Nomad
发贴: 1982
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2001-04-26 08:39
daqla兄: 去年十二月南昌特级师哥woopoo兄找我聊聊美国学校。woopoo兄与众不同,一开口竟然问及30所高校。其实我的见识交游很有限,没法向他一一介绍30所学校的情况。下面是那次回复woopoo的一些东东,不过逢场作兴,管见而已,还请个路大虾补充指正。 Nomad ============================================================== 美国建筑院校 (woopoo征美野心版) carnegie mellon is in pittsburgh, not a big city and it is known for computational design, a way of design thinking that is very mechanical...computers design army barracks etc. clemson univsity is near atlanta city. it is a small place and they have just advertised for some teachers. a friend of mine teaches there and is chair of the search committee. [I have a more recent post about this univ. on ABBS.] columbia univ is in new york and is one of the most famous. tschumi is the dean. very trendy place. high rent if you want to live in Manhattan but mostly i think you can live in nearby New Jersey. frampton was said to be thinking about leaving columbia when mark wigley was appointed, but i have not heard if he had decided to go. georgia tech has a couple of OK teachers like sabir khan and mark cottle, but no one very famous. IIT is to the west of the central business district of chicago. i don't think it is highly regarded anymore now that mies is dead. dunno who is teaching there...(ben nicholson was there? can't remember...) iowa state univ is in Ames, Iowa. it has a few interesting theorists Bob Segrest, Jennifer Bloomer, Catherine Ingraham, Mark Rakatansky. these are people with reputation. I have not heard of the iowa state univ of science and technology. MIT is very good. the shops around mit are very boring. one finds it hard to get a decent dinner there. My former student Ken is just finishing 1st year of MArch there. Surprisingly, Charles Correa (Bombay/Mumbai)) is professor there. Bill Mitchell is Dean and is a more mainstream thinker about computing compared with the guys at Carnegie Mellon. i'd never heard of north carolina state univ but i checked their web page just now. no one famous there. penn state univ. is in State College, PA. I have been there several times. It is in a very small town, 4 hours' drive outside philadelphia. The most important teacher there is Donald Kunze, a theorist who is admired in america, especially by the PhD people at UPenn. He has a nice web site too. His PhD is on the philosophy of Vico (a contemporary of Descartes) and the idea of place. Kunze does not have the stature and fame of UPenn teachers like Leatherbarrow and Rykwert, but in my mind I group him with famous people interested in hermeneutics such as Perez-Gomez (McGill), Frascari (Virginia Tech), Dalibor Vesely (Cambridge Univ), Peter Carl (Cambridge University). Don Kunze has a large dining room with a large fireplace. He plays the piano, has cats, teaches online courses, likes Hitchcock films. Dan Willis is also teaching at Penn State and he has published a book of essays recently with Princeton Architectural Press. He lives in a two-bedroom house, quite large. An (even younger and also quite cute) teacher there is Michael Jemtrud (who has only one arm and is a student of Perez-Gomez). Katsuhiko Muramoto is also a nice teacher there; elegant person. Katsu has a nice old car (expensive model, I think) in the middle of his house. Rensselaer's dean is Alan Balfour, who wrote a book on berlin. balfour was chairman of the AA in London but he didn't get along with people there and so he left after a brief stay. I checked their list of faculty for you. My impression is that this is a 1970s staff list with an emphasis on conventional architectural science. It's not a place that one goes to if one's main interest is in design or in history and theory. It is one of the few places in America that tries to promote itself for expertise in architectural lighting. Rice is a famous and rich private university in Houston, Texas. Houston is a city for cars. Hot weather. The Dean Lars Lerup has just published a new book (I think, with MIT Press). This school is not hugely in the limelight but has some good teachers. Zhang Yonghe became assistant professor there when Lerup was first appointed there. It has an interesting www architecture magazine, but you need a fast computer and Shockwave software. (My little SONY laptop crashed when I tried to look at the magazine!) Nana Last (new teacher who did her PhD at MIT) is one of the brightest young scholars in the field. Sanford Kwinter is a middle aged teacher (although he might not like me for saying so) and is well known for his work on theory. He is a buddy of Jim Corner at UPenn. SUNY Buffalo. This is a cold city about 2 hours' drive from Toronto. It has a serious comparative literature department including famous contemprary theorists such as Gasche (who wrote on deconstruction) and Elizabeth Grosz (one of the few feminists who is respected by architects). Lynda Schneekloth and her husband teaches architecture there, and they are very good quality. (Quite nice design culture in the school from what I could see.) Their dean is italian and was (or is?) friendly with Frascari. Syracuse Univ has Mark Linder (a recent PhD graduate from Princeton Univ who has some reputation for theoretical work about the 1960s) and Julia Czerniak (who has a rising reputation in landscape architecture, if I am not mistaken). There seems to be some connection with Cornell there because quite a few teachers have degrees from Cornell. Tulane Univ School of Architecture has nice new desks for the studios (but I have never been there). Geoffrey Baker, the English scholar who wrote some books on Corbusier, is professor there. (if one were a theorist, one wouldn't necessarily be interested in Baker's spatial analysis, but it may be useful to beginners in architectural design). Elizabeth English (PhD student from UPenn) is listed as a teacher...she's an unusual person with engineering interests as well as hisory and theory. (She'd be more famous if she talked less at dinners.) There are quite a few interesting associate professors (e.g. Elizabeth Yates, Burns Gamard, Scott Bernhard). I have the impression that this is a school for designers and people who take a cultural view of architecture. Unusual sense of consistency in cultivating a middling but interesting staff profile. UCLA, UPenn, Harvard, SCI-Arch...well, i have already written about these on ABBS. i have never heard of auburn univ....why do you want to go there? Univ of Florida (Gainesville) has some connections with the New York scene through some of its younger teachers. Nina Hofer is one of the brightest younger teachers of architecture in the US. Kim Tanzer has a good reputation also. Mario Gooden has worked for Steven Holl and Zaha Hadid. Some of the older teachers are not as interesting (to me). Univ of Kansas School of Architecture has one of the worst web sites among US schools of architecture. James Mayo, a professor there, is well known for his work on social aspects of architecture. Unversity of Kentucky has a very ordinary-looking staff list. It seems to be a kind of small school where PhD graduates from the famous universities might spend a short time before they get better jobs. So it is possible that there are a few good design teachers there. University of Maryland has two famous scholars for the study of modern Italian architecture, Richard Etlin (rather tall man) and Thomas Schmacher. Miriam Gusevich has a good reputation for history and theory. My impression is that this school has substantial staffing in architectural history. The approach to architectural history does not seem especially innovative but the work is solid and good quality.
Nomad edited on 2001-11-03 16:47
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