The Teacher’s Hunch and its Foundations: A Case for Epistemological Awareness in Architectural Education

Certainty, opinion throughout faculties and schools of architecture, teachers and students engaged in conventional education exchange an enormous amount of information, in a process intended to provide the latter with the skills required to become independent professionals. While part of the exchanged information can be recognized as clearly fitting within that formative goal, it is not uncommon for tutors to also suggest possible lines of inquiry that might sometimes seem arbitrary. Rather than taking those apparently incoherent indications for confusing or diversionary, I am convinced that they play a key role, not only in the education of the architect, but – most importantly – in the development of the architectural profession as a whole. In order to recognize the origin, importance and value of the architecture teacher’s hunch, in the following pages I will make a case for epistemological awareness as a sine qua non for the teacher’s hunch to become a productive source of professional knowledge. Without that awareness, what are taken for hunches might indeed be interpreted as whimsical, mysterious and fundamentally inoperative information.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Teach.2019.37

Volume Editors
Richard Blythe & Johan De Walsche

ISBN
978-1-944214-23-4