Politics of Learning, Politics of Space

Architecture and the Education Shock of the 1960s and 1970s

Tom Holert
De Gruyter, 2021
In English
128 pages, 38 illustrations
ISBN: 978-3-11-071094-6
14€

Available at bookstores, mail order buying / postal shopping via the Webshop

Also available: The German publication Bildungsschock. Lernen, Politik und Architektur in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren

The Covid-19 pandemic amply demonstrates the importance of the spatial dimension of learning. In the course of 2020, the functionality and dysfunctionality of built environments, technological infrastructures and geospatial realities of learning came to the fore. Many of the current debates concerning learning and teaching environments, physical and virtual, echo those of the 1960s and 1970s, the “Education Shock” era. Openness and flexibility, integration and desegregation, accessibility and participation have been among the values pursued and contested in the thinking, planning and experiencing of educational spaces.

This book complements Bildungsschock. Lernen, Politik und Architektur in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren, a resource volume of the eponymous research and exhibition project at HKW. It contains a substantially expanded version of the introductory essay of the Bildungsschock publication by curator Tom Holert, supplemented by three shorter, previously published and revised essays.

Table of contents:

  • Preface
  • Open Plan and Limited Access:
    The Embattled Classrooms of the 1960s and 1970s
  • School’s In/Out:
    OSZ Wedding, Berlin, or Learning from a Resilient Learning Environment
  • Educationalize and Fail:
    The 1967 Rice Design Fete and the Blind Spots of Transgressive Planning
  • Spaces of the Learning Self:
    Interiority and Instructional Design, ca. 1969