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2007年第06期
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作为设计教学战略的异常事物与惯例辩证法
普雷斯顿·斯科特·科
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作者单位：哈佛大学建筑设计研究院
作为设计教学战略的异常事物与惯例辩证法
——1996～2007哈佛大学第一学年工作室课程
The Dialectic of Anomaly and Convention as a Strategy for Design Pedagogy
——The First Year Studio Curriculum at Harvard，1996～2007 Studio Scope
普雷斯顿·斯科特·科恩
Preston Scott Cohen
摘 要 在教育刚开始的阶段，核心课程教育是本源。第一年的核心课程教学受着双重的束缚。问题来源于这样一个认识：今天最好的建筑师不是那些有着杰出的想法或是卓越技术之人，而是那些能在所拥有的各种想法和所掌握的技术手段之间产生神奇魔力之人。观念和技术的融合是难以传授的，也没有批评和论述的标准。因此，在建筑设计工作室里，主要的教学方式便是讲故事。积累起来的大量故事让人能通过类推的方式来表达那些难以直接描述的事情。
教育的核心沿着两条平行的轨迹在运行：一条着眼于建筑和建造的类型学，另一条着眼于几何学和建构。不管是哪一个方面，那些自相矛盾和似是而非的问题总会扰乱在理论上协调一致的类型学或者事物的秩序，这种类型学或秩序作为一种手段将约定俗成的概念引入建筑学之中。意识到这个事实的建筑师必须完善他们固有的建筑观念，或者建立起与知识体系相协调的观念。总之，对问题的质疑成了建筑学中所有事情的主角，对问题的设计和如何敏锐感知这些问题成了设计教学的核心。
关键词 教学战略 惯例辩证法 工作室课程
ABSTRACT I believe core pedagogy to be the issues at the root of the core，at the very beginning of education.
The first year core pedagogy has been caught in a double bind. The problem arises from an understanding that the best architects today are not the ones with the best ideas or best techniques. They are the ones who produce a strange alchemy between the kinds of ideas they have and the technical means they possess. The blend of ideas and techniques makes it difficult to be didactic and to establish criteria for critique and discourse. Thus, in architectural design studios, the main method of teaching is story telling, The accumulated wealth of stories allows one to say things by analogy that are difficult to confront head on.
The core has been running on two parallel tracks：a focus on architectural and building typologies and a focus on geometry and tectonics. In both cases, problems of contradiction and paradox are used to disturb a theoretically consistent typology or order of things, as a means to introduce the notion of convention or regularity in architecture. Architects being conscious of this fact must make up their own sets of architectural conventions, or establish them by reference to a consistent body of knowledge.
In the end, problemitization is the protagonist of everything in architecture. Thus it is the design of problems, and the teaching of sensibilities about the problems, that is at stake in design teaching.
KEY WORDS strategy for design pedagogy，dialectic of convention，studio curriculum中图分类号 TU-05 文献标识码 B 文章编号 1000-3959（2007）06-00-00
I am going to speak about matters to do with core pedagogy, particularly at Harvard.
I am going examine the core curriculum not by looking at its entirety but rather by looking at certain cases that exemplify what I believe to be the issues at the root of the core, at the very beginning of it, and some other things that could as well be dealt with in the very first year.
For the last decade, the first year core pedagogy that I have been working on has been caught in a double bind. The problem arises from an understanding that the best architects today are not the ones with the best ideas or best techniques. They are the ones who produce a strange alchemy between the kinds of ideas they have and the technical means they possess. They merge technical concerns with broader aesthetic concerns. The blend of ideas and techniques makes it difficult to be didactic and to establish criteria for critique and discourse. Thus, in architectural design studios, the main method of teaching is story telling, The accumulated wealth of stories allows one to say things by analogy that are difficult to confront head on.
The core has been running on two parallel tracks, sometimes independent, and sometimes overlapping: a focus on architectural and building typologies and a focus on geometry and tectonics. In both cases, problems of contradiction and paradox are used to disturb a theoretically consistent typology or order of things, as a means to introduce the notion of convention or regularity in architecture. It is as if norms are exemplified by anomalies. The learn through “negative” examples exhibited by countermanding forms.
Building typology is the basis for establishing foundations for basic design. Yet, given the plurality of architectural conventions and types, which combine spatial and tectonic models as opposed to building types which are bound to particular programs, there is no viable model for the typical that the initial building typology premise lays claims for. Architects being conscious of this fact must make up their own sets of architectural conventions, or establish them by reference to a consistent body of knowledge. Thus we turn to a mathematical basis for structural and material investigations. These are brought forward as a means to produce what we would like to believe are newer forms, and to give discipline to them, in lieu of canons or agreed upon foundations. So, first the premise that there could be conventions in architecture and that they could be produced by anomalies, and second, geometry which provides theorems and proofs, and the contradictions that materiality instills by definition.
Project Case Study: Inserting the Elevator
Slide: Plans of the Site
This is the project I will use to exemplify the architectural anomaly and learning by contradiction. It is an odd project in which the student is asked to insert an elevator inside a building that constitutionally repels it. This 19th century building, located in a small New England city, turns out to have a kind of Adolf Loos Raumplan-like logic to it. The analogy becomes clear as we analyze all the levels, though there is no direct historical evidence that any association with Loos' spatial idea was intentional on the part of the original architect. Thus, already, the role of intentionality vs. interpretation is put into question by the project.
The entrance level axis of symmetry bifurcates into two stairs that, winding up the building, proceed to drift toward the center and front of the building. The stair sequence adapts to a series of large rooms that alternate between the front and back of the building and has many eddies and dead ends, discontinuous circuits, producing complex interlocking symmetries, reoriented axes producing a rich and elaborate scheme. The scheme is enabled by party walls between which span the ceilings of the large rooms, while the more compartmentalized spaces between fill in with services. Thus the students learn that not only the composition, but also the structural and urban organizations are essential.
To place an elevator in this context is to wreak havoc upon it. It destroys the very essence of the whole idea of the Raum Plan, which is a three dimensional matrix of interlocking volumes unbound by the more usual continuous vertical extrusion. It is the very effort to insert the elevator which causes us to discover the theoretical association this building has with the Raum plan, to discover how the building works, organizationally. Any placement of the elevator on one level will disrupt another. To restore order and retain the Loos-like interior special idea, which is the task the students are faced with, it is necessary to deftly compromise the plans.
Slide: Raumplan
The Raumplan emerged from an aesthetic and philosophical cultural critique of society. It is a non-linear conception of space. It is about an aesthetic of dislocation, rather than rationality. It represents an aesthetic modernity that rejects the Beaux Arts tradition of strict hierarchies. Spatially, it is constituted by staggered volumes that are mutually intersecting (like Boolean intersections). In many ways, it is the opposite of a plan governed by a grid. Its spaces propagate in multiple directions three dimensionally. It returns, in an indirect way, to the Albertian tradition-the house as a small city-by conferring, within a single building, the complexity of aggregated spatial units as in a pre-modern city.
Slide: Elevator Section
Then we have the elevator. One of the chief technological protagonists of architectural space organization in the 20th century. Linear and rational, architecture by mechanization produces an inorganic programmatic organization of absolutely serial, successively stacked independent spaces. In this since, it absorbs in its section the logic of the plan of a grided city of discrete, aggregated programs, associated only by proximity. The effect of this is a situation in which technology replaces cultural critique, and architecture disintegrates according the logic of technological progress. The elevator manifests the technical ethos that mirrors all of the forces that transform the city in the 20th century: mass industrialization, rapid urbanization. These forces are outside the architect's interest in their own linguistic reformulations of conventions and in the elaboration of plastic space.
Slide: Athletic Club
Of course, as Rem Koolhaas has pointed out, the elevator can also be applied with greater programmatic effect in contexts in which the successive stacking is not always of identical spatial conditions. But, again it is more or less about the need for the accumulation and contiguity of discrete programs that normally would array in the city. But, it also does something else when we ask the students to put it in the analogous Loos. We see that, in a certain way, by virtue of this operation, the aggregation of elements in a single building, the building as an analogous city, we are dealing with organization as opposed to composition. Loos in the elevator is an essay on the skyscraper, the skyscraper itself being a kind of anomaly, a kind of pathological condition, as Koolhaas would call it. The early skyscraper adopted the classical types and tectonics in a procrustean fashion-the townhouse, the palazzo stretched beyond their limits-and distorted almost beyond recognition. (Montgomery Schuyler, Tafuri the Disenchanted Mountain). Trying to fit all of these now relatively small building types into a giant instrument, distortion and disintegration ensue. This is the distortion of canons and conventions caused by ruthless necessity.
Slide: Low House/Venturi
But there is another entirely different legacy of distortion in 20th century architecture which architects are interested in too. I could say that this particular example speaks to it more clearly. Here we have the problem that occurred when modern architecture, having stripped itself bare of traditional ornament, demanded extreme measures of any architect who desired a language by which to make distinctions. The introduction of an inventory of differences, the production of a linguistic code within an increasingly abstract language of form with the interest in typology in the 60s, would lead to the theme of extreme cases of dis-proportionality perhaps most conspicuously marked by these cases, the extreme gables which Venturi brought to light. The legacy brought us many examples which bring us to the present. The form is a given , a “found” condition, that the architect adopts. The architect by-passes composition and proceeds with distortion as the motive to discover all sorts of consequences of the process of transformation.
Slide: Lodged House
Which brings me to this case of the project called “The Lodged House” given to the first year students. The role of the site and program, for this kind of transformation, is mainly to exert pressure that can only be recorded by the figure of the gable and its distortion. Through active engagement with the gable, a student comes to understand its legacy. First, the students have to reproduce these houses, and we learn a great deal about what the students know, assume, what relationship they have to buildings and how they think about them. It is a means to discover for themselves the plans that are at the basis of projects like the elevator insertion and building between plans. Later, their technique of drawing is translated into a model. In the design, the constraining site is a gap between free standing houses in repetition and succession puts in crisis the logic of this type of urban context, the definition or status of its objects, demanding a reconsideration of boundaries as defined by ownership-the plots. It is a case again where the typical is identified through the instantiation of an anomaly. No doubt, the students are forced to develop a sensibility about conventions and anomalies.
Slide: Holdouts
With this, we have again a remembrance of the crisis of the skyscraper, represented by holdouts-small buildings that remain and disrupt the development of larger buildings-which in this example cause the extreme attenuation of the towers. The claims to ownership put in to crisis by the process of urban growth: the roots of political conflicts that are also responsible for architectural exceptions. Languages of architecture fall apart due to the extreme attenuation.
Slide: Holdouts
With the Holdout, the architectural anomaly is bound to the city. The pattern of the city is emblematic of the constraints which make architecture a social practice. “Holdout Architecture” is the crystallization of political and economic conflicts.
Yet, there are cases where the battle between the dominant building and the holdout produce remarkable urban forms. In all of these cases of exceptions that are, as it were, “caused”, the question of willful composition returns as we become conscious of these effects through formal analysis, a kind of retrospective theory of architecture as anomaly. We find examples where form resolves itself to accept the holdout that would otherwise cause a kind of malfunction in the language of architecture. We can see how in some examples that a holdout is drawn into a symmetrical or repetitious order. Configurations of buildings are made to accept other buildings that simply wouldn't go away.
Slide: Tribune Tower
But in a more exemplary case, we see how the whole linguistic system of architecture succumbs to a colossal distortion of proportion. The scope of transformation has been brought to correspond to the program.
Slide: Koolhaas upside downTower
This proceeds in the great mannerist architect, Koolhaas, who makes reference directly to problematic conditions that in their first iteration were strictly caused and were not only the result of mannered manipulations produced by a self conscious post-modern architect.
Slide: Matta-Clark and Hejduk
How do we move from here to the geometric side of the problem? To say that we have asked the students to rehearse the paradoxical combination of things and languages that disagree such that they become unhinged from their moorings is to remark on the condition we find ourselves in, in which all foundations become untethered. Perhaps only the procedures, distortions, re-syntheses as devices remain. So we have to reintroduce the possibility of foundations provisionally, not absolutely, since there can be no consensus. And in order to establish a discourse, a shared and socialized language of architecture, we introduce the ideas that there could be fundamental tools in the architect's craft and that's when I introduce the problem of projective geometry, which serves as a hermeneutic device, at least temporarily, in a way like Kants regulative principle. Projective Geometry (PG) is a tool that provides criteria for a means to discovery, a theory of knowledge built on ideal structures and types, one again. And, it seems that geometry is the best candidate for establishing the possibility of foundational design knowledge because it is already so close to architecture, so important to its tectonic definition. Moreover, it leads us back to the classical modern dialectic that we saw in Loos, though here it is a purely rational system rather than applied and makes possible the equivalent of standardized forms, but now defined narrowly according to metrical parameters.
Slide: Projective Geometry
The Projective Geometry curriculum has developed in to an inquiry about the way in which complex surfaces, digitally conceived, are put to test by opposing requirements. The constraining properties of material and materials processed by extrusion, necessitate a particular discipline in which curvatures are translated into panelized structures. Digital production in confrontation with industrially produced materials produces a syntax of form. Despite all the freedom we have gained to make form as we wish, architectural forms is once again constrained by necessity. With new digital forms, we are further and further constrained by the very reality that we had thought we were free of. This notion that we could apply a discipline of discretization to surfaces that are organic and free of the architectural conventions that we earlier called attention to, becomes a means to establish a new foundation in the provisional sort of way.
Conclusion
I would only say in conclusion, is that there is a tendency today to think that design emerges from analysis, analysis of particular conditions for every project, its program site etc. But in fact, as we have seen, the problematic of architecture cuts across all types, scales and situations. For an architect like Rem Koolhaas, the diagram and structure for a house, an opera house and a skyscraper may be the same. In many respects it stands on its own. It is based on contradictions much larger in scope than any single case, and it is sensitively and intelligently modified by a context and a program. Too often we teach students as if these cases come from analysis. This is harmful. It is difficult to teach this with sites and programs given at the start. The plans given and the gable allows one to do it. And, projective geometry asks students to take a problem of surface tectonics and to consider it on its own terms.
Ultimately, what I find most compelling is to think about the problem, the problem of problemitization-the contradictions and paradoxes-as the means to proceed to a discursive approach within the environment of the studio. In the end, problemitization is the protagonist of everything in architecture. Thus it is the design of problems, and the teaching of sensibilities about the problems, that is at stake in design teaching. For a teacher like me, what matters most is the design of the particular scenarios that spur the constraints to produce anomalies. It is a problem of research that goes to the core of architectural education and production.□
本文作者为哈佛大学设计研究院教授。
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