Cousins: Architecture teaching flawed

Mark Cousins, a British architectural writer and theorist, criticized the way architectural history is taught at a talk last night in Betts Auditorium, arguing that courses should expose students more profoundly to older forms of architecture to inspire their creativity.

Cousins is the director of general studies and head of the graduate program in histories and theories at the Architectural Association. His lecture was the last of a series on “Use and Utility in Architecture.”

In the lecture, Cousins asserted that all architectural history from antiquity to modernism that is commonly taught to undergraduate architecture students is deeply flawed. Instead, the subject requires an alternative method that lends greater significance and relevance to the outmoded styles.

“What was it about the way that architectural history is taught that makes architecture students feel that it had no value?” Cousins said.

As evidence, Cousins pointed to the divide apparent in most architecture schools between the studio classes, involving original student design, and the survey or lecture classes, which provide background. While the former engages student creativity and individuality, the latter often is disconnected from student work, he said.

“Within art and architectural history, there tends to be a kind of summary, which is given in the idea of style,” Cousins said. “What style is, at this level, is a number of categories, which can be used to identify a corpus of pieces or buildings such that they can be intelligently grouped.”

Cousins said that the categories were “brazenly daft” and served to make current generations of architects feel distanced from the past.

“One of the interesting failures of modernism is that it needs to deal with the past, but it doesn’t do so effectively,” Cousins said.

A well-designed architectural history course should “offer the possibility of making contact with the students’ passions,” he explained.

As a substitute for more traditional architectural history courses, Cousins proposed a new method in which students project their identities onto works from the past, rather than vice versa.

Cousins’ alternative method of architectural study does not involve “some magical possession of the prior [architect],” he said. “In the category of influence, one has to put oneself onto the past.”

One member of the audience, architecture professor Sarah Whiting, challenged Cousins’ proposal.

“How do you take this question of the past that you’re setting up and go ahead and teach it? How do you construct a pedagogy for those who go on to teach it?” she said.

Cousins acknowledged that the question of how to teach architecture was a difficult one and that he could not provide a completely satisfactory answer.

“We all suffer from too much evidence and not enough passion,” he said.