Untimely Teachers: Recovering Postmodernism's Anachronic Pedagogies

During the late 1950s and 1970s, when a re-examination of history unfolded against the backdrop of growing student protest in architecture schools, different architects and historians reread the work of major architects of the past, thereby staking out a position in a growing controversy over how architects should learn from history (Wright and Parks 1990). Whether out of sympathy with dissatisfied pupils, or as a counter reaction, several educators looked past the masters of modernism (i.e. their own teachers) in search of new, untimely mentors - those who might offer lessons ‘controversial and alive as ever’ that transcend ‘temporal conditions’ (Ungers 1981, 118). This panel aims to explore the pedagogical consequences of this turn to archaic teachers.How were such untimely lessons assimilated through experimental historicist or operative pedagogies in architecture schools? Oswald Mathias Ungers’s seminar teaching was directly informed by the architecture of Karl Friedrich Schinkel; Bruno Zevi asked students to design ‘critical models’ of Michelangelo’s architecture for the 1964 exhibition co-curated with Paolo Portoghesi; and Colin Rowe developed a pedagogy founded on a Gestalt-psychological rereading of the villas of Andrea Palladio (to cite but three instances of pedagogical reenactments, which like all survivals, reveal more about the concerns of the reenactors than of the reenacted). Recent research projects on architectural pedagogies in the postwar years (Anderson 1999; Ockman 2012; Colomina 2015) contain multiple leads as to how the postmodern concept of ‘history as a teacher’ entered architecture schools, parallel to new formalist, activist and environmental approaches. Little research, however, is available that documents the teaching of history in close proximity to studio programs, a space of exchange that triggered intense debates about historicist form-making and non-figurative ways of integrating history in design.This session invites contributions that investigate anachronic pedagogical experiments in the period described above, the untimeliness of which is less concerned with the shock of the old as provoked by the 1975 MoMA exhibition ‘The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts’, and more with imaginary didactic dialogues staged around the work of outmoded masters. It proposes to understand these encounters through a sense of contemporariness, which as Agamben defined it, is ‘that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism’ (Agamben 2009, 41). We invite papers that examine unforeseen ways of reading antiquated masters and of ‘interpolating time’, and as such, challenging the classical theorizations of postmodern time consciousness.