Bohumil Markalous: Architectural Didactics and Pedagogy

We can hardly conceive of the preparation of architectural apprentices except on a scientific basis, unlike earlier times that placed a significant emphasis on the artistic side, which considered the architect as an artist belonging to the guild of painters, sculptors, writers, and musicians (architecture = frozen music, stone poetry, symphony), who created architecture for visual impact, artistic expression, beautiful photographic images and views, and for sensory enjoyment, often sacrificing many purely practical considerations. The times that regarded almost only monumental tasks as worthy of architects, and the general conceptual design as the most inherent creative activity, a design that is more painterly than technically constructive or engineering, whose weight lay in its external appearance (facade work, even on foreign projects, has long been the domain of the architect). Perhaps we are not mistaken in seeking the main difference in the mentality of two or three generations of our living architects precisely in their attitude towards the tasks of direct, technical needs that require attention to detail of a common nature.
Today we are absolutely convinced that architecture, especially here in Czechoslovakia, where monumental concepts are a rare exception, must primarily focus on perfect solutions to common building needs, particularly to those that are socially most necessary, benefiting the broadest layers of society, raising the low average of housing, and that architecture here is least called upon to become a special endeavor in which all uncontrolled imagination can be unleashed without restrictions.
When we emphasize the overall scientific training, we also mean the broadest general education, a sense of current issues of the times, whether political, economic, or social, alongside specialized education, whose level should even exceed that of a building engineer. Even a layperson, a worker who builds a wooden shed for his family on the periphery, creates in harmony from two components, certain technical knowledge and according to his taste, and if this is true for a master mason or builder, how could one possibly separate these two components and assign the construction to a technician and the taste to an architect? We see the difference between the individual categories only in quantity, in that certain measure of technical training and taste. A strict separation of specialized education for building engineers and specialized architects has created two castes to the detriment of the matter.
Education is not just about scientific disciplines, but in both cases, we approach them, to a much greater extent than in any other practical employment, with an intuitive element, a personal feeling for the times, for the individual in his general and specific needs regarding his own work, that “sense of relationships” which we previously referred to as cultivated taste. Even in the education of a building engineer, one cannot ignore the cultivation of taste, as was done in the past and as evident from the efforts of our two technicians to eliminate this shortcoming with a special subject, “the aesthetics of engineering constructions.”
If the first scientific-technical training is architectural or engineering didactics, the second, inseparable part is the subject of architectural-engineering pedagogy.
Against voices that would prefer to limit the education of architects to the history of construction, it must be stated that precisely this education is lacking among our architects, or more accurately, that the extensive historical material struggles with our technicians in a cumbersome manner, through a long mechanical process of sketching and copying, during which the essence of architectural work escapes and the entirety of constructions, layouts, proportions, purposes fades in a multitude of details, thus losing the most important aspects.
On the contrary, greater emphasis should be placed on the scientific art-historical knowledge rather than on a formal or ornamentally decorative understanding, when historical buildings do not generally possess special technical complexities. It would be necessary to provide comprehensive assessments of great construction periods such as the Egyptian, the beam system of the Greeks, the arch, wall, and vault system of the Romans, the ribbed Gothic, and modern, to clearly and generously, in a sort of technical-philosophical manner, highlight the great cultural-historical epochs.
A great sorrow for our technicians is that they are exposed to too many teachers of varying age, different education, and often completely opposing views. A young, unorientated listener, a beginner, always relies on authority, clings to what he is told, holds on to the teacher, and continues more mechanically than consciously – it is indeed bitter to speak with a young listener of architecture when opposing principles and perspectives clash within him. To talk about properly organized curricula at our technical schools would be euphemistic. The departments suffer from an excessive number of admitted untalented students, who suffer from a lack of contact with a teacher who often, except for honorable exceptions, is limited to a well-trodden path of supervision, corrections, and lectures, suffers from a lack of engagement with current construction issues both at home and abroad, for which a vacation trip to Italy or to Germany, to Dresden or Paris, is a very small remedy. It is surprising that despite such conditions, individuals who demonstrate their competence emerge from our technical schools, which they primarily acquire through their private studies, their agility, their social contacts from their own diligence, industriousness, and conscious striving for a higher goal. But how many are there? At both technical schools in Brno and Prague, one or two a year, and there are also barren years.
When we consider the large extensive apparatus that the architecture department has at both of our technical schools, the years spent here, the work accomplished, we see that the cost incurred here, the operation of the entire complex institution, is absolutely disproportionate to the results that it achieves.
Anyone familiar with the organization of specialized technical universities in France or the wide, far more cultured structure of technical universities in Germany will be convinced that the delay in reforming studies here is a grievous sin. Throughout all the years of our independence, apart from supplements, we have accomplished nothing fundamental, by which we would place our higher technical education, which in fact continues unchanged in the form of old polytechnics from the Austrian era, reorganized in the 1950s, on a new modern basis.
Under these conditions, not taking into account a third institution, the Janák School of Architecture at the School of Applied Arts in Prague, the School of Architecture at the Academy of Arts, led by Kotěra since 1910 and by Gočár since 1923, is an institution that has extraordinary significance precisely because of its extremely simple organization. It may perhaps become a principle in the future that this school will be led by a single teacher, an architect of outstanding quality. After Kotěra, the choice of Gočár should be regarded as fortunate, especially since Gočár succeeds in bridging the contradictions between generations and that he shares a lively interest in modern architecture.
From the School of Architecture at the Academy have already emerged a number of significant workers: Krejcar, Roškot, Štěpánek, Fuchs, Benš, Fiala, Wallenfels, Vanický, Havlíček, Smetana, Pícha, Špalek, and others.
The exceptionally successful functioning of this school should be sought in its strict selection of a very limited number of students with prior education at a technical school, with at least four years of practical experience in a construction or architectural office or having passed a construction examination. Admission of students occurs based on submitted independent works and a special entrance examination. Despite these challenging circumstances, one only becomes a regular student in the second semester if he proves himself worthy of staying at the school. The education is individual, and students work independently. The school lasts three years, with coursework exams at the end of the year, after which study trips take place.
The curriculum prescribes in the first year a small house, a residential building, and a less complex public building; the second year deals with public buildings, baths, hospitals, and more complex private constructions; the third year includes regulatory and urban planning projects. Participants take part in public competitions, which often conclude successfully for them. After three full years, for those who have particularly distinguished themselves, there are two honorary semesters.
The School of Architecture at the Academy, led by a single teacher who is favorably inclined towards the full development of talented students, as we have seen at the recent exhibition of works, is not burdened by stagnant tradition or the bureaucratism of higher education.
While requiring proper technical training, practice, and presupposing education in historical material, it exclusively addresses the current tasks of modern construction.