What can be taught in architectural design? — parti, poché, and felt qualities

Abstract

This essay begins with a reflection on what has been taught in architectural design since the turn of the twentieth century. I shall trace back to the two disciplinary foundations of the French École des Beaux-Arts – parti and poché – in the education of an architect in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I shall then attempt to superimpose parti and poché on a modern disciplinary framework, say that of mathematics, which leads to musings on a series of architectural problems that include pattern versus type, stability versus mobility, orthogonal versus oblique, confinement versus transparency, and aging versus metallic sheen. These paradoxes, I suggest, demand the education of an architect to address both the instrumental pattern of a building configuration and the ambient felt qualities of a room, rather than vision alone.

Keywords

architectural design / teaching / parti and poché

References

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Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg