Hansjörg Göritz  Studio

July 2015

Auburn University -

Teaching the Summer School

Auburn University is a highly ranked place for architecture education. Its foothold into rigorous professionalism is a special summer experience. For four weeks thirty novices in architecture worked intensely with Hansjörg Göritz and Matt Hall to learn essentials in architecture, craft, and studio culture. Intensity with rigor, rooted in design practice, made this design boot camp an effective teaching tool, far distant from today's typical whimsical jargon in architecture education. Nevertheless, this tedious as much as joyous experience with this international group of students turned out to be the most compelling and successful in two decades of teaching. Past such accomplishments of novices designing and modeling extensions to the Auburn fraternity hall of Paul Rudolph, no excuses will be taken from this cohort for falling back into a generic jargon of either the meaningless or today's embarrassingly academic elaborations of the obvious.