ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE EDUCATION

Architectural Heritage Education (AHE) was conceived about 1979 as a project for testing the educational validity of introducing architecture into existing secondary curriculum through practical applications designed by teachers. Organized in annual cycles, the program began each summer with a two-week course conducted for participating teachers by the staff. The curriculum for the course covered systems for analyzing visual information through building styles, plans and design features, as well as interpreting buildings as cultural evidence in discussions and activities involving an interdisciplinary point of view.

During the school year teachers tried out different approaches to integrating the subject of architecture into their courses through examples of buildings from their communities. In over 1,500 class sessions and 37 subjects-from studio art, literature, writing and architectural drawing, to U.S. and world history, psychology and economics-teachers designed architectural lessons tailored for course material they ordinarily covered and learning objectives they had set themselves. Their applications involved a range of disciplines, teaching methods, and points of view, as well as students of varying abilities and grade levels and different types of schools and communities.

 The following are remarks by Leslie College Program Evaluation and Research Group.

CAPTURING THE SPIRIT OF AN ERA

Changing Ideals
Architecture presents a picture of broad patterns in human perception and experience. And, indeed, when the underlying principles that govern how a building should look undergo a major change, then a fundamental shift in how humankind arranges its view of the world can be seen at work. Thus the switch from the classical aesthetic of harmony, balance and order to the medieval-more oblique, exuberant, and spiritual-reveals a corresponding change in the outlook, or spirit, of these eras. Similarly, Renaissance, Romantic, or Modern ideals are captured in the architecture of their particular times, leaving for posterity a valuable, visual document for interpreting and understanding the people of the past.

ARCHITECTURE A RESOURCE FOR LEARNING

Architecture is a broad topic, encompassing many facets of the humanities and the arts. It is a prism, reflecting in built form the priorities of past civilizations, present values, ways of life and relationships among people, human creativity and universal human needs for shelter and for individual expression.
   Architecture is also a practical art, bound by considerations of geography and climate, technology and materials, economics, and the physical, psychological and social requirements of its occupants.
   Teachers in Architectural Heritage Education experimented with architecture, looking for ways to relate it to their own disciplines. They pulled the subject apart to analyze its potential for helping students understand topics and themes for art, social studies, the language arts or industrial arts courses.
   Following is a summary of the various ways teachers viewed architecture as a resource for learning about the spirit of an era, human creativity, associations, cultural values, social relationships, or historical chronology.

Changing Styles
Within the relatively narrow frame of a few decades, a style of architecture catches the "look" that appealed most to its contemporaries. In a very vivid way these preferences in style express the priorities and conditions of a particular time -as the simple, reserved Georgian style reflects the colonial era, or the frivolity of the elaborate and eccentric Queen Anne reflects the late 1800's. Both of these styles, and the many other examples that make up the history of architecture, show not just fashions that were popular in the past, but give us clues to what the physical surroundings of the colonists or Victorians looked like, and the concerns of the society and individuals who experienced them.

Changing Sources in Architectural Imagery
Architecture is a cumulative heritage: there has always been a storehouse of visual imagery for successive generations of builders to draw upon as they explore new directions in designing and decorating buildings.
The architectural styles of the past are symbols evoking the times, events and values of the cultures in which they evolved; consequently when old images appear in new styles, the associations between the two eras bear close scruti¬ny. It is significant that the American designers who fashioned the Greek Revival style in the Jacksonian Era were inspired by the temples of Ancient Greece; and that the Colonial Revival style of the late 19th century had origins in the architecture of our own colonial period. Most other styles incorporated images from the past and can be "read" through this language of as¬sociations for clues to the aspirations, interests, and priorities of their times.

EXPRESSING HUMAN CREATIVITY

A Work of Art

Architecture is another medium for human in¬spiration. Like painters, sculptors, composers and writers, the designers of buildings are creative interpreters of their times. Their works-the temples of Ancient Greece, Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance palaces-rank with paintings, sculpture, music and literature among the monuments of Western civilization. This tradition-the fine art of building-continues to be practiced with skill and imagination and can be found everywhere as a visible link in the present to the ingenuity of artisans and artists of the past.

A Language of Design

Architecture is an accessible, ubiquitous and rich expression of the components of design. Pattern, proportion, texture, color and form are balanced, contrasted, emphasized or harmonized in every architectural example. A selection of diverse buildings may illustrate clearly how different approaches to design are used to achieve different effects-and a deliberate visual chronicle of these changing effects can portray major shifts in design and aesthetic trends throughout the history of art.

A Practical Art
A building is a useful study in the relationship between creativity and invention. Although it is a fine art, architecture is also concerned with exclusively practical considerations: the demands of a climate, the logistics of a site, the availability of materials, money and technology. It is also constrained by other factors, such as economics, the functional requirements of a building's use, and the social and physical well-being of its occupants. Finally, in a very graphic way, buildings document the realities of the design and construction trades as they are practiced-legal considerations such as zoning laws and building codes, financing arrangements, contracting, and sales. 

MAKING ASSOCIATIONS

Analogies
Everyone responds to the look of a particular building or the appearance of a room. They can always find words to describe this effect-cold, intriguing, forbidding, friendly, brash, and impervious. These associations between the way architecture looks and how it makes us feel suggest a vocabulary for characterizing other things as well: attitudes about ourselves, others, and human interrelationships, the personalities of characters in a book or the mood an author conveys, the point of view of a people and their times, the qualities of a particular painting.
Inspiration
Architecture is a common part of human experience. Buildings not only evoke feelings or moods, but also memories of people, events from our past, other places. This evocative quality in buildings can inspire personal expression in the arts-the starting point for creating a painting or sculpture, photography or writing, a design project or a musical piece.
Suggesting Cultural Values

Conscious Messages
The architectural exteriors of civic institutions, such as banks, prisons, libraries or private clubs, are deliberately "coded." They contain a great deal of information about the institutions' position in a society as well as the activities that takes place inside. The kind of architectural detail, nature of the materials and their workmanship, and placement of doors and windows in these buildings communicate various messages to the public: reliability, exclusiveness, authority, prosperity, welcome. A public building which gives an ambiguous message may deserve a closer look.

Collective Symbols
Societies often indicate which aspects of their culture are most significant to them-religion, commerce, a certain form of government-by ascribing great importance to the buildings that house them: cathedrals, temples or churches, skyscrapers, palaces or town halls. Through their sitting, size and appearance these buildings will physically dominate a community. The absence of this kind of architectural symbol can be suggestive of the nature of a particular society or community as well.

Vested Symbols
Certain kinds of buildings-castles, palaces, a seat of government-are abstracted from their physical reality and become metaphors for the beliefs, values and aspirations of a society. A notable example of this form of architectural symbolism is the American home, which authors, politicians, social reformers and writers in the popular press have used to convey many meanings: an emblem of democracy, proof of private initiative or thrift, a sign of security and strength of the family, manifestation of opportunity and striving, or, particularly in the case of the extravagant mansions of the late 1800's, testimony to vulgar display in the face of poverty.

DISPLAYING SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS

Physical Needs/Social Needs and Attitudes
Shelter is a universal necessity of humankind. Its physical form reveals a great deal about the realities of life in a particular society: the nature of the climate, available technology, the mobility of the population, the level of security it requires. The African hut, Indian pueblo, and American suburban house are all responses to the universal need for shelter in the context of their places and times.
   Further information about a particular society's attitudes toward privacy, cooperation, socialization and hierarchy can be obtained from the way the interiors of these shelters are arranged. For example, very different social priorities are discernible in the medieval "hall" of the Puritan house, the formal Victorian parlor and the modern family room-or the communal s spaces of Native American long houses and cliff dwellings.

Social Interactions
Building interiors can be "read" as evidence for different kinds of social interactions. The inside of a house, for example, reveals relations between generations in the size, type and location of its rooms; subtle "barriers" to the entries into private, family areas suggest varying levels of interaction between the occupants and their visitors.
   In public architecture-schools, hospitals, town halls, business--the physical placement of the offices are clues to how people in different positions within an organization interrelate; the various ceremonial, public, private and service areas may indicate the differing roles to be played by insiders and outsiders.

Participation
There is some link, depending on the time and place, between the extent to which a group adopts the currently popular architectural style and the level to which it actively participates in a society. For example, people in the past who were physically isolated-farmers in remote villages or new settlers of a region-embraced a new architectural fashion long after its heyday. Typically, they reworked a style according to their own concerns, with the tools and materials at hand. Thus an architectural style on the frontier looked "different" from its counterpart in the city.
   Groups that are isolated socially, through cultural, racial, language or religious barriers, tend to participate less in the architectural mainstream. But any adoption of style, however minimal, can be read as a sign of aspiration: the brackets along the roofline of a Victorian-era worker's cottage, or the store-bought American furniture in a turn of the century tenement, are the visible evidence of a desire to join and belong-the beginning of assimilation.

Status
People often display their economic and social position in architecture. Through the visible language of building design they follow, as far as they are able, the conventions in their society that indicate status. Expressing status may involve the size and location of a building, the materials used to build and decorate it, the relative age of a structure, or its ornamentation.

REFLECTING HISTORY

Chronology
Architecture provides a visual parallel to historical chronology. At each juncture it encapsulates an individual's response to the social, political, economic and cultural conditions of his times. Buildings tell the story in an immediate, visual way of the history of people and their aspirations: European, world, ancient, medieval, local, or American. They depict, for U.S. history, the settlement of an unknown continent; the Rationalist thought that underlay the American Revolution; the spirit of the New Republic and its frontier; the light-and shadows-of the Industrial Revolution; the concerns of a postindustrial world power.

Interpretation
Because it is another form of historical evidence, architecture can be investigated for information about the past. Buildings represent the complexity and texture of history, and they raise useful questions about conventional or one-sided characterizations of historical time periods. There is a paradox, for example, in the shiny, "modern" architecture of the Depression, the exuberant, eccentric buildings of "dour" Victorians, or the imperial Roman monuments of the reform-minded Progressive Era.

Context
Buildings exist physically as well as in time. They are a way to visualize the surroundings of the people of the past. They can, for example, present the context for the personal lives of prominent historical figures. And the legacy of buildings erected by local people-settlers, farmers, captains of industry, factory workers, foreign immigrants-is an ongoing manifestation of that community's participation in the broader trends of national history.