What Would You Change?
I think it’s a sad kind of funny that architecture students are some of the most stressed, anxious, and busy of any college degree, and yet we are asked to design spaces that improve lives and build upon a vast design history. I don’t know about any of you but I constantly wonder if I’ve seen/experienced enough of the world to be able to effectively contribute to the built environment. Studio is such a high pressure box removed from everyday realities but we are asked to try and solve real problems that we often haven’t experienced first hand. Habraken calls out studio education as having several major blind spots, but I would add that the time we spend in the studio is also an issue. Reading about and studying buildings is no replacement for experiencing architecture and yet most of us spend more time in Lee hall than anywhere else.
I also loved that the reading points out that “The jury invited to a design studio does not ask what the student learned, but only looks at what is produced at the end.” In early studios, all our pretty process sketches of design development end up on our final boards, but a year in final boards are more about where you ended up rather than how you got there. I see the logic in this, but nearing graduation I have noticed I feel like I need to have perfect ideas the first time as if there isn’t time for creativity anymore. Solving the puzzle and trying a million different ideas produced the most interesting results but at some point, the early problem solving went from the most important part of the process to the most invisible. I wonder how different our studio projects would look right now if we were specifically asked to show everything we tried and not just where we ended up?
Are there any specific things about studio you think could be better? Do you like the studio process more now or do you miss the conceptual studio style?
Catrina, I really like your questions about how Habraken's theory relates to our own experience. With how our profession is, we as architecture students are taught very early on to be a generalist out of necessity. While this is an important trait to have, I have often found that it results in very minimal time for picking up so many skills at once. For that reason, I think there is some value in a quick turnaround for conceptual/schematic phases while in school. When working with the time constraint of a semester, it is near impossible to give equal time to conceptual design vs technical development. While I also find this disappointing sometimes, I do think the time spent on different stages of design - the process specifically - in the profession is all the more rewarding because of how it is taught in school. Granted there are so many things that can be improved upon in architectural education, but that is something I cannot begin to solve.
ReplyDeleteThis is really insightful and you are able to describe perfectly how I - and probably most of us in studio - feel. It would be pretty interesting to see if we all had to pin-up our process because the quick turnaround that we have to do leaves us little room for trial and error. But, I also think that these quick turnarounds are, unfortunately, preparing us for the real world. People are more interested on the result rather than how we got to what we got. Most clients don't care on the process but want to see the results and modern technology today has impacted our field greatly. I mean, you can buy a small home on Amazon now because being mass produced, its fast, relatively affordable, and it's a click away.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on studio process, this is something my studio partner and I have talked about this semester. Things are moving so fast so that we can fit everything in this semester that it leaves little time to think and design. It often only feels like production for the next review instead of a design process where we curate the things that tell our project's story. I know there are benefits to moving this fast through design as we don't have time to dwell and can think through multiple solutions quickly which is how the real world works for design but it would be nice to have time to come back to earlier ideas and think about them before moving on.
ReplyDeleteCatrina, I totally agree with your logic and I have experienced this in both architecture school and interior design school. The most extreme version of this that I have experienced was last semester in Barcelona where we had reviews bi-weekly. I also felt that there was no time for creativity when students are forced to constantly produce graphics for presentations.
ReplyDeleteThis is such an eye-opening post. I often say that it feels like we are just trying to meet deadlines in this major and it doesn't allow us time to actually enjoy the designing part. We are always being given corrections so we're trying to fix those while also moving forward in our designs. It takes away from us being able to explore new ideas and it feels like we have to go with the first idea we think of most of the time since we are expected to have almost finished buildings within a week or two of designing.
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