Doctor Jekyll and Architect Hyde: Investigating the Double Nature of Architectural Teachers Within Polytechnic Schools

Since the foundation of polytechnic schools, design has been a critical feature of polytechnic culture, which aims at transforming the world. Herbert Simon (1969, 111) identified the main task of engineering schools in changing the existing situations into a different state with desirable features: Historically and traditionally, it has been the task of the science disciplines to teach about natural things: how they are and how they work. It has been the task of engineering schools to teach about artificial l things: how to make artefacts that have desired properties and how to design. Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. […] Design, so construed, is the core of all professional training; it is the principal mark that distinguishes the professions from the sciences. Although the concept of design is a site of common ground for poly-technic schools, how it is used and conceived of within the training of architects and engineers has been under discussion since the birth of the first engineering schools in France and Germany. Thus, this work is intended to look at the different epistemological assumptions held by the polytechnic institutions as a way to recognize common ground and differences among approaches to conceiving the design action in training and roles that teachers assume. In order to provide some interpretative elements to tackle these issues, this work is an analysis of different critical moments in the history of schools of architecture and engineering: the years from the French Revolution until the foundation of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and passing through the Bauhaus experience.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Teach.2019.19

Volume Editors
Richard Blythe & Johan De Walsche

ISBN
978-1-944214-23-4