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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Article
What Would Vitruvius Do? Re-thinking Architecture Education for the 21st Century University
Author(s)
Winifred E. Newman1 and Shahin Vassigh2
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DOI:10.17265/1934-7359/2016.02.005
Affiliation(s)
1. Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville AR 72701, USA
2. College of Architecture and the Arts, Florida International University, Miami FL 33139, USA
ABSTRACT
In the 1996 AIA (American Institute of
Architecture) Convention in Minneapolis,
the governing bodies in the education and
professionalization of architects in the US (namely, the American Institute of Architecture,
American Institute of Architecture Students, National
Council of Architectural Registration Boards, National
Architecture Accrediting Board and the
Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture) released the Boyer Report, subsequently published as Building Community: A New Future for
Architecture Education and Practice. The report was named in honor of
Ernest Boyer, an educational theorist who also participated in writing the
text. Less comprehensive than the canonical texts by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio and his
interlocutors, it is nonetheless a mirror of our current assumptions about the
education of the architect. This paper looks at the epistemology inherited from
Vitruvius as it shapes pedagogy up and through the Boyer Report and into the 21st century. Using a
method of comparative analysis applied to past and current architecture
programs, our argument is that historical divisions between professional or
applied knowledge and liberal or theoretical knowledge inherited from the past
limit our capacity within architecture education to integrate new strategies
for knowledge creation and dissemination. It is concluded that any serious revision of architecture education means a systematic
reconsideration of the basis of architecture knowledge. What of the (persistent) Vitruvian model is relevant in our post-modern
condition? What do we learn from the image of our profession projected through
the lens of the Boyer Report and it is like? In other words, what would Vitruvius do?
KEYWORDS
Architecture epistemology, pedagogy, education, design thinking.
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