Ghost 13 participants listen to Ingerid Helsing Almaas’s talk on pedagogy.
Ingerid Helsing Almaas
The primary aim of the Ghost Architectural Laboratory has always been the education of architects. The digging and carrying, sawing and hammering, the thoughts, sketches, and discussions, the towers and barns, sheds and houses built at Shobac all have one main purpose: to provoke insight in students of architecture by engaging their bodies in the practice of building, and by turning their minds to the stories, facts, traditions, and challenges that might determine how we build.
Ghost 13: Ideas in Things seemed nothing less than an enacted manifesto, a conference played out in the same place and along the same lines as those previous laboratories. Surrounding the three days of presentations and discussions were tents, mud, dogs, wind, rain, and the close gravelly murmur of the Atlantic Ocean. Though we did not build, the invited practitioners who showed their work at Ghost 13 presented the results of thoughts and practices that over time seemed to circumscribe a common territory. Over the three days of gathering, this common ground became increasingly tangible—even more so because of the surroundings, the farm, the sheep, the cold barn, and the warm coffee; because of the grass and the timber, the music, and the dancing. And afterward we knew: we were there, together, and though the experience was limited to spoken words and pictures on a screen, something was made.
Traditionally, the subject of architecture is taught through representations, and the instruction of the skills regarded as necessary for practice happens as in a mirror: simulations of reality reflected in maps, drawings, and models. It is a game played with the tacit agreement of all parties—the teachers, the students, the surrounding profession—that the simulation is meaningful as a way to teach architecture. Only very rarely is this game disturbed. Most of the time the activities of an architecture school go on behind closed doors, with the occasional visitor from the outside world coming in to play their predefined part; a technical expert, a visiting architect, a guest critic.
In this conventional architectural training, a building is conceived of, developed, and presented as an image. Even with the most sophisticated 3-D technology, the building remains an imagined object, carefully composed and rendered, but nonetheless just a picture. It may well be that the production of such pictures is a necessary part of architectural training. After all, an architect needs to be able to imagine what the world will be like, and present those imaginings to other people. But if the full extent of an architect’s training is conducted in this way, through representations of mental edifices unchallenged by the messy and conflicting demands of reality, only luck will decide whether that architect is able to make any significant contribution to the real world.
Because obviously, even the smallest piece of built architecture is shaped by a whole host of surrounding forces: material, financial, social, political, emotional, etc., and architecture students need to be introduced to these forces and learn to deal with them in order to make a positive contribution to the world in which we live. And to quote Juhani Pallasmaa’s Ghost 13 keynote address: “The essential task of architecture is to improve the world that we live in, to make it a better place for ourselves.”1
These many forces that shape architecture are not easily represented. The increasing use of diagrams and flowcharts in student projects may signal an increased awareness that there is more going on in any given situation than can be conveyed in a conventional site plan. But though many of these mappings may be insightful, they do not necessarily teach students much about what happens when they actually have to engage in a situation as active agents.
For that experience, they need to be out there. They need to be given the time, the trust, and the guidance to take part in reality, be allowed to change it, and to feel the responsibility that comes with changing the way people live and do things.
It is through doing that you test your presumptions and the consequences of your actions, in architectural education as in all other areas of life.
This is where construction, like the Ghost laboratories, endeavors, not only offering valuable lessons: it is essential for an architect to grapple with the physical world. The experience offered by physical building practice is indispensable in architectural education. And, as Juhani Pallasmaa pointed out: the craft of building is not just a case of the thought guiding the hand, as the architect’s thought by extension guides the craftsman’s hand, it is also a case of the hand guiding the thought. As you work, you think. And if you don’t work, if you don’t move your own hands and feel the weight of lumber and concrete with your own body, you won’t understand what architecture is.
Obviously, the aim of making architects build is not to make them craftsmen, in the same way that teaching them philosophy is not to make them philosophers and teaching them statics is not to make them engineers. Architecture is a synthetic discipline, messy, “impure,” as Pallasmaa often states, “because it contains inherently irreconcilable ingredients, such as metaphysical, cultural, and economic aspirations, functional, technical, and aesthetic objectives.”2 The task of architecture is to bring these ingredients together and, through a physical construction, make life better. And for that, architects need to understand as many aspects of the synthesis as possible, from the philosophical to the physical.
Most architects will eventually develop some idea of this, in time, once they get out of school. But, paradoxically, there is a real advantage to engaging in physical construction while still in school, even though it can never be “real.” School offers the luxury of selective conditions. Education is not, and should not be, a simulation of practice. Yes, architecture school is the ground for the transfer of professional knowledge, but it is also a space where there are no limits to the questions asked. And if we accept that architects are charged with improving life, rather than simply confirming the status quo, then intelligent questions become as important as encyclopedic knowledge. How can you improve if you do not question?
Learning architecture through physical construction does not limit the necessity for questioning, for challenging what we see, think, and do. You do not stop thinking when you pick up a hammer. In fact, you could argue that it is precisely because architects are not professional craftsmen that they have so much to learn by building. Had they been better builders, they would learn less. Had they known the techniques and processes, had their operations with tools and materials been automated, professionalized, there would be no room for thoughts to drift in, no need to exchange words, to discuss and reflect. One of the strengths of the Ghost laboratories is precisely that most of the participants are amateurs, and so, thankfully, they are slow. As you step back from the wall and let the hammer sink for a moment, wondering what to do next, there is time for questions.
Even the structures of the Ghost labs can be thought of as questions. Why build a tower by the shore? Why build it on a hill? Why move a barn, why leave an old stone wall where it is, why cast a plinth, raise a wall? Because the consequences of building actions are physical and endure in time, the questions need to be good. And the answers even better. Once something is built, you will know, immediately, whether the questions were relevant, and whether the answers were good enough. You can’t fool the body.
The Ghost laboratories represent a strong position, a clear critique, and a productive counter-proposition to the priorities dominating mainstream architectural education. Stones have been laid. The many participants in the enacted manifesto of Ghost 13, the conversations carried out both from the podium and in the audience, people both speaking and listening, have mapped out a possible curriculum for another way of thinking, another way of doing architecture.
1 Juhani Pallasmaa, “Architecture and the Human Nature—searching for a sustainable metaphor,” keynote address, Ghost 13 conference, Nova Scotia, June 14–17, 2011.
2 Ibid.