Architecture Competitions as Pedagogical Tools: Bridging the Unit and the Office

The ‘Unit/Office’ association, then, is here understood as a site for knowledge production that employs this notion of cooperative pedagogy. Many examples of an academic unit (or studio) and an architecture office coming together to produce knowledge can be traced throughout history. However, one school of architecture managed to transform its studio structure and to attract practising architects to work with students on architecture projects. Introduced by its chairman John Lloyd in the late 1960s, the ‘Unit System’ at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) allowed for a more horizontal and collaborative teacher-student relationship. According to tutor Fred Scott, ‘an authoritarian teacher-student relationship was replaced by one of mutual discovery and reinforcement regardless of status, which also formed a basis for a remarkably even distribution of power throughout the school community.’2

emphasising not only the cooperation between the two traditionally separated ways of practicing architecture, but also the operational benefits this brings to both of them.
The 'Unit/Office' association, then, is here understood as a site for knowledge production that employs this notion of cooperative pedagogy.
Many examples of an academic unit (or studio) and an architecture office coming together to produce knowledge can be traced throughout history.
However, one school of architecture managed to transform its studio structure and to attract practising architects to work with students on architecture projects. Introduced by its chairman John Lloyd in the late 1960s, the 'Unit System' at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) allowed for a more horizontal and collaborative teacher-student relationship. According to tutor Fred Scott, 'an authoritarian teacher-student relationship was replaced by one of mutual discovery and reinforcement regardless of status, which also formed a basis for a remarkably even distribution of power throughout the school community.' 2 To transform a unit into an office, and vice versa, a series of mechanisms have to be applied. We could identify five lines of action, that are non-hierarchical and different in nature, but unfold closely and overlap with each other. These are: representation, the architecture of drawing techniques; narrative, the textual part which, together with drawings, forms the architectural project; media, The extreme whores of the practitioners and the most withdrawn of the pedagogues of the profession are frequently produced by the AA and this is its strength, because in order to achieve such productional extremes a great deal in between -student, staff and member -has also to be produced. Krier's Unit 2; 6 proposing competitions to other units and even schools; but also in nurturing and encouraging students who would then become tutors in the unit, work with him in his professional practice, liaise with other units, and ultimately explore and evolve their own paths and architecture projects. 7 [ Fig. 2   were used to test these types of projects, to release them from their otherwise purely theoretical nature.
In the span of ten years this Unit/Office complex was to use architectural competitions as a way to produce knowledge that would feed into both the professional practice of architects and the education of future professionals. The Unit/Office was operating in what the tutors called 'the spectrum from theoretical to real', 12 which meant that first research would be developed to be able to produce, through evident operative historical distortions, 'architectural theorems' that could be put into practice directly in real design projects. 13 Contemporary professional architecture competitions were used to create a space where the asymmetrical hierarchies of students and tutors of diverse backgrounds and with different points of

Residence of the Irish Prime Minister
In the late 70s, there were plans to turn an old The Office's reaction to these divergent demands was to resolve it by dividing the site along an east-west axis, a trajectory that goes from the curvilinear to the rectilinear, from the agitated to the serene, from the (relatively) exposed to the shielded. The two houses are an architectural extrapolation and interpretation of these themes: they echo and amplify the existing gradation of the land. 17 However, the so-called natural landscape was not more than an urban park and the standing buildings hardly had any historical value -in fact, of almost one hundred entries, only four preserved these buildings. Therefore, the question of preservation -mostly what to preserve and how -was already part of the Office since its beginnings. This way, you showed the students that one was involved in the same kind of things that they were.
We were going through the same struggles and it was visible, they could see me struggling on my drawing both Elia Zenghelis's Unit 9 and Dalibor Vesely's Unit 1, and later joined as a tutor Unit 5, 9, 10, 11, and led her own 'special unit' LOT 90.

Nicknamed by Peter Cook as 'The London
Conceptualists', this group led by architect Bernard 14. 'We did the project as part of OMA, students developed their projects, and Robert Stern, who was teaching History and Theory at Columbia at the time, participated in the competition as well. We worked on the project while the competition was going on and at the end of the semester we had the final review. Rem and I presented our project, the students presented theirs, but also Bob presented his project. The students were very positive about our project, but they gave Bob a very bad review. The next day he won the first prize for 18. 'We were doing all sorts of projects. You were free to propose your own briefs and make your own projects.
In the Fourth Year, for example, I was the only one doing a competition for the Acropolis Museum.' Elias Veneris in conversation with the author.