□ 刊发于《新建筑》
2007年第06期
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控制贪食
拉尔夫·勒纳
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作者单位：香港大学建筑学院
控制贪食
Managing Gluttony
拉尔夫·勒纳
Ralph Lerner
摘 要 现在学习建筑的学生需要掌握比以前更多的东西，如计算机和图像、可持续发展、媒体研究、都市规划、城市景观、批判性理论和批评、全球化等。建筑学的研究生教学所面临的挑战是需要平衡与建筑、城市和景观设计相关的极其繁杂的主题，同时将重点放在培养基本技能以及把握灵活多变的学科界限。
建筑学潜在的多学科交叉需求以及研究性大学的其他学术机构，很自然地使得我们重视在文化、社会和政治环境中建筑、城市、景观和建造技术间的关系，密切关注世界范围内的设计中心和自己机构里的其他学科。另外，教师和管理者应该对新事物非常敏感，如研究方法、先进的信息技术、国际视野的实践、环境和可持续发展、新的建造技术和材料等。成功的研究生培养计划会不断地改进课程大纲，并意识到建筑师正面临着非同寻常的全新的建筑项目。
关键词 建筑学 研究生教育 平衡
ABSTRACT Architecture is larger than ever, and a new problem has arisen in the last decade out of the need to stuff ever more content into a student's period of study-versus the pressures, from outside of higher education, to keep the period of a student's studies as trim as possible. Simply put, we are being required to eat much-too-much for the bodies we are allowed.
The challenges, here, are the need to balance the introduction to a tremendous number of topics relevant to the design of building, cities, and landscapes, with the need to concentrate on establishing the basic skills and rather flexible boundaries of the discipline.
The potential for interdisciplinary programs within a school of architecture, and with other academic units at a research university, should naturally help us stress the relationship of architecture, urbanism, landscape, and building technologies to their cultural, social, and political milieu. It is my view that we should look to work as closely with the “centers” of design throughout the world, as with other academic disciplines within our home institutions.
Teachers and administrators should also be sensitive to ideas related to current, and emerging, developments in: research techniques; advanced information technology, international aspects of practice; environmental and sustainability considerations; and new building methods and materials. A successful post-graduate program is constantly transforming its curriculum to recognize that architects are increasingly presented with unusual and new building programs, and that practitioners today are expected to formulate solutions that enhance the quality of life in unexpected environments. This brings up new and important questions, which teachers and students, alike, need to be asking.
KEY WORDS architecture，post-graduate education，balance
中图分类号 TU-05 文献标识码 B 文章编号 1000-3959（2007）06-00-00
Today I will spend a few minutes discussing a problem facing many of us in the business of designing curricula for post-graduate education in architecture. Architecture is larger than ever, and a new problem has arisen in the last decade out of the need to stuff ever more content into a student's period of study-versus the pressures, from outside of higher education, to keep the period of a student's studies as trim as possible. Simply put, we are being required to eat much-too-much for the bodies we are allowed.
The old constellation of areas of knowledge for the education of an architect -design, building technologies, architectural history, and professional studies- have now been augmented by a somewhat bewildering set of areas, including: computing and imaging; digital fabrication; sustainability; media studies; urbanism; landscape urbanism; critical theories and criticism; globalization; programming, etc., etc. A fire hose of new topics has been opened up upon us.
My own background is now firmly global-I have taught and been a university administrator on three continents, including nearly fifteen years as dean of a school of architecture at two great research universities: Princeton and the University of Hong Kong. My introduction to teaching post-graduate students was at the University of Virginia, the university of the architect/lawyer/president Thomas Jefferson-now a state institution that holds onto the instincts and traditions of a private university. I next went to London to teach at the Polytechnic of Central London（now re-named the University of Westminster）, and through that experience landed back in the US at Harvard-before moving to Princeton. Through these experiences I have come to know the strengths and weaknesses of the American and British systems of higher education quite well, though neither is particularly well-suited to the forms we utilize for the education of architects.
While I have taught at virtually every level of post-graduate education, and in every format (design studios, seminars, lecture courses, etc.) -I am always drawn back to teaching design studios near the beginning of a student's education. The challenges, here, being the need to balance the introduction to a tremendous number of topics relevant to the design of building, cities, and landscapes, with the need to concentrate on establishing the basic skills and rather flexible boundaries of the discipline.
For the last three post-graduate introductory design studios I taught at Princeton, I approached the education of an architect utilizing a research/topical approach, rather than through a series of increasing complex introductory exercises. These were: the Demise of the Public Realm in the City: Privately Owned Public Space; Landscape and Infrastructure: the New Jersey Turnpike; and the Idea of the Modern City: Chandigarh.
These design studios, and my work as dean, have persuaded me that with the exception of the simplest acquisition of skills, there are very few curricula sequences of value in the education of architects-I find that students thrive when fully immersed in the broadest range of issues necessary for their future practices -from the very beginning of their education as architects.
While not encyclopedic concerning the “stuff” of the education of an architect -I will quickly illustrate three recent projects, from my own practice, to introduce how different things have become in the last half generation, and use that as a way to illustrate the competing pressures on content and sequence in the education of an architect.
The first is the plan for the Financial District in Lower Manhattan, undertaken in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. Following the destruction of the World Trade Center, and the enormous amount of collateral damage well beyond the vicinity of ground zero, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation was created by the State of New York with the commitment to rebuild and renew all of Lower Manhattan. Its broad mandate was based upon the dual necessity for undertaking immediate and long-term re-construction of buildings and infrastructure. Time was a much bigger issue than material form or space.
We were asked to make a new city plan, which we entitled the Public Realm Improvement Strategy. It was intended to result in the reconstruction and systemization of all of the existing public open spaces in the Financial District, most of which are in a unique form: Privately Owned Public Space.
In order to find the most effective physical structures for a linked network of open spaces, and one which would include the changing nature of the daily and residential population in Lower Manhattan, we considered all forms of open public space. The variety of public spaces within the study area is surprisingly varied: spaces above and below ground; publicly and privately owned spaces; indoor and outdoor spaces; and the diverse set of streets and plazas that represent the entire history of spaces in the historic and modern cities.
Nevertheless, our initial research identified the complete absence of a typical form of public space within the study area-public parks or other types of publicly owned open space. The largest single component of open space here is Privately Owned Public Space-created as an exchange between private development and the provision of public amenities. These spaces have proven to be less than ideal as public spaces, and the Strategic Plan proposed renovations for all of these spaces, making them more conducive to public activities, both passive and active, while also making connections to other existing open spaces and transportation infrastructure.
This grouping of issues takes the form of a time-based program of improvements and changes referred to as the “Urban Succession.” This work underlines the need to significantly enrich the syllabi of our teaching beyond the formal, and its traditional relationship with structure, program, materiality, etc. This also underscores that we, as educators, need to develop our students' arsenal of tools for understanding the relationship between the economic and political cities, coupled and with inventiveness and agility and to work on the design of the physical city in its political, social, and economic dimensions.
The second is a project that is part park, infrastructure, environmental remediation, and the envisioning a new institution. We were asked to work on a virtually forgotten historic site just 15 miles from Manhattan-the Paterson Falls, the second largest waterfall east of the Mississippi River in the US, and to re-vision the institutional idea of public park in the process. Not only did the project require a high level of interdisciplinary work to be organized by the architect, requiring us to possess broad expertise in a wide variety of disciplines, but it also required us to bring this together as part of the effort to create innovative building forms. For me, as an educator, this meant that I had to reconsider when in an architect’s education one may introduce the problems of landscape urbanism, the design of infrastructure, ecological and environmental remediation strategies, and design of elements for the tourist economy. The project I mentioned earlier-for the New Jersey Turnpike with my first-year students at Princeton-was my first project in this pedagogic shift.
The last project is one of the five proposals sought for the Olympic Village as part of New York City's bid for the 2012 Olympics. The brief was unusual-but increasingly common: to build a “carbon-neutral” community for 16,000 athletes that would be occupied for two weeks, before being converted into a comprehensive community of market-rate residences for 20,000 New Yorkers. To make matters “even simpler” -it had to be constructed on a contaminated site containing a commuter-rail storage yard for one of the regional railways-which itself had to remain in that location. While this project also called for an experienced interdisciplinary team, as in the previous project, it again underscores the requirement that we must now introduce issues of sustainable development, environmental remediation strategies, the design of infrastructure, and a deeper knowledge of the role of architecture in economic development from the outset of an architect's education.
While it may seem contradictory, in order to fully participate in the intellectual life of the University it is especially important for each design discipline to realize its autonomy-no matter how broadly based is has become, nor how many productive interdisciplinary connections it may develop. Architectural forms, structures, and methods of construction are often viewed as no more than a product of their culture, because their origins and transformations depend on aesthetic, economic, social, and technological processes specific to the society in which the buildings are constructed. In this view, architecture and related design disciplines have no autonomy of their own; they are a dependent variable, and the individual designer is thus relieved simultaneously of effectiveness and responsibility. In contradistinction to this view, I am of the view that design is a mode of knowledge analogous to, though distinct from, other modes of knowledge such as physics or philosophy. In this view the processes, forms, means of representation, and design judgments are independent of the processes, forms, representational systems, and judgments derived from other disciplines. Each area of knowledge for the architect's education should be approached as a practice with its own history and traditions, a practice that must be respected, studied, and understood by those who participate in it. The specific ways in which architecture responds to other spheres of culture are made explicit, but not seen as determined by these spheres. Rather, the continuing tradition of architecture and design defines a context for designer's activities and delineates a framework within which they operate. My view is that this requires us to abandon incremental forms for educating architects, and-to the degree possible -fully develop curricula designed on full immersion from the outset.
I am mindful of the dynamic changes taking place in the professions, and as an educator doing research in my own practice, work to respond to these changes in ways consistent with our obligations to the profession, to new generations of practitioners, and to the position of architecture in global society.
I presume that we are all well aware of the pressures to keep a school “fresh” through the fostering of, and in some cases-insistence upon-an interdisciplinary approach. The potential for interdisciplinary programs within a school of architecture, and with other academic units at a research university, should naturally help us stress the relationship of architecture, urbanism, landscape, and building technologies to their cultural, social, and political milieu. To this end, and particularly for post-graduate education where our graduates must be nearly fully-formed as architects upon graduation, it is my view that we should look to work as closely with the “centers” of design throughout the world, as with other academic disciplines within our home institutions.
Teachers and administrators should also be sensitive to ideas related to current, and emerging, developments in: research techniques; advanced information technology, international aspects of practice; environmental and sustainability considerations; and new building methods and materials. A successful post-graduate program is constantly transforming its curriculum to recognize that architects are increasingly presented with unusual and new building programs, and that practitioners today are expected to formulate solutions that enhance the quality of life in unexpected environments. This brings up new and important questions, which teachers and students, alike, need to be asking.
Finally, I work hard to see that no area of knowledge necessary for the work of an architect, or related professional, should be seen as supplementary to any other. For example, a school's programs in architecture, with their important emphasis on design instruction (and its related technical, professional, and research concerns) should both provide a structure to engage all of the other work being carried out at the Faculty of Architecture-while accepting that all of the other areas of knowledge that we force our students to digest can be understood as modes of knowledge in and of themselves-design should not be particularly privileged, it is simply a synthetic center joining social, environmental, technical, and cultural questions (and anything else that may be thrown into this mix) into our expert understanding of buildings, cities, and landscapes.□
本文作者为美国建筑师协会会员、香港建筑师协会会员、香港大学建筑学院院长、主讲教授。
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