Teaching Form Through Practice (Werklicher formunterricht)

Frank almost never started a design with a predetermined shape. He liked to begin by “playing”—a word he used far more often than “working” when he talked about how he went about designing things—with wooden blocks of different sizes, each representing a portion of a building’s functional program. He would then stack or array the blocks in what he

Albers used a hands-on method to teach key ideas. He believed, Duberman writes, that the nature of an object is made up of three aspects: its inner qualities, its external appearance, and how it relates to other objects.

If you follow these instructions, you will succeed. If you keep your open-ended self in a box, you will rise up the ranks. What is heartbreaking is that increasingly, the process of education, which has the capacity to bring about the formation of the self—each person’s own point B—has itself veered toward templated achievement over open-ended proc