The burned map: military theory and architectural education

Abstract

This chapter analyses how military thinking regarding strategy and tactics infiltrated architectural pedagogy by examining the educational practice of the Belgian architect-artist Koen Deprez (b. 1961, Kortrijk). In the post-Cold War climate of the 1990s, he developed a specific pedagogical tool: the burned map, inherited from his military training as an officer. This paper argues that the military academy was a formative environment for the further development of an architectural pedagogical practice. The burned map is studied as an intellectual cognitive tool for generating, translating and disseminating architectural knowledge both within and outside the interior design studio. By demonstrating how a military tool could become a teaching device for raising the spatial awareness of interior design students, two sites of knowledge production, the army and the architecture school, are brought into close relation. More specifically, the interpretative leaps required for transposing military strategies and tactics into architectural knowledge are pivotal. As such, architectural knowledge is not interpreted as an autogenous, but rather as an evolving, body produced through encounters with seemingly disassociated sites of production.