Towards a New Aural Pedagogy for Architecture

AbstractThe way the architecture studio operates, as we know it today, it is in debt to the Weimar/Bauhaus-Dessau School. At that time, contradicting the academic way of teaching art through imitation, the main aim of the school was to set a laboratory for no boundary experiments. The new concept of <workshops>, where one craftsman and one artist were teaching together, established as a very productive way of exchanging information between the teachers and the students. Since then the idea of the <workshop> has spread and transformed into what is world renown today as the architecture studio class and is valid worldwide.Today, the vision of teaching an architectural studio class has shifted somehow but it keeps essentially the ocular centric approach to which a functionalist approach and a conceptual modus operandi are added. The teaching is based on photographed images and spaces and their analysis. It is also built on a functionalist understanding- teaching and learning «machine-like functioning solutions. The whole way of teaching seems to be summarized by Corbusier quote “I exist in life if I can only see” (Pallasmaa, 1996, p.17). Sight is the most important instrument of feedback and analysis in the architectural studio class today.Is this approach still relevant today in the context of contemporary architecture?It can be proved that today teaching architectural studio is somehow behind the contemporary cultural context. In searching for a possible solution, I propose a new aural pedagogy for architecture studio, in which the approach is based on all senses, including sight and more: is based on a distance from function, on bodily awareness and sensibility, idea built upon Peter Zumthor's (1999) quote: “In order to design buildings with a sensuous connection to life, one must think in a way that goes far beyond form and construction”(p.57)