Number of words: 398

Three  is a story about architects that reflects current beliefs about that discipline and its relation to education. When a certain school of architecture asked its graduates what they had found most wanting in their architectural education, the responses ran somewhat as follows: graduates who had been out of school five years said they wished they had been offered more drafting and blueprinting techniques; those who had been away for ten years stated they would have wanted more work in history and art; the twentieth-year graduates indicated that they were most wanting in psychology; and finally, the oldest set of graduates, those who had been away for twenty-five years and more, said what they really had need of in architectural schools was more philosophy.

The story perhaps shows that the older one grows, the more apparent becomes the need for reflection on ends and purposes, and reflection on values and ideals embodied in those goals. Architecture is not, the older architects discovered, merely draftsmanship and blueprinting, or pro ducing the new by studying the history and design of the old; nor is it simply “frozen music,” as some contemporary aesthetes would have it, structured according to the discovered behavioral needs and drives of human beings. Architecture is perhaps accidentally dependent upon but not essentially bound to all three of these things. But more importantly, and here I think the case for the older architects, those graduates of twenty-five years standing, is made, architecture talks about those things that ought to be the case, those idealized and utopian ends of man’s being that plague him and prick him to discover his real self. Frank Lloyd Wright once said that he designed his buildings not for the creature that man was but for the creature that man ought to become.

If philosophy is reflection on man’s ultimate nature, concern for the goals and idealized ends that constitute man’s highest aspirations, then architecture can come to serve those ends by reminding man what he ought to be, rather than merely telling him what he is. The older archi tects, I think, discovered that the thing most needful in architecture is this factor of designing for man’s ideals and not for his immediate bio logical needs and persistent psychological desires. In this paper I want to explore the ramifications of this idealized or philosophic architecture in and for education.

Excerpted fromhttps://www.jstor.org/stable/1980087?seq=1