Dr Bill Thompson helped to found the Undergraduate Architecture course at the University of Ulster and played a large part in it's evolution and progression into a masters course. His Cultural Context classes quickly became notorious for their ability to beguile while simultaneously pickling heads across the school. He also played a large part in encouraging us to establish this newsletter, and many of the things discussed within it's pages derive from the agenda laid down by the Cultural Context module. Bill retired last year and kindly wrote the following piece as a eulogy to his decade spent at the UU.
I have been invited to write a short comment on this architectural course of ours at the time of my leaving it because my age precludes my continuation in the educational system. Old farts have to make way for fresh young things with, hopefully, more years in them than I probably have in me.
Setting aside all the banal and trite though true comments concerning the pleasure of working with colleagues it has been my privilege, as it turns out, to have learnt from those I am supposed to have taught.
I have learnt that the social conditions people find themselves in as a result of the process of bringing objects into being, commencing with simple media and moving on to complex media skills as we find around us today now, remind us that we always have the ability to turn our back on the systems we make using specific objects although we are then forced to make different ones. On this basis, there is some reason to suggest that, hypothetically, all individuals could revert to anarchism and exist autonomously acting only as a result of their own cognitive and organisational abilities were it not for the fact that what has already been constructed cannot be easily ignored but must be de-constructed in the space of appearance which in the case of certain media such as building is next to impossible.
The centripetal force is the social and cultural, in other words the increasing forms of order required in the creation of any system contributes to the difficulty of escaping from that system that once created involves so much resilience in overcoming our familiarity with it if we are to make the objects that are required for that purpose out of the phenomena that we actually experience.
I have been invited to write a short comment on this architectural course of ours at the time of my leaving it because my age precludes my continuation in the educational system. Old farts have to make way for fresh young things with, hopefully, more years in them than I probably have in me.
Setting aside all the banal and trite though true comments concerning the pleasure of working with colleagues it has been my privilege, as it turns out, to have learnt from those I am supposed to have taught.
I have learnt that the social conditions people find themselves in as a result of the process of bringing objects into being, commencing with simple media and moving on to complex media skills as we find around us today now, remind us that we always have the ability to turn our back on the systems we make using specific objects although we are then forced to make different ones. On this basis, there is some reason to suggest that, hypothetically, all individuals could revert to anarchism and exist autonomously acting only as a result of their own cognitive and organisational abilities were it not for the fact that what has already been constructed cannot be easily ignored but must be de-constructed in the space of appearance which in the case of certain media such as building is next to impossible.
The centripetal force is the social and cultural, in other words the increasing forms of order required in the creation of any system contributes to the difficulty of escaping from that system that once created involves so much resilience in overcoming our familiarity with it if we are to make the objects that are required for that purpose out of the phenomena that we actually experience.
Dr William Thompson - former UU lecturer in architectural theory
No comments:
Post a Comment