By Mitchell De Jarnett, Senior Project Designer
Today, Archinect shows us (posted by that intrepid reporter, Orhan Ayyüce ) a Google translated letter written by Francois Roche to SCI-Arc, in which he:
1) Cancels an upcoming exhibition and lecture and
2) Levels accusations against the staff of “arrogances and ignorances.” Thanks to Orhan, and Archinect, for allowing us to enjoy this communiqué Française, which does have some broader relevance to the discussions of the “crisis” that some commentators claim is currently raging in the halls architectural academia. (Which Roche, with particular Gallic aplomb, refers to as, “Beaux Arts Syndrome.”)
The letter follows here:
Dear Sci-Arc Staff / email-letter
I have no other way than to cancel the Sci-Arc exhibition in the Gallery (scheduled in May 25) and the lecture (scheduled the April 6).
The gap of point of view, and the lack of interest for politics and attitudes, reducing the architecture process to a unique design agenda cannot fit with our scenario of production and scenario of speeches.
Our works and attitudes are toxic, animal, dangerous, regressive, politic and computational.
Architecture is mainly an affair of resistance and self-defense, against hypocrisies and “in”voluntary servitude, to quote La Boetie. It cannot be reduced to a design goal, exclusively dedicated and trapped by tooling. I disagree on the way the knowledge is framed by and for predictable professional, without any potential to corrupt and desalienate through educational procedures the “coming out” of neoplagiarism and neocopism, which remind me the Beaux Art symptom and syndrome. I’m French and know perfectly the stickiness of this slippering addiction.
I just want to precise that this voluntary abandon, cannot be understood as a “tantrum or capriccio” against the Sci-arc students pool, but it is at the level of Sci-Arc staff arrogances and ignorances, which seems to shrink architecture purpose to a simple affair of design agenda.
My best
F Roche / 13rd march 2011
PS Speaking and writing are done here, in my Frenchglish dialect / I let you the opportunity to translate it in the Shakespeare “mayonnaise…”
Letter via New Territories. Read it here.
In my opinion there is, of course, a whiff of grandstanding in the text. Aside from that, it does again raise the topical question of how we train ourselves to do what we do. Schools have become more specialized in the last decade, often resulting in ‘branded’ institutions which are identified with just one of the many critical strands which make up the fabric of current architectural discourse. This allows the schools to simplify their marketing efforts, but often creates graduating classes of young designers who have been fed a homogeneous diet of one particular “design approach” or another, educating generations of visual virtuosos who often have little capacity to critique what they do, or handle challenges to their work which come from outside the premises of their own institution. SCI-Arc, under the leadership of Eric Owen Moss, has certainly transformed itself into one of these “branded” schools, most closely associating itself with the work and approach of current graduate director, Hernan Diaz Alonso.
Historically, schools never really taught students how to ‘do’ architecture; those skills were always delivered during internship process. But in the last half of the 20th century, schools of architecture were adept at teaching students to think like architects, helping them attain the intellectual discipline necessary to evaluate their own work and the unanticipated design challenges that they would inevitably encounter in the course of their careers.
Schools of architecture were often were structured as forums of debate. Former SCI-Arc director, Michael Rotondi, was notorious for setting up collisions between faculty with strong intellects and conflicting points of view in the 1980s and 1990s. The resulting fireworks (and even explosions) on review panels were both frequent and valued. Students witnessed real debate being used in the school to define the profession and renew the critical discourse in architecture. In some ways, Roche seems to be calling for a resumption of this older model of education, one where impassioned, erudite disagreement is valued over conformity.
