Cycles of Work

Conor Moloney

As a student I never imagined impinging much on the consciousness of my studio tutors. The thing that surprised me most when I myself started teaching was that when studio tutors meet together, the first thing they do is talk about their students. We take our tea-breaks together in order to compare notes, swap anecdotes in the corridor - we even leave at the same time in the evening so we can chat about the day�s progress. I learned many of the skills of the studio tutor almost inadvertently during these exchanges in the gaps in the day. What I hadn�t understood as a student was that studio tutors are infused with a genuine sense of excitement for the development of each student and his or her work.

When Dominic and myself then (somewhat unexpectedly) found ourselves in the position of making and managing coursework in First Architecture, two years of such half-finished conversations quite spontaneously emerged as a compelling idea about teaching. The heart of this idea was that each person has within themselves the source of creative work. Even the youngest student has more than a decade�s raw experience of places, spaces and objects, and these offer all kinds of springboards into architectural investigations. Every tutor has seen the evidence of this in the uncannily mature work that first-year students often produce. And so we understood our role as the making of an environment where every student could work from what they already knew, rather than worrying about what they didn�t yet know.

Before learning to exercise judgement, one has to learn to suspend it. At the beginning, we set tasks of making deliberately bad drawings, super-fast drawings, left-handed drawings. Finger-painting sessions take place on the floor of the crit-room. Model-making begins without tuition or prescription. Everyone makes it up as they go along (sometimes we do too). This is a great leveller: nobody really knows or understands what it is �we� are looking for, and students are often surprised when �we� respond positively to their work. This leads to intense discussion. What many find it difficult to understand is that �we� too don�t know exactly what it is �we� are looking for (we don�t want to pre-empt anything), and so our responses are genuinely motivated by delight and admiration.

Through such conversations, the initial unease and uncertainty quickly give way to an atmosphere of free exchange and invention in the studio. New skills spread rapidly. Some skills come ready-honed through practiced students, others come through students� inventing their own ways to do things. Rivalry and serendipity are good teachers. Formal tuition of technique, precision and measure take place later on an occasional basis, usually as a tool needed for a specific project, or to address a particular deficit we may have identified.

We planned the year�s work as a number of cycles with different goals and emphasis. Each cycle begins loosely with play and analysis, and ends with a review and self-evaluation to bring the work full-circle. Longer projects involve an overlap with Technology Studio - which has separate coursework and staff - where we use a technical study as an opportunity to develop the design from a different perspective, while still in gestation. We try always to engineer multiple angles of approach for each project: through an understanding of the needs of the client or the conditions of the place; through the use of a specific building material or a specific drawing technique; through an idea about building services or colour or structure�

Design is not a linear process. When we start out, we really don't know where we're headed for. This is what makes an adventure of any creative work. In architecture in particular, there is an enormous amount of information to be assimilated and endless decisions to be made. To cope with this, architects have to work in a tentative, flexible way that allows them adapt their ongoing design to the inevitable changes that become necessary. One builds certainty about a design through a cumulative, cyclical process - like a snowball. Each turn of the cycle is an opportunity to incorporate new information, reflect on its significance, and act to develop the design further. Rather than superceding the previous cycle, each new turn adds another layer of precision. When one back-tracks in a design, the understanding reached is often especially useful and does not represent a failure. This cyclical pattern structures the sequence of projects in the year, but also patterns each week in a project, each day in the week, and ultimately becomes an instantaneous mode of operation by the professional architec, known by Donald Sch�n as 'reflection-in-action'.

Most interesting to me are points at which people get stuck - either at the beginning of a cycle of work, or often at the end of cycle. This brings up the question of work process - the core of what students learn in first year - in a way that is immediate and pressing. This is always the point at which the student really needs to take a risk. It sometimes helps to reassure students that there is no final, correct answer in architecture. It is more a matter of reaching the most advanced cycle of the process they can, or as we would often say, the most refined stage of incompleteness to which they can bring the project. The atmosphere of serious-play in the studio can be of great help in finding a way beyond stuckness. We adapted the slogan �by whatever means necessary� into a challenge for the student to find whatever it is that enables them sustain themselves through the demanding and absorbing work of design. This might mean re-examining the project through a different or favourite medium, or might as easily mean running a few laps of the quadrangle. Each person is in an ideal position to devise what it is that works best for them.

Students come to architecture school in order to learn about architecture. In fact they learn as much about themselves through architecture. We encourage them to keep diaries for each project, reflecting on the experience of working through a design. Commonly these refer to the importance of a particular piece of work and how it came about: a sketch on the back of an envelope, a �net� on a piece of butter-paper, a photocopy of a model. The diaries are often obsessively detailed and sometimes emotionally candid, and at the end of the year provide a record of profound development in each individual.

We are lucky to have worked with wonderful colleagues and outstanding groups of students, but I guess we�ll never really know how much the quality of their work has to do with our teaching. At the very least I�d say we all benefit from each others� energy and curiosity. For a while I think I actually believed we were offering students an education free of the sort of orthodoxies I railed against as a student. But of course our curriculum is in fact no less coloured, and like our students we are probably working out our own preoccupations through the coursework. In studio teaching, there is a constant tension between the value of accompanying the student through their own discoveries and the value of demonstrating to the student the reflective practice of the architect. In the former, the student�s work process and technique are the objects of study, and therefore you must remain disinterested in the architectural content; in the latter, it is the tutor�s understanding of architecture that is the object of study, and so as a tutor you must always declare your bias. Because of this inevitable bias, it is as important for tutors as it is for students to be able to move on and work with new people with different interests, other ideas.

Conor Moloney is no longer a first-year studio tutor in the School of Architecture at University College Dublin.