Alan Atlee Lecture

UK Architecture Education in numbers

applications to Part 1 courses up 13% between 1988/89 and 2008/09*

2008/09 enrolments on Part 1 courses up 127% on 1988/89 levels*

During the same period the number of full time academic staff down by 55%*

5 years of formal training at circa £3k tuition fee per year*

47% of UK architecture graduates had found employment (not necessarily as architecture assistants) 6 months after graduating in summer 2008** *source: RIBA monitoring statistics 1998 – 2009 ** source Architects Journal, November 2009

PROFESSIONAL PARADOX*

1.  Specialisation – narrowing the area of knowledge one is expected to engage with. We lose sight of things outside our immediate field. In architecture this means losing sight of the raw effort of building, of producing space.

•  Expertise – to be an expert you have to be certified by the proper authorities, who instruct you to speak the right language, cite the right authorities, hold down the right territory.

•  The inevitable drift towards power and authority – towards its requirements and prerogatives

•  The professional bargain - upon which professional ethics are based, is extended to ensure the effectiveness of a profession’s support for the system within which it operates. Architecture has specific system-maintaining functions to perform. Professional ethics in architecture tend to serve those system-maintaining functions.

*Source: Edward Said, ‘Professionals & Amateurs’ 1993 Reith Lecture

THE CULTURE OF THE NEW CAPITALISM Richard Sennett 3 Challenges for the ‘ideal’ man/ woman presented by C of the NC

•  TIME – “how to manage short term relationships and oneself, while migrating from task to task, job to job, place to place. If institutions no longer provide a long-term frame, the individual may have to improvise his or her life-narrative, or even do without any sustained sense of self.”

•  TALENT – “how to develop new skills, how to mine potential abilities, as reality’s demands shift. (…) The emerging social order militates against the ideal of craftsmanship, that is, learning to do just one thing really well; such commitment can often prove economically destructive. In place of craftsmanship, modern culture advances an idea of meritocracy which celebrates potential ability rather than past achievement.”

•  SURRENDER – how to get rid of the past

*Source: Richard Sennett, “The Culture of the the New Capitalism” 2006 Yale

ECOSOPHY = the ethico-political articulation of 3 ECOLOGICAL REGISTERS: 1. THE ENVIRONMENT 2. SOCIAL RELATIONS 3. HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY

purpose of ECOSOPHY = POLITICAL, SOCIAL and CULTURAL REVOLUTION, RESHAPING THE OBJECTIVES MATERIAL AND IMMATERIAL PRODUCTION

“Society has been completely urbanized. This hypothesis implies a definition: An urban society is a society that results from a process of complete urbanization. This urbanization is virtual today but will become real in the future.” Henri Lefebvre, La Revolution Urbaine, 1970

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This axis runs from the complete absence of urbanisation (“pure nature”, the earth abandoned to the elements) On the left to the completion of the process on the right.

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Political City

Mercantile City

Industrial City

Critical Zone

Transition from agrarian to urban

implosion-explosion (urban concentration, rural exodus,

extension of the urban fabric, complete subordination of the agrarian to the

urban)

Today around half the world’s population live in urban environments. In 1950, only 29.8 percent of people lived in urban areas, but by 2010 51.5 percent will live in cities. The trend towards urban living is particularly acute in developing countries. The urban population in Africa will jump from 14.7 percent in 1950 to 42.7 percent by 2010. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the urban population will increase from 41.9 per cent to 79 percent during the same time period. UN Habitat

‘You describe in many ways the core architectural view when you said that a city consists of streets, roads and a built environment located within a vaguely defined "urban cloud." In this vision, the city becomes a collection of separate cells with built environments compacted together to form an urban mass. This view is radically different from the larger-scale spatial or regional vision of the city as an expansive urban system of movements and flows, of goods being produced and people living not just in built environments but in constructed geographies characterized by different patterns of income, unemployment, education levels, ethnic and racial cultures, housing and job densities, etc. All these things are often pushed aside in the obsession - sorry, the passionate concern - architects have for design. These constructed geographies get lost when the city is reduced entirely to a collection of built forms. As a result, architects either tend to see planning the city as their exclusive domain, as specialists in built form, or else they dissociate themselves entirely from the planning process, seeing it only as imposing constraints on their creativity.” Edward Soja interviewed by Arjen Mulder 2001

$20k House (2004/05) Rural Studio

Rural Studio

Rural Studio - car windshields

ECOSOPHY = the ethico-political articulation of 3 ECOLOGICAL REGISTERS: 1. THE ENVIRONMENT 2. SOCIAL RELATIONS 3. HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY

purpose of ECOSOPHY = POLITICAL, SOCIAL and CULTURAL REVOLUTION, RESHAPING THE OBJECTIVES MATERIAL AND IMMATERIAL PRODUCTION

SAID’s AMATEURISM*

“Despite their pervasiveness, each of them (the 4 tendencies of PROFESSIONALISM) can be countered by what I shall call amateurism, the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by the love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a speciality, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession.” *Source: Edward Said, ‘Professionals & Amateurs’ 1993 Reith Lecture

THE CULTURE OF THE NEW CAPITALISM Richard Sennett 3 Critical Values necessary to counter the C of the NC

•  NARRATIVE – “fashion ‘parallel institutions’ which seek to afford workers with the continuity and sustainability missing in short-term, flexible organisations.”

(re-thought labour unions, trade associations, job-sharing and collectivity, longer-term planning, educational institutions, CSA/ UCA?)

•  USEFULNESS – “as scope of uselessness has expanded in the political economy, it might seem that people could compensate through the more informal relations in civil society.”

(social capital, re-valuing practice in relation to public good)

3. CRAFTSMANSHIP – “broadly understood means the desire to do something well for its own sake. Craftsmanship has a cardinal virtue missing in the new culture’s idealised worker, student, or citizen. It is commitment.”

*Source: Richard Sennett, “The Culture of the the New Capitalism” 2006 Yale

Alan Atlee Lecture

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Transcript of Alan Atlee Lecture