A paper examining visual bias in architectural education, authored by two doctoral
students in architecture from Texas A&M University, was one of ten papers
selected last fall in an international competition for the 2003-05 European Association
for Architectural Education (EAAE) Prize. The international competition is sponsored
by the VELUX Group, the world’s leading manufacturer of roof windows and
skylights.
The EAAE Prize is presented every two years to stimulate original writings
on the subject of architectural education. For the 2003-05 competition, entrants
were asked to examine, “how the demands of the information society and ‘new
knowledge’ will affect the demand for relevant or necessary ‘know
how’ in architectural education?”
The paper written by Upali Nanda and Irina Solovyova and presented at the
EAAE’s November 2004 workshop in Copenhagen, Denmark, was the only entry
authored by students to be nominated for the prestigious award. Their work, “The
Embodiment of the Eye in Architectural Education,” examines the disembodiment
of architectural education by focusing on visual bias in education, its cause,
and its consequences. It looks at problems in the comprehension and representation
of perceptual issues in the current educational setting, and proposes a multi-modal, “synesthetic,” approach
that explores different media and different sense-modalities to achieve an
embodied objective.
“Synesthesia,” Nanda said, “is a rare neurological phenomenon
in which a stimulus to one sense triggers an involuntary response in a different
sense. For example, a person with this condition may see the color red when
tasting chocolate.”
The synesthetic approach, proposed in Nanda’s doctoral dissertation,
explores this phenomenon in architectural education by experimenting with media
across sense-modalities. She and Solovyova are both committed to introducing
embodied issues to information-age, main-stream education. Their research has
been guided by Texas A&M architecture professor Frances E. Downing.
The EAAE competition was open to architecture schools from all over Europe
and the Americas. The distinguished panel of judges for the 2003-05 EAAE prize
included Alberto Perez-Gomez, Juhani Pallasmaa, Peter McKeith, Per Olaf Fjeld
and Dagmar Richter.
The EAAE Prize was first awarded in 1991 and has been sponsored by the VELUX
Group since 2001.
“More than ever, future architectural education requires a creative
approach to teaching combined with the advancement of architectural research,” reads
the EAAE’s promotional brochure. “The aim of the EAAE Prize is
to stimulate new pedagogical initiatives and to communicate these initiatives
as related to the broad scope of teaching and research.”
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