And can modernism ever really be explained, though, in all its complexity, without an architectural education?

Centre Canadien d'Architecture / Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA)

Exhibition at Canadian Centre for Architecture, focuses on a single module that ran at the Open University from 1975 to 1982, called A305: History of Architecture and Design, 1890-1939.





For the exhibition's curators, the affectionately nicknamed OU is actually a daring multimedia experiment. It presages a way of "mobilising new media environments for educational purposes", which can respond to the crisis of access and quality in higher education, especially in architecture.

The exhibition “The University is Now on Air” at the CCA in Montreal tells the story of the Open University





Devised by the Labour government minister Jennie Lee in the 1960s, the Open University would offer courses to people that couldn't, or wouldn't, attend a conventional university, and who had no prior qualifications.





It would educate them not via conventional lectures in a campus of gothic or brutalist buildings, but through media – particularly, specially published course books and radio or television programmes, often broadcast in the graveyard shift of terrestrial TV.

Centre Canadien d'Architecture / Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA)





Materials from the course are laid out across several rooms in the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Pamphlets on the Arts and Crafts or the New Objectivity, a shelf of the set reading (a crash-course from William Morris to Reyner Banham), and most of all the TV. Subjects include Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Peter Behrens and the branding of AEG, Frank Lloyd Wright, Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower, the Bauhaus, and more local topics, like the London Underground or English housing and cinemas of the 1930s

one-by-one, for the duration of the exhibition).