cubastudio

I think the goals of the studio and also working with Cuba are somewhat similar. I go places where I am invited and where the studio can help. Because MIT has incredible resources. Let's share them with the rest of the world if we can.  So actually the project in Cuba was one that they wanted. Because they want prototypes about how to develop the areas.

In terms of what I want the students to get out of this, I want them to make the most beautiful buildings in the world, but I want those buildings to relate to the people. So I’m not just teaching how to design buildings, which of course is part of the studio.  Nor am I teaching just that we should be making the most beautiful building.  But we should be making the best architecture we can make, and respond to the people’s needs.  I’m critical about our profession because I think often architects are what I call technocrats. They just kind of follow what somebody tells them to do, and they're technicians.  So my goal for the students is to come away, of course, with opening doors into a new way of looking at architecture. 

There may never be a typical week, but I'll tell you the ingredients that go into teaching.  It's a combination.  Today I'm gonna show some of my own work.  So it's a combination of lecturing about work that I've done.  And more importantly how I’ve gotten to that work, not only the work.  It's a combination of lectures of particular subjects, maybe materials, or ... ; issues that I'm concerned about.  It’s an intense experience of what we call "desk side crits", where you sit down with the students, and you look at their work.  It's kind of an interesting process; I've done it for years.  You quickly see what they're doing, they've sketched something or they've made a model.  And you have to very quickly say what you think about that.  We have what we call pin-ups, which are reviews.  In our case these are often once a week, where students put their work up and the class talk about it.  I encourage my studio class to actually engage in the discussion about the work.  In fact just last week I asked them to create models, exchange models and talk about each other's work, to get them out of their own way of thinking.  And there are periods of just working in the studio.  And then full-scale reviews, where I invite people in from either the faculty of the school or other professions to give them feedback. 

I think in the studio teaching it's important to get out of the studio and go into what I call the library of architectural form, everything that surround us.  In all my studios, the site is very important to understand.  I told them when I was a student I used to go sleep on the site for a weekend, and I'd cook out, and so on.  So that I could get to know the site as well as my own backyard.  And then I would come back and announce to my professor that the site was too beautiful to build on.  I'm glad I'm not one of my students, but anyways...  The point is to absorb the site as much as you can.  Absorb the outside.  So I think a big part of the studio is getting out of here, getting out of MIT.  Now the other side of that is I bring people in who know about, in this case Havana Cuba, to talk, to give their views.  I want my students to know as many different views as they can.  And from that they make a decision. 

I think the teaching of a studio and the teaching of architects is the most important thing we can do.  Because I think the architects are the only ones who could be looking out for the physical world.  And the physical world is in bad shape.  In this generation it may disappear, as we know it.  I think of architects as care-takers of the physical world.  I think we have to be sensitive, much more sensitive than we have been, to the cultures, to the land, to the forest, to the water, to everything, materials.  We're more than technicians.  We are what I call creative builders.  I think that's the new role for us.  And I think it's a very important one that we take very seriously.