Theo Spyropoulos on Educating Architecture

It is very important for students to understand the contexts and the environment that they want to study in. And also understand how the education will be able to profit their interests in architecture to begin with. So, it is very important for them to really start to address maybe their own personal attitude towards architecture and their belief. And try to find context to where they think that they can force to this. In terms of the education of the architect and also in terms of the city and the context in which they are studying, city becomes a laboratory to extend this.For example, here at the school, at the Architecture Association, London becomes as much a laboratory for design in architecture and experimentation as the School itself. So, we try to look for ways to really have an active dialogue between the educations, the contexts of practice and to understand that reality is a very radical construct at the moment.

The issues that we are trying to develop here are issues that try to actually engage in this. For students, it’s important for them to understand that they play a vital role in this. Because, architecture for many reasons doesn’t necessarily have all the mechanisms to design and innovate and the role of education is really a very important empowerment for students in that context; to really engage and participate in this.

Do you feel that is important for someone to be passionate about architecture in order to be successful as a student of the field, as a professional?

I would suggest that the thing generally in terms of education is that the Schools of Architecture have to realize the role that they play in the greater purpose of architecture. And professionally all the limitations at their arms, so in terms of actively experimenting and testing and innovating the school becomes a place where experimentation and failure are able to be expressed and drive innovations that practice can also implement.If you see it in the history of architecture, for example different and other design disciplines we don’t actually have a prototype or different ways of testing things. We go directly from design to build. So, the role of active engagement with fabrication issues computation and different forms of experimentation have a very strong place in the university system and in programs such as the one that I teach. This becomes a very important aspect of understanding how the role of education and honestly the development of architecture in general.

Does Architecture as a profession need empowerment? In which  ways should this be done?

Architecture in general and architects need to reinvest the purpose of what architecture is today and we instate a kind of attitude towards the everyday. When you see how much of building is not really designed by architects, you start to see why we have a certain kind of crisis with the building environment. In terms of sort of engaging with some of the issues of sustainability and different issues as design led issues it’s critical for architects to really start to question different kinds of types, apologies and how we can really engage.In that in a certain way educate the role that architecture can participate in. Because, generally, architects don’t do a very good job of communicating actually what we do and foster kind of situation which sort of relegates it in a very limited sense instead of fully empowering the possibilities and kinds of problems that architects can address. Today, more than ever, with a kind of shared tools and platforms, with aspects of open source and so forth there is a really much higher level of architectural engagement that we profit many disciplines and we reinstate architecture as a participant, nothing more and nothing less.

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