A different kind of architectural education
In Habraken’s text, “Questions That Will Not Go Away”, he
talks about education and how the traditional studio environment must change.
Architectural education has been the same for years and it doesn’t seem to be
changing anytime soon. He says that “…in studio it is impossible to exercise
distribution of design responsibility, or deal with the sharing of values and
qualities among designers, or to handle issues of change. Studio can no longer
be the only format for teaching design. Other ways must be invented.” (p. 7) I
whole-heartedly agree with this stance. Something must change.
Rem Koolhaas gave a speech at Cornell University in 2011
where he spoke about the issues with architectural education. His solution was
to require graduate education to occur every 10 years after undergraduate with
the idea that after those 10 years of practice in the field, you return to
academia and acquire a new body of knowledge. This is an interesting notion- it
doesn’t make much sense to only attend school once when a student is in his/her
20’s and that bank of knowledge is expected to last their entire careers. There
should be a system in place where architects don’t get too comfortable at work
and are challenged in different ways every now and then.
Although this idea makes perfect sense to me in theory, I’m
not sure how it would be carried out logistically, especially in the United
States. However, something that could and should be implemented in graduate
schools is a required design-build studio. I participated in this studio for
the past two semesters and although it was extremely challenging to design and
build a structure with 12+ people, I learned more than I have in my entire
graduate education. Even though it was a relatively small project, our
understanding of materials, working with a client, balancing a budget, and
learning to work on a team is something that I think should be required of all
students.
I totally agree with your idea about the lifelong learning which I think is especially important for architects. But another thing I am thinking is that learning from daily life, traveling and friends could be a possible way to deal with this problem.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of continued education is an intriguing one.
ReplyDeleteThe current system for continued education of architects in the US differs between states, but as far as I know, most involve completing a set of courses or earning credits in order to renew your license. In my experience, these mostly focus on technical issues or new products/materials, and less on issues of history, theory, and ethics that are focused on as students.
I agree. Implementing more design/build projects or ones that have some degree of a 'real world element' would be extremely helpful. Participating in design/build studios in undergraduate and at Clemson gave me some of the most valuable experiences in my entire collegiate career.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more. Regarding design-build studio, I keep coming across things this semester that we learned by doing (during the design-build studios) instead of hearing during a lecture.
ReplyDeleteContinuing education design-build projects could be an interesting change of pace for professionals - but unfortunately it would be expensive and time consuming.
I definitely agree with both you and Habraken. I personally find it a bit disturbing that although everything about the built world has changed over the past century, we still learn in the same Beaux-Arts studio atelier format that architecture students 100 years ago did. Clearly, something needs to change. I think much of architectural education is, to borrow the words of a friend, "spinning our wheels" which I define as doing something just for the sake of doing it, rather than actually learning from it (i.e. building a representational model when a graphic would show the same information in a better way). I think that your idea of adding a design-build component during graduate school is a great idea. Adding another layer of technical, hands-on knowledge as a graduate component is a solution to the stagnation of learning I have experienced in graduate school. I often tell people that I haven't learned much in graduate school, I've just developed studio projects past where I did in undergraduate (where I was capable of doing the same). I think adding this layer of actually constructing things would allow students to gain another layer of knowledge, rather than just designing 4 more studio projects for their portfolio.
ReplyDeleteWe definitely need to continue learning throughout our entire architecture careers. It essential to be challenged and face issues that are out of the norm. I think we can all get complacent in what we are doing and this idea of constantly learning is one way to make sure architecture continues moving forward. How this can be implemented is the challenge we need to figure out first.
ReplyDelete