Tom Frantzen Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, Amsterdam, the Netherlands 431
I therefore proposed to break the Morphology course down into a series of exer-
cises that are based on the use of existing material as the basis for a creative produc-
tive process. As the series grows in complexity, a gradual transition takes places from
the study of the formal qualities of existing material to conferring your own form on
(existing) material. Both study and creation take place through doing it. I consider
the coherence and proper coordination of the series to be of great importance. Mor-
phology is only successful when there is a tradition rooted in the curriculum. This
is the lesson of the demise of the Bauhaus pedagogy after the Second World War,
the bankruptcy of Morphology at Eindhoven after the departure of Slothouber and
Graatsma, or the success of Jenny in Zurich.
Unfortunately, the desire to cultivate a tightly coordinated Morphology tradition
in the curriculum will not sound sexy to everyone, above all because Morphology
could be seen as the only part of the curriculum where students are still free to
play. Regrettably, in my view, free situations at the Academy only too often lead to
forced results, particularly to show that the ability to think out of the box has been
mastered. It was Friedrich Schiller, a contemporary of Goethe who also came from
Weimar, who formulated it as follows: ‘a person is only a full person when he can
play’.^10 I wholeheartedly agree. Given the fact that the Academy of Architecture no
longer just trains students to become qualified architects, landscape architects or
urban designers alone, but in my opinion trains them in the first place to become
Masters, Academics, people, the academy must always allow scope for the play that
is educational necessary.
Simply granting freedom does not automatically lead to a playful, unprejudiced,
free (= academic?) mind. ‘Play’ is something that you have to learn. I owe this insight
to an ‘incorrect’ book about sleep by a US nurse. When my son Lieven was four months
old and did not want to go to sleep (a situation that many of us will recognise), my
wife came home sheepishly with this book, in the hope that at any rate she would
fall asleep reading it. Besides many handy tips that were endlessly repeated, I came
across a real eye-opener. The writer claimed that a child has to learn everything from
its parents and surroundings, including sleep. Still, many young parents think that
sleep is something that should come from inside the child itself. This supposition is
seldom borne out in real life, the author claims. Many tutors think that freedom is
something that should come from inside the students themselves. This supposition
is seldom borne out in real life, I would claim.
In my view, the most important educational objective of the new-style Morphology
series had to be that students learn to be able to look in an unconventional way at
what they are confronted with every day in their professional practice. This applies
both to skills, techniques and assignment and to clients. The ability to see through
conventions is an essential germ for the formation of a free design mentality that
can determine objectives on its own and can develop the corresponding (... new and
unknown?) form on the basis of an existing, already known context. Such a designer
is a “player”.