IRENE SUNWOO

Princeton University From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the‘‘Market Place:’’ The ArchitecturalAssociation Unit System

As chairman of the Architectural Association (AA) in London from 1971 to 1990, Alvin Boyarskypresided over a seminal moment in the history of the school. Launching a critical departure from theAA’s postwar modernist professional training, during the early 1970s Boyarsky developed the ‘‘unitsystem’’ as the foundation of the school’s educational program. A framework of vertical studioteaching, the unit system invited tutors to seize pedagogy as a medium for architectural experimentand critical inquiry.

Introduction WeekIn late September 1973, the ArchitecturalAssociation (AA) in London launched its Autumnterm with ‘‘Introduction Week,’’ a program ofactivities and events intended, on the one hand,to facilitate ‘‘[o]rientation and survival in thecity’’ for students new to London. ‘‘Orientationand survival in the AA,’’ however, a welcomebrochure explained, ‘‘is more particularly whatIntroduction Week is about.’’1 To be sure, theschool of architecture—Britain’s oldest and one ofthe discipline’s most idiosyncratic—was thenreorienting its institutional position and testing itsown survival skills. Established in 1847 by twostudents as an educational alternative toapprenticeship, the AA had maintained itsprogressive ethos, its institutional autonomy, andits democratic foundations. Yet throughout the1960s its independence was threatened by animpending merger with the Imperial College ofScience and Technology, following the RoyalInstitute of British Architects’ postwar educationalreform, which mandated the consolidation ofarchitectural schools into polytechnics anduniversities.2 In 1971, after the merger’s eventualdissolution and in hopes of recoveringinstitutional stability, students and staff electedthe Canadian-born architectural educator AlvinBoyarsky (1928–1990) as chairman of the AA—anarrival that marked the beginning of a newepisode in the school’s history of independence.

Accordingly, as an analog to IntroductionWeek’s scheduled tours of London, students alsoreceived a guided tour of the AA’s academic terrain,recently refurbished by its new chairman.Throughout the lecture hall, studios, and otherrooms within the AA’s Bloomsbury residence, aseries of Georgian townhouses located at 36Bedford Square, tutors and staff outlined theresponsibilities of academic departments andfacilities, explained individual teaching objectives,and lectured on their current architecturalpreoccupations. Even the welcome lunch forIntroduction Week—boasting an internationalassortment of Indian, Greek, Italian and Englishmenus—was ‘‘served in different parts of theschool’’3 (Figure 1).

Indeed, the occupation of the school premisesby this programmatic ‘‘menu’’ heralded theinstitutionalization of Boyarsky’s ‘‘well-laid table,’’his metaphor for an educational model thatconfronted the student with a rich selection ofdivergent theoretical positions and designmethodologies. At the AA, Boyarsky’s ‘‘well-laidtable’’ indelibly recast the institutional identity ofthe school, which began to operate as a testingground for alternative forms of architecturalproduction. Whether exploring ecology orconceptual art, politics or phenomenology,pedagogy both transgressed the limits ofprofessional practice and proclaimed a criticaldistance from architectural modernism.

In this way, the AA offers a historical lens thatbrings into focus a broader shift in architecturaleducation: from a modernist system of professionaltraining that codified the architect’s responsibility todesign and build for the needs of society, to apostmodernist pedagogy that positionedarchitecture as an intellectual and critical practice.Accordingly, this study of Boyarsky’s work at the AAconsiders how educational reform contributed tothe emerging contours of architecturalpostmodernism. However, what it does not proposeis a periodization of architectural education thatcorrelates to a stylistic ‘‘movement’’ based onhistoricist visual codes. And though certainhallmarks of postmodernism—such as consumerism,the rise of media, and pluralism—are salient to adiscussion of the ‘‘well-laid table,’’ my aim is not toestablish Boyarsky’s model as a consummatepostmodern product. Recent publications haveoffered critical readings of a diverse range of latetwentieth century architectural practices and howthese tackled modernism’s cultural, aesthetic, andsocial abstractions.4 In empathy with suchscholarship, which has complicated architecture’spostmodern agency, what follows is an attempt tosituate education as one of architecturalpostmodernism’s most productive arenas.

Boyarsky’s transformation of the AA’sinstitutional program was far-reaching, ranging fromhis prolific expansion of its media production to theinvigoration of its exhibitions and lectures program

Journal of Architectural Education, From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 24pp. 24–41 ª 2012 ACSA

and the internationalization of its students andstaff. But perhaps his most well-known contributionto the school and to architectural education morebroadly was his redesign of the AA ‘‘unit system,’’ acompetitive framework of vertical studios, or‘‘units,’’ that each offered tutors autonomouspedagogical territory for developing individualizedarchitectural investigations.5 During the 1970s, theAA unit system supported the experiments of tutorsincluding members of Archigram, Robin Evans, LéonKrier, Bernard Tschumi, Dalibor Vesely, EliaZenghelis, and later in the decade, Nigel Coates,Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, and RemKoolhaas—among many others.

Rather than rehearse the ‘‘greatest hits’’ of theunit system during Boyarsky’s chairmanship (see, inpart, above), this institutional history considers thematrix of figures, events, and discourses thatinformed the development of a teaching model thattransformed architectural education at BedfordSquare and beyond, yet which has received limitedhistoriographical attention.6

The structure of the unit system has remainedrelatively unchanged at AA, a remarkable testimonyto the durability and flexibility of the model. Intheir subsequent roles as heads of school, itsearliest participants would design further iterationsduring the 1990s—perhaps most notably atColumbia, under the deanship of Tschumi, and atthe Bartlett, under the direction of Peter Cook.What this historical investigation also questions,then, is whether the enduring influence ofBoyarsky’s pedagogy, which has contributed to theeducation of generations of architects, signals thepersistence of a postmodern moment inarchitectural education, or its impendingtransformation.7

Unit SystemsThe unit system that Boyarsky launched at the AAin 1973 was in fact the descendent of a teachingmodel born out of emergent modernist polemics atthe school during the late 1930s, which was thenrevived in the late 1960s in a critical gesture of

revisionist modernism. A brief sketch of these twoearlier iterations of the unit system will elucidatethe foundations and motives of its laterreincarnation during Boyarsky’s AA chairmanship.

When it was first introduced in the Spring termof 1936 by the Scottish planner E.A.A. Rowse, thenPrincipal of both the AA’s School of Architectureand its School of Planning, the unit systemprecipitously (and not without controversy)overturned the five-year structure of the school’sBeaux-Arts course. The new teaching modelvertically integrated small groups of students intofifteen ‘‘units’’ each term. More indebted to thesociological theories of Patrick Geddes than theexpanded socio-esthetic program of the recentlydissolved German Bauhaus, Rowse’s unit systemencouraged group work, project analysis, andresearch methods appropriate to the course’s newemphasis on town planning and contemporaryarchitecture, thus rendering obsolete the historicistframework and individualistic working methods ofthe AA’s extant Beaux-Arts training8 (Figures 2and 3).

The controversies sparked by the unit system’sabrupt metamorphosis of the AA curriculum wouldbecome the stuff of legend within the school bythe postwar period, fueled in part by JohnSummerson’s 1947 centenary history of the AA,which concluded by conflating the institutionalrevolution of the 1930s with the rise ofarchitectural modernism in Britain. Certainly,following the end of the Second World War, thebroader social identity of the student—that is, as afuture architect—would be reframed in the contextof postwar reconstruction and planning. During thelate 1940s and the 1950s, the AA continued todevelop a ‘‘realistic’’ approach to architecturaleducation, taking contemporary building programsin Britain, such as housing, schools, and urbanredevelopment, as the focus of student projects9

(Figures 4 and 5). Faced with an increasinglyprofessionalized agenda and an influx of studentsreturning from war, however, the Year System was

1. Architectural Association Reception, c. 1973. Photograph published in AA Prospectus, 1973 ⁄ 1974. Photo by Sue Barr. (Courtesy of the

Architectural Association Archive.)

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soon revived as a more effective structure for theAA’s modernized curriculum and would remain inplace until the mid-1960s.

A glimpse of the 1963 ⁄ 1964 curriculumillustrates how the AA student encounteredprograms of increasing scale and complexity as heor she progressed through the school’s postwar YearSystem. The First Year of study introduced thestudent to modes of three-dimensional design andrepresentation, proceeding from the visualarrangement of planes and studies in proportion tothe design of a single-celled space. In the SecondYear inquiry advanced to the scale of town planningand more complex construction techniques.10

Emphasis on professional practice and constructiontechnology was further honed in the Third Year,which began with a reinforced concrete buildingproject requiring cost estimates, technical analyses,and the preparation of working drawings.11 Whilethe Third Year concluded with a medium-sized townplanning project, in the Fourth Year students beganto design at the scale of the urban, with projectsfocusing on the redevelopment of areas in centralLondon. The Fifth Year was largely devoted to anindependent thesis based on a brief developed bythe student and through individual tutorials withdesignated staff members.

With the exception of the First Year and theFifth Year, each year of students was subdividedinto smaller groups—what was in fact the postwariteration of the unit, each supervised by a UnitMaster (who was in turn supervised by a YearMaster) responsible for guiding student work on amore intimate level.12 No longer the definingelement of a ‘‘system,’’ the unit had becomeauxiliary to the Year System curriculum. Just as themodernity of the unit system, in terms of both itseducational method and content, had eclipsed thetradition of Beaux-Arts teaching at the AA, aninstitutionalized pedagogical practice of modernismnow eclipsed the original polemical agency of theunit system. Or, as AA Principal William Allen woulddeclare in 1965, invoking the ‘‘battle’’ that had

unfolded at the school three decades earlier, ‘‘theargument is now a memory,’’ for ‘‘what was foughtfor now prevails’’13 (Figure 6).

By the late 1960s, the modernist agendas ofother leading British schools of architecture,including Cambridge, the Regent Street Polytechnic,and the Bartlett, seemed to corroborate Allen’sstatement. And yet, contemporary publications suchas Aldo Rossi’s Architecture and the City and RobertVenturi’s Complexity and Contradiction, bothpublished in 1966, contemporaneously attempted todismantle such universalizing perspectives onmodernism—as did a fast-approaching wave ofpedagogical shifts at architecture schoolsworldwide. Disparate as they might be, such eventsand discourses demonstrated how modernism wasin fact provoking new (self-reflexive) ‘‘arguments.’’Indeed, by revising the AA’s modernist curriculum,John Lloyd—Allen’s successor and AA Principalfrom 1966 to 1970—contributed such an‘‘argument.’’ Although his methodology andideology may have been less critically charged incomparison to those of his contemporaries, Lloyd’sown resuscitation of the unit system in 1967 as acritique of the AA’s postwar technocratic curriculumnevertheless laid the institutional groundwork for

the pedagogical innovations that his successor,Boyarsky, would cultivate.

As Dean of the Department of Architecture atthe Kwame Nkrumah University of Science andTechnology in Kumasi from 1963 to 1966,Lloyd—an AA graduate and former First YearMaster—had been responsible for designing thecurriculum of Ghana’s first school of architecture.For Lloyd, the development of West Africapresented an ‘‘open-ended’’ situation requiring aflexible pedagogical analog for a faculty that founditself ‘‘by necessity, in order to teach, trying todefine the role and form of the future BuildingIndustry.’’14 Rather than import preexisting‘‘paternalistic’’ teaching methods based on Westernformal and esthetic canons, Lloyd instead arguedthat the Kumasi curriculum should respond toGhana’s national policies and building projects, itslocal climatological conditions, natural resources,and emerging social dynamics.15 It was in thiscontext that Lloyd began to articulate a pedagogicalobjective to produce ‘‘generalists’’ capable ofstrategic problem solving through interdisciplinarymeans.16

‘‘Above all we must engender a scientificattitude amongst our students,’’ Lloyd asserted in

2. Entrance to a City Road Tunnel, perspective by C.O. Tremeer; AA Year 4, Term 2, Monument Studies, March 1934. Photo by Sue Barr. (Courtesy of

the Architectural Association Archive.)

From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 26

his 1966 AA Principal candidate’s statement, ‘‘notjust an ability in low grade applied technology.’’ Theinvective targeted what Lloyd viewed as limited anduninspired uses of technology in postwar Britisharchitectural practice, and in turn, architecturaleducation. Moreover, for Lloyd, the inflexibility ofthe AA’s Year System curriculum engenderedindividualistic solutions and a competitive attitudeamong students and was thus incongruous with thecollaborative exigencies that they would encounteras modern practitioners.17 The curriculum not onlydistorted ‘‘the relationship between the individualand his society,’’ he argued, but also, and moregravely, hindered the fundamental rights of anindividual in a democratic society to ‘‘choice.’’18

Therefore, in the context of the AA—’’founded bystudents, for students,’’ Lloyd was quick toacknowledge—what was at stake was the student’s‘‘freedom of choice’’ in the shaping of his or herown architectural education.19

In the Autumn of 1967, Lloyd abandoned theYear System in an attempt to facilitate research,independent decision making, and a ‘‘shift inemphasis from the teaching of a curriculum towardsthe education of the individual will.’’20 While theFirst Year of study maintained its largelyfoundational aspirations and the Fifth Yearremained dedicated to independent work, it wasthrough Lloyd’s consolidation of the second, third,and fourth years of study into a newly designatedMiddle School that the unit system dramaticallyrearticulated the AA’s modernist agenda.21

Previously oriented horizontally to distributestudent supervision to tutors, nine units were noworiented vertically through the Middle School. UnitMasters were now responsible for defining designprograms and working methods, establishing apedagogical matrix in which the student’s newlyawarded ‘‘freedom of choice’’ encouragedengagement with subjects ranging fromindustrialized housing to ‘‘problems caused byurban waste and refuse,’’ and ‘‘the possible use ofthe continental shelf as an extension of human

3. Land Settlement, presentation board by A.K. Scott, AA Unit 5 project, 1939. Photograph by Sue Barr. (Courtesy of the Architectural Association

Archive.)

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resources.’’22 In effect, Lloyd stated, the unit systemallowed students to ‘‘exercise a large influence onthe structuring of their own curriculum and inparticular on the nature and sequence of theproblems studied as studio programmes.’’23 It wasthrough such an uninhibited landscape of topics,navigated and explored ‘‘democratically’’ via the

unit system, that the student’s ‘‘generalist’’architectural training was to unfold.

And yet, it was an ironic stroke of institutionaldemocracy that kept Lloyd from seeing his ‘‘MiddleSchool experiment’’ develop further. After nearly adecade of debate at the AA over the school’smerger with Imperial College, in 1970 negotiations

with its once welcoming host crumbled. Facing nearclosure, the school experienced an intense momentof institutional crisis that culminated in Lloyd’sresignation and the seizure of the school’soperations by students and staff, who coordinatedan election for a new chairman, In the summer of1971 they cast their votes for Boyarsky over hisopposing candidate, Kenneth Frampton.24

FragmentationWhen Boyarsky began his chairmanship at the AA inthe Autumn term of 1971, he was no stranger tothe school’s history of upheavals. A Montreal native,Boyarsky had studied architecture during the late1940s at McGill under a modernist curriculum thathad been designed by graduates of Rowse’s AAPlanning School. After earning a master’s degree inRegional Planning in the late 1950s at Cornell,where he serendipitously crossed paths with ColinRowe, he taught briefly at the University of Oregon.In 1963, he relocated to London, where he taughtat the AA as a Fourth-Year unit tutor (1963–1964),and then as Fourth-Year Master (1964–1965),organizing the year program around the planningand redevelopment of the Royal Courts of Justice inLondon. Boyarsky’s resistance to Allen’s efforts toweigh further technical studies upon the FourthYear program of study was complicated by his ownskepticism about the AA’s ongoing mergernegotiations. Disagreements with his superiorultimately led to the termination of the youngtutor’s post, and as a result Boyarsky accepted ateaching position at the University of IllinoisChicago Circle Campus in 1965. Yet, as director ofthe International Institute of Design (IID) SummerSessions in London—an independent school hefounded and directed from 1970 to 1972, andwhose participants drew heavily from the AA staffand student body—he was able to keep a watchfuleye on the events unfolding at Bedford Square.25

Introduced only four years earlier by Lloyd andtested as the Imperial College merger crisis wasreaching fever pitch, the unit system that Boyarsky

4. ‘‘Entering the city from a class D road from the Zone (approaching the tunnel),’’ drawing by Pat Crooke, Andrew Derbyshire, John Voelcker. AA

Fifth Year project ‘‘The Zone,’’ 1952. Photograph by Sue Barr. (Courtesy of the Architectural Association Archive.)

5. AA First Year Studio, 1958 ⁄ 1959, Peter Rich at desk. Photograph by Elizabeth Sakellariou. (Courtesy of the Architectural Association Archive.)

From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 28

inherited was still very much in its nascency.Throughout his first year in office, the newChairman, teaching staff, and students togetherevaluated the efficacy of Lloyd’s academic model ina series of school meetings, working parties, as wellas in the pages of the AA Newsheet, a newin-house bulletin covering the school’s day-to-dayaffairs.26 Rather than a radical overhaulspearheaded by Boyarsky alone, the AA’s departurefrom Lloyd’s modernist philosophy and thereorganization of its curriculum developed througha process of dialogue.

Although their opinions and interests were byno means uniform, both students and tutors agreedthat the intensely democratic nature of Lloyd’seducational policy—that is, the insistence on thestudent’s responsibility for shaping the course of hisor her education—was in principle highly desirable,and certainly, in keeping with the ethos of the AA.Yet, left largely unchecked, such democracy had infact triggered various forms of ‘‘fragmentation’’within an educational platform that purported toproduce ‘‘generalists.’’ Combined with their unitwork, the disparate agendas of the ‘‘service’’departments—Systems Studies (buildingtechnology), Arts & History (visual arts and thehistory of art and architecture) and, newlyintroduced in 1971 by Boyarsky, the

Communications Unit (audio-visual technology)—put AA students in a ‘‘confusing position ofattempting to reconcile several points of view.’’ Theresult was the veritable ‘‘fragmentation of thestudent mind,’’ according to one student.27

Teaching staff had experienced their own strains of‘‘fragmentation.’’ First Year Master Tony Gwilliamflagged the difficulties of supervising and managingthe entire group of sixty First Year students, andsuggested breaking the monolithic introductorycourse into a sequence of smaller teaching units,each developed by a different tutor, to betterprepare students for the range of methods andwork undertaken in the Middle School.28 Rumblingswere also heard from within the Middle School. Thehigh degree of individualism across studentprojects, which not uncommonly departed fromestablished project briefs (and were under Lloyd’spolicy encouraged to do so), was compounded bythe student’s freedom to move from unit to unit,thereby exponentially increasing the demands andscope of tutorial supervision.29

Corroborating accounts surfaced in a ‘‘MiddleSchool Survey’’ launched by the AA Newsheet,which invited tutors and students to share theirexperiences in the unit system and compiled reportsof each unit’s activities that year. The report on‘‘MS2’’—nicknamed ‘‘the Greek Unit’’ after its

tutors Thalys Agaropoulos and Elia Zenghelis, andwhich took as its theme ‘‘buildings and thecity’’—revealed that the unit had amassed anenrollment of nearly one hundred students by theSummer term. The population of the ‘‘Greek Unit’’thus constituted an overwhelming majority of theentire Middle School student body of two hundredand fifty. In contrast, the Middle School communityaction unit taught by tutor Brian Anson had lessthan thirty students in the same year.30

It was in the last year of study, overseen byFifth Year Master Peter Cook, then assisted by ateam of tutors who included Colin Fournier, JamesGowan, Bernard Tschumi, and Dalibor Vesely, that‘‘educational freedom’’ perhaps reached itsapotheosis. At times, however, the price ofindependence in the Fifth Year was a student’svirtual anonymity. Today, many former Fifth Yeartutors recall a typical scenario at staff meetings: asnames from the roster were read aloud tocollectively review the progress of individualstudents, the identities of many students was oftena mystery to tutors.31 Nevertheless, theindependence of the Fifth Year could also yieldextraordinary and fiercely original results—such asRobin Evans’ piezoelectric study (1969);‘‘Motorolarama’’ by Piers Gough, Diana Jowsey, andPhilip Wagner (1971); Mike Hickie and BobJardine’s establishment of a community televisionstation in North Kensington (1971); and PeterCrump and Bruce Haggart’s ecological manifestopublished as the little magazine Street Farmer(1971), to highlight just a few notable studentprojects32 (Figures 7 and 8).

The pressing matter that underpinned suchheterogeneous critiques of the existing educationalstructure at the AA, then, was not the quality ofstudent work, nor the capabilities or methods of theteaching staff. Many of the latter had in factestablished themselves as resident personalities;tutors such as Keith Critchlow, members ofArchigram, Gowan, and Zenghelis, for example, hadinspired and guided a generation of students during

6. Performance by AA students at 36 Bedford Square, 1961. Photograph by Paul Simpson. (Courtesy of the Architectural Association Archive.)

29 SUNWOO

the 1960s as the school principalship shifted handsfrom Allen to Lloyd. Rather, what was at stake wasthe coherence of the overall structure ofarchitectural education at the AA. In a sense, whatstudents and tutors advocated was a morestrategically synthetic form of institutional‘‘fragmentation.’’ Infiltrated by a unit system thathad swiftly and boldly overturned a rigid, twenty-year-old curriculum, the institutional infrastructureof the AA had seemingly dissolved under theLloyd’s ‘‘generalist’’ rubric. In the Summer term of1972, at the end of Boyarsky’s first year as schoolChairman, Archigram member William Chalk woulddismiss the Middle School unit system as nothingshort of an ‘‘abysmal failure’’ and even concededthat ‘‘the re-adoption of [the] Year Master wouldhelp to shoulder the responsibility of so many lostsouls, shopping in the Middle School DepartmentStore.’’ As he added parenthetically with acerbic

disdain, ‘‘note I didn’t use [the word] Supermarket,because there is nothing super about it.’’33

In addition to fragmentation, then, Chalk’srecourse to the language of consumerism in hisindictment of the unit system introduces anothertrope of postmodernism. His invocation of themetaphor of shopping is revealing on multiplelevels. We need only to consider his roots inArchigram as a reminder of how deeply the logic ofconsumer culture had become ingrained in theBritish architectural avant-garde. During the 1960s,concepts such as obsolescence, ready-madecomponents, and consumer choice were equallychampioned by colleagues such as Cedric Price andReyner Banham (and before them in the 1950s,through the Independent Group’s religion of massculture), as antidotes to the formalism andabstraction of modern architecture. Chalk’sinstinctive transposition of the shopping metaphor

into his analysis of the Middle School unit systemoutlines a trajectory from off-the-peg design and‘‘throwaway’’ esthetics into the domain ofarchitectural education, implying the possibility ofan analogous antidote to the formalism andabstraction of modernist architectural education.But whether in the ‘‘department store’’ or the‘‘supermarket,’’ the student was already aconsumer. The unit system’s ‘‘freedom of choice’’had already commodified architectural education atthe AA; the task of its postmodern reinvention,then, would be to maximize the experience ofconsumption.

Predatory CreaturesAt the conclusion of his first year as AA chairman,debates about the school’s academic infrastructuresurely lingered on in Boyarsky’s mind as he quickly,if not seamlessly, changed hats in late July 1972 to

7. ‘‘Motorolarama’’ at Wormwood Scrubs, London. Piers Gough, Diana Jowsey and Philip Wagner, AA Fifth Year project, 1971. (Courtesy of Piers Gough.)

From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 30

commence what would be his third and last term asdirector of the IID Summer Sessions, hosted thatyear by the Institute of Contemporary Arts.Established in 1970 as ‘‘a well-laid table and aplatform for free-ranging souls as opposed to the

arid battery fare of their local school andprofessional cafeterias,’’ the independent summerschool was, in fact, the first institutional articulationof Boyarsky’s gastronomic metaphor. Cullingstudents, architects, historians, designers, and urban

planners from across the world to participate in itssix-week-long programs of lectures, seminars, andworkshops, the Summer Sessions also operated—asBoyarsky had declared prior to Chalk’s remarks onan AA ‘‘supermarket’’—as a ‘‘marketplace forexchange of ideas.’’34 A significant point ofintersection between the philosophy of the SummerSessions and the shifting institutional fabric of theAA, this shared notion of pedagogy as a mode ofconsumption also evolved within a broader field ofdiscourse on the current state of architecturaleducation.

In the aftermath of student uprisings duringthe late 1960s and in response to the attendantdissolution and ongoing reform of educationalinstitutions, the Summer Sessions offered neutralground for the discussion of such phenomena. In aseries of forums devoted to pedagogy, teachers andstudents from Denmark, Italy, Hungary, SouthAfrica, and other countries described the objectives,pressures, and solutions that were shaping theirrespective educational ‘‘scenes’’ (Figure 9). Theinternational ‘‘marketplace’’ of the Summer Sessiontherefore provided a critical lens on contemporaryarchitectural education at the very moment thatBoyarsky was recalibrating the program of the AA.Although an active participant in the conversationsthat unfolded, the new chairman did not explicitlydivulge the details or debates concerning theschool’s reorganization that had arisen during hisfirst year in office. His comments neverthelessdisclose his own perception of the AA and ofarchitectural education more broadly. On the cuspof a significant relaunch of the AA’s educationalprogram, what his comments make clear is that theproject of restructuring the AA was not an isolatedmatter of curricular reform, nor was it even limitedto education; rather, it was a matter of theideological foundations of modern architecturalproduction.

In a presentation at the 1972 Summer Session,four representatives from the University of Torontooutlined the Department of Architecture’s new

8. Street Farmer, magazine cover, Peter Crump and Grahame Caine, AA Fifth Year project, 1971. (Courtesy of the Alvin Boyarsky Archive.)

31 SUNWOO

‘‘open-ended’’ curriculum, formally instituted in theautumn of 1968 and designed to ‘‘encourage eachstudent to develop his own view of architecture.’’35

The presentation sparked an animated groupdiscussion among attendees on the role of thecurriculum in architectural education. While a fellowNorth American participant expressed his ownfrustration over the time and energy he had spentgrappling with the curricular guidelines published inthe ‘‘Princeton Report’’—the assessment ofcurricula in American schools drafted by RobertGeddes and Bernard Spring in 1967 and sponsoredby the American Institute of Architects—anotherattendee critically observed the inherent paradox ofthe student’s purported ‘‘freedom’’ to develop anindividual position within the prescribed,overarching philosophy of the Toronto curriculum.36

Furthering the discussion, Boyarsky impartedhis own interpretation of the role of the curriculumin architectural education. Through its sequence oftechnical exercises, design programs, and otherrequirements, the curriculum promised to teach thestudent ‘‘how to see,’’ ‘‘how to join brick andglass,’’ or even ‘‘how to write,’’ he proposed. Putdifferently, latent in such curricular constructionswas the epistemological promise of architectureitself. Through the sum of its parts, the curriculumtherefore presupposed a definition of architecture inall its visual, spatial, material, tectonic, and evendiscursive constituents. However, it was throughsuch teleological gestures that the curriculum—regardless of institutional, historical, or nationalcontext, or even its composition or design—wouldremain inherently ‘‘paternalistic’’ and ‘‘tyrannical,’’Boyarsky contended: paternalistic in the sensethat its obsolescence is inevitable in the face ofunrelenting social and technological developments,and tyrannical in the sense that its prescriptionswould nullify the cultural and intellectualdifferences of those who engaged with it.37

In effect, the curriculum was indeed (toparaphrase Walter Gropius) a blueprint forarchitectural education.

Echoes of Lloyd, who himself had foundit ‘‘criminally irresponsible to lay down acurriculum,’’ are perhaps audible here. However, by

parsing his modernist stance on pedagogyagainst Boyarsky’s ruminations, a modulation ineducational methods and objectives becomes more

9. Stationery, International Institute of Design Summer Session, 1972. (Courtesy of the Alvin Boyarsky Archive.)

From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 32

discernible.38 Although based on the conviction thatindividual students should steer the course of theireducation, Lloyd’s notion of ‘‘educationaldemocracy’’ ultimately relied on a totalizingconception of architecture as the product of aninterdisciplinary framework of operations and aconception of the architect as its coordinator,trained to adapt and respond to changing socialdemands and contexts. In this way, Lloyd’sphilosophy recalled Walter Gropius’ emphasis on theteaching of ‘‘method’’ versus ‘‘information,’’ asmuch as it did the global ambitions of BuckminsterFuller’s proposals for an expanded multinational andmultimedia educational network.39 For Lloyd, ademocratic model of architectural educationanticipated the democratic choices that the architect-as-coordinator would encounter in the dual role ofmember and spatial organizer of modern society.

In his response to the ‘‘Toronto Curriculum’’presentation, Boyarsky made an alternativeproposition. The new task of the school ofarchitecture, he stated, was to ‘‘be a critic ofsociety,’’ rather than merely its provider or formgiver. To be sure, Boyarsky was not alone in his callfor architectural education to embrace a morecritical, rather than simply professional or social,stance. The capacity of the studio, atelier, and otherpedagogical spaces to adopt a manifesto hadalready become apparent, for example, in RobertVenturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s1969 studio at Yale, which culminated in thepublication of Learning from Las Vegas (1972), oreven the radical formation of Unité pédagogique 6(UP6) in France.40 For Boyarsky, however,architectural education as a polemical mechanismpresented itself at an institutional scale and in theshape of the AA. If a school of architecture was tofunction as a critical thermometer of contemporaryarchitectural production, then it must be fueled by‘‘the energies and interests of a lot of people, sothat the school community is bubbling with dozensof sometimes contradictory interests and activities’’and in which the ‘‘so-called curriculum,’’ Boyarsky

argued, must therefore be ‘‘conditioned daily,weekly, and annually.’’41 Conscious of the negativeconnotations of such a simultaneity of ideas,Boyarsky defended the support of such an ongoingideological surplus as ‘‘the most responsible activityof all for a school of architecture.’’ ‘‘It makeseverybody uncomfortable and edgy,’’ he explained,‘‘because everybody has to justify their ownexistence to themselves.’’42 In this proposedpedagogical model, the imperative of ‘‘choice’’ didnot facilitate or simulate methods of practice.Rather, working in concert with the continuousformulation of competing architectural positions, itwould stimulate the production of theory.

Later on, during his own presentation, Boyarskyfurther developed his proposition of architecturaleducation as a process of ideological friction byframing it within the AA, deftly reinventing what hispredecessor had fashioned as a democratic trainingground for modern architects.43 At the AA, notutors were tenured, he informed his audience atthe Summer Session, and in place of a traditionalcurriculum, the school offered an ‘‘interactivekaleidoscopic situation’’ in which a cacophony ofpositions formed the crux of its educationalprogram. With students and staff primarily workingat home and in nearby offices, respectively,Boyarsky described (with a touch of pride) how theAA ‘‘doesn’t have any facilities.’’

It’s just a chandelier—which is an eighteenthcentury chandelier—an eighteenth centurymarble fireplace, with nice windowsoverlooking a green London square. And a barwhich sells whiskey and wine [and which has]lots of comfortable chairs. And students gettheir crits in the bar or under the chandelier.It’s like downtown. You come to meet peopleto talk.44

Enamored by this vignette of 36 BedfordSquare, Boyarsky summed up the ‘‘relativeinformality’’ of this educational milieu by remarking

‘‘there’s no place, there’s no money, and nobody’sthere for very long periods of time. It’s veryinteresting.’’ Withstanding the winds of change,vestiges of old-world conviviality persevered againsta stark institutional backdrop now vulnerable to itsurban surroundings and programmaticallyeviscerated to maximize the circulation, pursuit, andconsumption of ideas. ‘‘People at the AA have onething in common,’’ Boyarsky delighted. ‘‘They’re allpredatory creatures’’45 (Figure 10). Capitalizing ontheir differences, a new breed of occupants wouldcome to inhabit this renovated space.

Fair Grounds‘‘The AA philosophy is one of selection bychoice,’’ affirmed the AA Newsheet at the start ofthe Autumn 1972 term, before outlining the‘‘dramatic changes’’ to the undergraduate coursethat lay ahead.46 In deference to this philosophy,both Lloyd and Boyarsky had seized upon theunit system as an alternative to a curriculumorganized by year. But if the modernchoreography of Lloyd’s unit system hadcounterbalanced the ‘‘will’’ of the student withinthe regimented display of the Middle School‘‘department store,’’ its emerging postmodernmovements would prove more dynamic.Maximizing the philosophy of ‘‘selection bychoice,’’ during Boyarsky’s second and third yearsas AA chairman the unit system was distributedthroughout an undergraduate course newlyreconstituted into First Year, an IntermediateSchool (second and third years), and a DiplomaSchool (fourth and fifth years).47 Pressuring tutorsthroughout the school to replenish and revitalizethe AA’s repertoire of architectural provocationsand inviting students to take on the roles ofdiscerning ‘‘predatory creatures,’’ the unit systemtherefore reemerged as an educational modelpredicated on both production and consumption.Cyclical, self-organizing, and equally self-effacing,it was a system of architectural educationdesigned to counteract its own obsolescence.48

33 SUNWOO

Throughout the postwar period, the programsand exercises of the AA’s introductory First Year haddistilled architecture to its ‘‘fundamentals,’’ and hadin fact functioned as a probationary period to assess‘‘whether or not the student has the potential tocontinue with the study of architecture.’’49 Bycontrast, Boyarsky’s revised First Year distilledmodes of architectural inquiry. Divided into groupsof twenty, throughout the 1972 ⁄ 1973 academicyear students rotated through four ‘‘Briefing Units,’’each designed and taught by a different tutor.50

Although the basic design and visual exercises inTony Gwilliam’s unit might have preserved some ofthe original ambitions and methods of thepreexisting introductory year, the other three unitsadopted divergent tactics. Students in StefanSzczelkun’s unit explored the relationship betweenmobility, technology, and education through therefurbishment of a London city bus purchased bythe AA. After outfitting the bus with audiovisualequipment and living quarters, students tested theirdesign during a two-week tour of British schools ofarchitecture51 (Figure 11). Alternatively, GrahameShane’s unit used the city of London to introducestudents to architectural issues in an urban context,while in Tony Samson’s unit the ecological andsocial conditions of a Welsh village in a ‘‘transitionalphase’’ between postindustrial dormancy andredevelopment served as a point of entry. Amodification in the following academic yearextended the First Year units into three year-longprograms; after participating in a brief commoncourse, students joined the unit of their choice.52

Unsettling the previous grounding of architectural‘‘fundamentals’’ in formal and spatial principles andmodes of representation, the unit system’sfragmentation of the First Year of study establisheda new introduction to architecture, one thatequipped the student with the critical apparatusesnecessary to navigate the heterogeneity ofarchitectural production within the educationalprogram of the AA, and indeed, outside of theschool.

In this sense, the subsequent encounters withthe unit system in the Intermediate School and theDiploma School confronted students with anunrelenting stream of architectural introductions.For example, during the 1973 ⁄ 1974 academic year,Intermediate Unit 1 approached architecturethrough the platform of community action.Organized by the renegade planner Brian Anson,the unit spearheaded a campaign to educateScottish communities on the effects of North Seaoffshore oil drilling, which had recently spurred ‘‘anavalanche of speculative planning proposals inScotland.’’53 Arguing that ‘‘technology which

exploits nature ultimately exploits man,’’ the‘‘Rational Technology Unit’’ (Intermediate Unit 4),formed in 1973 by tutors Gerry Foley and GeorgeKasabov, responded to the energy crisis throughseminars and research on resource consumption,population growth, and the conservation ofmaterials and energy in an effort to understand howto ‘‘design with nature’’ rather than ‘‘against it.’’54

Entering architecture through immaterial resourcesand technologies, Intermediate Unit 6, co-taught in1973 ⁄ 1974 by Archigrammer David Greene andtelevision director and filmmaker Mike Myers,proposed that ‘‘the imaginative communications

10. Enid Caldecott (AA Librarian), Alvin Boyarsky, and Marjorie Morrison (AA Slide Librarian) in reconstruction of AA Members Room at 36 Bedford

Square, installed at the ‘‘AA 125’’ exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1972. (Courtesy of the Architectural Association Photo

Archive.)

From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 34

skills needed to make a good film or a goodtelevision programme are the same in principle asthose needed to make good buildings. It is aquestion of designing pieces of time as well asblocks of space.’’55 Revisited here, suchinvestigations and concerns certainly echowithin architectural education and practicetoday.

Notwithstanding their differences, theinvestigations conducted at the AA during the1970s would move outside the realm of professionalpractice, as a collective polemic. As the agendas ofindividual units tacitly counterpoised the methodsand objectives of one another, the unit system inturn also generated a continuous obstruction ofdisciplinary certainty. The potential of the unit asmanifesto was already latent in Lloyd’s MiddleSchool, although overshadowed—if notsuppressed—by its ‘‘democratic’’ aims.Foregrounded as the building block of architecturaleducation at the AA, its systematization duringBoyarsky’s chairmanship synthesized andinstitutionalized a culture of architecturalfragmentation.

Today, the polemical agency of the AA unitsystem is most often associated with the DiplomaSchool, but it would in fact take a year of tinkeringbefore it would fully participate in this system.Although its teaching staff were asked to play thedual roles of ‘‘both tutors and people of ideas’’ tocultivate ‘‘a much more critical atmosphere,’’ anoverarching program ultimately prevailed across thefinal stage of the 1972 ⁄ 1973 undergraduatecourse.56 The unexpected departure of Cook(former Fifth Year Master and subsequent head ofthe Diploma School) from the AA in January 1973(to take up what would be a brief stint as directorof the ICA) prompted a further reevaluation of thefourth and fifth year of study by students, staff, andthe school chairman. During a school meeting inJanuary of 1973, Boyarsky proposed that theDiploma School student should be able to ‘‘‘weave’his way through a ‘rich supermarket’ of offerings

and self-generated programmes,’’ invoking the nowfamiliar metaphor that had surfaced in previousconversations both at the AA and at the SummerSessions.57

As the second year of his chairmanship drew toa close, there would be no Summer Session topreoccupy the now former IID director. In its place,the AA had absorbed its structure, operations,community, and even its institutional language. Thistransfer culminated in the Autumn 1973 term whenBoyarsky extended the unit system not only to theDiploma School but also to the reconstituted‘‘Service Units.’’ As the name of the latter suggests,these units functioned as a support structure for theAA’s architectural design program and included theGeneral Studies Unit (formerly Arts & History), theTechnical Studies Unit (formerly Systems Studies),and the Communications Unit, which consolidatedinstruction in all visual media.58 In September 1973,‘‘Introduction Week’’ thus inaugurated theestablishment of the unit system as the AA’s newmodel of architectural education.

Given full reign over the pedagogical territoryof a unit, Diploma unit masters now devisedadvanced teaching programs.59 For many of theearliest Diploma units, the contemporary cityfigured as the object of scrutiny, although it wouldbe manipulated through distinctive theoreticalfilters. A cross section of these investigationsreveals theory as an impetus for the AA’s departurefrom its modernist legacy and illustrates howpedagogy offered, an intellectual infrastructure forarchitectural postmodernism.60

While ‘‘urban insurgency’’ had been the subjectof a series of his lectures at the 1972 SummerSession at the AA, Bernard Tschumi honed andreinterpreted the concept as ‘‘urban politics’’through the platform of Diploma Unit 2.61

Not politics in the institutional sense though(Parliament, elections, parties, localauthorities. . .), neither politics in theideological sense (class struggle, proletariat,party. . .) but politics in a sense that has not

11. AA First Year students with Peter Murray and the ‘‘AD ⁄ AA ⁄ Polyark’’ bus, 1973. (Courtesy of Peter Murray.)

35 SUNWOO

been yet defined, and which perhaps mustalways remain undefined. Such politics are notconcerned with well defined alterations toinstitutional rules, but rather with theelaboration of subjective spaces and socialplaygrounds. Although based on an analysis ofthe city in terms of social relationships andmodes of production, this political journeynever speaks about revolution withoutexplicitly referring to everyday life.62

This declaration of the unit’s refusal to engagewith the city’s form or its institutions appeared inthe ‘‘little magazine’’ Chronicle in Urban Politics(1974) (Figure 12). From the unit’s inception,Tschumi had envisioned the collective publicationproject as a pedagogical resource that wouldencourage students to develop both design andcritical writing skills. Over the course of the unit’shistory during the 1970s, other forms ofrepresentation—including photography, literature,and film—would play an increasing role in itsexplorations of the spatial complexities of everydaylife63 (Figure 13). As its title suggests, thepublication chronicled the breadth of Diploma Unit2’s activities and compiled student projects andtexts, as well as transcripts of lectures delivered atthe AA by invited guests. During the unit’s

inaugural year, these guests included AntoineGrumbach, Fernando Montes, and a number ofradical Italian architects. Among the latter, Pietro DiRossi, Paolo Deganello, and Gianni Pettena hadhosted the unit in Italy during grouptrips—moments of which are captured inphotographs on the front and back covers ofChronicle in Urban Politics, symbolically conveyingthe dialogic itinerary contained within.

Like Tschumi, the Czech emigré Dalibor Veselyhad also graduated from the Fifth Year teachingstaff to the Diploma School, where in 1973 hebegan presiding over Unit 1. Titled ‘‘City ofContinuity: Towards Urban Resurrection,’’ the unit’sactivities were based on the premise that ‘‘the cityas an institution is deeply rooted in the nature ofour civilization.’’64 Unit 1 explored this hypothesisthrough contemporary and historical urban analysis.While a ‘‘live project’’ generated proposals for anurban institution sited on Cambridge’s new citycenter, for the unit’s ‘‘research project’’ studentsstudied ‘‘the problem of urban dwelling andelementary patterns of urban fabric, such as streetpatterns, urban blocks, clusters etc.’’ Vesely alsocoordinated an intensive series of lectures, sometaught by visitors to the unit. Ranging in subjectmatter from ‘‘City as a vision, Bruno Taut, DieStadtkrone’’ to ‘‘Surrealism and the contemporary

city,’’ the lectures introduced students to analternative history of urbanism via the radicalmodernism of early twentieth-century avant-gardes.65 Although its theoretical foundations weretenuous, as Vesely conceded pensively in the Springof 1974 in the AA Events List (a new weeklyitinerary that documented the multiplicity ofactivities now flooding the school), the unit was, ashe explained, ‘‘going through a process of defininga framework for a new approach to [the] city.’’66

Put differently, pedagogy was shaping a theory ofurbanism.

In a similar move, Diploma Unit 9 made itsdebut in 1973 by beckoning ‘‘Post-Intermediatestudents to shift from the domain of ‘reality’ to thescope of ‘possibility.’’’67 Taught by seasoned AAtutor Elia Zenghelis,68 the unit invited students tojoin its efforts ‘‘to develop an architecturallanguage for large scale and complex institutions.’’Such a language was to be ‘‘based on ideologicalconcepts,’’ rather than historically or sociallyconditioned factors.69 While rejected outright byTschumi and upheld as a transhistorical typology byVesely, urban institutions would preoccupy DiplomaUnit 9 through explorations of the scale anddensity of the city and a reevaluation of theconditions of the modern metropolis. Zenghelisinaugurated Diploma Unit 9 through a series ofdesign projects that advanced inquiries that he hadinitiated in the previous year as an IntermediateUnit 6 tutor, and which had considered ‘‘theadvantages of millions living together on relativelyrestricted areas’’70 (Figure 14). Equally informed byhis collaboration with his former student RemKoolhaas on the 1972 Exodus project, Zenghelisasked Diploma Unit 9 students to take ‘‘asignificant strip across London’’ as a site ‘‘to exploitits magnetic urban potential’’ and to propose anurban park ‘‘designed to hold a continuous‘Ideological World[‘s] Fair.’’’71 Of the latter heanticipated, ‘‘this territory of architectural dialecticswill be an information battlefield and test bed ofconflicting ideologies.’’72

12. Chronicle in Urban Politics, front and back cover. Produced by AA Diploma Unit 2, 1974. (Courtesy of Bernard Tschumi.)

From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 36

An ‘‘ideological world’s fair’’ was indeed an aptdescription of the emerging ‘‘unit culture’’ at theAA during the early 1970s—not simply in terms ofits diversity of theoretical arguments or even theinternationalism of its student body and staff, butalso in terms of the very display mechanismsintrinsic to its machinery. Such mechanisms werealready at work in the Autumn term of 1973 at‘‘Introduction Week,’’ as tutors advertised theirpositions at the beginning of the academic year toattract students. These pitches would become aninstitutional rite at the AA as the convivial, domesticconnotations of the ‘‘well-laid table’’ unequivocallyappropriated the competitive, urgent tone of the‘‘marketplace.’’ Certainly, the shopping metaphorwas now common parlance at the AA. At theconclusion of the first year of the unit system’s fullinfiltration of Bedford Square, in the Summer of1974 the AA Events List commented that ‘‘theschool has changed from the well defineddepartment store into a supermarket withsomething of everything, all polished and wellstacked.’’ But as the editorial suggested, the schoolhad ‘‘moved on again from this point to the marketplace—and now perhaps the bazaar, where manythings are offered, but there are few r[u]les ofpresentation.’’73 These observations coincided with

preparations for the AA’s end-of-year exhibition. Inthe summer of 1974 the end-of-year show wouldbe the first public showcase of the fruits of its neweducational model. Each unit was allotted a spacewithin the school to design an exhibition of itsactivities and work. ‘‘The visibility and thuscredibility of the school needs no overall format soeach of the parts becomes self sufficient,’’ theEvents List assured its readers, and clarified thestakes of the task at hand: ‘‘The visitor’s view of usdepends on his needs and the degree of satisfactionoffered to his taste.’’74 Opening the AA‘‘marketplace’’ to the architectural public, bothtutors and students, then, prepared the school for anew breed of ‘‘predatory creatures.’’

Generations‘‘No other architectural school in Europe can evenremotely claim the prestige and pervasiveimportance of London’s Architectural Association,’’the Architectural Review (AR) immoderatelydeclared in a feature published in October 1983,one decade after Boyarsky had fullyinstitutionalized the unit system at the AA.75 Theseaccolades appeared after a number of victories byformer AA tutors in major internationalcompetitions. Tschumi had secured the Parc de la

Villette, with Koolhaas and Zenghelis (as the Officeof Metropolitan Architecture) placed as runners-up.Zaha Hadid, once a student of and co-tutor withKoolhaas and Zenghelis (and a former OMAassociate), had submitted the winning entry for theHong Kong Peak, a residential and recreationalcomplex. As the magazine remarked, this string ofsuccesses both ‘‘vindicated’’ the AA’s dedication toarchitectural experimentation and validated itseducational philosophy.76

Accordingly, the feature chronicled thematuration of the Diploma unit system. The articletraced, for example, the evolution of urban theoriesin the units launched by Tschumi, Vesely, andZenghelis (and subsequently advanced by theirrespective co-tutors Nigel Coates, MohsenMostafavi, and Koolhaas and Hadid) and illustratedhow the unit system had provided neutral testingground for theoretical pursuits, whether in the formof the socially charged readings of domesticity byRobin Evans and Fred Scott or the radically atavisticurbanism of Léon Krier. To be sure, the AA shelf-lifeof Krier’s theoretical position was brief, as ARpointed out. Indeed, in contrast to the legacy ofsome other units, the inability of Krier’s teaching togain ground within the milieu of the AA during themid-1970s both demonstrated the intrinsic volatility

13. ‘‘Prison Park,’’ presentation panels by Nigel Coates, AA Diploma Unit 2 project, 1974. (Courtesy of Nigel Coates ⁄ Architectural Association.)

37 SUNWOO

of the unit system and reflected an institutionalresistance to the rise of architecturalpostmodernism’s historicist provocations (whichwere also filtering through the schoolcontemporaneously via the teaching of CharlesJencks in General Studies).77 Commending itsresilience to such external pressures, AR observed,‘‘the most important project to be produced at theAA in the last decade has been the structure of the

AA itself,’’ fashioned ‘‘not simply as a school ofarchitecture, but as a model urban institutiondesigned to counteract the increasingfragmentation, specialization and consumerizationof public life.’’78

Although I have argued that the veryinstitutionalization of the unit system at the AA hadactually internalized such ‘‘fragmentation,specialization and consumerism’’—akin to what

Jameson has characterized as postmodernism’s‘‘consumption of sheer commodification as aprocess’’79—the AR’s conflicting interpretationnevertheless points to contradictions latent withinBoyarsky’s postmodernist educational philosophy. Ifthe informality of the ‘‘well-laid table’’ and theunregulated activity of the ‘‘marketplace’’ hadchallenged overturned pedagogy’s complicity insustaining the philosophical, formal, andprofessional foundations of architecturalmodernism, the polemic of Boyarsky’s educationalmodel was motivated by what was nothing short ofa truly modernist ambition to create a newarchitectural culture. The school ofarchitecture—that institutional typology hinging(however tenuously) professional concerns withintellectual discourse—was perhaps the ideal stagefor such a cultural insurrection to take place.Certainly, AR’s spotlight on the AA plainlyacknowledged and substantiated the school’s owncoherent architectural culture, legible not only inthe unit system, but also in its extensive publishing,lecture, and exhibition programs. In this way, theAA’s constellation of activities perhaps rival theexpansive program of the Bauhaus, thatinstitutional heavyweight of early twentieth-centurymodernism, whose pedagogical methods had beenreinterpreted at architecture schools worldwide.Indeed, if the AA’s postmodernist model ofarchitectural education had crystallized throughcritiques of the standardization andprofessionalization of pedagogy, it had alsoreclaimed a role for the school of architecture as thecrux of architectural culture and the site ofdisciplinary reinvention.

Although Boyarsky’s institutional redesign ofthe AA during the early 1970s had subversivelysituated the school’s cultural production on themargins of the discipline, a decade later the ARfeature repositioned its coordinates dead center.This movement is made clear by the fulsomelyextensive coverage of the school in AR, mouthpieceof the British architectural establishment. During

14. Density Study by Kerstin Nilsson, from AA Intermediate Unit 6 ‘‘Housing Prototypes and Densities’’ booklet, published January 1973. (Courtesy

of the Architectural Association Archive.)

From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 38

the 1970s, the AA had retreated contentedly intothe more brazen, open arms of Architectural Design(which by the end of the decade had itself becomesaturated with the cool, muted tones ofpostmodernism’s typological and historicistreveries). The AA’s endorsement by AR, however,was not a matter of ‘‘selling out.’’ Rather, on arelated but different register, the institutionalizationof an avant-garde through the medium of educationis certainly key to gauging the interlaced inflectionsand histories of both modernist and postmodernistarchitectural pedagogy.80

After a decade of watching the AA unit systemflourish, Boyarsky revealed a glimmer ofapprehension about its future direction in aninterview conducted by AR for its 1983 feature onthe school. The tutors who had first tested the unitsystem during the 1970s—‘‘thethoroughbreds’’—had moved on, Boyarsky noted,and had left behind a legacy of teaching programsand architectural investigations that were beingreinterpreted by a ‘‘second generation’’ of tutors,many of whom had studied under the ‘‘firstgeneration’’ of unit tutors.81 Two years earlier, thisgenerational phenomenon had provoked tutorRobin Evans to lament that the ‘‘teaching units,however insular, are becoming more and morealike,’’ and that the ‘‘subject matter for excitementis harder to find.’’82 Although the volatility of theAA’s postmodernist ‘‘marketplace’’ model had beendesigned to inhibit the hegemony of architecturalcertainties, its consumerist processes and pluralismwere equally capable of producing a newinstitutional regime. The unit system hadsuccessfully become, as Evans implied, just that: asystem, one laden with inherent contradictions andveiled modernisms, yet—as its legacy beyond theAA suggests—both effective and thoroughlyexportable, nonetheless.

AcknowledgmentsThis article represents a portion of my doctoraldissertation, which has been supported by a Graham

Foundation Carter Manny Award for DissertationWriting, and fellowships from the Paul MellonCentre for Studies in British Art and PrincetonUniversity. My project has greatly benefited fromconversations with many of the former AA tutorsand students who appear in this essay. Specialthanks to Edward Bottoms at the AA Archive andNicholas Boyarsky for facilitating archival research;to Spyros Papapetros, Dalibor Vesely, Jean-LouisCohen, Thomas Weaver, and Lucia Allais, whoprovided comments on earlier drafts; to ReinholdMartin who allowed me to develop my research inthe context of a seminar at Columbia University;and to the editors at the Journal of ArchitecturalEducation. Nicholas Boyarsky, Nigel Coates, PiersGough, Peter Murray, Elizabeth Sakellarios, PaulSimpson, Bernard Tschumi, the AA Archive, and theAA Photo Archive all kindly provided images forpublication.

Notes

1.‘‘Programme, Introduction Week, 24–28 September 1973,’’

Architectural Association Archive (AAA), Box no. 2008:55, p. 1. That

year over forty-seven different countries were represented in its

undergraduate body alone. See ‘‘Students’ Countries of Origin,’’ AA

Prospectus (1973–1974), p. 10. It is also worth noting that on January

1, 1973 the United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community.

2. Two main bodies constitute the AA: the Association, which comprises

a membership that is governed by a Council of elected members, whose

primary responsibility is the stewardship of the School of Architecture.

For nearly its entire institutional history, AA students have been

permitted to sit on Council, thereby exercising the right to participate in

administrative matters. The RIBA’s postwar educational reform was

directly informed by the proceedings of its 1958 Oxford Conference. On

the Oxford Conference, see Mark Crinson and Jules Lubbock,

Architecture—Art or Profession? Three Hundred Years of Architectural

Education in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994),

pp. 137–148.

3. ‘‘Programme, Introduction Week, 24–28 September 1973,’’ AAA, p. 1.

4. See, for example: K. Michael Hays, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the

Late Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Reinhold Martin,

Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s

Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and Aron Vinegar,

I Am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 2008).

5. For an analysis of media production at the AA during the 1970s, see

Irene Sunwoo, ‘‘The Static Age,’’ AA Files, no. 61 (Winter 2010), pp.

118–129. For an overview of Boyarsky’s expansion of the AA’s cultural

activities during the 1980s see Igor Marjanovic, ‘‘Lines and Words on

Display: Alvin Boyarsky as a Collector, Curator and Publisher,’’

Architectural Research Quarterly 14 (2010), pp. 165–174.

6. Literature on the history of the AA and Boyarsky’s chairmanship is

largely limited to articles, essays, and book chapters. See, for example:

Igor Marjonovic, ‘‘Alvin Boyarsky’s Delicatessen,’’ in Critical Architecture,

ed. Jane Rendell (London: Routledge, 2007), 190–199; Andrew Higgott,

‘‘Searching for the Subject: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural

Association,’’ in Mediating Modernism: Architectural Cultures in Britain

(London: Routledge, 2006), 154–187; David Dunster, ‘‘Boyarsky and the

Architectural Association,’’ in An Architect’s Guide to Fame, ed. Paul

Davies and Torsten Schmiedeknecht (Oxford, UK: Elsevier, 2005),

33–50. Alternatively, other publications coordinated by the school

comprise vignettes of its institutional history as told by its protagonists.

See for example, James Gowan, ed., A Continuing Experiment: Learning

and Teaching at the Architectural Association (London: Architectural

Press, 1975). What remains perhaps the most informative historical

account is that by John Summerson, brief as it may be, and though it

deals only with the first 100 years of the school’s activities. John

Summerson, The Architectural Association, 1847–1947 (London: Pub.

for the Architectural Assn. by Pleiades Books, 1947).

7. This study aims to contribute to a growing body of scholarship on

architectural education in the late twentieth century. Recent work

includes Sean Keller, ‘‘Fenland Tech: Architectural Science in Postwar

Cambridge,’’ Grey Room 23 (Spring 2006), pp. 40–65; Andrew Leach,

Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History (Ghent, Belgium: A&S Books,

Department of Architecture & Urban Planning, Ghent University, 2007);

Jean-Louis Violeau, Les Architectes Et Mai 68 (Paris: Recherches, 2005);

Jorge Otero-Pailos’ chapter on Charles Moore in Architecture’s Historical

Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern.

8. For an excellent analysis of architectural education at the AA during

Rowse’s tenure, see Elizabeth Darling, Re-forming Britain: Narratives of

Modernity before Reconstruction (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 179–

191.

9. See account of former student David Goddard in James Gowan, ed.,

Projects: Architectural Association, 1947–1972 (London: Architectural

Association, 1972), p. 10.

10. ‘‘Year 1’’ and ‘‘Year 2,’’ Architectural Association Curriculum Table

(1963–1964), AAA.

11. ‘‘The Studio Training,’’ Architectural Association Prospectus (1963–

1964), AAA.

12. In principle, throughout the year students were to change units or

Unit Masters to ‘‘encounter a variety of outlooks upon architecture,’’

though in fact some students opted to remain within the same unit for

the duration of the year. A.A. Information Notes (1962–1963), AAA,

p. 7.

13. AA Prospectus (1965–1966), AAA, pp. 9–10. Allen, a technocrat

who had honed his expertise in physics and acoustics at the Building

Research Station, had risen in rank at the RIBA during the 1950s. Along

with other modernists including Leslie Martin and Richard Llewelyn-

Davies, Allen had participated in the RIBA’s 1958 Oxford Conference,

which culminated in a nationwide educational reform that had set the

terms for the AA’s potential absorption into the Imperial College of

39 SUNWOO

Science and Technology. See Mark Crinson and Jules Lubbock,

Architecture—Art or Profession? Three Hundred Years of Architectural

Education in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994),

pp. 137–148.

14. John Lloyd, ‘‘Intentions,’’ Arena, The Architectural Association

Journal 82, no. 904 (July ⁄ August 1966), ‘‘Kumasi Special Issue,’’ p. 40.

15. Ibid.

16. John Lloyd, ‘‘Principal’s Comments,’’ Architectural Association

School Handbook (October 1967), p. 1.0. On Lloyd’s role at Kumasi see

Hannah Le Roux, ‘‘Modern Architecture in Post-Colonial Ghana and

Nigeria,’’ Architectural History 47 (2004), pp. 385–389.

17. John R. Lloyd, ‘‘Application for the Post of Principal of the

Architectural Association School of Architecture, Supporting Statement,’’

AAA Box 1991:13, p. 3.

18. As Lloyd would remark, ‘‘recent debates on the need to reshape

Parliamentary democracy and the world-wide student unrest are the

most obvious symptoms of the need for [a] redefinition’’ of this

relationship. John Lloyd, ‘‘Education for Choice and Change,’’ Arena:

The Journal of the Architectural Association 84, no. 923 (June-July

1968), p. 2.

19. John Lloyd, ‘‘Education for choice and change,’’ Arena: The Journal

of the Architectural Association 84, no. 923 (June-July 1968), p. 2.

20. John Lloyd, ‘‘Principal’s Comments,’’ Architectural Association

School Handbook (1968), p. 2. Reflecting back on his changes to the

AA curriculum, in 1975 Lloyd (a Subud mystic who in the course of his

principalship would change his first name to Michael) commented:

‘‘given the exuberance, diversity and ability of the AA it seemed to me

criminally irresponsible to lay down a curriculum. Rather I believe that

those affected by the series of decisions which make up a course of

study are in a better position to take the decisions themselves. I was

also confident that the staff had very much more to offer than had been

possible under a curriculum-orientated school structure. Not least, I was

sure that by restructuring the school so that participation was the norm

there would be a great release of enthusiasm and creative effort.’’

Michael Lloyd, ‘‘Reply,’’ in A Continuing Experiment: Learning and

Teaching at the Architectural Association, edited by James Gowan

(London: Architectural Press, 1975), p. 163.

21. John Lloyd, ‘‘The Structure of the Undergraduate Course,’’

Architectural Association School Handbook (October 1967), p. 1.1.

22. John Lloyd, ‘‘Education for choice and change,’’ Arena: The Journal

of the Architectural Association 84, no. 923 (June-July 1968), p. 5.

23. John Lloyd, ‘‘The Structure of the Undergraduate Course,’’

Architectural Association School Handbook (October 1967), p. 1.1–1.2.

24. For an account of these events, see Charles Jencks, ‘‘125 Years of

Quasi Democracy,’’ in Gowan, A Continuing Experiment, pp. 149–160.

25. For a biographical account of Boyarsky’s Chicago period, see Igor

Marjanovic, ‘‘Alvin Boyarsky’s Chicago: An Architectural Critic in the City

of Strangers,’’ AA Files 60 (2010), pp. 45–52. On the history of the

International Institute of Design Summer Sessions, see Irene Sunwoo,

‘‘Pedagogy’s Progress: Alvin Boyarsky’s International Institute of

Design,’’ Grey Room 34 (Winter 2009), pp. 28–57.

26. The AA Newsheet was founded by Neil Steedman, an AA graduate,

in Autumn 1971 and ceased publication in Summer 1974.

27. Fitzroy Ponniah, ‘‘Towards a Unified Educational Policy for the

School,’’ AA Newsheet, no. 11 (Summer Term, 1971 ⁄ 1972),

unpaginated.

28. Tony Gwilliam, ‘‘First Year AA’72,’’ AA Newsheet, no. 16 (Summer

1971 ⁄ 1972), unpaginated.

29. As already discussed in 1970 by Middle School tutor Aristides

Romanos. See Aristides Romanos, ‘‘Viewpoint: Notes on an Educational

Experiment. Towards a Structure of Academic Freedom,’’ Architectural

Association Quarterly 2, no. 4 (Autumn 1970), p. 44–49.

30. ‘‘MS2 – The Greeks,’’ AA Newsheet no. 13 (Summer 1971 ⁄ 1972).

31. Peter Cook, interview with author, November 2010, New York;

Bernard Tschumi, interview with author, February 2011, New York;

Dalibor Vesely, interview with author, February 2011, London.

32. For Cook’s own account of his experience as a teacher at the AA

during this period, see Peter Cook, ‘‘The Electric Decade: An

Atmosphere at the AA School 1963–1973,’’ in Gowan, A Continuing

Experiment, pp. 137–147.

33. Warren Chalk, ‘‘Go Tell It To the Mountain,’’ AA Newsheet, no. 11

(Summer Term, 1971 ⁄ 1972), unpaginated.

34. Alvin Boyarsky, ‘‘In Progress IV: Summer Session 70,’’ Architectural

Design (April 1971), p. 220.

35. ‘‘Toronto Curriculum’’ presentation, ‘‘Participants Forum,’’ audio

recording, IID Summer Session, 2 August 1972, ABA. The new Toronto

curriculum had been developed by Peter Prangnell, whose redesign of

the first year of architectural study at Columbia University had prompted

Australian architect John Andrew—appointed Chairman of the

Department of Architecture in 1967—to hire Prangnell to undertake a

similar curricular overhaul at Toronto. See ‘‘Winds of Change,’’ Parts 1,

2, and 3, Canadian Architect (February 1969), pp. 32–44.

36. ‘‘The Study of Education for Environmental Design,’’ A Report by

Princeton University for the American Institute of Architects. Co-

directors: Robert L. Geddes and Bernard P. Spring (Princeton: Princeton

University, December 1967).

37. Alvin Boyarsky, ‘‘Participants Forum,’’ International Institute of

Design Summer Session, London, audio recording, 31 July 1972, ABA.

38. Lloyd, ‘‘Reply,’’ in Gowan, A Continuing Experiment, p. 163.

39. See Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture; Buckminster Fuller,

Education Automation.

40. See Vinegar, I AM A MONUMENT: On Learning from Las Vegas;

Martin Pawley and Bernard Tschumi, ‘‘The Beaux-Arts since 1968,’’

Architectural Design 41, (September 1971), p. 533–566.

41. Alvin Boyarsky, ‘‘Participants Forum,’’ International Institute of

Design Summer Session, London, audio recording, 31 July 1972, ABA.

42. Boyarsky, ‘‘Participants Forum,’’ 31 July 1972, ABA.

43. Alvin Boyarsky, ‘‘Participants Forum,’’ International Institute of

Design Summer Session, London, audio recording, (undated) 1972,

ABA.

44. Boyarsky, ‘‘Participants Forum,’’ (undated) 1972, ABA.

45. Ibid.

46. ‘‘Lower School First Year,’’ AA Newsheet, no. 1 (Session 1972 ⁄ 1973

Autumn Term). See ‘‘Editorial,’’ AA Newsheet, no. 1 (Session

1972 ⁄ 1973 Autumn Term).

47. On the one hand, such reorganization was practical. With the

creation of the Diploma School, the weight of RIBA requirements was

shifted from the fourth year to the fifth, granting the fourth year

student more time for design work while also imposing structure onto

the fifth year. The caesura between the Intermediate School and the

Diploma School coincided with the ‘‘year out’’ that followed the third

year of study, but importantly also created a point of entry for

continuing students from other British institutions and international

students from abroad—a financial palliative to an ongoing saga at the

AA during the 1970s, when the Department of Education & Science and

local education authorities withdrew grants for students at the AA, a

private and independent institution.

48. Higgott’s essay on Boyarsky’s AA chairmanship is to date perhaps

the only account that attempts to historicize the unit system, yet limits

its study to the Diploma School. See Higgott, ‘‘Searching for the

Subject: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association.’’

49. See, for example, ‘‘Structure of the Undergraduate Course’’ in AA

Prospectus (1968–1969), unpaginated.

50. ‘‘Lower School First Year,’’ AA Newsheet, no. 1 (Session 1972 ⁄ 1973

Autumn Term), unpaginated.

51. The AA First Year bus tour was jointly coordinated by Architectural

Design, through the initiative of Technical Editor Peter Murray, and by

Polyark, a network of architectural schools conceived by Cedric Price.

See ‘‘AD ⁄ AA ⁄ Polyark Bus Tour,’’ Architectural Design (April 1973), pp.

201–212.

52. See ‘‘First Year Requirements,’’ AA Prospectus (1973 ⁄ 1974), p. 11.

53. ‘‘Lower School – 2nd & 3rd years,’’ AA Newsheet, no. 1 (Autumn

term, 1972–1973), unpaginated; ‘‘Unit 1,’’ AA Prospectus (1973–1974),

Intermediate School, p. 2.

54. ‘‘Unit 4, Rational Technology Unit,’’ in Intermediate School, AA

Prospectus (1973–1974), p. 6.

55. ‘‘Unit 6,’’ in Intermediate School, AA Prospectus (1973–1974), p. 9.

In 1972 ⁄ 1973, the inaugural year of the new Intermediate School,

David Greene had co-taught Unit 2 with fellow Archigrammers Ron

Herron and Dennis Crompton.

56. For example, the theme of the first group design program was the

‘‘Street Corner.’’ For student projects, see ‘‘Street Corners,’’ AA

Newsheet, no. 4(Autumn Term, 1972 ⁄ 1973).

57. Michael Walsche, ‘‘Alvin’s staff meeting,’’ AA Newsheet 2, no. 10

(March 1973). Also see ‘‘Will Success Spoil Peter Cook?’’ AA Newsheet

2, no. 7 (January 1973).

58. On the AA Communications Unit during the 1970s, see Sunwoo,

‘‘The Static Age,’’ AA Files, no. 61 (2010), pp. 118–129. I regret that

General Studies and Technical Studies cannot be discussed in further

detail here.

59. The adoption of the vertical studio dominated by a tutor in fact

echoed the structure and hierarchy of the Beaux-Arts atelier. My thanks

to Jean-Louis Cohen for this insight.

60. Tschumi, who had joined the AA teaching staff in 1970, recalls that

in it the launch of the new unit system, Boyarsky had encouraged

different units to collectively develop comparative urban studies.

Bernard Tschumi, interview with author, 30 October 2009, New York.

61. Tschumi’s teaching would subsequently relocate to Diploma Unit 10.

62. Bernard Tschumi, ‘‘A Chronicle of Urban Politics’’ in Chronicle of

Urban Politics (London: Architectural Association, 1974).

63. At the start of the 1973 ⁄ 1974 year Tschumi had in fact planned for

the production of two magazines over the course of the year, although

From the ‘‘Well-Laid Table’’ to the ‘‘Market Place’’ 40

the second would be published by the unit in the following year,

1974 ⁄ 1975. See Chronicle of Urban Space (London: Architectural

Association, 1975). On the history of Diploma Unit 2, see Bernard

Tschumi and Nigel Coates, Discourse of Events (London: Architectural

Association, 1983); and Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, ‘‘The London

Conceptualists: Architecture and Performance in the 1970s,’’ Journal of

Architectural Education 61, no. 4 (2008), pp. 43–51.

64. ‘‘Unit 1, City of Continuity, towards Urban Resurrection,’’ Diploma

School, AA Prospectus (1973–1974), p. 2–3. On the later history of the

Diploma Unit 1 see Dalibor Vesely and Mohsen Mostafavi, Architecture

and Continuity: Kentish Town Projects, 1978–81: Diploma Unit 1

(London: Architectural Association, 1982).

65. ‘‘Unit 1, City of Continuity, towards Urban Resurrection’’ in Diploma

School, AA Prospectus (1973–1974), p. 2–3.

66. Dalibor Vesely, ‘‘City in Continuity,’’ AA Events List Week 14 (28

January – 1 February 1974), cover. For an analysis of the AA Events List

see Sunwoo, ‘‘The Static Age,’’ pp. 120–122.

67. ‘‘Unit 9,’’ Diploma School, AA Prospectus (1973–1974), pp. 18–20.

68. This interest in the ‘‘culture of congestion’’ was shared by his former

student and future Diploma Unit 9 co-tutor Rem Koolhaas, who would

further explore the phenomenon in Delirious New York (1979). See

‘‘Unit 9,’’ Diploma School, AA Prospectus (1973–1974), pp. 18–20. That

year, Zenghelis was assisted by Thalis Argyropoulos, Stuart Knight, and

Stirling-office-export Léon Krier. During the 1960s, Zenghelis had

taught in the First Year, as well as in Lloyd’s Middle School.

69. ‘‘Unit 9,’’ Diploma School, AA Prospectus (1973–1974), pp. 18–20.

70. Intermediate Unit 6 program (1972–1973), p. 5, Peter Wylde

Papers, AAA. On Zenghelis and Koolhaas’s encounters at the AA see Elia

Zenghelis, ‘‘Text and Architecture: Architecture as Text,’’ and Lieven De

Cauter and Hilde Heynen, ‘‘The Exodus Machine,’’ in Exit Utopia:

Architectural Provocations, 1956–1976, edited by Martin van Schaik and

Otakar Mácel (Munich and New York: Prestel, 2004), pp. 255–262;

263–274.

71. ‘‘Unit 9,’’ in Diploma School, AA Prospectus (1973–1974),

pp. 18–20.

72. Ibid.

73. ‘‘End of Year Exhibition,’’ AA Events List, Week 31 (24–28 June

1974), front cover.

74. Ibid.

75. ‘‘AR Reviews AA,’’ Architectural Review 174 (October 1983), p. 23.

76. ‘‘AR Reviews AA: Celebration and Comparison,’’ Architectural Review

174 (October 1983), p. 68.

77. ‘‘AA Now: A Selected Survey of Work from the Last Decade,’’

Architectural Review 174 (October 1983), p. 44–67. Nevertheless, Krier

today views his brief time as an AA tutor as an opportunity to hone his

own theoretical position and reflects fondly upon the critical atmosphere

that the school generated. Leon Krier, interview by author, 7 April 2011,

via Skype.

78. ‘‘AR Reviews AA,’’ Architectural Review 174 (October 1983), p. 23.

79. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late

Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. xv-xxxiv.

80. For readings of the institutionalization of the avant-garde in the

context of art history and artistic production, see Peter Bürger, Theory

of the Avant-Garde, Theory and history of literature v. 4 (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and Andreas Huyssen, After the

Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Theories of

representation and difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1986).

81. For an overview of the Diploma School unit system during the

1974–1975 year, see Higgott, ‘‘Searching for the Subject,’’

pp. 154–177.

82. ‘‘Ambience and Alchemy,’’ interview with Alvin Boyarsky,

Architectural Review 174 (October 1983), p. 28–29; Robin Evans, ‘‘From

Axes to Violins,’’ AA Files 1, no. 1 (Winter 1981–1982), p. 120.

41 SUNWOO