Academia

At the very inception of smallprojects, a position to run a studio was made available at the University Malaya. It was of particular signifiance to me on account of my previous firm having overlooked the monthly deductions from my salary for the progressive payment of income taxes – the outstanding was an equally significant quantity which needed to be paid.

Teaching began as the means for temporary survival as I had not saved a cent of the somewhat lean re-numeration at the company during my time there, and as I felt my prior experiences as a teaching assistant and solo teaching a class at MIT, would best serve the curriculum locally. Within a short three months, it hit me that everything I had been told about teaching being good research for one’s work, was wrong – it was completely the other way around. I was, in fact, teaching as the expression of all the research I was doing in my architectural work. Over the first two years of teaching, and when I was financially able to stand on my own, I requested that my monthly wages be put directly into a student fund for the fourth years to do some research travel prior to their final year in architecture school – a preparatory sojourn of sorts.

The stint at this university started out as a case of fiscal necessity, but it began the next twenty years of intellectual and philosophical must, as the very foundations of teaching concerns the questions and doubt regarding the process of learning – I discovered I was a student for, and of, Ife. The enthusiasm and youth of students feeds my own – each and every one of us have had the same experiences in school, and being able to narrate and communicate these to students, decades younger than the age when i first understood them, is a profound and powerful event.

We live in a world where personalities in our profession often speak of teaching as research for their work.

What a pitiful representation and influence of oneself, to be so unbashedly mercenary as to subvert the highest form of servitude in teaching to serve our own calculated self-interests.

It is often said that those who can, do, and those who cannot, teach. I have learned it actually works quite the other way around, that only those who are unable to teach descend to private practice, while those who can, teach.

This section on academia concerns the various techniques I utilise in helping students challenge their own ceilings, and hopefully, break them. It is taken down into sections: studio is the place where it all begins, and plays out. It is in relation to the peculiar kinds of studios i have taught and continue to run, in having students understand the distinctions between design and styling, objects and relationships, and the eternal battle between the individual and society. Thesis work is exactly that, selected student thesis projects I have guided which demonstrate the outcomes of a process in critique rather than purely form-finding. Workshop and lectures are simply a record of those conducted or delivered in schools and academic institutions over the years.