Teaching Architecture, Practicing Pedagogy

Education has persisted as a fundamental facet of architectural culture throughout a spectrum of aesthetic, scientific, ideological, institutional and political upheavals. Pervading the realms of both professional and experimental practices, and functioning as a potent medium for the dissemination of ideas and methods, architectural pedagogy’s multiple guises across different historical and international contexts offer a diverse range of lenses for critically examining the discipline’s continuing transformations. Recognizing the current emergence of much new research on architectural education during the 20th century, this symposium seeks to create a platform for this expanding realm of scholarship, as well as an impetus for dialogue on the current state and future directions of architectural education in the 21st century in light of recent professional, social, theoretical, and technological developments.

While much existing literature has historicized a modernist era in architectural education, and though the year 1968 is often upheld as a chronological marker, the symposium does not aim to make such finite historical distinctions. Engaging instead with a broader range of concerns that have informed architectural pedagogy’s inflections during the 20th century, in its generalist approach this symposium aims to present a range of interrelated research topics, bringing scholars and students into dialogue on historiographical methods and historical concerns, and provoking a reevaluation of existing scholarship. This symposium welcomes papers based on current or recently completed doctoral dissertations that focus on innovations in teaching methods, including studio culture and the teaching of architectural history and theory; the institutional status of architectural schools; the role of politics within the architecture school; traditional and experimental models of architectural education; the uses of emerging media and technologies; national or international aims of educational programs; how policy has shaped pedagogical paradigms; the role of research in architectural schools; specific teachers, deans or institutions and their teaching philosophies; the boundaries between profession and education, the architectural office and the school; the institutional co-habitation of urbanism, planning, and architecture programs; the role of students in educational reform.

Please submit abstracts (300 word maximum) for 25-minute paper presentations, along with a CV, to practicingpedagogy@gmail.com by November 1, 2010. Participants will be notified by November 12, 2010, and will be asked to submit full paper drafts by December 20, 2010.

Organizers: Enrique Ramirez, Irene Sunwoo and Vanessa Grossman