WEEK 2 - NOTES & REFLECTIONS

WEEK 2

Professional Practice:  Can Professionalism be taught in School?

Professionalism cannot be taught in school – school is a resource, a tool if you will to help student become critical thinkers. But school does not help student become professional practitioners in their fields for their communities. Professionalism is something you gain as you experience working – only then can you value the importance of given opportunities. “…the practical arts of engineering and construction…” need to be “…the focus of formal architecture education.” If you want students to become more involved and active in the academic world make them work with their hands and mind – theory and practice go together, not separate. You imagine, you design and you build. In design school you are not taught a general body of guidelines in the creative process – you have to gain experiences through thinking ideas and creating theme – making them and remaking them over and over – with a continuous practice to gain a general body of knowledge and of expert labor! But I don’t see how architect school is preparing students to become professionals and competitive practitioners in the field of architecture.

100 Years of Humanitarian Design

Housing is a necessity – it becomes a luxury when their inhabitants maintain and care for it. Yet “…housing has been gripped by a cycle of war, natural disaster, and poverty…” And of course, architects have been called upon to provide solutions, designs dictating the quality of living and over the time working collectively with communities to design an appropriate home – a united community. Many years of history in collected experiences throughout the globe helped shape this unity between architect and community. Star architects in their minds held solutions they thought would atone for the failures in urban planning. There was Le Corbusier’s Maison Dim-ino concrete housing strategy, Walter Gropius’s prefabricated walls to whole structures for affordable housing projects, K. Buckminster Fuller for his experimentation with standardized building components, modular systems and prefabrication – all three believed that mass-manufactured dwellings represented the future housing.  And in America, the automobile was the integral part of American life style – portable housing such as mobile homes which allowed people to live on the road. As the housing process continued to evolve, more humanitarian strategies were approached to understand communities – their values – in order to design homes where people are united as one.  

Community Engagement

“…architect as a public servant, yet serving a public that for all intents and purposes was abstract, anonymous and remote.” “to bring moral and social conscience to the practice of architecture.” “Design-build programs…involving students in actual construction – learning by doing while providing a community service as a collateral benefit.” “…academic program where students live full-time in the community…take full-time academic load…” “…community-design centers….design built programs suggest that the underlying principle that makes community engagements successful…is an approach that identifies local skills and resources, treats the community as an equal partner, and pursues an open and sustained process of exchange.” “…benefit the community or benefit the student.”