Elke COUCHEZ
In her work, Elke Couchez explores the intersections between architecture, visual studies, intellectual history and pedagogy. She studied Fine Arts (Sint-Lucas Academy, Ghent) and Art History (KU Leuven) and defended her PhD “Gestures make Arguments. Performing Architectural Theory in the Studio and the Classroom 196x-199x” in June 2018 at the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture. In 2018 and 2019, she worked as a post-doctoral fellow on the project “Is Architecture Art?” at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Architecture, Theory, Criticism and History. As of October 2019, she teaches art, interior design and architecture history at UHasselt and works within the research group TRACE on a new project concentrated on the educational laboratory ILAUD.
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SLuW functioned as a hinge that joined institutionalized education, community service, and theoretical exchange on an international level. It was emblematic of Janssens’ ambition to overthrow the binaries between working and thinking, action and thought, in his professional and pedagogical practices.
The last decade has seen a substantial increase in interest in the history of architectural education. This book widens the geographical scope beyond local school histories and sets out to discover the very distinct materialities and technologies of schooling as active agents in the making of architectural schools. Architectural Education Through Materiality argues that knowledge transmission cannot be reduced to ‘software’, the relatively easily detectable ideas in course notes and handbooks, but also has to be studied in close relation to the ‘hardware’ of, for instance, wall pictures, textiles, campus designs, slide projectors and even bodies.
Presenting illustrated case studies of works by architects, educators and theorists including Dalibor Vesely, Dom Hans van der Laan, the Global Tools group, Heinrich Wölfflin, Alfons Hoppenbrouwers, Joseph Rykwert, Pancho Guedes and Robert Cummings, and focusing on student-led educational initiatives in Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, the book will inspire students, educators and professionals with an interest in the many ways architectural knowledge is produced and taught.
By contrasting the studio briefs of the two first ILAUD residential summer courses in Urbino to a series of highly illustrative student drawings, this paper sheds light on the different and often contradictory implementations of this method of reading by drawing. This paper furthermore argues that this experiential planning method became a tool in enabling a critical stance vis-à-vis the figure of the architectural historian and traditional ‘linear’ historiography. Reading by drawing was an attempt to retrieve an ‘essence’ which was believed to be ‘truer than history or words’, and thus involved a search for an architectural knowledge that was embedded in architectural and urban form.
The paradigm of direct experience will be framed in the disciplinary exchange between historians and architects in the 1960s and 70s. In the works of De Carlo’s contemporaries such as Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo Rossi and Vittorio Gregotti, direct analyses of urban form for instance often displaced texts. Staged in a binary opposition to textual history, the method of reading by drawing upheld a promise of a more democratic and participatory way of perceiving the built environment and thus formulated a response to the alienation engendered by the post-war urban environments.
By means of a close reading of a series of highly illustrative student drawings made during the formative ILAUD years in Urbino, this paper asserts that drawing became a predominant educational tool in enabling and representing critical discourse on architecture and urbanism at a time when built heritage was no longer seen as an obstacle to modernization. Functioning as an educational extension to Team X, ILAUD’s design-based approach focused on the notions of ‘re-use’ and ‘participation’ and herewith openly criticized the rational planning scheme of the functional city as laid down in the Athens Charter (1933). Students were encouraged to use drawing as a means to ‘read’ the city and the physical environment, or as De Carlo explained: “to discover and decode every strata of signs (…) to understand the essence of that which has to be retrieved”. Unlike a classic design process of fine tuning from the particular to the general and vice versa, the ILAUD staff stimulated drawing as a ‘tentative’ and erratic activity, which arguably enabled students to interpret the marks left by social transformations on the physical space.
Based on new archival work and interviews with some KU Leuven participants, this paper will shed critical light on ILAUD’s ambitions and show that these drawings were more than mere cognitive aids or aesthetic products. They were analytical and educational tools, producing implicit theories of urban regeneration.
(Western Australia) newly formed Department of Planning in 1965. In his writings, Ritter combined emerging theories from diverse fields – psychoanalysis, educational theory, environmental education – in ways that were not purely theoretical, but rather that intended to be read as manifestoes for childhood creativity. This paper argues that a better understanding of select writings by Ritter and a comparison with educational reports produced by institutional reformers in the UK, sheds light on the educational climate of the late 1950s and 1960s
and helps to uncover debates on how to train architects in a rapidly changing world.
The last decade has seen a substantial increase in interest in the history of architectural education. This book widens the geographical scope beyond local school histories and sets out to discover the very distinct materialities and technologies of schooling as active agents in the making of architectural schools. Architectural Education Through Materiality argues that knowledge transmission cannot be reduced to ‘software’, the relatively easily detectable ideas in course notes and handbooks, but also has to be studied in close relation to the ‘hardware’ of, for instance, wall pictures, textiles, campus designs, slide projectors and even bodies.
Presenting illustrated case studies of works by architects, educators and theorists including Dalibor Vesely, Dom Hans van der Laan, the Global Tools group, Heinrich Wölfflin, Alfons Hoppenbrouwers, Joseph Rykwert, Pancho Guedes and Robert Cummings, and focusing on student-led educational initiatives in Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, the book will inspire students, educators and professionals with an interest in the many ways architectural knowledge is produced and taught.
Architecture Thinking across Boundaries looks at architectural theory through the lens of intellectual history. Eleven original essays explore a variety of themes and contexts, each examining how architectural knowledge has been transferred across social, spatial and disciplinary boundaries - whether through the international circulation of ideas, transdisciplinary exchanges, or transfers from design practice to theory and back again.
Dissecting the frictions, transformations and resistances that mark these journeys, the essays in this book reflect upon the myriad routes that architectural knowledge has taken while developing into architectural theory. They critically enquire the interstices - geographical, temporal and epistemological - that lie beyond fixed narratives. They show how unstable, vital and eminently mobile the processes of thinking about architecture have been.
SLuW functioned as a hinge that joined institutionalized education, community service, and theoretical exchange on an international level. It was emblematic of Janssens’ ambition to overthrow the binaries between working and thinking, action and thought, in his professional and pedagogical practices.
The last decade has seen a substantial increase in interest in the history of architectural education. This book widens the geographical scope beyond local school histories and sets out to discover the very distinct materialities and technologies of schooling as active agents in the making of architectural schools. Architectural Education Through Materiality argues that knowledge transmission cannot be reduced to ‘software’, the relatively easily detectable ideas in course notes and handbooks, but also has to be studied in close relation to the ‘hardware’ of, for instance, wall pictures, textiles, campus designs, slide projectors and even bodies.
Presenting illustrated case studies of works by architects, educators and theorists including Dalibor Vesely, Dom Hans van der Laan, the Global Tools group, Heinrich Wölfflin, Alfons Hoppenbrouwers, Joseph Rykwert, Pancho Guedes and Robert Cummings, and focusing on student-led educational initiatives in Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, the book will inspire students, educators and professionals with an interest in the many ways architectural knowledge is produced and taught.
By contrasting the studio briefs of the two first ILAUD residential summer courses in Urbino to a series of highly illustrative student drawings, this paper sheds light on the different and often contradictory implementations of this method of reading by drawing. This paper furthermore argues that this experiential planning method became a tool in enabling a critical stance vis-à-vis the figure of the architectural historian and traditional ‘linear’ historiography. Reading by drawing was an attempt to retrieve an ‘essence’ which was believed to be ‘truer than history or words’, and thus involved a search for an architectural knowledge that was embedded in architectural and urban form.
The paradigm of direct experience will be framed in the disciplinary exchange between historians and architects in the 1960s and 70s. In the works of De Carlo’s contemporaries such as Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo Rossi and Vittorio Gregotti, direct analyses of urban form for instance often displaced texts. Staged in a binary opposition to textual history, the method of reading by drawing upheld a promise of a more democratic and participatory way of perceiving the built environment and thus formulated a response to the alienation engendered by the post-war urban environments.
By means of a close reading of a series of highly illustrative student drawings made during the formative ILAUD years in Urbino, this paper asserts that drawing became a predominant educational tool in enabling and representing critical discourse on architecture and urbanism at a time when built heritage was no longer seen as an obstacle to modernization. Functioning as an educational extension to Team X, ILAUD’s design-based approach focused on the notions of ‘re-use’ and ‘participation’ and herewith openly criticized the rational planning scheme of the functional city as laid down in the Athens Charter (1933). Students were encouraged to use drawing as a means to ‘read’ the city and the physical environment, or as De Carlo explained: “to discover and decode every strata of signs (…) to understand the essence of that which has to be retrieved”. Unlike a classic design process of fine tuning from the particular to the general and vice versa, the ILAUD staff stimulated drawing as a ‘tentative’ and erratic activity, which arguably enabled students to interpret the marks left by social transformations on the physical space.
Based on new archival work and interviews with some KU Leuven participants, this paper will shed critical light on ILAUD’s ambitions and show that these drawings were more than mere cognitive aids or aesthetic products. They were analytical and educational tools, producing implicit theories of urban regeneration.
(Western Australia) newly formed Department of Planning in 1965. In his writings, Ritter combined emerging theories from diverse fields – psychoanalysis, educational theory, environmental education – in ways that were not purely theoretical, but rather that intended to be read as manifestoes for childhood creativity. This paper argues that a better understanding of select writings by Ritter and a comparison with educational reports produced by institutional reformers in the UK, sheds light on the educational climate of the late 1950s and 1960s
and helps to uncover debates on how to train architects in a rapidly changing world.
The last decade has seen a substantial increase in interest in the history of architectural education. This book widens the geographical scope beyond local school histories and sets out to discover the very distinct materialities and technologies of schooling as active agents in the making of architectural schools. Architectural Education Through Materiality argues that knowledge transmission cannot be reduced to ‘software’, the relatively easily detectable ideas in course notes and handbooks, but also has to be studied in close relation to the ‘hardware’ of, for instance, wall pictures, textiles, campus designs, slide projectors and even bodies.
Presenting illustrated case studies of works by architects, educators and theorists including Dalibor Vesely, Dom Hans van der Laan, the Global Tools group, Heinrich Wölfflin, Alfons Hoppenbrouwers, Joseph Rykwert, Pancho Guedes and Robert Cummings, and focusing on student-led educational initiatives in Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, the book will inspire students, educators and professionals with an interest in the many ways architectural knowledge is produced and taught.
Architecture Thinking across Boundaries looks at architectural theory through the lens of intellectual history. Eleven original essays explore a variety of themes and contexts, each examining how architectural knowledge has been transferred across social, spatial and disciplinary boundaries - whether through the international circulation of ideas, transdisciplinary exchanges, or transfers from design practice to theory and back again.
Dissecting the frictions, transformations and resistances that mark these journeys, the essays in this book reflect upon the myriad routes that architectural knowledge has taken while developing into architectural theory. They critically enquire the interstices - geographical, temporal and epistemological - that lie beyond fixed narratives. They show how unstable, vital and eminently mobile the processes of thinking about architecture have been.