Learning from Las Vegas and Made in Tokyo: Pedagogy and Drawing of the Architectural Project.

The event is one of the most controversial concepts in contemporary philosophy. It not only reconfigures the present and delegates a future unthinkable without it, but it has the ability to resize and articulate the past that precedes it so that it can be explained: a war, a natural disaster, a pandemic, a sonata, a book… All of these events act as spontaneous mechanisms to understand reality.

The situation of carrying out architectural projects in environments of crisis, while wishing to maintain a high level ofprojectual and intellectual ambition, is a difficult task, hard to reconcile within a reality that is continually been molded outside the academic milieu. Thus, the practice, teaching, and research of architecture gradually move away from the eventualities of the building itself. However, there is a multi-vocational architect or sniper theorist who, committed to new strategies, combines practice in parallel with teaching, research, and publication, building a transgressive discourse capable of reconciling with external forces that govern and determine our discipline inside and outside academia. Therefore, the pedagogy of the architectural project is indebted not only to this figure but also to the books it produces -suspiciously conceived in contexts of crisis-. Let us understand that this type of professor trains and develops an “intellectual design methodology”, and that their books systematically establish a theory that is used in turn to teach.

Under this hypothesis, it seems useful to build a genealogy that tracks the presence of these publications in our current pedagogical framework, understanding that they can act as vehicles with sufficient capacity to make it visible and make us aware of it, since they are evidence of that combined knowledge between academia and reality that our profession demands. But which books have formalized a breakup with their immediate past to the point of becoming defining instruments of our contemporary pedagogical framework?

Learning from Las Vegas, 1972 (LLV) was the Trojan horse of its time. It divided the western academy in a turbulent context in the midst of the 1968 crisis. Although almost all the schools of architecture are indebted to the procedures of this studio made book, few know that it was born from Denise Scott Brown’s academic insurrection, transferring an “illegitimate” pedagogy to the architectural studios. However, the book questions and challenges the idea of research in architecture, by not posing the fundamental transfer between the previous analysis and its application in a design proposal. Nevertheless, thirty years later, Made in Tokyo, 2001 (MT) is published, being the son of the recession caused by one of the biggest speculative bubbles in modern economic history. While the book contributed to the discourse of its time, Atelier Bow-Wow also provided a useful and applicable method -inherited from Wajiro Kon; The Architectural Detectives Agency and The Street Observation Society, led by Terunobu Fujimori-, supported in an almost scientific language that has unleashed a global academic event, as substantiated in the exhibition Architectural Ethnography at the XVI Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018.

Revealing the behind the scenes of both editorial ideas, and attending conversations with their authors, Denise Scott Brown and Momoyo Kaijima, the reader will be guided towards a need for a drawn pedagogy in architecture capable of negotiating with the new conditions of the XXI century. This itinerary will be developed under the view of the educator, supporting its path in the three fundamental elements for the elaboration of all kinds of knowledge: the content, the methods and the languages.