The history of construction in architectural education is long and varied. The German Bauhaus returned to an emphasis on craft. Architects were expected to learn and practice ceramics, textiles and printmaking. Through the internalization of “making” at all scales and media, design of buildings could be broached. Equally important to the Bauhaus was technology and the efficiency of new construction practices and materials. Architectural education also held a political agenda. The expertise and creative talents of designers presented an opportunity for social equality. By designing with the mass-produced materials such steel and glass, the architect could provide affordable housing for workers. Even though the Bauhaus pedagogy was introduced to America through the immigration of Mies van der Rohe, Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius, actual full-scale building fell out of favor in the mainstream architecture schools. (2) The American Institute of Architects even went so far in their first code of ethics to condemn the architect-builder, seeing this as somehow a conflict of interest. (3)

Therefore, it took the alternative architectural schools to reinvigorate the construction studio. The most well known example, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship, located in Spring Green, Wisconsin and Paradise Valley, Arizona, required their students to build their own classrooms and dormitories. The original Fellowship was founded in 1932 as a “School for the Allied Arts.” The tuition was $650 and the curriculum each day involved three hours of working in the fields and on construction projects and five hour studying“organic” design and specializing in pottery, weaving, sculpture as well as other crafts. As Robert C. Twombly says in his book, Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture, “Wright believed that education should be in the doing, not in the classroom.” (4) Unlike the Bauhaus, Wright was the single master and Taliesin did not focus on a “machine-age aesthetic,” it was less formal and more isolated from the urban condition, politics and cultural movements. Wright said his apprentices were “like fingers on my hand.” (5)

“Now the architect rarely visits the site, or he won’t even go to the site because he won’t take the legal responsibility. I think that’s all crucial, and we’re getting a poor environment because of it, and real bad craftsmanship, because the architect has a low opinion of the maker, and the maker has a low opinion of the architect. If the architect and the maker are the same person, it’s got to be different.

- Steve Badanes (6)

The Jersey Devil is a sort of Architectural protest through hands-on construction. Their work presents an alternative to the status quo and in fact shows deep distrust and dread for it. As Forrest Wilson, in his foreword to Crosbie’s The Jersey Devil says, “Here are the architects who, fascinated with technological innovation, are profoundly distrustful of its prevailing goals. They see technology as a device to expand man’s consciousness rather than simply a means of increasing his material well-being.” (7) Jersey devil describes itself as “committed to the interdependence of building and design.” (8) Humor and struggle are revealed in the process and the product. Crosbie says, “Form follows fun.” (9) Their work speaks of Humanism and the need for architecture to be fun. (10) The Jersey Devil often live on the site of their projects. As John Ringel, one of the founders says, they were campers first before architects and therefore they have an intimate understanding of the realities of climate and the environment. (11)

It may be these unconventional personas and their schools, which have generated a certain skepticismtowards construction studios. Many see the hard labor and inevitable emphasis of budget and pragmatics as antithetical to the creative freedom embodied in design. Students have even been known to say when beginning one of our construction projects, “I thought I was in school so I wouldn’t have to do manual labor!” (12) But the struggle embodied in construction is imperative to design pedagogy.

Two recent precedents for the Building Institute are the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s program under Dan Hoffman and Samuel Mockbee’s Rural Studio at Auburn University. These two programs are quite distinct and noteworthy among construction studios. Cranbrook’s program stresses experimental processes (of design and fabrication) and the importance of craft. The Rural Studio began as outreach to the poor communities of northern Alabama. Mockbee’s innovations, with his students, include the high level of client interaction and collaboration as well as economical and sustainable construction. It is our goal at the Building Institute to combine all of these high ideals into a program, which is perfectly suited to our students, environment, culture and history.

Cranbrook

Founded in 1925, the Cranbrook Academy of Art continues to uphold the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement under which it was established. Eliel Saarinen, the architect who master-planned the campus was also committed to Arts and Crafts having based much of his Finnish National Style on it prior to WWI. (13) The architecture department continues to focus on construction processes often utilizing full-scale installations. Several major projects have been designed and constructed by students and faculty under the direction of Dean Dan Hoffman. The campus gateway projects, in particular, pushed the department to levels of quality and complete fabrication never reached before. (14) It was Hoffman’s goal (he left Cranbrook for Arizona State University in 1998) to bring the architect closer to the processes of construction.

“…[the architect’s]… role is now limited to the representational and legal description of the building on its site. Architects have thus become increasingly preoccupied with describing a proposed building as an abstraction rather than a collection of processes that occurs over time.

- Dan Hoffman (15)

Auburn’s Rural Studio

“The social development of the architect is at the heart of our program,” according to late director Samuel Mockbee, FAIA. (16) Direct interaction with the rural poor families of northern Alabama is the fire, which fuels the program. Public service agencies refer clients to the program, held off-campus in a donated building in Mason’s Bend, Alabama. Then second and fifth year architecture students set to work interviewing the clients, holding design charrettes and scrounging for recycled and donated materials. Many students speak of their education in social interaction equally with architectural matters. (17)