Intersight 22

Elizabeth Gilman, M Arch,
Fred Wallace Brunkow Fellow (2019 - 2020), Editor

As the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning annual publication of student work, Intersight captures the present intellectual and cultural moments of our school. Since the redevelopment of the journal's agenda through Intersight 19, discussion has become a key component to the series as a mode of celebration, evaluation, and critique.

This year’s edition of Intersight builds off of the trajectory of the past three volumes by bringing together faculty and students in a series of conversations that reflect on our school’s pedagogical development and provoke critique of ideologies, both past and present. The conversations each center around statements made by prominent architectural and educational figures from the past, which became pivotal in shaping the fundamental ideas behind our school’s creation and evolution. The intent behind these conversations was to reflect on student perceptions of their education; to locate current ideological focuses within the school; and to engage the collective intellect and experiences cultivated within our program.

“‘Architects, as conventionally conceived, are obsolete,’ Eberhard says. ‘It is no longer sensible to talk about one body of men called architects as though they were the only ones involved in architecture.’ He says environmental designers must operate as a team led by men trained as generalists..."

- excerpts from an interview in The Way Architects Practice Must Change, Engineering New Record, 1969

“There is an effective strategy open to the architects. Whereas doctors deal with the interior organisms of man, architects deal with the exterior organisms or man. Architects might join with one another to carry on their work in laboratories as do doctors in anticipatory medicine. Architects might solve design problems of worldresource use before people get into resource troubles. Architects might thus join forces, as do scientists, with the integrity of inter-self accrediting of the respective abilities of each individual on the team. Architects might begin the laboratory pooling of their resource capabilities at the university level."

- Buckminster Fuller

“Since 90 per cent of all scientists and research workers who ever lived are alive today, and since all countries are bent on adapting technology and industrialization, a further acceleration of the rate of change is to be expected everywhere, with a scientific and technical culture ultimately resulting everywhere.

It is probable that the most ‘practical’ education will prove to be a theoretical one. Habituation to routine will be valueless, or even a handicap. What is wanted is the ability to face new situations, to solve new problems; and to adjust to new complications.”

- Robert M. Hutchins

“Since the industrial revolution our civilization has suffered from a growing discrepancy between ideological potentiality and actual realization.

The metamorphosis of the world through mass production, mass distribution, and mass communication forced man to think in economic terms and organize his business affairs on a global scale. But his life philosophy remained provincial. He absorbed the technological and economic aspects of the industrial revolution with surprising speed but without an understanding of their dangerous antibiological and asocial dynamics if accepted without planning."

- Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

“Anyone who will take the trouble to investigate the architectural schools will shortly discover that, as institutions of learning, so-called, they are bankrupt, if, by solvency we assume what makes for the good of the people. Not only are they useless to our democratic aspirations, they are actively pernicious, and their theory of operation is a fraud on the commonwealth which supports them. Their teachings are one long continuous imbecility. They are undemocratic to the core of their dried-up medievalism, although a democracy pays their bills and houses and feeds them in a land of freedom. They are essentially parasitic -- sucking the juices of healthy tissues and breeding more parasites."

- Louis Sullivan

“Figuring out How we can deepen the bridge between student educational experiences and faculty research, in a way where student work is informing faculty research and faculty research is informing students."

- Korydon Smith