Life Philosophy as Architectural Education
Aristotle's Sculpture
Architectural Education, in my opinions, can be a prototype of creating renaissance man but unfortunately architecture education today’s are too obsesses on creating a different individuals that possessed a has-to-be-different attitude. What is different at the first place? Was being different doing good to our inner self or society? That is a big question mark. In our conventional capitalistic society, different equals to good, and that is the problem with our world. The point is, there’s no wrong of being different but we are trying too hard to be different instead of being different in our true self. In order for us to understand our true self, we need to be eager for knowledge and constantly on a learning mode. In other word, we need to learn more about life philosophy.
Sci-Arc's Student architecture model
What does it meant to be understand true self is that, we need to be always aware of what are we doing. People who were in the sludge of life, they would only follows trend even if they are one of those top efficient working machines. Take a zooming lens on architectural education instead, taking aside famous architectural school and just focus on normal universities around the world. Majorities of the students are basically doing the same thing despite they own their own fancy terms and that is not learning. Learning is not about how to refines a similar things that your best friends are working on. I think we need to understand more of value of life in order for us to be more explorative and creatives in term of providing a design or solutions. Our designs reflect who we are, it can be sharp, clean and interesting, while it can be dishonest, exaggerated or attention seeking as well.
Walt Disney Concert Hall, Frank O Gehry
Speaking about honesty, it is something we design students never really appreciate even todays. We never learn of expressing ourself honestly and always trying to cover ourself. For instance, when our design is less satisfying, we tend to cover it in a bombastic words or pseudo philosophical way and that is not right. Frank Gehry is always a respectable designer because he treat his design very honestly, when his design concept is a fish, it is a fish, it is not any other bombastic philosophical concept. In our generation where emotions can be instantly expressed and shared, we lack of this kind of attitude of being honest. To be an responsible designer in the future, honesty in design is definitely one of the first criteria we need to possessed, and honesty goes back to our life, life philosophy.
The worst thing you can be in our life is you are dead once you graduated from university, you work like slave and never lived a single day, and that’s what frighten me when I’m approaching working life. We need to know what we want, which many of us don’t. We study because of our parents, friendships or maybe our loved one. We study because we have the responsibility on our family. We study because we need to study. It’s a very sad things to say when one’s only study for a certificate instead of making the worlds better place. We wouldn’t care more about what’s happening on people at the other part of the world. People today lived like zombies, when other zombies discover brains around, we follows. We have no objectives nor solid thoughts.
nevertheless, it is these life values we need to learn in order to create more interesting and responsible architecture. It is not difficult to see how mesh up our world is when people value knowledge more than life values. In my opinions, back to a less intense atmosphere, we need to learn more about life philosophies in order for us to understand more about our self, the value of honesty and what we wanted to do, in order to be a better human being that creates amazing architecture.
