EXISTENTIAL ARCHITECTURE EDUCATION

Architecture’s focus on the lived conditions of existence places the discipline in a unique position to address urgent contemporary problems. As Paolo Friere notes, however, education regulates the way that the world ‘enters into’ the students. What is at stake is that students can only understand what is a part of their existential experience, which depends on the way both architecture and students are embedded in the world spatially and temporally.

This lecture will explore the techniques, technologies, materials, and especially the spaces and social relations that make the production of architectural knowledge possible. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s power-knowledge analysis and Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action, we will attempt to clarify the way particular relations produce the objects of study and the subject-position of the ‘knower’.

Using a range of contemporary and historical examples, from Daniels, to Notre Dame as a pedagogical space, to Willowbank, this lecture will speculate on the way alternate relationships to the world produce novel ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving.

Marcin Kedzior is a Sessional Lecturer at Daniels, founding editor of Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political-Economy, and director of the Willowbank Centre.

Craig Crane is the Managing Director of Willowbank and co-founder of SITUATE | DESIGN | BUILD

Image: Benedictan Monestary drawn by Marcin Kedzior and Will Fu