Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

424 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy

Until 1989 I played team sport as a catcher of the Nuenen baseball and softball club. I
didn’t play at the top, but I was at a pretty good level. Then, a persistent back injury
prevented my body from keeping up with my sporting ambitions any longer. A year
earlier I had already stopped playing hockey, my other sport.. I wasn’t a real talent
at that either, but by training hard enough I usually managed to make it into the
first youth team. I decided to quit when I realised that my desire to play the game to
perfection was making it impossible for me to play at all. So a few years ago, when
I wanted to take up a sport again, I had the choice of resuming an old sport, where
my ambitions could be an obstacle again, or to choose a sport that would be above
all else a game for me. I chose soccer, a sport in which I had no skill or pattern of
expectations at all. I’m playing my fifth season this year, and by absolute standards
I’m still a hopeless player, but I have a lot more fun than I ever got from the sports
I was good at.
But now, I discover how the game is to be played by just doing it.

When I was first invited by the Technical University Eindhoven (2003), and later by
the Academy of Architecture Amsterdam (2004) to investigate what Morphology can
and should mean within the education of an architect, I took up the challenge for the
same reason that I now play soccer: I didn’t have the faintest idea what Morphology
really was or was supposed to be. The lectures in Morphology that I had followed at
the Technical University Eindhoven in 1991 did not seem to have left much of an
impression. So I just started the research, hoping that insights would arise along the
way. At any rate, I had become curious

The research got off on the wrong track. The archives of the Technical University Eind-
hoven turned out to have practically nothing on the Morphology Department which had
played such an important role ever since the setting up of the Faculty of Architecture
in the late 1960s. The department was started by Jan Slothouber, who had previously
set up the Centre for Cubic Constructions with William Graatsma for DSM.^1 The CCC
represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale of 1970 with their work based
on the possibilities for combining cubes [fig. 1]. When Slothouber and Graatsma left
the Faculty of Architecture, Morphology changed from a whole series of interrelated
exercises in which the phenomenon of form, and the cube in particular, was studied
(re)productively and theoretically into the 8-week set of lectures and seminars on
Morphology during the third year of study which I had forgotten in the end.
Various architects of the so called ‘Eindhoven School’, who had experienced the
Slothouber/Graatsma era at first hand, stated that it was precisely their exercises
that had trained them as designers. I was flabbergasted at the lack of information
about the now extinct department of Morphology within the Faculty of Architecture
in Eindhoven!

It was only when I found myself sitting on William Graatsma’s sofa that I discovered
that the Morphology tradition in Eindhoven was actually a continuation of the Bau-
haus tradition that Oskar Schlemmer, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky
had introduced to the Bauhaus University in Weimar as Vorkurs and Grundlehre. This
course dealt with visual phenomena such as Point, Line and surface [fig. 2], Body and