Patrick Lynch on Education

Only by understanding what is worth conserving can new architecture enrich the old, says Patrick Lynch.

In her 1970 essay 'The Crisis in Education', German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt reflected on the strife that hit university campuses in the 1960s. Arendt said that education must by its nature be conservative, because human artefacts wither and decay and the young must be educated in order for them to be able to make decisions about what is worth conserving or remaking. She added that because human affairs are perishable, and in need of conservation and renewal, it is pointless trying to maintain the status quo, and that attempting to do so – the basis of conservative political thinking – is hopelessly wrongheaded and futile.
As Arendt was painfully aware from her own experiences fleeing Hitler during the Second World War, it is the ignorant who want to smash old things and to glorify their youth in the name of some chimerical future. To illustrate how supposedly radical education policy leads to conservative architecture, I draw your attention to the latest project by the ex-Dean of Columbia University's schoolof architecture, Bernard Tschumi: the BLUE residential tower in Manhattan. Chamfered blue glass walls in aluminium frames plus air equals 'a mosaic of the diverse community around it'. Or so we are told.
It is exactly because architecture is an expression of material culture that the tension between individual freedom and collective responsibility is apparent to all. The difficulties of building in cities cannot be resolved by a mix of iconic buildings by individual geniuses and background buildings by the rest of us. The question of what is worth saving and creating implies value judgements about the use and meaning of a building, not simply its value assessed as aesthetics or taste. This entails thinking about why we bother commemorating something and what is being represented.
Our ability to judge what is worth conserving was perhaps hampered during the 20th century because we received very little education in the history of architecture, and history is still taught almost everywhere as a separate subject to design. Heike Hanada's comments about her winning competition proposal for an extension to Gunnar Asplund's Stockholm Library are insightful, and point to a new/old way of thinking about the historical condition of architecture. She says: 'The plot is of a kind which will be common in future, with less and less land going spare. A number of decisions will have to be made concerning what is to be demolished and how one can or should adapt oneself when building. It is a tricky balancing act in which conservative conclusions come easily. When a new building stands next to an old one, the different periods are made articulate, the new enriches the old and vice versa, resulting in a powerful wholeness.'
Considering the quality of recent work, I wonder if the German and Swiss education systems – with their insistence upon the integration of construction, ecology, typology and history into design projects – have held on to some difficult truths which have been cast aside elsewhere. Hanada's design looks like a good example of a building in which to conserve things, and yet she proposes to demolish and remake the site, rejuvenating its elderly neighbours.