Browsing in the local library I came across Francis Ching's Architecture (3e).
I think Ching started publishing very helpful books on the craft and practice of architecture when I was near the end of my degree.
I borrowed the book: I wanted to see his approach to architecture.
In a word: wonderful.
I reflect on the fumbling attempts in my course by most faculty to 'teach' architecture on the 'throw into the pool' method of fatal immersion. I guess, if you have no analysis of architecture, no theory of it, and no structured concept, that's all that's left. Let's all founder together. No wonder it took 6 years for the course to arrive at a degree!
Ching shows in deft and confident strokes of the pen, of words on a page, what architecture is, what it is about, how it is structured, and provides a vast repertoire of approaches to thinking about it.
I think of the years wasted! This degree could be taught in 4 years, with an optional 2 years for a cognate masters in it or a related discipline. We'd all be much richer for it.
His book is a manual that could be the core basis for the first two years of architectural education and exercise. Instead of a first year pretending we were in a Bauhaus art class, we could have been studying the formal disciplines of architecture, thinking about buildings in their multiple social and technical dimensions, and learning a systematic approach.
Oh, and that reminds me. In second year we had a subject 'Systems Analysis'. I looked forward to this subject as something that might teach us something about systems. Our lecturer even had an MBA from Harvard...so he must've been smart.
But no. He gave us a half-baked introduction to programming in Basic on teletypes hanging of an ICL mainframe. Collectively we learnt nothing! Certainly nothing about 'systems' or their 'analysis'.
Yet at the same time as he was waddling though a pointless Harvard MBA, he could have nipped over to MIT and worked on true systems analysis with the systems engineers there; the school Jay Forrester had done so much for. Now, that would have been a great way to frame architecture...we might even have come across a proper theory of architecture, as architecture, not as foppish drawing board decorating.
