Teaching architecture, learning architecture

April Teaching and Learning Architecture from Practice, Memories, and Imagination Architecture is hard to define. In “ Teaching Architecture, Learning Architecture,” Peter Zumthor explores the meaning of design to architects. He believes that teachers of architecture only help students answer their own design questions, not offer the right answers. At the same time, teachers learn with their students, as the latter understand what architecture means by doing it. His main argument is that learning architecture involves the intersection of logic, emotion, the senses, memories, practice, and imagination, so that ideas can become tangible expressions.
Zumthor asserts that students must learn architecture by using their reason and emotion. A good architectural design is both intelligent and emotion-laden. Furthermore, Zumthor believes that their reasoning about design comes from their growing-up experiences. Their first experience of architecture comes from their interaction with built spaces during their childhood and the impact of these places and spaces on their thoughts and emotions. Logical research on design is not complete without remembering the past, according to Zumthor.
Aside from using reason and emotion, Zumthor asserts that architecture is always tangible, although it is based on intangibles. It is about concretizing memories and feelings. He explains that although architects work with materials, they do not have actual models. Instead, he asserts that architects have concrete objects. From concrete objects, they make their plans, and their plans embody their ideas. Ideas, however, for him must be based on new images. The past can only serve to offer old images, from which the materials of new images arise.
Finally, Zumthor describes that thinking about design is thinking about the whole and its parts. The whole is not whole yet, however, but a work in progress. Design comes from the sensuality of the imaginative human mind. The actual physical work is not the real image; the image is still in the mind, in the senses of the architect, waiting to be discovered and polished.
Work Cited
Zumthor, Peter. “ Teaching Architecture, Learning Architecture.” Thinking Architecture (1998). Print.