It’s fitting that long-time MIT architecture professor Maurice Smith, who died this December at 94, had been, in his youth, a New Zealand ping-pong master because everything he taught in studios for over 40 years was nuanced with spin, subtlety and intellectual swerve. Out of his own asymmetrical spirit, in his own oblique language, from his richly layered thought system, Maurice—as everyone called him—taught students to think different. Why design a conventional three bedroom apartment when, after all, a group of Highland bagpipers might want an apartment with a figure-8 circulation?
Maurice placed a ping-pong table in his studio, which acted like a town square next to the three-dimensional wood labyrinths that his students, wielding drills, wrenches and hammers, bolted together on multiple levels. The professor-raconteur-theoretician-architect would wheel a shopping cart of books up to the table where students could borrow what they wanted. The cart and table were a metaphor for his studio, for choosing from a pedagogy that was a banquet of complex ideas. Maurice taught by indirection in an open-ended Socratic method that led students to think critically and arrive at their own conclusions.
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