“There are two reasons why we may think the Barcelona Pavilion is a rational structure: Mies said it was, and it looks as if it is. It looks rational because we know what rationality looks like: Precise, flat, regular, abstract, bright and above all rectilinear. This image of rationality is unreliable, however.”
—Robin Evans
Can a formal analysis be a workshop? Form makes us nervous because is fixed on how something appears to the eye. In the typical studio analysis problem, students take selected material on a particular building and re-represent it. They make accurate drawings from published sources and are asked to look at how the specific work embodies the primary forces (gravity, material, light, habitation) and orders of architecture through a series of analytical drawings. The lesson leans away from the concrete to the abstract in order to garner truths about the building that are “solid, stable and enduring.” This tilt towards abstract thinking—the analysis—describes more aptly a case study for the mind than a workshop for the hand.
Abstraction in basic design overlooks the hand working independently, and places the hand behind the mind. Nevertheless, formal analysis or case study serves as an isolated tool in the curriculum to build representation skills. It is good that the hand picks something up even if it is behind the mind!
Once at a presentation level, the project freezes in a “terminal state”: it is complete and bound to the specific work/building at hand. Closure violates a basic pedagogical aim of fostering the development of a student’s own project or set of architectural concerns which might span over multiple studios, into a thesis project, and walk out the door with them. Specificity holds the danger that what the student takes away will reappear as lessons in form to be collaged or imitated rather than general principles to be activated.
Our proposal splits the formal exercise from the analysis in order to allow the hand a little breathing room from the mind. Two phases are added to complete the problem. The student begins with contemplation and moves to making. It invites succinct execution of a full cycle along a learning spiral and links to the student’s continuing educational experience. It is a microcosm of reading lessons at the foundation level that can prepare literate hands on their way to becoming thinking-hands.— Margarita McGrath and Scott Oliver