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Drawing/Thinking: Confronting an Electronic Age

student work, laid out in a manner consonant with the Koolhaas ⁄ Mau collaboration and much current architectural publicity. Joining the long tradition of publications devoted to the extra-architectural objects generated through the production of architects, the book is organized to lay bare the curriculum’s structure (design exercises, required readings, lectures) and its layering of skill acquisition, intellectual formation and speculative creative activity. It does this effortlessly, establishing a sustained dialectical reframing of the interplay between singular efforts on the one hand and group experiences and consciousness-formation on the other. The volume compiles first-year student work from various academic years, displaying them in a user-friendly, color-coded page-framing device. Within its pages, junctures abound between image, caption, commentary, and generative protocols (assignments are reproduced along with lists of necessary supplies). Lush visuals are accompanied by an introductory dialogue between Angélil and his co-author Dirk Hebel and a few short texts by firstyear instructors. Studio activities during the fall term cycle through space, program, and technology; those in the spring address context and form. This narrative, in effect, stages a complex pas de cinq of educational growth. The book also argues, in a more novel vein, that through this carefully choreographed instructional regimen, students are regularly invited to bring their prior, nonarchitectural knowledge into the studio to address the scale, character and conventions of individualized domestic environments for small collectivities, i.e., the single-family detached house. The pedagogical intent is clearly to inculcate in students not only methods, both representational techniques and conceptual apparatuses, but an imperative to question them. This entails not so much reformatting students as architects but acclimating them to the sort of individualized questioning – of social norms, for example – that contributed to their construction as citizens and subjects. Importantly, the authors of this volume claim to have fashioned a curriculum that initiates an ‘‘auto-reflexive agitation’’ on the part of the budding designer. The intention is to disrupt the standard first-year pedagogical goal of providing ‘‘a sheltered environment within which to lay down an accepted foundation of disciplinary norms and methods,’’ as stated in Deane Simpson’s meditation on disciplinarity and method. The pedagogy thus aims to encourage students to position themselves as already intellectually engaged, somewhere between the extremes Simpson identifies as disciplinary autonomy and scattered dilettantism. As a result, their creative activity is subtended by and within a politicized aesthetico-technical agency rendering them form makers and content producers (information processors). The surprise here is that this publicity volume actually practices what it preaches, arguing that architectural representation is not a métier for the student to master but a constantly constructed display of mastery. To illustrate this, Deviations unfolds like the design process itself. The stakes are not the generation of a space but the creation of a thinking and making being, one who is educated for a future life rather than merely trained for a future career. The resistant thinking this approach purports to instill is clearly framed towards larger ends, namely questioning the very stability of the architectural program which, like disciplinarity, is always open to alteration, if not abuse, on the part of the user, beyond the discipline’s predictive vision. A round table discussion with four invited jurors about the first-year pedagogy’s merits and weaknesses is perhaps the volume’s most provocative component. A public interrogation of the private workings of the ETH’s pedagogical mission, the round table raises pertinent questions about the tendency for studio pedagogy to simplistically equate instrumental projection (production) with creative performance (knowledge). This discussion makes clear how the curriculum wisely deviates from what has traditionally constituted standard practice within recent architectural education. Here, (self-) criticism is introduced not in terms of the adjudication of excellence – the hobgoblin of pedagogies dependent upon formal principles – but instead as a system of norms, exceptions and (self-) regulation. Here, Deviations proposes an innovative direction, for the pedagogy it profiles welcomes into architectural education the media savvy of contemporary publicity practices as a platform for design. Through the ruse of ‘‘scattered dilettantism’’ and an ideal of eclipsing set methods and standard practices, space for constructing a designer’s identity and the necessary conceptual armature to perform that identity emerge, awaiting activation by instructors and students in tandem. Less a sequel than a counterweight to Inchoate, Deviations is both leaner (with fewer texts) and meatier (with a veritable glut of student work). By questioning earlier assumptions, the instructors who spawned this publication suggest that all pedagogical projects generate latent mediating dynamics, and yet every student brings to education a powerful potential to reject, revise and reconfigure them. In this sense, Deviations proposes that more deviation would benefit the world at large beginning, of course, with architectural design instruction.