Practice is Learning Through Experience
Ted Landsmark
President
Boston Architectural College
Theories about space, materials, and aesthetics have long been integral to design education. Design theories developed by academics and innovative practitioners have captured our imagination as teachers, and have long been juxtaposed against the value of learning skills in practice. To read the rest of Ted Landsmark’s “Practice is Learning Through Experience,” click here.
Thinking About Architecture
Anthony Vidler
Dean, Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture
The Cooper Union
The idea of architectural theory encompasses many different kinds of knowledge. First, there is the kind that normally counts for theory in the sciences—the hard data and experiential results that are the substance of structural, material, and to a certain extent environmental decisions. Then there are the historical treatises of the discipline, from antiquity to the present, which constitute the received wisdom of the profession and its stylistic, aesthetic, and methodological development over the ages. Finally, there are those texts that, outside the domain of architecture, nevertheless help in framing the nature of practice and its role in society. To read the rest of Anthony Vidler’s “Thinking About Architecture,” click here.