Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

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

In view of the conference theme – pedagogical shifts – we would like to join other speak-
ers who began by forging some preliminary conceptual links. One can first of all connect
the idea of pedagogy with the act of being at play (paidia), a process that links directly
with the arcane notion of cultural play (paideia).^1 Cultural play accounts for the creative
struggle across a dense field of choice (the agon), through which a path is cleared, and
in which ambiguously-poised values are negotiated. Play also describes the back and
forth movement between cultural extremes that typically characterises education. For
the Greeks this latter process became known as the periagoge, or ‘turning’, an act of oscil-
lation or between-ness that casts light upon the ancient notion of play.^2 To this encrusted
semantic pile can be added the non-etymological, but still intimately linked term agoge,
which further characterises learning as a process stirred by eagerness, conjuring up
speculation, and perhaps most importantly, drawing us towards the unknown.
If we compress these values into a coherent description then the pedagogical proc-
ess at work within architectural education suddenly resembles something like a stir-
ring intellectual movement caught between extreme spatial, material and temporal
parameters. This paper offers a theoretical account of two such parameters that inform
the pedagogical middle ground of Kingston University School of Architecture: on the
one hand, slowness and dense matter, and on the other, lightness and rapid temporal
flows.

A Contemporary Dilemma: Flow or Hindrance?

Teachers of design place their agendas and attitudes within an historical context of prec-
edents and references because it helps them to make sense of, and ultimately legitimise,
their pedagogical practice. Such precedents are usually clustered around a thematic
epicentre. For us, that epicentre would be the idea that the architectural ‘project-space’
is both anachronistic and diachronistic, i.e. consisting of differentiated layers of matter
embodying different time signatures ranging from the inert and slow-moving, to the
socially compliant and rapidly changing. This suggests that architects can structure their
thoughts and projects as an intensified spectrum of material states; states which coexist
not as linear dialectical processes (dematerialisation in the modernist sense), but as
interactive conditions. Despite using the term anachronism, we want to avoid any notion
of nostalgia or escapism. Instead we wish to propose resituating the architectural project
within a differentiated temporality stabilised at one end by something like slow mass,
and at the other by recent developments in the field of dematerialised (gravity-free),
highly temporalised, digital media. To put it briefly, we are interested in teaching how
architectural matter can embody multiple temporalities or timelines.
‘Unlocking potential’, ‘releasing an idea’, ‘seeding’ and ‘sparks’ are pedagogical
expressions familiar to many design educators. What they hold in common is the underly-
ing discursive strand of movement, or the apperception that creativity is primarily a fluid
act. So when considered against this widely-held assumption that the creative process
flows in one direction or another, the idea of slowness conjures up an opposing image:
that of a retrograde, non-progressive action. But are there any intellectual precedents
to suggest otherwise, that slowness, or being out of sync might in fact be central to the
creative act?