Guest-edited by Gretchen Wilkins
The renowned Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit, Michigan, has been described as the epicentre of American Modernism. When it opened in 1932 it combined a stunning Eliel Saarinen-designed campus with a radically open educational philosophy to attract and produce some of the most influential artists, designers and architects in US history, including Charles and Ray Eames, Fumihiko Maki, Florence Knoll and Edmund Bacon. Often compared to other experimental schools such as the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and Taliesin, Cranbrook’s sustained purpose has been advancing a wide, interdisciplinary latitude and self-directed design research to expand and diversify its approaches to architectural practice. There is a deep and persistent idea that open and experimental acts of making should define pedagogy, and by extension that education should shape practice, not the other way around. Cranbrook’s rigorous defiance of dogma and loose grip on the disciplines enables an educational model that combines the practices of art, design, making and urbanism. In this issue, alumni, faculty and scholars reflect on Cranbrook’s model in light of contemporary and challenging questions in architectural education, practice and the profession.
Contributors: Kevin Adkisson, Emily Baker, Peggy Deamer, Pia Ednie-Brown, Ronit Eisenbach, Dan Hoffman, Yu-Chih Hsiao, Peter Lynch, Bill Massie, Hani Rashid, Jesse Reiser, Lois Weinthal, and Tod Williams.
Featured architects: Asymptote Architecture, Building Culture PLA, Reiser+Umemoto (RUR), Studio Libeskind, and Tod Williams Billie Tsien.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction Hive of Education: Reflections on a Model of Architectural Education
Chapter 2 Evolution Over Revolution: Eliel Saarinen as Architect and Educator
Chapter 3 Provoking the Outliers: Trajectories for the Near Future Drawn from the Enigmatic Past
Chapter 4 ‘The Unmeasurable’: Lessons from Cranbrook
Chapter 5 Schooling Fishy Knowledge
Chapter 6 Postgraduate Architectural Education In Situ
Chapter 7 Unprompted: Open-ended Investigations in the Choreography of Construction
Chapter 8 Building A Dream: Fertile Ground for Social Good
Chapter 9 Unbuilding and the Recovery of Craft in Architecture: Cranbrook Department of Architecture 1986-1996
Chapter 10 An Architecture of Marks: Reading Histories and Writing Futures
Chapter 11 Methods of Inspiration: A Pedagogical Approach Based on Singularity
Chapter 12 The Interior Within Hand's Reach: Tactile Proximity
Chapter 13 Arrows: The Long Lines of Influence in Architecture
Chapter 14 Forming Action: The Subject in the Object
Chapter 15 The Agency of Making: An Anatomy of Practice-based Pedagogy
Chapter 16 From Another Perspective - Adept and Apprentices: Contributors
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