Unbalanced Design

Architecture professor Kenneth Conant once said that every step Harvard took in education moved the University a hundred years ahead of anyone else. Perhaps this was the case two years ago when the Corporation gave Walter Gropius $25,000 for an experimental course in the theory of design, but Dean Hudnut's recent decision to drop Design 1 is hardly progressive.

Not only reactionary, it is an especially poor decision in the light of the experiment's success. When the School of Design's Student Council polled a group of students who had taken or were taking Design 1 it found that the response in favor of retaining the course was overwhelming. These men are in a professional school and have only three years to study architecture. Their crowded schedule leaves no room for extraneous instruction. Therefore, a difficult and time-consuming course which creates such an enthusiastic attitude in its students, can scarcely be called a failure.

Design 1 is invaluable because it supplies the architect with his basic tools. Without a knowledge of the fundamentals of space, form, and color the architect's education is incomplete. Without the ability to draw, to work with his tools, to solve artistic problems which go beyond the range of his specific task the architect can never rise above artistic mediocrity. Design 1 develops the student's own initiative, and he learns by doing. Besides this, the course acts as a necessary bridge between the student's general education and his professional work.

Dean Hudnut gave two reasons for dropping Design 1. It costs too much and it takes too much of the student's classroom time. To answer the second objection: This is an experimental course and as such is still flexible. Twenty hours a week on one course may be too heavy a load for a man who must spend forty-two hours in classrooms each week. But you do not have to tear down a house to repair the roof. The administration has not made provision for a course in design theory to take the place of this one. Design 1 should remain, even if the amount of required work it demands is decreased.

In a modified form, the course would require a smaller outlay of money. And since students find this course invaluable, the school should balance its budget in some other way.

Clearly, the University is making a mistake. It has invested a large sum of money, has seen that investment almost realized, but now has decided to forget about the whole thing.