The Virtual, The Actual, and The Aspen Idea

This paper expresses a challenge to the problematic conceptual division between teaching and practice in architecture. This division generates a troublesome tension between the university and the profession as it maintains a condition of perpetual reconciliation between the two. This challenge is issued through an account of the Aspen Summer Design Program at the University of Colorado Denver College of Architecture and Planning, taught in conjunction with Harry Teague Architects, CCY Architects, and Studio B Architects in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley. Through a reading of the concept of the Virtual and the Actual as articulated primarily by Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, and a connection of these concepts to ideas of situatedness and embodiment implicit in the Aspen Idea of Albert Schweitzer, the Summer Design Program demonstrates a manifestation of a more overlapping and simultaneous conception of teaching and practice.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Teach.2019.72

Volume Editors
Richard Blythe & Johan De Walsche

ISBN
978-1-944214-23-4