A Boot Camp for Beginning Architects
When the lights were switched off, plunging the long corridor into blackness, the gathered architectural students blinked in bewilderment. The darkness seemed solid, heavy as a chunk of coal.
But gradually, as their eyes adjusted, the neophyte designers began to perceive how traces of the sunshine outside seeped through gaps under the corrugated metal roof and pierced minute holes in the distant doorway. The faint light gave shape and substance to the dark surrounding space.
Instructor Gary Paige explained the exercise, quoting architect Louis Kahn, designer of the famed Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth, Tex.: “A poet once asked Kahn, ‘What slice of the sun does your building have? What light enters your room?’--as if to say the sun never knew how great it is until it struck the side of a building.”
This let-there-be-light exercise was part of an intensive summer workshop for fledgling architects and other design aficionados run by the Santa Monica-based Southern California Institute of Architecture.
Grueling Course
Sweltering in a tin-roofed studio in the institute’s graduate school, 23 students survived a grueling five-week introductory course titled “Making and Meaning.” One participant described it as “a kind of design boot camp.”
Ranging in age from 18 to the mid-40s, the students have various motives for taking the $1,250 course. Some are fresh out of high school and contemplate a career in architecture. For these students, the program is a concentrated dry run that gives them a taste of the future. Several students are middle-aged professionals in other fields who have nurtured a life-long fascination with architecture and see the course as a short sharp plunge into the mysteries of the designer’s art.
The 2-year-old program, which runs from July to mid-August and which will be repeated in following summers, begins with the view that architecture is an art, “a creative endeavor that is unique in the way it uses light, structural systems and a wide range of materials to make spaces in which people live, work and play,” explains course director Paige.
In five weeks, Paige, assisted by institute instructors Isabel Brones and Chris Aykanian, hoped to impart some insight into the way designers transform light, space and materials into an architecture “that has a meaning beyond its function as a usable building.”
The long day, which begins at 9 a.m. and may run past midnight, is split into two sessions.
Platonic Shapes
The morning is given over to a Visual Studies Laboratory, where students learn through lectures, demonstrations and exercises about technical drawing. They study the Platonic shapes (cube, sphere, pyramid) that make up the basic building blocks of all three-dimensional design.
Afternoons are devoted to studio work, in which the visual studies are applied in projects that “constitute a foundation for experiencing, understanding and making architecture,” the course brochure explains.
An early studio exercise involves students in an investigation of the nature of simple materials. Taking rolls of chicken wire, lengths of timber or sheets of plywood, students struggle to create forms that express the flexibility of wire mesh or the rigid strength of wood in its solid or laminated forms.
The course is rounded out with evening lectures and projects and weekend field trips to local architectural landmarks, such as the famous Craftsman Gamble House by Greene and Greene in Pasadena.
“The materials exercise drew blood,” said student Anne Bergren, a UCLA classics professor whose Venice house was designed by institute dean Michael Rotondi’s Morphosis office.
Bergren said she took the course “to alter my intellectual approach to design with a direct grasp of what the whole process is really about.”
“Making and Meaning” has given her “new hands and eyes,” she said. “I know how it feels to struggle with a roll of chicken wire that’s cutting your palms, searching for a meaningful shape that is true to the character of the material.
“I have the glimmerings of a visual--rather than a verbal--understanding of how things fit together to create coherent architectural spaces.”
Bergren, an experienced teacher herself, calls Paige’s program brilliant, contending it “cuts to the heart of the matter, slicing through the surface issues of style and fashion to the quick of the making of architecture.” The course does this by asking the right questions, rather than supplying a quick fix of answers, she says.
‘Hard Work, but Fun’
Noelle McBride, an 18-year-old San Francisco high school graduate who sought an introduction to architecture as a career, liked the course “a lot. The program made me look at things in different ways. It’s made me feel buildings, rather than just think about them. It’s been hard work, but fun.”
Getting students to feel, as well as think about architecture, is a struggle, Paige said.
He found that young people fresh out of school are trained to think conceptually rather than sensually. “They’re taught to name things, not experience them,” he said. “In many ways, kids are blind to sensation as a learning tool. We have to fight to transform words into the flesh and blood of light and space, and the materials that shape them.”
The program’s final project, the design of a bath house on Santa Monica beach, ties all the threads of feeling, seeing, drawing and listening into the making of an actual small building.
In this simple structure, students face the acid test of applying their insights to the concrete reality of a piece of architecture that people could use.
The bath house designs were sober and disciplined, yet imaginative. Students worked to balance the boxy, flat-roofed building with playful arrangements of interior partitions, toilets, showers, lockers and benches.
They tried to capture the atmosphere of the sunny beach scene in the colors of the tiles on walls and floors. They discovered how complex a small act of architecture can be, and how much scope there is for personal experiment even in the most mundane design assignment.
“The students surprised us, and surprised themselves,” instructor Aykanian said. “In a brief period, they came to understand how a building can be an expression of feelings, abstract forms and real materials that both serves people yet transcends its function to become a work of art. In short, they have begun to learn to design.”
