Charrette 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 Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020|124 freespace 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.