From the issue dated June 29, 2001
The 'Insane Little Bubble of Nonreality' That Is Life for Architecture Students
Hours are endless, and some experts think they aren't even learning what they need to know
By PETER MONAGHAN
New York
They work much of almost every night, while fewer and fewer cars and buses whiz by outside on Broadway, and then they stand on the deserted avenue at 3 or 4 a.m., waiting for a cab to get them home.
They have more to learn each semester than they can recall learning during all their undergraduate years.
Their friends and loved ones keep asking them, Don't you want to just chuck the whole thing?
Such is the life of a modern-day architecture student here at Avery Hall at Columbia University, and everywhere else that architecture programs are offered.
"Late at night, the world outside is dark, and everyone is asleep, and you walk into Avery and it's all light, and everyone is all over the place, and it's just this insane little bubble of nonreality," says Aaron Hockett, who has just finished his first year in Columbia's master's-degree program.
He looks around the table at three fellow students and friends. No one disagrees.
"You get so involved in this snowball of work," pipes in Jason Stoikoff. "There's just this energy. It's the noise. It's the work. God, I hate it, but I love it."
It would be hard to measure, but architecture students, educators, and professionals are convinced that the difficulty and requirements of a professional degree in their field rank with those in medicine and law. Eighty-hour workweeks are common, as are all-nighters.
At graduate architecture programs, at least half of the students commonly arrive with professional undergraduate degrees in architecture or majors in pre-architecture. Many have several years of experience in architecture firms before returning for further academic preparation.
Adding to the pressure: The profession is insisting that the schools are inadequately preparing students for practice. Last year, a report by 15 senior members of the American Institute of Architects reflected: "There often appears to be a disconnect between formal education and the diverse practice settings students experience upon graduation."
They recommended easing the "unnecessarily painful, alienating, and unrewarding" transitional period between graduation and the nine-part national licensure examination they take a few years later.
Architecture educators, often accused of residing in a theory-mortared retreat, spotted coded words – fighting words, even – in the panel's recommendation that the institute "advocate making graduates of accredited programs eligible to take and prepared to pass the Architecture Registration Examination upon graduation."
Decoded: The schools should teach the day-to-day skills of the trade.
Yet despite change and new pressures in the practice of architecture, says Thomas R. Fisher, dean of architecture and landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, architecture education is being pushed by universities to be more academic and theoretical. "The schools are really increasingly torn between two masters," he says.
The schools may, at times, be hermetic, Mr. Fisher allows, but "a typical building involves 10,000 decisions. You're dealing with everything from psychology to physics. The curriculum in schools has focused on what the firms can't do. So we teach the basics of design. We teach history, theory, the more academic subjects."
Bernard Tschumi, dean since 1988 of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia, says more emphatically, "You want to teach people how to think rather than just to learn the code. We do not try to simulate a professional architectural office downtown."
Columbia's students seem to buy that. To murmurs of approval from three classmates, Mr. Hockett says: "Our professors are always telling us that we're here to prepare for the last 30 years of our careers, not the first five years."
Just what that entails is apparent when, one afternoon each term, professors take turns pitching their second- and third-year design studios. Students then vie, through a lottery system, for placement in the studios of their preferred instructors, or "critics."
The critics' presentations mix high theory with plain practicality. The professors – big names or rising stars of architecture, some visiting from China, Israel, or Italy – announce that their studios will:
Design an international airport that takes into account the increasing mobility of populations.
Consider the urban-design implications of largely agricultural China's embrace of capitalism, globalization, and modernization.
Imagine a skyscraper for Times Square where "building becomes sign and sign becomes architecture."
Construct a manifesto for architecture today and exemplify it with a design. (If you cannot operate tactically with your own vision, "you'll be a boring architect who will get plenty of work – for someone else," deadpans critic Mark Wigley, a New Zealander and one of the field's leading theorists.)
Do ... well, something relating to dependence and dominance, twinning, monster cities, Spinoza, Deleuze, Lewis Carroll, Carlos Castaneda, skill shifts, complex cinematic dreamscapes, artificial intelligence, cybernetics. ...
If the amount of work in each studio sounds daunting, each critic is able, thanks to a large endowment to the studio program, to sweeten the pitch by offering a relatively low-cost, whirlwind field trip during the semester – to Beijing, London, or other locales. "In the second and third week, we'll go to Barcelona," one critic breezily intones.
Engaging students' interests – whether in art, film, or the mundane intricacies of modern life – is a healthy thing, explains Mr. Tschumi later. "You cannot be an architect without a certain understanding of human activities – of economics, of geography, or politics," he says.
Some studios are "paperless." Mr. Tschumi's colleagues credit him with making Columbia a highly ranked architecture school, first by recruiting more Deconstructivists, and then by throwing the school's lot in with computer-based design, in the early 1990's.
Columbia quickly became a place where practitioner-theorists like Hani Rashid, Greg Lynn, and William MacDonald pushed the use of the computer not just as a new, fancier version of pencils, paper, and other time-honored architectural tools, but as a new conceptual medium for design.
As Columbia's theoreticians chase designing with computers into more and more arcane territory, students do their best to fathom it, along with everything else in their curriculum.
The hint of secret knowledge, of initiation, is not the only echo of architecture's 16th-century roots as a guild. Another is fashion. By students' third year here, for men and women both, adherence is near total to a look – turtlenecks, blazers, leather, all blacks and greys, all terribly Left Bank, '70's.
Here, too, Mr. Tschumi leads the way. Swiss, French-speaking, urbane, and in better threads, frankly: haute-couture suits, sans tie; a streak-of-red scarf instead.
More than 1,000 miles away, not just geographically, is Mr. Fisher's well-respected but quite different program at the University of Minnesota. Only one or two of its faculty members and virtually none of its students would make it in Columbia's specialized fashion world.
At the studio of Marcy Schulte, several aspiring architects are concentrating on learning to think like architects in a crowded room of beat-up tables squeezed together in happenstance combinations.
From numerous vases, cups, and coffee cans sprout pens and pencils, felt-tip pens, pastels, as well as many other drawing tools. Pins, tacks, nuts, bolts are scattered about. Cardboard and balsawood models sit half-finished or half-recycled amid scraps of the raw materials that went into them. A cut-up running shoe? A hard hat?
In drawers beneath the drafting tables lie the auxiliary tools of the trade: a broken portable CD player, coffee cups, a plastic bottle of Tylenol.
The university's School of Kinesiology and Leisure Studies, Ms. Schulte has told her students, plans to hitch a new building to its existing one, so think about how that might be done. Think about how the idea of leisure might figure in. Step back, she says, to consider, say, the notion of parasites. So, students sort through essays, blueprints, magazine clippings, Internet print-outs, their own drawings and doodles and notes, and they brainstorm. They consider a campus master plan, ideas of community, skins and how they work, cosmetic enhancements such as fake breasts, fish equipped with luminescent lures. One student presents his research on prosthetics and "the negative connotations of missing parts" – influenced, as it happens, by an essay by Columbia's Mr. Wigley.
Minnesota's program differs from Columbia's primarily in emphasis – less futuristic, less premised on the likelihood that its students will be high-flying designers. Most of Minnesota's studios relate more closely to social and planning issues, such as "smart growth," wetland and scenic-waterway restoration, and affordable housing. "There is a kind of Midwest pragmatism here," says Mr. Fisher. "There aren't many people interested in theoretical problems that may be interesting in themselves but that are a little disconnected from everyday life."
Still, students at the two institutions are engaged in the same process – learning to "make an argument spatially," as Gregg Pasquarelli, a critic at Columbia, puts it.
And the brutally frank responses of their critics to their designs are a toughening, eye-opening experience. "I think I've definitely learned how you can put your personal opinion and tastes into a design, but not have a personal reaction if somebody doesn't like it," says Sarah Hughes, who has just graduated from Minnesota's program.
Her classmate, Lynn Lehman, adds, "I also feel confident going into a job that I have a sophisticated level of thinking about design."
They know, however, that despite all the theorizing, intellectual formation, and boot-camp-hard slog, there is much that they still don't know.
And that worries them.
They don't know how to draw as well as firms will expect them to draw; how to prepare a set of construction documents; how to use many of the computer programs that are ubiquitous in the field. Intellectualism is fine, says Ms. Lehman, but how will she talk to clients?
Their gaps in knowledge are not for lack of studying. They averaged 70 hours a week. "It's just a lot. It really totally consumes your life for three years," says Ms. Lehman.
Projects piled on top of projects as, at any moment, she found herself in, say, an all-consuming studio; a lecture course with a seemingly limitless design problem; another course on technical issues; a required computer course. ...
Professors often wonder how their students manage, especially if they have families or work part-time in architectural or other jobs. Says Mr. Tschumi, "Unless you have had some prior, basic knowledge of architecture before you start graduate school, it's really, really hard to do it in three years."
Mr. Fisher says, "You need to teach students how to handle time management."
Students say that part of the problem stems from the culture of architecture – bonding via the all-nighter.
But beware, Mr. Fisher says he tells students, of the quasi-myth of the "heroic genius architect" – of imagining that with enough effort they will soon be building their own designs.
Yes, he says, architecture has some iconic figures. But Frank Gehry, a superstar of this era, is 72 years old, Mr. Fisher points out, and "he's just in the last 10 years hit his peak." Because of its complexity and myriad requirements, "architecture is well-known to be an old person's profession."
Students, constantly swamped, understandably can become testy, and dubious of the way they are asked to gain a command of their field. Instruction from practicing architects or renowned theoreticians is enlightening, and often leads to lucrative jobs during or after degrees; but too often, students say, they are treated like peons by, for example, instructors who assign them variants of their own professional projects.
And must they constantly answer those phone calls from their design offices?
The studio system is under pressure. Many schools struggle to get professionals to come for more than short visits. But deans like Mr. Tschumi and Mr. Fisher say that, to find a balance between scholarly preparation and practicing their trade, students must be exposed to architects, not only to glean theory and history, but to learn how to deal with contractors on job sites.
As the pressures of architectural training and practice increase, architectural education hears growing calls for following the lead of law schools by making the graduate master's degree the only accredited degree. The National Architectural Accrediting Board certifies some 111 institutions, and more than a dozen more are vying for approval. About half offer a five-year bachelor's degree in architecture. The clear trend, however, is toward a three-year master's degree built on a liberal-arts base, because architectural education is simply too much for a five-year undergraduate to learn.
And firms are calling on the schools to produce graduates who require less on-the-job training, because architects have less time to be mentors for new hires. Though booming, the profession is in a time-and-money squeeze. Computerization led firms to work faster, but not necessarily for more money.
The nonarchitectural demand for architecture graduates is part of what worries officials in the field. "There is a three-year-plus period after someone graduates from school where we lose a lot of our brightest and best to other professions," says Helene Dreiling, a senior official at the American Institute of Architects.
But with his program's graduates "extremely sought after by the major architectural offices," Mr. Tschumi, for one, doesn't sound like he's about to capitulate to the profession's calls that the schools become less theoretical and more practical.
Columbia's emphasis on theory is "not discrepant within the practice," he defiantly claims. Many of his faculty members' practices involve theorizing about projects and problems. And theory, conversely, constantly grapples with "the reality of building," he says. "To implement your theoretical idea, you have to be enormously pragmatic. An architect is not alone with theory. No, it's also about struggles with the weather, with gravity, with engineers, with the code."
For students like Mr. Hockett, Mr. Stoikoff, and their friends, mulling over ideas like those – filling the spare moments that their schedules don't really contain – seems to fuel them for the countless hours of study and late nights. When they snatch a moment in a cafe on Broadway, just south of the Columbia campus, they have plenty to say about the profession's calls for more utilitarian education.
"From having done schools," says Ian Dunn, who before enrolling here practiced for 13 years, working on designs for schools, houses, and a police station, twice as the lead architect on major commissions, "I can say that the process of learning in a firm is being exposed to the experience from on high that percolates down. So, you learn obvious things, like sizing classrooms, and aligning ceiling grids, where to put outlets, and how cabinetry works. Learning that in a classroom would be a waste. And it wouldn't sink in."
But that's not really what the students want to talk about. They want to weigh in on the questions that occupy their professors: postmodern theory; questions like, Should architects communicate their intentions to public users of their buildings?; and such quandaries as how one squares the computer's ability to evolve designs in real time with architecture's historical emphasis on permanence.
Mr. Hockett, who had no architectural experience when he came to Columbia with a bachelor's degree in history and education from Brown University, a year's teaching experience in a high school, and a talent for illustration, says discussions like that help him forget the occasional ignominies of architectural education.
Ignominies?
For example, the time when he came to school with a model he had worked on virtually all night, and was told by his studio critic: "Forget that. That's a bad idea."
It was a topographical model of a visitor center at a highway rest stop – off ramps, cliffs, hiking paths. ...
It was the one that was daubed with blood from where he had sliced his hand with an X-Acto blade at 4 a.m., but had been so pressed to finish it that he hadn't had time to pause to stop the bleeding.
Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
