Lecture
Tuesday 29 October 2013, 18:30
Auditorium SG, EPFL
As part of the exhibition Open City – Thinking while building
Radical Pedagogy-a collaborative project
Pedagogical experiments played a crucial role in shaping architectural discourse and practice in the second half of the twentieth century. These experiments can be understood as radical architectural practices in their own right. Radical pedagogies shake foundations, disturbing assumptions rather than reinforcing and disseminating them. This challenge to normative thinking was a major force in the post-war field of architecture, and has surprisingly been neglected in contemporary thinking.
This was a time of collective defiance against the authority of institutional, bureaucratic and capitalist structures; a geopolitical landscape further transformed by the Cold War and the Vietnam War; a domestic environment built out of consumable plastics and objects of mass-produced desire; and a utopian technological prophecy foretold in science fiction tales now realized in a brave new world of computation, gadgets, and space ships. Architecture was not impervious to such shifts. The discipline sought to stake its claims amidst a new territory. Is anything similar happening today?
Beatriz Colomina
Professor of History and Theory of Architecture, Princeton University, USA