Incoming PSU School of Architecture director Jeff Schnabel (PSU)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
As a new academic year arrives, changes are afoot at Portland State University's School of Architecture.
After 12 years, Clive Knights stepped down as director at the end of the summer, with professor Jeff Schnabel taking on the position. Knights will remain as a faculty member and can also devote more time to his artistic career, as an accomplished print maker. And Schnabel is essentially looking to continue what Knights has established.
When Knights took over in 2007, there was no School of Architecture and no accreditation; he guided the school through these processes and also oversaw the establishment of the Center for Public Interest Design, the nation's first research center in this burgeoning field. Accompaning this was cultivation of the school’s growing design-build program, which has manifested itself in some eye-catching temporary works of architecture through partnerships with the Pickathon music festival and other organizations as well as socially-minded efforts the POD Initiative to build homeless housing.
Schnabel has been along for the ride in many of these efforts as well, and he has been a leader in his own way: as a co-founder of the Portland Winter Light Festival and vice president of the Willamette Light Brigade.
Recently I sat down with Schnabel and Knights to discuss their vision for the PSU School of Architecture and what’s ahead.
Portland Architecture: Clive, are you glad to have more time to teach and make art?
Knights: Yes. I’m teaching five courses this term, and you probably have more influence on the program in regular teaching roles than as a director. The students hear your voice more than they hear a director’s voice. You’re in the trenches.
Schnabel: But it’s also to your credit, Clive, that as a leader you said, ‘These are the goals we have for our courses, but as long as you meet those, you have a lot of freedom to arrive at them.’ That’s part of the culture of Portland State. I remember when I went to Penn for graduate school, almost all the courses were really well defined; they would do the same studios year in and year out, regardless of which faculty members were there to teach them. I think if they were at Portland State, those professors would be arriving at architecture in a way that they felt more passionate about.
Knights: That’s actually why I left the UK in 1995 and came to what was essentially an art department [at Portland State], because the pedagogy [in the UK] was so predetermined by tradition. They’d literally white out the dates of the syllabi and recopy them. Much of the pedagogy here relates to enabling faculty to bring their imaginations to the studio. We wanted to stimulate the pleasures of teaching. The faculty needs to be inspired. That can’t happen when something is handed to them. You just need to frame it enough to trigger their imagination.
Schnabel: I haven’t quite thought of this before, but there is very little repetition of studios. The faculty, year in and year out, are being opportunistic. They’re finding maybe an interesting client to work with in the community, or an interesting site. But they’re very rarely repeating the same projects. That makes for a very different studio. As a faculty member, you’re investigating a project at the same time that students are. Of course if you repeat a project over and over the outcome can become predictable, and you start to guide students towards that predictable outcome. That does have some value in terms of an architectural education, but it’s a different kind of architectural education than everybody exploring and discovering at the same time. It makes teaching a kind of creative project.
Outgoing director and continuing professor Clive Knights (PSU)
And that’s bound to impact the student experience, right?
Schnabel: Right. It kind of sets up the idea of someone teaching this class being…mentor is the wrong word. Maybe it’s a master-and-apprentice relationship more than about the student and the institution. In some ways it feels more authentic to real practice this way, where each project does have a brand-new client, [and] every client brings forth a different personality and different aspirations. Every new project has a new site, with all the push-pull of forces active on that site. And the building programs, there may me similarities between project types, like schools, but also differences. By giving faculty that autonomy, and for them to embrace that by envisioning a new studio project each time, it feels like it more closely approximates the real practice of architecture.
And then you’ve got to make sure you have a diverse set of teachers and points of view, right? I think of one of my favorite movies, 8½, where the swirl of people around a movie director while on location come to inspire his vision for the movie itself.
Knights: It’s interesting you reference film. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could reference a building to make that same point? There’s a lack of contemporary architecture of the recent past that can do that, with some exceptions. Alvaro Cesar buildings are utterly remarkable and there very skillfully manipulated geometries that move your body in certain ways and your perceptions are modified and changed. They’re not overly embellished buildings at all, and yet they’re so rich in the perceptual experience they give you: what you see and what you’re shielded from and how your body’s moving up ramps and stairs. It’s great.
Clive, your artwork and some of your academic research is anatomically-focused, if I’m not mistaken. How does that factor into the way you see teaching architecture?
Knights: In all the other arts, their primary function is to engage with the profound questions of what it means to be human: a good movie, a good novel or play, a piece of music. In architecture it’s a slight obsession with innovative technology or innovative materials, or it’s none of that and it’s just plugging along and responding to the pressures that are put on you: scheme architecture. That’s not good enough. And it’s not changed much since the ‘70s, since I started school. Architecture is a language. It’s a means by which culture expresses itself to itself. Our job as professors is to initiate interesting questions. But if you’re asking questions within a narrow field of reference, which means nothing to the person on the street, then you’re not relevant.
When you talk about impacting how a body moves through space, Clive, it makes me think about the idea that architecture is largely an experiential design, no matter how much media or the public may focus on exterior looks.
Knights: That’s something we’ve tried to bring to the pedagogy of our school: that experiential dimension—how the moves through space, how you engage with a building’s spatial qualities—as a primary concern. That’s how you begin to articulate meaning: how you receive the design, how it speaks to your body.
I find the idea of biophilia-minded design and daylighting design interesting for that reason: the idea of design responding to physiological needs.
Schnabel: I would say that obsession with the body runs pretty deep in the faculty. It’s not as pervasive as we’d like but we’re working hard to make it present everywhere, including in all the drawings. In my educational experience, I routinely did plans that were unfurnished, that didn’t have a body in the spaces. That is no way to generate architecture. So even in the very early stages, and at all stages, we have to be committed to the body in space, but not just there for scale, where you cut and paste a body into the section so people understand it’s a ten-foot ceiling and not an eight-foot ceiling. What’s that person doing in that space? Are they making love? Are they preparing a meal? Are they sleeping? And actually, having them engaged in that activity lets you know whether or the architecture is contributing in any way to that activity. But until you put a body in that space, it’s all just guesswork as to whether or not that is going to contribute to that. It’s so fundamental.
Clive, we were talking about giving faculty flexibility. Yet in some ways the school’s collective personality has started to emerge with entities like the Center for Public Interest Design or other efforts to aid the community through the design-build program. Was that part of your decision making process about stepping: knowing that a kind of foundation had been laid?
Knights I feel pretty happy. Even though we’ve had some faculty move on, people who made great contributions, I’m pretty happy with the people who have replaced them. We have three new faculty members this year, and are approaching fifty-fifty with women and men. We can’t do everything so we have to figure out what it is we want to be doing, and what we’re capable of given our expertise. There’s a kind of Penn mafia within the school, but that’s not meant to be derogatory: it’s a kind of sensibility that translates. There’s a kind of merger of practice sensibility, theoretical sensibility, pedagogical sensibility.
That’s interesting because in the past there was a Penn connection at the University of Oregon, too, which manifested itself as a Louis Kahn connection through professors like Thomas Hacker.
Knights: It’s a Berkeley mafia that’s taken over now as the Kahn mafia has retired.
Schnabel: Penn when I was there had Kahn’s disciples employed, had the AAA in London’s influence, had strong Postmodernism, serious classicism and classical orders, Antonio de Souza Santos bringing in colleagues from South Africa and their version of modernism. And they didn’t try to create camps. No one was trying to win. It was exposing the students to a full spectrum of architecture, and you make choices for yourself.
Whom are some of those professors who comprise that spectrum?
We have faculty like Juan Heredia, who thinks the plan should be the starting point for architecture. We’ve got Aaron Whelton, who is really interested in digital media and digital fabrication, and how new ways of making influence form. And there’s Andrew Santa Lucia, whose aesthetic comes from Miami. It’s strong and the students are drawn to it. He’s the one who’s not afraid of color. He’s not afraid of mixing forms and ideas in a way that isn’t at first completely legible. Rather than us take a position that this is good or this is bad, we’re curious. Why are the students drawn to this? We want get to the heart of a rigorous investigation of architecture, even if it’s not your version of architecture. We’re trying to resist boundaries. We’re placing students in landscape architecture firms. That’s not by teaching electives in landscape architecture. It’s by having landscape architects come in and teach architecture. If I let that fall away, then I’ve done a terrible job. Because that’s fundamental to the success of the program: that that culture is maintained.
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