Driven by societal changes and student protests architectural education in the 1960s and 1970s changed and gave rise to experimental approaches that reflected the greater responsibilities of the architect with regard to e.g. social circumstances. The result were new approaches tested at well-known institutions like the HfG in Ulm, Germany, the Black Mountain College, the Architectural Association in London but also largely unknown experiments like those by the Eames’ in India or the Latin American Schools. These as well as numerous other experimental approaches to architectural education are gathered in „Radical Pedagogies“, edited by among others Beatriz Colomina and Anna-Maria Meister and published by MIT Press in 2022: over the course of some ten years of continuous research, different scholars and students have unearthed a global net of schools and approaches that sought to change the rattle the status quo of architectural education.
In fourteen chapters the book organizes them loosely along topics like „Retooling the Practice“, „Subject and Body Matters“ or „Beyond the Classroom“ and each example is comprehensively illustrated with archival material and photographs that bring the reader close to the individual teaching situations. As the chapter titles indicate, the different examples approached architectural education from very different angles and thus offer a multitude of starting points for the critical analysis and reflection of today’s architectural education.
Against this backdrop, „Radical Pedagogies“ is more than „just“ a historical analysis of past experiments in architectural education but indeed provides cues for today’s practice that call on both teachers and students to question what is and how it is being taught. A truly thought-provoking read!
