Teaching architecture

The window. Acrylic on canvas by Christina Ramos.

Young people go to the university with the aim of becoming architects, of finding out if they have got what it takes. What is the first thing we should teach them?

First of all, we must explain that the person standing in front of them is not someone who asks questions whose answers he already knows. Practicing architecture is asking oneself questions, finding one’s own answers with the help of the teacher, whittling down, finding solutions. Over and over again.

The strength of a good design lies in ourselves and in our ability to perceive the world with both emotion and reason. A good architectural design is sensuous. A good architectural design is intelligent. We all experience architecture before we have even heard the word. The roots of architectural understanding lie in our architectural experience: our room, our house, our street, our village, our town, our landscape –we experience them all early on, unconsciously, and we subsequently compare them with the countryside, towns and houses that we experience later on. The roots of our understanding or architecture lie in our childhood, in our youth; they lie in our biography.

Picture from wikihow.com

REFERENCE: paragraphs from chapter Teaching architecture, learning architecture. 1996. From the book Thinking Architecture, by Peter Zumthor. Berlin