By Living We Learn, by Creating We Think. The Living Legacy of the Edinburgh Summer Schools
Edinburgh Summer Meetings, 1893, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow – © DR
This seminar focuses on the legacy of Patrick Geddes and his Edinburgh Summer Schools.
The goal is to examine how his holistic and interdisciplinary approach—based on direct observation of territories, firsthand experience of places, and the integration of disciplines such as biology, geography, sociology, and architecture—can inspire today’s architecture, urban planning, and landscape architecture programs.
The meeting will also examine various similar educational initiatives in Europe and the United States to assess their potential for learning, knowledge transfer, and local action.
Finally, it will seek to highlight the intellectual connections within Geddes’s thought—particularly his links to ecology, sociology, and urban history—in order to reflect on the current role of planners in the face of environmental crises and the need to preserve the livability of territories.
A welcome address by Anne D’Orazio, director of ENSA Paris-la Villette, will be followed by an inaugural lecture delivered by Murdo Macdonald, an art historian at the University of Dundee, Scotland: “The Vision of Patrick Geddes: Summer Meetings, Publishing, and Colleges.”
The following day, the following speakers, among others, will take the floor:
Thursday, September 24, at 10:30 a.m.
Pierre Chabard, architectural historian and faculty member at ENSA Paris-la Villette: Scenography of the Edinburgh Summer Meetings
Inspired by the British university extension movement, the summer meetings that Patrick Geddes organized in Edinburgh—initially on an informal and confidential basis beginning in 1887, and then withgrowing in scale and organization until 1899, were above all a mechanism for fostering dialogue among the major fields of scientific knowledge and for disseminating that knowledge to wider circles. They should also be viewed as one of the many drivers of thehighly distinctive reform movement that the biologist spearheaded over that long decade in Old Edinburgh—a movement we might briefly describe as a fundamentally educational endeavor aimed at shaping the civic spirit of a city to positively influence the course of its development. “Vivendo discimus [we learn by living],” Geddes would often say.
His pragmatic, non-textbook approach to education placed crucial importance on its spatialization, with architectural, urban, and geographic space constituting at once the framework, the vehicle, and the very object of knowledge transmission. It is from this perspective that we will examine the Edinburgh Summer Meetings, positing the hypothesis that the program of lectures, seminars, workshops, concerts, and excursions was the result of a refined and intentional spatial design, fostering collaborative interaction among participants with the neighborhood, the city, the region, and so on. It is this distinctly “scenographic” dimension that we intend to highlight.
Thursday, September 24, at 2:00 p.m.
Catherine Maumi, architectural historian and faculty member at ENSA Paris-la Villette: “The Clearing” and “Taliesin”: Earth School and the Organic Way of Life as Alternatives to University Education
Wisconsin stood out as early as the late 19th century for its educational policy promoting progressive reforms in teaching. While John Dewey’s “learning by doing” is now a major point of reference, the Experimental College proposed by Alexander Meiklejohn at the University of Wisconsin championed similar educational goals. Both Dewey and Meiklejohn were friends of Frank Lloyd Wright, who founded the Taliesin Fellowship in 1932 as a place to learn organic architecture.
A frequent visitor to the site, where he regularly gave talks at the architect’s invitation, landscape architect Jens Jensen—founder of the Friends of Our Native Landscape association—helped pass on to the apprentices his knowledge of native flora and the ecological systems specific to the Midwest. Wright and Jensen had known each other since the turn of the century, when they were both working in Chicago to develop an architectural and landscape design approach specific to the Great Plains of the Midwest. In 1935, Jensen founded his own “school of the soil,” The Clearing, in Ellison Bay, Wisconsin, drawing inspiration from the Taliesin experience.
The educational approach at both Taliesin and The Clearing moves beyond traditional academic frameworks to offer a variety of artistic and human experiences in close contact with nature.
Thursday, September 24, at 4:00 p.m.
Alessia De Biase, anthropologist and faculty member at ENSA Paris-la Villette, panelist: Mouvement moderne
The seminar is organized by LHAC (ENSA Nancy) and AAU_Cresson (ENSA Grenoble) with the support of the University of Grenoble Alpes and in collaboration with ENSA Paris-la Villette, HDiffusion Publishing, the Cerisy International Cultural Center, and the Patrick Geddes France Association.
This event is open to the public without prior registration.
All presentations will be recorded and published later as podcasts.
