无用之用——建筑教育札记

On the Usefulness of the Useless Architectural Education

建筑教育总是难以满足建筑师职业胜任的要求。其实这种实际工程的胜任能力只能在作工程的过程中才会学到。换言之,这即是职业培训。既然如此,那么还有必要在"象牙塔"中培养建筑师么?通过追溯东西方人文传统与大学教育的关联,这篇杂文旨在将职业培训与教育区别开来。由此我们可以回观建筑教育的开端与发展——17世纪末期的法国皇家学院与后来19与20世纪初的巴黎美院,以及早期建筑教育的真实含义与目的。借用庄子之哲理,本文的中心即是指明建筑教育之大用正好存在于其无用之中。这正是我们今天必须理解并且要倍加珍惜的建筑人文之本。其功效远远超出建筑防范风雨之用。

The university education of an architect always falls short to meet the professional competency standard as demanded by the profession.But the truth is that such trade competency can only be gained through apprenticeship, or, to use the modern jargon, vocational training.Why then do we bother to educate an architect in the ＂ivory tower＂ ？ This essay seeks to distinguish education from vocational training by tracing back to the humanistic roots of education in both West and East. From here I launch into a quest for the meaning and validity of architectural education by returning to its inception in the French Acad^mie Royale in the late seventeenth century, and the subsequent Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.The thrust of this essay is to suggest that the superior usefulness of architectural education, to paraphrase Zhuang Zi, lies in its useless, which must be held dear as the true humanist meaning of architecture that is beyond the necessity of protecting us from the elements.