Is an appetite for stone taking architectural education back to the drawing board
(…and to the quarry)?
By Niki-Marie Jansson, Principal at NM Jansson Studio, Associate lecturer at Newcastle School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape
It has been said that “every good craftsman conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding.” While it is somewhat ironic to speak of concrete practices in the context of stone, Sennet’s statement from The Craftsman provides food for thought while I contemplate the architect’s role in today’s society and what it really means to practice architecture sustainably.
As an architectural practitioner and educator frequently engaging with the stone industry, I am often asked how we can collectively increase awareness of stone within architectural schooling as a means of appealing to aspiring designers and encouraging sustainable thinking in practice. Creating platforms for interdisciplinary dialogue, debunking myths that discourage contemporary uses of stone, integrating field work and material studies to curriculums, and exposing students to processes of production, are immediate steps that all go a long way towards rekindling an enthusiasm for this sustainable material.
However, reflecting on the unprecedented generational pressures facing students, as tensions between climate-anxieties, impacts of AI on employment, fears of financial instability and political polarisation accelerate society towards the unknown, I wonder whether appeal is enough.
In pursuit of authenticity, architectural education and practice haven’t ceased to evolve since their inception, continuously challenging, contradicting and reinventing themselves through theoretical and technical dialogues. Whether through the ornamental expression of Sullivan, or Bauhaus’ distilling of classical principles to arrive at ‘pure’ form; whether “less is more” or “more is more” through the respective eyes of Mies Van der Rohe and Venturi, their approaches are reconciled by their common pursuit of what is ‘authentic’ and ‘honest.’
This impulse towards authenticity could provide an objective grounding for design practice that is enduring beyond temporary notions of appeal.
Our current intellectual endeavours as architects are simultaneously challenged by questions of resourcefulness and sustainability— constraints that didn’t occupy the post-industrial mind until relatively recently. Surely sustainable practice must also involve the cultivation of the architectural student as a ‘person’, making purpose the driving force of procedure, and not vice versa as is currently the case.
And what of appeal? We all know the following to be true: the faster the acquisition the quicker the loss, and conversely, the slower and more arduous the acquisition —whether in the gym or in the reading room— the more sustained the results.
While we can promote stone as an answer to current challenges of embodied carbon, providing an immediate gateway to implementing policy change, its primordial character will ensure lasting cultural appeal. The pre-industrial era provides a wealth of material knowledge intuitively embedded in sustainable thinking, that by enduring the test of time gradually established customary practices and traditions of craft.
Exposing students to these epistemological approaches could invite hybrid-possibilities of learning and practicing that simultaneously nod to the past and future, and expand and mature over time.
Material-knowledge, through self-critique, also builds self-knowledge, as with the apprentice stonemason, who through repetitive tooling studies their own ingrained practice and modulates it from within, as Sennet explains.
This self-reflective process nurtures the forming of the ‘authentic person’ and derives purpose in a way that over-reliance on CAD software, for example, simply cannot because of the disconnect it creates between simulation and reality.
Working within physical constraints, tracing and retracing, liberates creative process, building a self-awareness and material understanding that enables complex challenges to be met with enthusiasm and endurance.
As our built environment suffers the consequences of disembodied design practice, my hope is that we as architects and a stone industry can by example lead, inspire and cultivate a reembodied approach to sustainable practice through active engagement with students. An approach which ripens material knowledge by combining the acquisition of practical skill, commitment, and discernment iteratively sharpened through “head and hand” learning processes.
We need to be dusting-off our drawing boards and getting our hands dirty at the quarry, in order to push past not only intellectual, but social boundaries that compromise the critical development of the architect as a person— as a stone-thinker.
