Clossing Session 477
designer had a one-page contract for the same amount of money, because the client
trusted that this group had the knowledge to perform the job. So I agree completely
with what Urs is saying, because what we have to do is become experts, we have to
able to have full control of everything we do, be fully responsible for what we do,
before we attempt to gain that trust again. Then you work like an artist: the client
tells the artist: you have this bag of money, make me your piece; and he trusts the
artist to perform his job well. This is a position that in my view it is very important
to imagine and to regain – or to gain, because I am not so sure that we ever had that
position, the position where people really respect what we are doing.
Constantin Spiridonidis, Thessaloniki, Greece
If I may just say, for architects to be trusted it is necessary that they have the
appropriate competences.
Vana Tentokali, Thessaloniki, Greece
Two short comments. The first comment is addressed to Dino’s view that we should also
give priority to the pedagogical perspective and not to knowledge as such. To this I
would like to add one more argument, which comes again from Deleuze. Deleuze says
that knowledge is no longer depicted or represented as a tree with branches and leaves:
on the contrary, knowledge is a reason that does not have a voice of support; it is
slippery, and if it is slippery you cannot catch and hold onto it. The second comment I
would like to make refers to Dimitri’s proposal or wish when he stated that we no longer
talk about individuals but about collectivities. I am afraid that I do not agree, because
there is another word that could be more apt to the discussions in these sessions and
which seems to me to be more Deleuzian. It actually is a Deleuzian word, and one which
I could say that even Derrida would agree with: the word is difference.
Dimitris Papalexopoulos, Athens, Greece
Agreed.
Rivka Oxman, Haifa, Israel
In order to be able to discuss the debate we need to share the same ideology, and I think
our ideologies are different. When you look upon architectural schools and what they
were in the past and what they are trying to be today, in the past it was very clear that
the responsibility of architectural schools was to educate professionals, and going back
even to the Italiescent school run by Frank Laudry, the best way to gain knowledge and
skill was to work with some professional, some great architect, some master, from whom
you could get or kind of inherit knowledge and skill, and that was very well accepted. It
is only lately that we draw in university, so actually school in a university framework is a
quite new conception; and then we have started, for example in my university, to expect
people to win Nobel prizes: well, we say that in architecture the only Nobel prize you may
win is the Nobel prize for peace. Some schools emphasise the theoretical contribution
that comes with theoretical research and some schools emphasise professional education:
this, I think, was made very clear in the discussion we heard, so really educating and
teaching very much depends on the ideological framework of your school or on your own
thinking. So we have to define what we want: what profile do we want, what are the