Pedagogy into practice : Alvin Boyarsky's collections and the estrangement of architecture

• Main Author: Marjanovic, I.
• Published: University College London (University of London) 2014
• Subjects: 720
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.631996

The second half of the twentieth century was a time of change marked by increased global mobility and the exchange of ideas, a context framed by the diversification of approaches that occurred at the confluence of modernism and postmodernism. Responding to this context of dispersal and fragmentation, the Canadian-born educator Alvin Boyarsky (1928-1990) acted as a collector of ideas, drawings and people, and, consequently, a promoter of novel forms of architectural pedagogy that affected architectural culture worldwide. His Transatlantic web of educational, curatorial and publishing venues absorbed new disciplinary discourses and propelled careers of protagonists like Zaha Hadid, Bernard Tschumi, and Rem Koolhaas, who in turn influenced architectural ideas and built work around the world. As Boyarsky’s pedagogical experiments poured into practice, they engendered a form of architecture that distanced itself from any national or professional confines, thriving instead on international displacement of people, ideas and images. Boyarsky embraced this peripatetic context – the growing national and professional mobility of architectural ideas, artifacts and educators – allowing his collections of postcards, books, and drawings to act as itinerant sites of architectural production worldwide. His pedagogical models echoed these collections, embracing estrangement, opposition and resistance not only as pragmatic opportunities conducive to global economic change, but also as engines of disciplinary transformation that erased boundaries between academia and practice, the local and the global, and production and consumption. In blurring such boundaries these pedagogical models imploded traditional institutional, national and disciplinary structures and heralded a truly international era of architectural education and practice. Rather than mere globalisation of architecture, they signalled a more nuanced estrangement of architecture – a time when strangers and foreignness resurfaced as globally significant categories whose diverse narratives were only reconciled within the loose framework of a collection and the constantly shifting desires of its collector.