Author(s): Leonie Bunte
John Hejduk’s influential experiments at Cooper Union in the 1960s and ’70s, most famously the *Nine Square Problem* and *Juan Gris Problem*, trained students to manipulate geometry, projection, and compositional systems as vehicles for architectural invention.¹ These exercises, indebted to early modernist painting and abstraction, remain foundational in architectural pedagogy.² Yet, as Kenneth Frampton observed in *Notes from Underground* (1972), such exercises risked reducing architecture to “a layered two-dimensional graphic matrix,”³ emphasizing representation over lived experience and social function. On the opposite end of Hejduk, we can place a number of authors, among whom the case of Arno Brandlhuber is of particular interest to us. Brandlhuber’s pedagogical approach has attracted interest over the last decade for the way it addresses architecture’s entanglement with law, policy, ecology, culture, and an overarching legislative re-definition of building standards. Projects such as *Antivilla* (2014) and films like *Legislating Architecture* (2016),⁴ conceived at the intersection of teaching, research, and profession, demonstrate how form emerges as the by-product of negotiating legal, ecological, and social constraints, resulting in a formally heteronomous architecture.⁵ In this paper, we attempt to defend the impossible—that a pedagogy grounded in formal autonomy⁶ and another grounded in formal heteronomy may, in fact, be reconcilable. We argue that this reconciliation operates through an autonomy of means and a heteronomy of goals, where formal procedures are pursued rigorously, while design outcomes remain shaped by spatial and institutional conditions. This principle forms the premise of the following Architectural Design I studio project, which seeks to cultivate a pedagogy that is both formally rigorous and socially grounded.
Volume Editors
Reed Kroloff & Francisco J. Rodríguez-Suárez
ISBN
978-1-944214-52-4