Statement 59

(MJ) My history professor at the ETH was Paul Hofer. In 1972, he proposed a future school of architecture, an “école tentaculaire,” that envisaged flanking the main tract of the architecture program – the “professional training course” – with both a “critical wing,” for which he wanted to enlist the services of external specialists in economic policy, social sciences, psychology, and philosophy, and a “scientific wing,” within which the more advanced students were to be entrusted with research projects of their own. Hofer “incorporating the humanities taught in the Architecture Faculty not merely as a minor, but as part of the main tract, as a course fully integrated into the central training process.” To his mind, the histories associated with art, architecture, and urbanism were not part of the “scientific wing” but an essential com¬ponent of the basic training course. Hofer wanted history to be taught not merely as “what happened in the past,” but as “another, mightier presence” that impacted on each new object and design project. Central to his work was constant dialogue with the design professors with the aim of integrating historical architecture “as the living present in the teach¬ing of design.” Such an expansive curriculum – even to image it – would be unthinkable today. 

(For discussion see: Sylvia Claus, “Phantom Theory: the gta Institute in Postmodernist Architectural Discourse,” GTA Papers 3: Founding Myths (Zurich: gta publishers; 2020), 127-8.