What we do at the Faculty of Architecture & Fine Art at NTNU, Trondheim, Norway, and why and how we do it.
Hans Skotte, professor MArch, PhD
Two of this year’s shortlisted projects for the Mies van der Rohe Award were made by students from, or architects straight out of NTNU’s Faculty of Architecture and Fine Art. Adding to this the worldwide publicity given to the works of Tyin Tegnestue who hit the scene while still students, and works built by some of our other students, also published, one is entitled to ask if the teaching approach by the Faculty has anything to do with it.
I think it does, but perhaps only indirectly. The Faculty only opens up ‘academically’ for the student proposals. Then the students do them more or less on their own. Sometimes even outside the formal academic structures. The challenge is therefore to structure these learning processes within a university framework while heeding to calls by students that “One must not let the more experienced (i.e. the staff) take over”. Because the success of this approach lies in the responsibilities the students take in preparing for and realizing their projects. Our role as ‘teachers’ is thus transformed into ‘mentors’. Hence teaching is made a function of learning, rather than the other way around.
This turn-around allows the students to learn the essence and the many aspects of architecture through the experience of building, much in line with what progressive educators have propagated for ages. But change takes time, especially in academia. The bedrock of our re-thinking education lies in the writings of Juhani Pallasmaa, recent developments in the field of embodied cognition, and through insights gained from the experience of students. We can vouch for its learning efficiency and how it shapes the way students understand architecture and the role of the architect. What emerges is – to paraphrase John Turner – a realization that It’s not (only) what architecture is, it’s (also) what architecture does.
We start out in the first semester where students build full scale wooden structures on campus.
This experience has proven pivotal. Not only do students gain practical insights and skills, but more importantly the embodied experience of handling materials and creating spaces build an ‘architectural self-confidence’ that underpins many of the later ‘real’ projects that students do. They dare do more because of this experience. So they tell us.
The following four years our ‘learning-by-building’ train may pass through building workshops, often conducted abroad, ‘live studio’ and ‘localized planning’ courses throughout Norway (and currently also in Uganda), and not least, the independently initiated student projects. Buildings have been realized throughout the world and throughout Norway
These projects constitute a real architectural or planning practice and give an experience beyond what the first semester courses are able to. Now they have to manage constraints in funding, time, skills and access to materials and tools etc. Equally important, they have to deal with real people, clients, neighbors, bureaucrats and decision makers, and become personally responsible for what they do. This has proved to be an exceptionally efficient mode of learning, in developing communication skills and in understanding architecture’s strategic capacity. A case in point is a project three of our students did in the Philippines a couple of years back.
. Engaged by an NGO to build a study center for street children in Tacloban they first engaged the children and the mothers who helped them overcome the reluctance of the day labor fathers. The engagement of the fathers was crucial in grounding the project locally as well as benefitting from their individual skills during construction. The students’ design was a simple structure rigid enough to embrace the individual contributions by the parents and children. The building is much used and locally appreciated – and published internationally.
There is more to a comprehensive architectural education than comes from our emerging ‘learning-by-building’ approach. Our professional challenges are wider than this approach can cover. Is it therefore merely a cop-out from the challenges of the market? Or does is contain an essence that will help our students confront them more strategically? This remains our challenge. We’re working on it.
Whatever the case, some important insights emerge from our learning-by-building experience:
* It raises the self-confidence of the individual student and thus holds a powerful didactic quality.
* Students enter a world where they have to work with others, at times even depend on others. This interdependency and the constraints that come with it, aligns with Leonardo’s dictum of “strength is born from constraints and dies in freedom”. He should know.
* Architecture is in part a societal strategy. It is about people and about contributing towards making the world a better place. What can be a more important architectural experience?
