The work of critique in architectural education

Abstract

The research reported here is an investigation of instruction and assessment in\narchitectural education. The focus is on the practice of critique, an educational\nactivity in which instructors and professional architects give students feedback\non their finished projects. Taking an ethnomethodologically informed approach,\nthe interests of the thesis revolve around questions of how critique is done as an\noccasioned instructional practice. The empirical material consists of video recordings\nof critique sessions at a Swedish school of architecture. The core of the thesis\nconsists of four empirical studies. Study 1 deals with issues of professional vision\nand the ways in which the graphical surface of the presentation is seen. Study 2\naddresses the significance of intentions in the setting. The study examines how the\nrelation between students’ stated intentions and the presented designs is treated\nby participants. Study 3 deals with the use of precedents and references, analyzing\nhow critics respond to students’ ways of handling intertextual aspects of architectural\ndesign. Study 4 focuses on the material and spatial set-up of critique—the\ndiffering affordances of digital slideshows and posters for presentation and discussion.\nCritique is found to be a site where architectural proposals are treated\nfor the purposes of instruction as provisional and improvable, and where their\nsignificances are detailed in exhibitions of architectural reasoning and judgment.\nSuch exhibiting involves identifying and elaborating on problems and qualities,\nand articulating values that are visible in the envisaged buildings and their graphical\nrepresentations. These interpretations may be juxtaposed with the expressed\nintentions of students, as these appear in verbal presentations or in textual accounts.\nTheir interrelations are inspected and discrepancies are noted and discussed. On\nthe basis of the analyses in the thesis, the function of critique is argued to centre\non the juxtaposition of student-produced objects with professional competences\nfor seeing, articulating, assessing, and contextualizing these objects. In organizing\nthe educational program around cycles of production and critique, architecture\nis provided with a powerful means through which design competences, and the\nassessment practices that lie at their core, can be made massively present within,\nand constitutive of, the developmental processes through which students acquire\nthe intellectual, aesthetic, and discursive repertoires necessary for competent architectural\nwork.