BRADLEY WALTERS ARCHITECT

Bradley Walters, Mark McGlothlin
University of Florida

This work was first published as:

Walters, Bradley and Mark McGlothlin. 2014. “Dead Letter Office.” In Living & Learning: Proceedings of the Second International Conference of the Association of Architectural Educators, edited by Rosie Parnell et al, 94-99. Sheffield UK: University of Sheffield.

The paper was subsequently expanded and substantially revised, independently peer-reviewed, and published in the journal Charrette as follows:

Walters, Bradley and Mark McGlothlin. 2015. “Dead Letter Office.” In Charrette: Living & Learning, Volume 2, Number 1, Autumn 2015, edited by Rosie Parnell, 32-45. Sheffield UK: Association of Architectural Educators (AAE). ISSN: 2054-6718.

The full text as published can be accessed through Charrette’s website, here.

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ABSTRACT: To speak of “live” projects is also to acknowledge the presence of “dead” projects, those for whom there is no client and at the end of which there is no plan to implement or full-scale project to occupy. Severed from implementation and disconnected from professional expectations, dead projects take residence within the architectural dead letter office, a place of unbuilt or unbuildable ruminations unable to find a way into the world of built things. These projects offer a way to reconsider Live Projects by reflecting on the role of speculation and incompleteness in architectural education and in doing so can serve as a reminder that design pedagogy is inherently richer by the presence of both “live” and “dead” thinking.

KEYWORDS: design, studio, pedagogy, unbuilt, speculative

In his book The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable, Robert Harbison observed that “in no other art could one claim that there were two forms of architectures, plans on paper and structures in stone and brick.” [1] This notion of a divided architecture has been a persistent and rather contentious question for both the profession and the academy, as the argument seems forever framed by entrenched positions regarding where architectural merit may lie, either in the finite expectations of the profession, or in the esoteric indeterminacy of art. Recent interests in building have swayed the debate towards the concerns of professional competency, and more so finding this competency through simulated or direct encounters with practice, wherein the obligations to client, material, and construction can be addressed head on. This swing has reinforced the expectations that the academy operates in support of the normative practice of making buildings first and foremost, and in doing so further displaces academic imaginations and interests, that reside in the unbuilt.

As professors, our interests in material making and professional alignments run deep and we are enthused when our students can find in their work a means by which to shift between the purely speculative and a more direct and measured sense of reality. We are, however, reticent to embrace the principles of “live” work entirely, without question, or at least without concern for the discarded and dispossessed aspects of the academy. If one can accept the value of “live” work as having clear academic intent and merit, then it seems equally valid to explore its antithesis, the “dead” project. In this regard, our focus will take as its centre the idea of “dead” work, examining its potency in design pedagogy, and its promise as a counterpoint to the pressures of professional convention and conformity in architectural education.

“If the student of architecture could master the mathematical and scientific branches taught in modern polytechnic schools, make himself proficient in drawing, attend an academy of architecture, and then become in succession a good carpenter, mason, stone-cutter, painter, sculptor, and decorator – no doubt such a student would be eminently well prepared for professional life, and produce marvels of architectural art; but as human life is too short to enable one man to master practically so many arts, the question to be answered is reduced to this: Shall the pupil of architecture be educated in some mechanical workshop, in an art studio, or in a polytechnical school?” [2]

The practice of architecture has, for centuries, occupied a contested ground between craft-based practices and a discipline rooted in art, history, and cultural production. While defined literally as “master carpenter,” the Greek architekton was used to refer to both those skilled in building and artists, with backgrounds in sculpture and metalwork. [3] After largely falling out of use during the Middle Ages, the word “architect” was revived in fifteenth-century Italy, but with a different usage. During the Renaissance, “architect” was used principally to refer to those familiar with the forms of antiquity, especially those skilled in painting and sculpture. We see in this era the emergence of a fissure between the architect-as-scholar and master builder: “Because they were not building craftsmen and did not belong to the construction guilds, these men were called architects rather than master builders. As the cult of the artist developed during the Renaissance, some commentators carefully distinguished architects from master builders and craftsmen.” [4]

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, universities developed similarly parallel models of education based on liberal or mechanical arts, drawing at times sharp lines between competing educational models. [5]

While these differing science- and art-based curricular models were being developed, the study of architecture also became more firmly institutionalized within the university. This was reinforced by a certain professionalization of the discipline, growing out of genuine concerns for the public’s health, safety, and welfare as well as advocacy from professional organizations. University programs were charged with delivering a rigorous education in preparation for professional practice in architecture. While legal frameworks vary from country to country (and also from one local jurisdiction to another), completion of an accredited professional course of study is typically required for practice today.

Professional programs, however, do not fit easily within the structures of either liberal arts colleges or major research universities. In either case, professional programs transgress boundaries, either positively cross-pollinating or negatively diluting the integrity of deep silos of academic knowledge. With few exceptions, the faculty of schools of architecture are diverse, representing a range of intellectual positions and roles: the humanist, the scientist, the historian, the writer, the mentor, the researcher, the practitioner, the artist, the draftsperson, the inventor, the craftsperson, the teacher, the friend, the technician, and the artisan, to name a few. Most research universities value the individual expertise developed within these separate roles. The roles, separately identified, form a faculty; considered together, they form an architect.

Disciplinary Bounds

Fertilior seges est alienis semper in agris, Vicinumque pecus grandius uber habet (“The seed’s often more fertile in foreign fields, and a neighbour’s herd always has richer milk”) [6]

The lines between faculty and between areas of expertise can be sharply or loosely drawn, depending on the nature of the institution and the personalities of the faculty. But one of the most common fault lines is one that emerges between practitioners and those who are principally engaged in work of the academy, whether it is teaching, writing, or other research work. Those on one side or the other usually either believe passionately in their own approach or long to crossover and switch places with those on the other side.

Practice is valued largely because of its connection to materials and productive, synthetic cultures outside the university. Believers advocate for the power of constraints imposed by “the real world,” and the need to prepare students for this work. For those who advocate strongly for practice-based education, the academy can be seen as disconnected and/or aloof to the realities of practice, including regulatory issues, client management, teamwork, budget, and schedule. Those not involved in practice often have little appreciation for the tremendous amount of work involved in even modest built projects.

Those most rooted in the academy will, at times, eschew practice as a corruption and/or distraction from more rigorous educational pedagogies. Learning to do something, it can be argued, is not the same as doing the thing itself. Conventional practices that are responsive to disparate local concerns but not critical of themselves are a cause concern for many educators. As Stan Allen writes, “too often, contemporary practice oscillates between mechanical repetition and shallow novelty. Conventional practice renounces theory, but in so doing, it simply reiterates unstated theoretical assumptions. It works according to a series of enabling codes, which themselves comprise a random sampling of the dictates of professional practice and the learned habits of normal design culture. It is these unexamined codes that give practice a bad name.” [7] In their worst incarnations, educational models that emulate conventional practice can prove diluted and/or devoid of opportunities for deep and meaningful learning. Worse yet, students can come away with an incomplete understanding of the opportunities of practice, hobbling them for many years to come.

Transgressive Models: Live Projects

Recent educational experiments in designbuild and community-based design strive to address the broad professional requirements of practice while also training students through direct, hands-on work with materials, users, and/or community organizations. The “live project,” as it is most commonly known, “comprises the negotiation of a brief, timescale, budget and product between an educational organisation and an external collaborator for their mutual benefit. The project must be structured to ensure that students gain learning that is relevant to their educational development.” [8] This is an important turn in education, one that embraces the responsibilities of practice in a direct way. The live project opens the path for students to bring together aspects of practical experience while also being a part of an academic community.

As articulated by the University of Sheffield, “Live Projects set real constraints, responding to budget, brief and time. In each project there is regular contact with the client and a defined end result, normally a presentation, report and sometimes physical building work. The projects place a large responsibility on the groups to deliver; as opposed to most student projects these are public and accountable.” [9] Students learn to work within serious and typically unyielding constraints, whether they are physical, material, formal, or political in nature. The validation of the work comes principally through the ability of students to meet the goals of the project, solving thorny problems in creative ways. Teamwork, collaboration, and communication are highly-valued; the need to be accountable to schedule, budget, and program requires clear decision-making processes and organizational structures.

The merits of the live project are largely self-evident, and the projects are typically affirmational in their structure, providing the students and faculty with positive tangible products (buildings, reports, plans, etc.) that serve as physical evidence of their professional training and work. In this regard, it is difficult to find fault in their principles and outcomes, and the growing emphasis of Live Projects in design pedagogy seems entirely warranted. Yet, this growing emphasis, which seems close to drifting towards preoccupation, beckons for a counterpoint, a gadfly of sorts to remind the academy that architectural thought is not limited solely to aspirations, conversations and compromises associated with the conventions (and limitations) of normative practice.

Disciplining Practices: Dead Projects

To speak of “live” projects is also to acknowledge the presence of “dead” projects, those for whom there is no client and at the end of which there is no plan to implement or full-scale project to occupy. The dead project is severed from implementation and/or actualization, disconnected from productive processes, and often lands in the architectural dead letter office; a place of unbuilt or unbuildable ruminations that cannot quite find a way into the world of built things.

Figure 1. Disciplining. Associate Professor Martin Gundersen during studio reviews of work in progress. University of Florida School of Architecture, Architectural Design Four, Spring 2014. Photo: Lisa Huang.

The dead project gives us a way to frame a reconsideration of Live Projects by reflecting on the role of speculation and incompleteness in architectural education as contrasted with similarly fertile possibilities of the specific and determinate. This is not to suggest that these two aspects of practice work in opposition to one another, but rather it is to say that each approach can serve as a vehicle through which it is possible to better understand the possibilities of the other. By intertwining these processes, we have an opportunity to allow more projects to come alive, to unfold into or across productive streams, and to inform our discipline in inventive and unanticipated ways.

Both types of projects are included in some manner within the “practicum,” as defined by Donald A. Schön. He writes that “a practicum is a setting design for the task of learning a practice. In a context that approximates a practice world, students learn by doing, although their doing usually falls short of real-world work. They learn by undertaking projects that simulate and simplify practice; or they take on real-world projects under close supervision. The practicum is a virtual world, relatively free of the pressures, distractions, and risks of the real one, to which, nevertheless, it refers. It stands in an intermediate space between the practice world, the ‘lay’ world of ordinary life, and the esoteric world of the academy. It is also a collective world in its own right, with its own mix of materials, tools, languages, and appreciations. It embodies particular ways of seeing, thinking, and doing that tend, over time, as far as the student is concerned, to assert themselves with increasing authority.” [10]

Both types of educational projects rely on a process of learning through doing, typically based on a direct engagement with matter and materiality. There is an important process of reflective “self-education” at work in both kinds of projects, where the students’ iterative design efforts gradually close the gap between an idea or intention and the thing that he or she makes. Both live and dead projects can develop within a studio-based environment, where students learn from one another as much as they learn from precedent or studio faculty or tutors.

The parallels between the structures are so close and overlaps so many, that the lines that define and divide live and dead projects are actually quite fine. That said, it may be useful to consider the particularities of dead projects as vehicles for understanding their unique attributes, and also for informing future incarnations of Live Projects.

Spaces for Failure

A central hallmark of the dead project is that it occupies a “safe space,” where failure is allowed and encouraged. This safe space allows for open-ended speculation and experimentation, without the obligations of protecting the public’s health, safety, and welfare. Risks to others are minimized or often non-existent, and cost, budget, and schedule are typically non-issues. To develop this kind of space requires the careful construction of student/faculty relationships, where both recognize that neither of them is fully in charge of the work. In this regard, the work takes on a certain autonomous existence and develops in own momentum, steered by students and faculty, but not towards a predetermined end, but developed until the end reveals itself. Johannes Itten, in explaining his students’ work in material and texture at the Bauhaus, referred to a similar logic and momentum that emerged after a series of introductory exercises;

“In solving these problems the students developed a real designing fever. They began to rummage through the drawers of thrifty grandmothers, their kitchens and cellars, they ransacked the workshops of craftsmen and the rubbish heaps of factories and building sites. A whole new world was discovered: lumber and wood shavings, steel wool, wires, strings, polished wood, and sheep’s wool, feathers, glass, and tin foil, grids and weaves of all kinds, leather, furs, and shiny cans. Manual abilities were discovered and new textures invented. They started a mad tinkering, and their awakened instincts discovered the inexhaustible wealth of textures and their combinations.” [11]

Perhaps the hallmark of Itten’s observation is the “real design fever,” which should be understood to be present in the strongest of both live and dead projects. As a distinction, though, is Itten’s direction towards “mad tinkering,” a suggestion of unencumbered material experimentation reaching for an end that cannot be known until it is reached, which carries with it the inevitable risk of failure.

Spaces for failure are critical for development of design processes that do not have a fixed or known endpoint, and more so seek out original queries rather the repetitive thinking. Students can allow the design process itself to direct and shape subsequent studies, such that even a “failed” attempt actually provides useful seeds for the next study. Work can proceed in a fluid manner, allowing the students to recognize the value of design processes, developing along the way strategies for interrogating both themselves and their work.

Sir Kenneth Robinson’s much adored TED lecture, Do Schools Kill Creativity? observed of children that, “They’re not frightened of being wrong. I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you are not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Robinson continues to note that, “We stigmatize mistakes. And now we are running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.” [12]

When the forum of the dead project becomes this kind of “safe space,” we find that students produce more work with greater enthusiasm and enjoyment, and without fear of penalties for ideas gone awry. Students are encouraged to make without over-thinking, and this is reinforced by discussions that celebrate the possibilities of the tentative, incomplete, and even the naïve. In many ways, it is the failure that allows for critical learning to occur. Mistakes, missteps, and dramatic failures of construction or intent are accepted as a part of the learning process. They are not always pretty and are rarely appreciated by the student at the time, but they are the moments that often define a project’s hinge point or even a student’s overall trajectory.

Disciplining

More often than not, the dead project is one that operates at the scale of the drawing board or cutting mat. Even if the project is contemplating the future of a vast urban territory or the full-scale details of a wall assembly, the fact that it is often studied at the scale of the author’s body through drawings and model constructions is important. The bodily scale of drawings and models allows the student to work in a rapid manner, making and re-making the project. This allows for an iterative process to be developed, especially one with short cycles of production, testing, measurement, and evaluation. Students benefit from this disciplining as a means of learning through a continual process of making.

The manageable scale of work products means that students can efficiently complete them and gain useful feedback quickly, which allows for numerous cycles within the course of a project’s development. With multiple iterations, students gain a tacit understanding of how to work critically, allowing them to become both more precise and more efficient over time.

Lumpy Pedagogies

Viewed from a certain distance, many professional projects share a similar structure: beginning, middle, end. Nothing to something. Ideas to buildings. Vague to specific. General to particular. While Live Projects do not portend to be “professional” in the same way, it is common for them to adopt some of the same delivery structures and often even the same nomenclature for phases of design and/or construction. This is a strength of the live project, as it helps introduce students to the professional structures and languages that will be expected of them in practice.

Neither live nor dead projects are obliged to strictly reflect the linearity of process, nor are they expected to follow predetermined processional sequences, though the constraints of Live Projects may prove more inflexible than those of dead projects. This allows the opportunity for dead projects to be structured in alternative ways that allow for targeted learning to occur at particular moments within the project’s development. The process can be intentionally weighted in uneven and lumpy ways to develop certain skills or sensitivities in the studio.

This requires careful construction, and often the work of numerous faculty members working in concert across a student’s educational curriculum. There are many possible approaches to create this kind of lumpiness: shifts and oscillations in scale, changing project parameters, alternative methods of inquiry, and shifts in media, to name but a few. This can be a part of a curricular dialogue between students and faculty, one that requires “thinking on your feet” and that encourages a nimbleness in critical thought. It reinforces the notion that there is not one solution, approach, or process, but in fact many. When faculty remain nimble, they can adjust sequences such that exercises occur at precisely the moments when students may be most receptive to the particular skills, concepts, or subject matter at hand.

The difficulties of lumpy pedagogies are twofold. Firstly, the faculty must be willing to recognize the need for lumpiness rather than overarching order, and that there is value in uneven learning at concentrated moments, so long as broader academic consistencies are met. Secondly, there is greater emphasis on the school’s overall curricular structure rather than its individual courses to provide balance. The shifting of emphasis from the class to the curriculum may have fallen out of fashion in some schools, but it affords much greater educational value than is possible when curricular concerns are addressed only through singular, isolated classes, studios, or projects.

In a lecture at the University of Florida, Bruce Lindsey, then Head of the School of Architecture at Auburn University, noted that curricular discussions in architecture schools often start with broader pedagogical objectives and connections, but quickly retreat into an exercise of shuffling boxes within a tracking diagram, wherein broader curricular issues and pedagogical goals and objectives are quickly framed into neatly and conveniently packaged courses, classes, wherein the ease of delivery becomes one of the primary driving measures of pedagogical success. [13] In fairness, this is an inherent challenge in design education in general, and one positioned often by external, rather than internal concerns. [14] Complex ideas and exercises must be rooted in some find of foundation work, wherein more direct and simple exercises build upon one another, are revisited and then refined in order to address the more complex situation at hand. In many ways, both live and dead projects are imbedded at this level of thinking, and parsing them out as separate and colliding agendas is a rather abrupt and artificial approach. That being said, the omnipresence of bureaucratic pressures and constraints, and the requirements of tracking mechanism and matrices that ensure students move through the curriculum in an efficient manner exaggerates this kind of thinking, and unfortunately, it is one that all educators would begrudgingly acknowledge.

Lindsey’s appeal for a different kind of curricular diagram resonates clearly and finds a certain affinity with the curricular diagram at the Bauhaus, which avoided the lockstep logics that have come to dominate many design curricula. We would suggest that the nonlinear thinking so essential to lumpy pedagogies is both their limitation and their power, as the lumpiness will necessitate faculty collaborations, communication, and a perpetual search for some degree of consensus, while also having to accept the unavoidable disagreements, disputes and debates that are forever colouring the conversation.

Full-Scale and Real-Time

One of the most celebrated aspects of the live project that is the fact that many of these projects involve full-scale project work, built by students or produced as a result of the design work prepared by students. It may be one of the most meaningful results of design-build projects, as everyone involved grows through a direct engagement with matter, materiality, and space. Drawings and models are typically used as interim studies, representations, and approximations, operating as placeholders for the building that arrives at a certain point in the process.

The dead project gives us the opportunity to challenge this representational aspect of drawing and model constructions. It is possible to create an environment in which the drawing is not representative but is rather the thing itself.

This follows the educational structure promoted by Maria Montessori, one that proceeds from concrete towards the abstract. For Montessori, the bodily engagement with space and matter is primary and allows for the creation of deep knowledge. [15] By approaching the architectural design process in a similar manner, the drawing and model can serve as the centre of the educational process and need not refer to something else that is absent and largely not understood by student. This kind of approach relies on experiential thinking and making, and as such tends to drift away from the familiar process whereby the abstract becomes increasing real. In its stead is a process that favours architecture’s ineffable qualities, and thus repositions abstraction as not simply a beginning. This trajectory, from real to abstract, offers students the opportunity to rethink their preconceptions at a meta-level, asking questions that do evade conventional measures, and as such may expose architecture’s origins rather than its ends. It should be noted, however, that dead projects do not simply exercises of abstraction, but rather that they oscillate between the concrete and the real, beholden to neither and perhaps in greater service of redefining the relationship the two.

In his review of the 1983 exhibition of Daniel Libeskind’s Chamber Works, Robin Evans recognized precisely this point: “Architecture, which has always involved drawing before building, can be split into prior and subsequent activities: design and construction. The building can be discarded as an unfortunate aftermath, and all the properties, values, and attributes that are worth keeping can be held in the drawing; perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that they retract back into the drawing.” [16] When architecture “retracts” in this way and resides solely in drawings and models, students have an opportunity to become more directly and intimately involved in its making. They can fully know and own their work process, and can grow through direct, full-scale and real-time experimentation. This kind of immediacy of work and self-awareness of process can prove immensely rewarding, and though both live and dead projects share in the potential of understanding of cause and effect in design work, they arrive at this understanding through differing means and ends. Live Projects, by their very nature, position the student within a broader network of individuals and parameters, and the student undoubtedly comes to know their work and influence as being a part of this network. Though dead projects may approach a similar context in terms of studio work and collaborative thinking, it is likely that the dead project directs students towards more inward thinking and reflections, and thus an understanding of their personal work in a discrete manner.

Emergence, Indulgence, and Cultivation

If one of the greatest benefits to the dead project is its ability to challenge the representational aspects of the conventional architectural design process, it must be understood that this is accomplished by an intentional valuing of the internal logics and emergent ideas of process rather than the preoccupations of a “defined end result, normally a presentation, report and sometimes physical building work”. [17] This reinforces the understanding that the design process can be a synthetic act of thinking through making, wherein the ends and means are indistinguishable, explored and reflected upon simultaneously, in real time, and without the concern of being in service of something else. [18]

This process-centric model is anchored most directly to the pedagogical philosophies and curricular models of the early Bauhaus, wherein students were engaged in a progressive sequence of courses and exercises that started with Vorkurs, and ended with Architecture. This foundation course, developed by Johannes Itten, comprised the first year of the students’ education, and intended to “stimulate individual creativity through a succession of exercises teaching abstract relationships of forms, materials and colours, problem-simple to complex,” that simultaneously “cleansed the students’ formal preconceptions, treating them as corrupted bodies laden with a ragbag of cultural detritus.” [19] Though historians and theoreticians may dispute the reasoning for the severity of this position, it is clear that Itten’s logic, as that of his successors Moholy-Nagy and Joseph Albers, was to provide students a way of working that moved the creative process out from under the shadow of convention.

In many ways, the dead projects operate in a similar manner, insofar as they allow, and may even encourage, a direct departure from the normative expectations of architecture as buildings. More so, the expectations of conventional reviews and assessments are rather ill-fitted, as the pre-occupation is not on the making of things to be exhibited and discussed, but rather on the experiential discoveries born through the act of making. This logic finds a certain affinity with the Bauhaus as well. As Josef Albers notes of the Vorkurs coursework;

“First we seek contact with material…Instead of pasting it, we will put paper together by sewing, buttoning, riveting, typing, and pinning it; in other words we fasten it in a multitude of ways. We will test the possibilities of its tensile strength and compression-resistant strength. In doing so, we do not always create “works of art,” but rather experiments; it is not our ambition to fill museums; we are gathering experiences.” [20]

Alternative Paths

One of the most important outcomes of studiobased learning in architectural education is fundamentally its preparation for practice. As Alfonso Corona-Martínez summarizes in his book, The Architectural Project, “If we believe that architecture resides in every building and can be identified in the project, it follows that in the process of making that project, everything meaningful for architecture will somehow happen in the design studio. Through the minds of the students and over their drawing boards must pass everything that is relevant for architecture. It is not enough to learn the routines of a practice the student still cannot master. Students must also learn there, and through the same medium, what architecture is and should be.” [21] The spectre that Corona-Martínez implicitly raises is that of architecture’s inherent meaning, and in doing so exposes what is perhaps the clearest distinction between live and dead projects.

Live Projects tend to align with the question of “what architecture is” rather than “what it should be”, and in doing so find meaning though the direct connections drawn between designer and client, between the project brief and its context, between the pressing budgetary issues of what is wanted and what can be afforded, and between what is imagined and what can be accomplished within the bounds of outcomes and deadlines. This is a powerful learning experience, as the full complexity of a project may be more properly understood and discussed. That being said, it is also an experience that could be equally dampening in terms of architectural meaning, particularly if the pressures of schedule and outcomes take an overly prominent position in the process and leave little room to discuss a project’s position within and advancement of, the broader architectural discourse. The race towards an end can quickly lead to a process where the ends justify the means. Complex questions can become oversimplified, bracketed for expedient decision-making, and then left to snap judgements that offer little opportunity for reflection, let alone retreat, given the pressures to arrive on time with the expected deliverables in hand.

The dead project can similarly be structured to predetermined outcomes, and may suffer similar challenges from looming deadlines. However, it can also be structured to provoke students to pursue a wide range of individually determined paths. Both dead and Live Projects can embed questions that allow students to respond in divergent and expansive ways, which may at times result in “architectural” projects that are not buildings or urban plans, and may even push the margins of architectural thinking and making overall. In this regard, there is a shared sense of “breaking the rules,” in both live and dead projects. The distinction may lie, then, on which rules are being broken and to what end.

Understanding this difference requires a more targeted lens, and more so will yield more overlaps than individual traits. In this regard, the sense of live work needs to be understood as upending, in part, the normative expectations of practice, and in doing to attempting to find alternate means of design practice. Dead projects, in contrast, may upend the tenets of design thinking, and as may become an entrée into art, graphic design, fashion, film, and/or writing. The dead project can be a lens with many foci, allowing students to find different possibilities within it depending on their particular approach. Within our own field, the dead project can provoke different design approaches and material resolutions, possibly suggesting alternative methods of practice. It would be hugely problematic to construct an architectural curriculum that is systemically rudderless and responsive only to the whims of individual faculty, but equally problematic to expect that curricular decisions serve solely as a preface for practice, particularly if practice is narrowly defined as the act of making buildings. Both approaches would be inherently limiting. It is critical that students are afforded the opportunity to seek out or create paths that may suit them better than a single predetermined mold, and to afford them time in the process to understand, reflect upon, challenge, and potentially reject the process, brief, or expectations.

This mentality, alas, may prove difficult to position within the limits of all Live Projects, whereas it is central to dead projects. Dead projects are self-reflective, and given the intertwined qualities of process, can be selfreferential and self-critical to a fault. This must be understood to be a strength afforded only when the full pressures and expectations of the profession are held at bay. Dead projects, and the lumpy pedagogies that provide their foundations, allow for, encourage, and may even expect, students to indulge in and become completely absorbed by intellectual pursuits, and in doing so find meaning in disparate sources and references that would otherwise be excluded.

Knowing too quickly, knowing too late

After examining the evolving role of women in professional classical music, and more precisely the audition process that carried so many undisclosed biases, Mark Crinson concluded;

“Why, for so many years, were conductors so oblivious to the corruption of their snap judgments? Because we are often careless with our powers of rapid cognition. We don’t know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don’t always appreciate their fragility. Taking our powers of rapid cognition seriously means we have to acknowledge the subtle influences that can alter or undermine or bias the products of our unconscious. Judging music sounds like the simplest of tasks. It is not, any more than sipping cola or rating chairs or tasting jam is easy.” [22]

His observations should not be limited to the professional musician, or doctor, or jam-maker, and if extended to architecture, become a validation of the need for dead projects within architectural education. The necessity for schedules, deadlines and deliverables is a constant for live and dead projects alike. For Live Projects, these issues are likely to be defined at the outset of a project with contingencies built in, and as such provide direction and encourage timeliness in decision-making, in turn reinforcing professionalism in both conduct and efficiency in the design process. This kind of schedule and sequence creates few problems for straightforward projects, as the lessons of each decision can be discussed openly and directly with students. Yet, as project complexity and deliverables grow, it is increasingly likely that the decision-making process becomes top-heavy, driven by the pressures of schedule efficiency and omnipresent deadlines, which take as their casualties the nuances, complexities, contractions and undisclosed biases that frame each decision. In this regard, the potential of snap judgements become increasingly present, particularly if the pressure of schedule, budget and predetermined deliverables become a primary driving factor. In order to keep a project moving forward, the faculty may overlook their roles as mentors and assume command, enforcing quick decisions within the design process that may veer between precise thinking and personal preference. At its best, this kind of snap judgement, if informed by direct experience and professional wisdom, can provide much needed clarity and direction to the issues at hand. At its worst, this kind of quick thinking may infringe upon more principled academic objectives, displacing the objectives of learning with the production of a predetermined end.

Ursula McClure notes of architectural research studios, that “to indulge is one thing; to become self-indulgent is another. Professors would be remiss to ignore this aspect of the profession.” [23] In all fairness, the critique of over-directedness and self-indulgence can be applied just as easily (and correctly) to dead projects as to Live Projects. Live Projects do not take specific privilege to this characteristic, and dead projects can easily be couched within the self-referential interests of individual faculty. One distinction, however, lies in the fundamental differences between live and dead projects. Live Projects, whether normative or speculative, offer the opportunity to explore differing opinions from many parties – students, faculty, critics, consultants, stakeholders, etc. This richness can offer a wonderful opportunity to align disparate interests and instill a spirit of collaboration and coordination towards a common end. At the same time, the faculty leading Live Projects may discover that the pressing issues of schedules, budgets and stakeholders force the hand of the studio, and in doing so lead to snap judgments and compromises that solve the problems of a project, but stifle the advancement of the discipline.

In contrast, dead projects often may have fewer external pressures, and thus can afford a slowness of process that can expose and confront the inherent biases of the student, the professors, the critics, and the architectural discipline as a whole. Contingencies and alternate plans may not be needed, as the issues and conflicts within a project can be addressed head-on and without the overt pressure for seeking compromise or consensus. This is perhaps, the greatest struggle of the dead project, as the pressures placed on students and faculty are often bound up in the abilities of both to accept the inevitability of conflicting and irreconcilable readings of the project. In this regard, it is essential that both student and professor, but more so the professor, be forthcoming about his or her interests and biases, as this is not a moment to enforce or indoctrinate, but to accept the inherent value of differing opinions.

It is fair to say that many of the issues bound up in dead projects would likely be governed by Sayre’s Law, and as such would likely erupt in impassioned and often circular debates that advance little beyond the academic. Live Projects, by their very nature, avoid such heated, circular and self-referential logics. Live Projects have many hands involved, and thus cannot be easily steered by dominant dogmas or self interests. In this regard, the potential rewards of Live Projects are not in question, but their institutionalization may be, particularly if they find themselves pressured into conforming to the professional standards and value systems that the live project seeks to reframe. Given the isolated state of the dead project, it is fair to say that its process can clearly teeter on the edge between critical awareness and self-indulgence, but this kind of vulnerability has specific merit. Like the live project, the dead project is in search, at least in part, of the moving target that is architectural value and cultural meaning. Whereas Live Projects may find this assessment through the shared efforts of many, the dead project may retreat towards internalized issues, and as such both reveal and conceal the peculiar interests, values and judgments of the individual student, their peers and the faculty. To offer a more poetic image to this struggle, the inherent debates within the dead project are akin to the laboured and backbreaking act of panning for gold; given the right matrix, the circular motions, kneading of material, and flushing of lighter weight debris will yield a fine grain of enriched material.

To be clear, dead projects rarely attempt to address the full complexity of architecture as is pertains to the aspects of clients, stakeholders context, construction, and so on. They also run the risk of becoming too self-absorbed and self-referential, particularly when the faculty uses the dead project as an opportunity to impose their own will over that of their students. That being said, similar characteristics of imposed logics and professorial dogmas can permeate Live Projects just as easily. In this regard, both live and dead projects can be accused to potentially telling students what to think, as opposed to helping them think.

Dead on Arrival

One could easily say that the arts, the humanities and architecture have shared in a rather strained and distant relationship with one another since the invention of the printing press, as all lay claim to housing with greater permanence the shared pursuit of cultural truth. Victor Hugo provided a beautiful clarity to this confrontation in his novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, noting in the chapter “This Will Kill That “architecture is dead, dead beyond recall, slain by the printed book, slain because is was less durable, slain because it cost too much.” [24] It is perhaps curious that Douglas Darden draws an excerpt of this chapter at the end of his book, Condemned Buildings. The architectural work contained within is largely the product of ten unbuilt pursuits, residing only loosely in model and more precisely in highly detailed and rendered drawings that hint as a broader, enigmatic narrative for each project. Though each project can be interpreted independently, Darden provides a conceptual stitch of sorts to help tether the projects together; “The ten works of architecture cited in this book were constructed from a particular canon of architecture that has persisted throughout the centuries and the varieties of architectural styles. The buildings are a turning-over, one by one, of those canons. Like the action of the plow, this was done not to lay waste to the canons, but to cultivate their fullest growth.” [25] Darden’s observations offer a distinct clarity into the potential merits of the most extreme of dead projects, namely those never intended to leave the page because the built world is incapable of holding them. Projects such as Condemned Buildings, Piranesi’s Carceri, Kaplan and Krueger’s aggressive and mocking Mosquitoes, and Lauretta Vinciarelli’s body of ephemeral watercolours, all share the common trait of remaining at the margins of the architectural practice. Some, like Vinciarelli’s paintings and Piranesi’s etchings, approach the ideas of architectural space through the proximity that the page provides, evoking a full sense of spaces both tortured (Piranesi) and serene (Vinciarelli), without committing their ideas to the limitations of building and material presence. In this regard, they do not attempt to find merit in building, but rather help to steer architectural thought through the rendering of space that cannot be built.

Darden’s subtle poetics, alongside the more aggressive and uninhibited work of Kaplan and Krueger, take as their charge a critique of architecture itself. Where Darden chooses to till the fields of architecture through lyrical subtleties and semiology, Kaplan and Krueger veer towards more violent and cynical methods, laying waste the conventional expectations of architecture in order to rekindle its inner fire; “Architectural experimentation, gripped correctly, is a political hammer, demolishing the primitive shack of thought currently guiding architectural ideologies.” [26] Neither approach is ashamed or self-conscious, and both act in service of the discipline of architecture, only the advancement of this service is inherently unsettling to those intent on defining architectural thought through professional competencies only. In this regard, dead projects that attempt to critically challenge the status quo of architecture are perhaps the most disquieting, because their shared intent is precisely to agitate an otherwise stultified profession.

Live Projects embrace architectural thinking in a comprehensive and inclusive manner, but may only move the discipline forward in very small increments. Dead projects, in contrast, may accept the risk of huge strides of thinking and accept the causalities that come with these strides with critical disregard, but perhaps that is their intent. As Kaplan and Kruger note, “Thinking is good for you (by the way this idea is nowhere to be found in either Freud, Marx, Le Corbusier, or Einstein). Our objective is to hot-wire your thinking engine, so that you can deliver some torque to the ideas that might be up there. However, if all we get is smoke or the smell of burning rubber, then maybe there’s nothing left to do but say with bravado and self-assurance, “Pass the Sweet’s Catalogue, please.” [27]

Conclusions

As educators who are intensely interested in issues of both live and dead projects, the real questions do not centre on which approach is better or worse in the abstract, but rather how to structure either kind of project as a component of an architectural education.

If the question was simply “how should we teach our students to do ‘X,’” our job would be simple. The structure of this mandate suggests a certain clarity of intention, objectives, goals and outcomes, all of which are coupled with an equally clear set of metrics through which the efficiency and effectiveness of teaching and learning can be measured. There might still be some discussion around best practices, about sequencing and order, or about the relative importance of certain steps in the process, but the process, and more critically its terminus, are, by and large, clear and unwavering from the outset.

If this end could be consistently determined and agreed upon, our jobs would be manageable. The difficulty we face is that the intention and outcomes are not uniformly known, nor should they be. As Donald Schön wrote in Educating the Reflective Practitioner, “the problems of real-world practice do not present themselves to practitioners as well-formed structures. Indeed, they tend not to present themselves as problems at all but as messy, indeterminate situations.” [28] The indeterminacy to which Schön refers is inherently complex and indeed messy. The characteristics of both live and dead projects are likely to be found constructively interwoven in the best of cases, but just as often, these characteristics will be knotted together and straining against one another. This is particularly clear in curricular discussions, where the questions of distributing the architectural objectives, constraints and contingencies are most heatedly debated. Given the complexities at hand, these kinds of curricular discussions may find comfort in the breaking down of complexity into manageable tasks, as if Ockham’s razor can adequately parse these complex issues into discrete and discernible tasks. Champions of dead project may find comfort by directing curricular attention to conceptual thinking and avant-garde experimentation, but in doing so may exaggerate the tenuous connections to the larger world of architectural practice. Similarly, enthusiasts of Live Projects, particularly design-build variants, may rally lovingly around direct experiential learning found through building or the clarity afforded by a refined, singular plan, but reduce any theoretical principles to conceptual asides. In either case, we see an over-simplification of the discipline, a conscious editing of the complex, and a reduction and streamlining of process to both create favoured end points and the choreographed curricular paths to reach them.

This is admittedly an important part of what we do as educators. It is, after all, our job to structure the educational process, to formulate strategies for building competency and knowledge in our students. But what and how we edit to structure the learning process is of critical concern. As Schön has written, “the most important areas of professional practice now lie beyond the conventional boundaries of professional competence.” [29] If we recognize the truth in this statement, the education of architects must be always inventive, projective, forward-looking, and adaptive. In this regard, architectural thinking and making can benefit from the lessons of both live and dead projects equally, as well as a blurring of the distinctions between life and death.

Acknowledgements

At the University of Florida, the curriculum is a shared project of the entire faculty. The present work is developed within the context of a thoughtful curriculum that benefits from the work of many hands over many years. The curriculum continues to evolve, and it is hoped that this document furthers that mission. Thanks to the many students and faculty who contribute every day to the vibrancy of the discourse at the University of Florida School of Architecture.

REFERENCES

[1] Robert Harbison, The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1994), 161.

[2] Leopold Eidlitz, The Nature and Function of Art, More Especially of Architecture (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1881), 479.

[3] Mary N. Woods, From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 5.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Joan Ockman, “The Turn of Education,” in Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2012, 13-17.

[6] Publius Ovidius Naso (“Ovid”), Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), AD 2, translated by A. S. Kline 2001, http://www.poetryintranslation.com/klineasartoflove.htm, accessed: 4 August 2014. Original Latin from: http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/ovid/ovid.artis1.shtml (lines 349-350), accessed: 4 August 2014.

[7] Stan Allen, Practice: Architecture Technique + Representation, Expanded Second Edition (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), xii.

[8] Jane Anderson and Colin Priest, Live Projects, http://liveprojectsnetwork.org/liveprojects/, accessed: 4 August 2014.

[9] About Live Projects. University of Sheffield School of Architecture, http://www.liveprojects.org/, accessed: 4 August 2014.

[10] Donald A. Schön, Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987), 37.

[11] Johannes Itten, Design and Form. The Basic Course at the Bauhaus. Trans. John Maass, (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1963), 43-44.

[12] Do Schools Kill Creativity?” Ken Robinson. Web. 18 Oct. 2015. www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity

[13] Bruce, Lindsey. “Sustainable Practice/Community Works: Sambo Mockbee and the Rural Studio.” Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. 23 Jan. 2006. Lecture.

[14] The question of external forces and/or evaluative measures is a constantly shifting and surprisingly complex concern. Validating and/or accrediting bodies (RIBA and NAAB for example), provide a means of establishing consistency between disparate professional programs and their curriculums, and ensure that certain competencies are being met. That being said, the relationship between accrediting systems and curricular issues can be quite tense, as curricular development can often conflict with the preferred ends that may be suggested through accreditation, particularly if curricular decisions and coursework emerge simply to meet the expectations of competency rather than addressing the broader aspirations of the curriculum. This kind of pressure, when coupled with a host of additional institutional requirements and agendas too eccentric to measure, can create a tremendous amount of interference in curricular discussions and leave surprisingly little room for alternate curricular thinking.

[15] Maria Montessori, “The Montessori Method: Scientific Pedagogy as Applied to Child Education” in The Children’s Houses, with additions and revisions by the author, trans. Anne E. George (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1912), 199-200.

[16] Robin Evans, “In Front of Lines That Leave Nothing Behind,” in Architectural Theory Since 1968, ed. Michael K. Hays, K. Michael. (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1998), 488.

[17] About Live Projects.

[18] This kind of open-ended thinking in the design process is common attribute of the studio sequence and curriculum at the School of Architecture at the University of Florida. The school finds its pedagogical roots in Modernist tenets, and more particularly within the principles of the Bauhaus curriculum. Though numerous internal school references could be used, perhaps a momentary return to the Bauhaus will offer insight, Johannes Itten’s particular passage from regarding the first of his objectives for the Basic Course at the Bauhaus seems appropriate, “To free the creative powers and thereby the art talents of the students. Their won experiences and perceptions were to lead a genuine work. The students were to free themselves gradually from dead conventions and to take courage for work of their own.” Johannes Itten, Design and Form. The Basic Course at the Bauhaus. Trans. John Maass, (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1963), 9.

[19] Mark Crinson and Jules Lubbock. Architecture. Art of Profession? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). 92-3.

[20] Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman. Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 17.

[21] Alfonso Corona-Martínez, trans. by Alfonso Corona-Martínez and Malcolm Quantrill, The Architectural Project (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003), 42.

[22] Malcolm Gladwell, Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), 252.

[23] Ursala Emery McClure, “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Use and Abuse of the Research Studio.” Journal of Architectural Education. 62. no1. (September 2007), 73.

[24] Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. (New York: The Lowell Press), 222.

[25] Douglas Darden, Condemned Buildings: An Architect’s Pre-Text. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 9.

[26] 26 Ken Kaplan and Ted Krueger, Mosquitoes. A Handbook for Survival. Pamphlet Architecture 14. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 7.

[27] Kaplan and Krueger, 10.

[28] Schön, 4.

[29] Schön, 7.

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