This indicates a general idea of a local and personal approach to projects, while the next chart described the variety of ways in which these topics were handled.

There was a spread even within the various themes as to how they handled their own setting. Boris left us with a few questions to consider for future projects and our engagement with our own profession. How do we choose to communicate our projects? This is interesting as far as convention is concerned. In what way do the project need to describe itself? What is the relevant debate we want to raise and on what arena? As Boris stated  the architectural debate is a public matter and the conventional vocabulary might not communicate as well in a tabloid setting or a meeting with the public of a municipality for example.

His other question, which I touched in on now is the debate and theme following the project. Boris pointed out that projects siting external references along their process often brought a wider discussion to the critique as well. The personal projects had an ability to be overly autonomous and hard to discuss in their relation to anything else. It can be very fruitful to the development of a project as well as the debate around its themes to introduce external sources in the process and presentation as well as influence the focus of the critique.

Leebus Woods’ Architecture School 401 is a series where he discuss this strategy and show examples of what he has been doing with his classes. Work that show how his classes learn both technical and theoretical lessons through more or less abstract projects. The closest I’ve been myself to these sorts of approaches have been through my 3rd semester ‘Urbanism and the City’ course with Adrian Lahoud and Frank Minnaert at UTS where we made a Psychogeographic Map and a video presentation of our reading of the city.

Lately I’ve seen several voices that comment on this kind of approach and in Germany this summer the DIA holds a conference called ‘Design Education as Research Lab’ with speakers from many of the most famous schools of architecture around the world.

I’ve visited an exhibition and synopsis at HCU Hamburg ‘Explorationen: Tendenzen und Potentiale der Architekturforschung’ and ‘Stop Making Sense’ which showcased a project of theoretical work with essays and graphics.

It’s fascinating to see good fusion of theory, design and built items and I really hope for less separation of the parts in school as well as a more research oriented approach in the earlier stages of architecture school. The essentials of architectural practice should be possible to teach through more though provoking means than emulating the work life and also be valuable to the schools research output in the long run.

(Photo:haveiendom.no)

Several of the questions seemed to me like they were trying to him on the basis of the aesthetics of the building. I think the public debate could gain a lot if participants would approach it with a more personal stance, referring to what they themselves have explicit knowledge about as some of the questions did.

The interdisciplinary nature of architecture and being a very public topic makes input from a lot of directions seem smart. It could be great to have debates like this where anyone can get through. However it seems like the setting falls short as the architect ends up spending most of his time fending off complaints about the first impression from the pictures. This does not result in anything except the architect returning back to the official consultants to get a better structured and constructive dialogue.

I am not familiar with how many open meetings ther have been about this project prior to the competition going out or in the aftermath. There should be room to hear a lot of different sides in an architectural process and I hope there will be fruitful debates through the Internet as well. Politicians have embraced the net as a media to rapidly reach out and communicate broadly and I expect that architects will follow.