Notes on education and research around architecture

The education around learning-by-doing, evolved to support the formation of aspirants for a profession centred upon creativity, is not yet fully appreciated by the academic community in the UK whose educational preferences continue to be shaped by the linear, predictive models upon which universities have, historically, based their expectations. The amalgamation of Beaux Arts educational methods (centralised, collective and doctrinaire), and those evolved during the Arts and Crafts Movement (individualised, liberal and regional), into a pedagogic system to serve modernism, necessitated a change of perception it has taken a century to assimilate into established, academic institutions. Project-based education appears to lack the intellectual rigour of the disciplined procedures associated with the sciences. Academic convention has, consequently, constrained the potential for education around architecture, and its concomitant research activities, to fulfill its promise and establish project-based education as an alternative pedagogy. These notes scan particular aspects of the educational history and analyse the unique characteristics evolved which set architectural pedagogy apart, a system from which education in its broadest sense might profit.