three sessions a day and the occasional lunch-and-learn. The aim was that we would accommodate those who were working full or part time in LA with weekend and night classes, as well as those who had the time to attend the school in its entirety. All workshops were
135 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 optional and there was no enforced output. Once a week there would be a group check-in to reflect on the direction, structure, and relative success of the school. We made it clear that alongside their own teaching sessions, the participants had full agency to curate the sessions with the collaborators as they saw fit, and we provided all the contact information of anyone involved in the school.
The first three weeks were largely curated by us, and the schedule for the following three weeks was cleared for the participants to curate their own curriculum. We also wanted to ensure that we made time for desert trips and beach days, tours of the best of LA’s architecture, drinks and meals together and time for organic development. In spite of this attempted clearing of the schedule, we still had over sixty different workshops, each with a unique premise and style.
This made for an incredibly interesting curriculum, albeit a busy one. We had tried to focus the collaborations on organisations or individuals taking an alternative and playful approaches to architectural practice, or groups with a focus on meaningful change in the context of Los Angeles. It was a showcase of other ways of practising architecture and an attempt to tap into the embedded knowledge of life outside the studio, the things we learn from a city, the places that comprise it and the people who inhabit it. The participants also offered a unique array of classes – from unremarkable photography, to a weekly Conversation Club that challenged how we respond to architectural production, to a tour of one of the participant’s eco-house developments, to a run-down of design culture in Dubai.
We found it very difficult to find a permanent home for over fifty participants from 23 countries – particularly being a new, and somewhat rogue, organisation with a reputation for rebellion. So, the first few weeks we had to make do with what we could find: architectural offices, my house, bars and cafes, galleries, neighbourhood walking tours, and public parks were the initial venues for the school. This had the advantage of imposing a compulsory exploration of LA and the unintentional consequence of having to consider how the space that you are in changes the conversations you are having. Perhaps this partially contributed to the fact that the discussions of FSA18 felt much more productive and much less woeful than those of the first year. It helped that we also had a variety of disciplines in attendance, who had little interest in lamenting the problems with the field of architecture and insisted from the beginning that the typical jargon of the architect’s dialogue be rejected in favour of more inclusive language. This had the effect of framing the conversation towards more tangible and comprehendible ideas and solutions.
The second half of the school, as part of a collaboration with the LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, was based in a gallery on Hollywood Boulevard. In LA’s hottest summer in decades, the non-air-conditioned
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Figure 11: space felt very reminiscent of the previous year’s locale, but set the Eleanor Tullock presents scene for unorthodox workshops, exhibitions, experimental making and her proposal for a workshop production, some great parties, and even the accidental establishment of exploring the strange world of Libertarian Seasteading (Tessa what was basically an illegal nightclub. The backdrop of Hollywood’s chaos Forde). and characters helped to inspire the chaos and characters of the school and brought many curious members of the public off the street – even one who came to attend every subsequent session and became our in-house photographer.
For us four coordinators, in 2018 our learning was much less focused on the content of the workshops and the conversations surrounding them and more on whether or not the school was living up to its intentions. Despite our objective as organisers to make the programme itself non-hierarchical, it became difficult for us to blend into the participant group and separate ourselves from coordination roles as we attempted to hand over the torch. The incredible complexity of running a school and the huge amount of administration work involved proved almost impossible to part with. In many ways we did too much, and further iterations of the school may re-imagine its organisation with more flexibility and a more established system for handing off responsibility.
There were for the 2018 school some pitfalls similar to those that the 2017
137 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 iteration faced. For one, the issue of money was pervasive. The irony of setting Figure 12: ourselves up as a company to receive money was that it cost about as much The first edition of ‘The Daily User’, a publication by the as what we had been offered in donations, so we actually lost money, and participants of 2018 (FSA 2018 through failed fundraisers forced the participants to become involved in that Cohort). burden. In trying to remove our egos from the face of the school, we also sacrificed some of the school’s transparency. There was a vagueness to the school and who was running it, which also meant that its intentions were similarly confusing. While the concept of a relay-type school – where each incoming group of participants gets to take the baton from the previous year and run with it where they like – is an intriguing and appealing one, it is also a huge ask, and one we failed to voice until the school was already in session.
In saying this, the school ran almost entirely without issue. It was exciting, new and provided each participant and collaborator with a wealth of new ideas, knowledge and insight into different ways of understanding and practising creatively. And like the previous year, despite the lack of enforced physical output, there was a significant level of creative production, from models, to exhibitions, to a publication called ‘The Daily User’, and to the questions and
Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020|138 freespace potential solutions raised by each conversation. Lead by tech-savvy Elisha, we did a thorough job of archiving all of this, through the online educational tool Are.na.5 The coursework, course outlines, photos, production and all related content from FSA is linked to our website: www.freeschoolofarchitecture.org.
The school culminated in a public exhibition and closing party at WUHO Gallery. Perhaps this was another area where our intentions as coordinators were overlooked in favour of external pressures. The need to make a final ‘statement’ or ‘prove’ that something had happened at the Free School, as well as to validate our position as a worthwhile summer residency for the LA Forum, meant we generated the only enforced output for the school, the curation of an exhibit. While a nice way to close out the six weeks, the decision should not have been ours to make, but the participants’.
In spite of this, the exhibition did demonstrate that there is something wonderful about a complete lack of enforced output in an inspirational environment. It allows room for playfulness and failure and an opportunity to create for the sake of creating. All the sessions brought something unique to the table, and while we could have allowed more time for making and responding to these, in themselves they provided a backdrop for creative output and an opportunity to make a wider comment on what it all means in the context of architecture.
Foundings, findings, futures, reflection The Free School of Architecture 2018 ended in a gallery on Hollywood Boulevard, under a disco ball, with tears, laughter and too much mescal. Overall, the school had been chaotic, intense, extremely exhausting, but fundamentally hopeful, and an incredibly complex and challenging learning experience. We shifted the conversation from ‘What is wrong with architecture’, to ‘How can we make meaningful change? What should a Free School of Architecture be?’.
FSA had a critical focus on conversations that perhaps do not have the time or space given to them within the realms of academia and practice. Instead, it was pushing towards other kinds of knowledge production, beyond ‘design’, to the kind of knowledge we learn from asking questions and actively listening to answers from people we do not usually get to hear from. This meant, as Lili put it, mundane acts of sharing could be potentially radical. Along with a lack of enforced output, this also suggested that sometimes the experience of learning is enough, without the need for any tangible proof of learning to exist.
There were discussions about how FSA might continue, such as smaller offshoots in Sweden or Dubai, more realistic weekend workshops in different cities at the same time, or simply by maintaining an online presence. The idea of a Toolkit, a how-to guide for running an FSAx wherever you are, continues to be considered.
139 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 But in spite of our most well-meaning intentions, the task of taking over Figure 13: the Free School was not one easily handed off. And in many ways, this was A display from the final exhibition in 2018 of the work unsurprising. There needs to be an element of extremeness to stir rebellion produced as part of “The or incite the kind of passion required to voluntarily run a school. For us Conversation Club in 2017, the gap between what the school was and what it could be was (Tessa Forde). so extreme, we felt we had no choice but to take it over. In 2018, though obviously flawed as anything is, the school was great, and while I am sure the participants would love for the experience to be shared in another iteration, there was not the same desire to push it forward. I am also certain that the clear burnout of the four of us (all studying or working full time while we did all this) and the extremely intimidating nature of the task, speak to the sustainability of a model with no money and a dependency on people simply wanting to learn from each other.
It would be easy to dismiss the Free School of Architecture as a ‘failure’ because it is no longer existing in the form in which we started it, but I do not believe longevity has to be the marker of a successful school. While it would be great for more people to experience a programme like FSA, it was already life-changing and incredibly influential for many of us who did. If we focus too much on whether something can be sustainable, we might never try anything.
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Figure 14: FSA does continue to exist. It exists as a group of architects, artists, A rooftop presentation by developers, urban planners and architecture enthusiasts who were shaped Synthesis DNA at their office in by it and who now shape their lives differently because of it. The realities of Downtown LA. (Tessa Forde) time and economy mean we have to be okay with that, and embrace it as a success, though, of course, if any philanthropic benefactor out there would like to give us a bunch of money to keep going – by all means we will.
As many of us go on to run our own practices, to teach or find ways to make meaningful contributions to our communities, we might reflect on some of this learning – not just in the knowledge shared between participants and collaborators, but in the pedagogical, administerial and structural experiments of the school.
To me, the critical lessons for architectural education from the experience of FSA lie in the importance of reframing the hierarchical narratives of a school and in the alternative ways we explored understanding architecture. While many of these lessons may seem obvious, exaggerating, highlighting and making a real effort to practice our intentions and values made clear which were the most interesting and important. Respecting the value that each person brings to any conversation or situation, regardless of the teacher- learner roles, played a critical part in shaping FSA’s workshops and discourse. Time and space to create and curate personal learning played a large role in
141 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020 this too, and allowed for the development of strong social bonds, making for more open and inclusive conversations. The physical exploration of place and context, especially when framed by architectural learning, is incredibly useful in understanding the environmental, social and cultural backdrops designers operate within and is a hugely important part of practice and education. The lack of enforced output, alongside an inspirational learning environment can allow for a more playful exploration of the knowledge that is being shared. And, although important in other contexts, accreditation, documentation and deliverables are not needed to validate the learning that takes place.
The Free School of Architecture was founded twice. The first time out of frustration and spite, and the second time out of frustration and a sense of hopefulness: that we can be better, that we can reshape the institutions we operate within, and that we can make meaningful change. We really just have to start.
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REFERENCES 1 Peter Zellner, ‘Architectural Education is Broken - Here’s How to Fix It’, The Architect’s Newspaper (16 September 2016). https://archpaper.com < https:// archpaper.com/2016/09/architectural-education-broken-fix/> [accessed 15 February 2020]
2 From the FSA orientation booklet, The Free School of Architecture (2017).
3 Schuyler Moore, ‘Most Films Lose Money!’, Forbes (3 January 2019)
4 FSA, ‘About’, The Free School of Architecture (03 October 2018).
5 Are.na < https://www.are.na> [accessed 15 February 2020]
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