An opening: ignorance in architectural education
On the matter of awareness and the teaching of architecture, we have been dwelling in ignorance for many years. Cliché-bound, uniform programmes have long thrown their shadow over teaching; the fixed and tedious programme of higher architectural education in Iran, and its prescriptive methods imposed on the schools of architecture, are the marker of that ignorance and inertia. This unfeeling teaching is each time started for a fresh group of nineteen-year-olds — coming in with a background of mathematics and physics — and after they have spent six or seven years on it, they meet professional matters that have little connection to what they learned in the course of their education.
Architecture as public health
It would perhaps be apt to compare architecture in society to public health in society. In advanced societies, in order to forestall the appearance of disease, the teaching and recognition of matters of hygiene is generally placed among the first programmes of children's education, and this teaching is continued in later years. They believe that one of the most fundamental methods of preventing disease is the observance of principles of hygiene.
Comparing awareness in architecture with awareness in public health is not unrelated. Home, alley, street, city, and village are places we are continually in contact with, and we form an attachment to them from childhood. That attachment may go with delightful and unforgettable memories of one's living space, or with troubled, soiled, anxious images of those spaces. Raising the individual's sensitivity through the various stages of his growth, and providing him the chance to experience varied spaces, is one of the principal means of preventing the diseases of architecture and urbanism. By teaching architecture from the start — as is customary in advanced societies — the individual's attention to the surrounding space is awakened from childhood.
The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) experience
An example of this kind of teaching is carried out by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) — a most instructive experience. This centre is concerned with awakening the individual's sensitivity to architecture and urban space; it gives those it teaches the courage to take their own creativity through to execution, to compare their views and opinions with those of their peers, and to raise their spatial sensitivities through a particular educational process. The teachers in this respect offer and cultivate a many-sided teaching — drawing on history, mathematics, literature, and so on — and reveal to the individuals the role of the architect, or the role they themselves can later play in the structure of their city.
The Canadian Centre for Architecture, or CCA, is a study centre and museum dedicated to architecture, history, and education in society — the only organisation and institute of its kind in the world. Since its opening to the public in 1989, it has gradually gained local, national, and international standing. CCA is built on the conviction that architecture, as a part of the social and natural environment, is a matter of the everyday life of ordinary people.
Four lines for international programmes
CCA's international educational programmes are built on four principal lines: theory and practice in contemporary architecture; photography and architecture; modernism and its surrounding debates; the foundations of architectural thinking. Along this path, fundamentals such as the nature of a city, the relation of building to ground, the impact of local cultures, the relation of architecture and art, and political, social, and economic questions are presented and weighed.
The 2001-2002 calendar
Kindergarten and primary: with the aim of awakening a sense of discovery, the teaching begins with cube-like building volumes — light or heavy, plain or patterned stones, small house-building bricks. These elements awaken the children's fresh, unclouded minds to fundamental architectural matters: shapes, volumes, types and qualities of materials, proportions, uses, and so on. The children take a discovery tour of CCA and then, in the workshop, build models of an imaginary museum in different teams. The programme is two hours long, in groups of up to 18, for ages 5 to 12.
The travelling 'CCA Mobile' workshop: under the title 'Awakening the Sense of Observation', CCA goes to schools. The dedicated CCA mobile teaching workshop, as a guide and a means of weaving history and architecture together, goes to schools and acquaints them with the points and questions of a building's siting in its setting. One of the CCA teachers goes to the school and helps pupils explore a piece of Old Montreal and propose a scheme for an assembly that could be built there. At the end, each team presents its scheme to the group.
The CCA building itself as workshop: the CCA complex is composed of two main parts, built more than a century apart from one another — itself an interesting opening for the topic of the relation between history and architecture. Pupils first see a series of photographs and slides of the older part of the building, dating from 1879, and then visit the new museum wing, built in 1989. The programme is one hour long, in groups of up to 22, for ages over 12.
The 10-strong tours: for 2001-2002, five tours are foreseen — a tour of CCA, a tour of CCA's sculpture garden, a tour of the three-month Mies van der Rohe exhibition in America together with the master's works in Montreal, a tour of the three-month Pritzker-laureate exhibition in 2001 (devoted to the great Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, makers of the Modern Gallery in London), and bespoke tours by prior arrangement. The tours are one hour long, in groups of 10, for ages 5 to 12.
Free Thursdays — 'broaden the view': on this day admission is free, and varied programmes are offered, including lectures and film screenings. In 2001-2002, the matter of computer use in architecture, as a fresh tool in architecture's new movement, is up for assessment.
The CCA bookstore: alongside its broad and selective offering of books on architecture, urbanism, landscape, photography, and design, it presents a fitting collection of pre-school and primary books with architectural teaching aids for children.
Footnote: CCA is housed in a building made by Peter Rose, with Phyllis Lambert as consulting architect and Erol Argun as collaborating architect. The building was inaugurated in 1989 and, with an area of about 130,000 square feet, has won various awards in Europe and America. The new building (galleries, an amphitheatre, library and bookshop, administrative offices, the study centre, and supporting facilities) is integrated with the older Shaughnessy House — designed by W. T. Thomas in 1879 — and the Quebec Cultural Heritage organisation has taken on responsibility for its preservation.
