Valuing your mentors. Prior to talk about my admiration for the EPFL, let me set the background. When studying the discipline of one’s choice, one encounters figures that have a direct and indelible impact on who one is to become. During my studies, I was fortunate to have encountered many talented faculty who imparted their knowledge with generosity and commitment.
In doing so, they introduced us to their own masters, those who influenced their personalities as both practicing architects and seasoned educators.
I believe that it is through this lineage that education becomes rich and meaningful. Never in the process of transmission did we, as students, ever feel the beliefs of our faculty to be an imposition, or a way to restrict our desire for creativity and discovery. On the contrary, the traditional master-student relationship was less dogmatic than Americans may assume about a European architectural education; but I will cover this topic in a future blog
My background
The making of one’s own identity is set within an historical context that is social, cultural and existential. At the time of my studies, many of the junior faculty were a product of the 1960s and early 70s. During this time, most architecture programs had thoroughly assimilated the tradition of Modern Architecture and were slowly questioning this movement as no longer legitimate for teaching and practice. Schools struggled to move from an understanding of architecture as primarily functional, towards new architectural ideas which were part of an urban agenda. Within this context, topics on the act of place making “were situated at the articulation between theory and practice, history and poetics, tradition and modernity, realism and the reclaiming of utopia.”
On the other hand, for the senior faculty teaching at my alma mater, and certainly this must have been true at other schools in Europe, their datum point relied on the iconic pioneers such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Alvar Aalto as some of the most important masters. And yet, modernism since the mid-century was slowly seen as part of history. New buildings and writings issued from the postmodern movement replaced the seminal texts of Le Corbusier, and refuted ideologically driven dogmas with a new approach. One of them was The Architecture of the City (1966) by Italian architect and theoretician Aldo Rossi (1931-1995) whose work gave birth to a renewed attention regarding the role of the city and its urban fabric, architectural typology and the importance of historical forms, and what was to come full force during my studies, a prerequisite to work with precedence.
In this context is the important lineage of Rossi’s influence on his students (including Jacques Herzog et Pierre de Meuron) while teaching at the ETH-Zürich (1972-75) and the parallel emergence (through two of his teaching assistants) in the 1970s of the Ticinese Tendenza in southern Switzerland.
In the United States, publications such as Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), and, with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (1972); Ulrich Conrads’ Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-century Architecture (1970); Colin Rowe’s Collage City (1978); and Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1978), demonstrated that the Modern Movement “could be neither rediscovery nor heritage.” Thus, the content of these writings enabled academia to move in a new direction and again lead rather than chase after a now questionable modernism.
Finding’s one’s language through vernacular architecture
During my studies in architecture at the EPFL between 1979 and 1985, I was forced to assess my creative intuition—consciously, but mostly without understanding the complex ramifications of my art form—and my position in relation to the meaning of architecture, one that was constantly filtered through a recognition of my faculty’s didactic positions. The faculty’s stance was accompanied by senior students questioning the old guard’s unchanging positions towards architecture, and resulted, for me, in a desire to step back and simply understand architecture as an object of knowledge. As a novice in architecture, retrospectively these controversies were welcome and became part of an authentic learning process; one that implied a constant re-actualization of a discipline’s know-how, its instrumentation, its social responsibility, and, most importantly, its belonging to a larger body called theory of architecture.
To anchor us with fundamentals, my school in Lausanne had chosen to educate us students during the first trimester of freshman year through a robust immersion in vernacular architecture with key faculty; Frederic Aubry, Mario Bevilacqua, and Plemenka Soupitch. I guess that this approach of looking at precedents—in this case, buildings done by non-architects—was heir to Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand’s teaching at the 18th century Parisian polytechnic, although stripped of its reliance on certain canonic building types of the history of architecture.
It was a superb way to introduce us to the notion that architecture was also a matter of construction, a stand that has, and continues to infuse Swiss architecture and the education of an architect. But above all, I believe that it was to shield us from both current professional and academic realities that encouraged a practice that supported private (often nihilistic) statements and overtly and open stylistic quotations, a position often in opposition to a commitment towards the better good of the collective at large. Perhaps, it was their way to resist and remain truly polytechnic, by re-actualizing the content and relevance of a rich and contemporary curriculum focused on improving and preserving the built environment.
In conclusion
Retrospectively, this relevance seemed timely in the 1980s, and is perhaps opportune for today’s emerging reflection on how institutions should seek to characterize themselves as strong differentiators among leading international architectural schools. Perhaps a post Covid-19 educational agenda will let us emerge stronger than ever by transitioning back to the future, and providing architecture as a humbler environment for the creation of desirable and inclusive places for human interaction.
Looking back at my experience, my alma mater’s pedagogical stand offered aspiring architects a set of fundamental interdisciplinary design principles based on a unique creative approach to understanding the built environment. This content, but not specifically the topic of vernacular architecture, is what I continue to favor as a polytechnic educational model based on a “disciplinary depth and inter-disciplinary breath… [and]… a creative interaction with art, science, and engineering.”
Architectural Education: valuing your mentors -Robert Slutzky. Part 2
Architectural Education: valuing your mentors -Raimund Abraham. Part 3