The debated “gap” between the academy and the practice of architecture is usually situated as a rift between the conceptual work of a studio-based design education and the mundane, work-a-day tasks of an office. These discussions lean on anecdotal evidence that suggest a lack of preparedness where new recruits enter internships with little knowledge of building codes, budgetary concerns, and construction methods. Poor pass rates on licensing exams are also stated indications of a problem, although these are taken after an average of about five years of professional experience, clearly placing that burden more on the internship process.[1]
The 2023 Florida American Institute of Architects (AIA) state conference featured a discussion session entitled “Bridging the Gap.”[2] In a questionnaire produced by attendees for the academic community, excerpted below, the professionals' concerns, for the most part, parroted familiar tropes.
- “How are schools ensuring that academia aligns with the needs of the architecture field? How do they ensure that students have realistic expectations of practice?”
- “Most students are disappointed about architecture post-graduation. What are we doing to mitigate this?”
- “Why is design such an emphasis, when in practice, it is only a small part of a much more complex career?”
- “How can students learn more about how to actually work for an architectural company in regards to Construction Documents?”
- “How can practicing professionals influence the curriculum of architecture education? Your schools of architecture are training our entry level collaborators. Shouldn't our needs for certain skill sets be taken into consideration when developing curriculum?”
- “There seems to be an ever widening gap between what is being taught at the college level and the day to day practice of Architecture. All too often it appears we are setting false expectations of our profession.”
- “Many students who seek internship with us have no realistic understanding of architectural practice and offer few practical skill sets other than wanting to be environmental / cultural warriors.”
- “There seems to be a need to understand that our client base is not singularly focused on the demise of the natural environment and climate. Yet this is what students express to us as being a preeminent focus to the detriment of many other important aspects of the profession. This is very one-dimensional and doesn't serve the next generation of architect's, our clients or the larger community of citizens well.”
- “How can we better balance theory and practical application in architectural education?”
- “Is a design-forward curriculum still important? Is a more business-forward curriculum more relevant?”
- “Should schools of architecture be focusing on innovation and technology?”
- “Can colleges be a catalyst for creating a more profitable profession?”
- “We need a better understanding of theory vs. practice. It seems a lot of education is leaning and pushing towards theory to understand the concept of space yet everyday practice seems to have lost that all together.”
- “The transition after education is difficult when in practice the relationships and understandings of theory and space are not the same. In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”
It should be noted that these questions are posed by attendees of a single conference and not all assumptions are supported by evidence.[3] For example, take the queries, “Is a design-forward curriculum still important? Is a more business-forward curriculum more relevant” and “why is design such an emphasis, when in practice, it is only a small part of a much more complex career?” These suggest that graduates are over-prepared in design but under-prepared in the technical and business aspects. However, data from registration exams in Florida doesn’t support this read, and, in fact, the design portion of the exam proves the most difficult to pass.[4] Or, the query that begins “most students are disappointed about architecture post-graduation,” is too broad a generalization to build any argument upon. At their most banal, these assumptions suggest that firms require nothing less and nothing more than the skills needed to serve their business model. They also fail to acknowledge the immense challenge of preparing students for leadership in a rapidly evolving technological, ecological, and political landscape. The questions do at least, however, take the temperature of a segment of the profession in a particular place and time, and there is an important assertion here that the perceived disequilibrium is a disservice not only to a firm’s economic bottom line, but to graduates’ sense of self-worth; that their transition to the workplace would be less fraught if they could emerge from their education and move seamlessly, and profitably, into a pre-ordained notion of “the real world” that fits most, if not all, firms, if such a generalization were even possible.
The concerns of both entities, academic and professional, ultimately reside in the generational evolution of the world around us. Ever-changing disciplinary boundaries continuously re-frame architecture as a cultural construct impacted by socio-political forces. Recent years have seen an emergence of what we might call crisis curriculum, responding in real time to the highly charged socio-political issues facing the world: climate change, social justice, and the push to “de-colonialize” the curriculum. Graduates come of age and are inevitably confronted with new and unforeseen global threats coupled with a reshuffling of social orders. And while professional practice seeks expedient solutions, it is the role of the academy to ask difficult questions. The thesis we wish to advance here is that the perceived “gap” between practice and the academy within the myth of the “real world” may in fact serve an essential and existential purpose in the making of an architect. We also posit that a bridging of the gap resides less in “teaching them how to make working drawings” than in the reality of an evolving professional census and the boundless possibilities offered by a plastic, malleable curricular logic that expands the discipline into more fluid conditions of education and practice.
Consider for a moment the practitioner returning to the studios to serve on critiques after a long stretch away from the academic world embroiled in the day-to-day challenges of working in an office. S/he feels a sense of nostalgia, being re-connected to a place of creative energy and intellectual debate. The practitioner, recounting that now elusive window of time where they once had the opportunity to engage unencumbered with conceptual experimentation in the design studio, inevitably expresses a palpable gratitude for the gift of their education. They return to the office inspired to re-invest their work with the meaning and purpose that brought them to study architecture in the first place. Certainly, rifts need to be healed and institutional bridges between the two worlds must be fostered. But efforts to collapse the gap only unidirectionally, from the academy towards the goals of the profession, ignore the precious gift afforded by the educational experience. Thus we would suggest the profession embrace their own role as educators, a two-way street. If there is a rift to be healed, might it involve not just the academy shaping itself to the needs of the profession, but the profession also bearing a certain practiced gratitude toward the gifts brought forth by the academy?
The Fear of Theory
Architecture has long been a discipline seeking rules and guidelines in search of a definitive answer to the question of its very definition. As Joan Ockman states, “Indeed, it is fair to ask whether architecture has ever really constituted a unified domain of knowledge. Its unsettled boundaries have contributed to a tense relationship between the worlds of practice and academia.”[5] Let us address what practitioners often state is the culprit of the perceived gap: that architecture schools delve too heavily in theory-based coursework in lieu of practical knowledge. Recall the young design student looking for the correct answer to a design exercise only to be confronted with numerous solutions and perhaps, ultimately, more questions than answers. The theoretical curricular realm, both reactionary and pro-active, has long been politicized, and the critiqued gap as we know it traces its origins at least to the Vietnam era, when anti-war protests intersected with civil rights movements and the rise of feminism. The reigning hegemony of top-down instruction gave way to collaborative engagement with studio courses addressing the socio-political issues of the day. Curricular changes placed conventional professional preparatory classes such as structures, technology, and practice management in the background to varying degrees while schools reconsidered curricula.[6] We also see today a form of practice driven by the academy with the emergence of community-based design centers directly engaged with cities and neighborhoods through an activist, boots-on-the-ground sensibility.
This period of open-ended inquiry in the education of an architect, although firmly in place since the beginning of the twentieth century, is recent relative to the longer arc of history. Principles of architecture were more or less scripted into training and practice from antiquity to the 19th century. History reveals how formal and spatial sensibilities, evolving over time, were ingrained into the language of buildings according to the technical skills, available materials, and traditional sensibilities of the day. The all-encompassing treatises of Vitruvius, Leon Battista Alberti, and Andrea Palladio defined the scope and the rules of the practice of architecture. Beginning in the first century AD, Vitruvius’ De Architectura provided the first pedagogical handbook for architects, describing in its ten volumes the subjects of city planning, materiality, proportions, temple construction, infrastructure, private houses, color and interior ornament, public buildings, astronomy and mathematics, and military engineering. Architecture and all of its creative contributors, from the simple artisan to the supreme artist, were united in a single collective task.[7]
Representing craftsmen and merchants, and interwoven with the political and economic fabric of their towns, Medieval guilds kept competition in check and upheld standards of professionalism. From these emerged the tiered system of expertise from apprentice, to craftsman, to journeyman, to master. Notably, the guilds simultaneously contributed to the emergence of academia. The University of Bologna, the world’s longest continuously operating university, and the first to award degrees, was founded in 1088 by a student guild, the studiorum. Common throughout Europe by the 12th century, institutions of learning, called Studium Generale, offered pupils training in a singularly focused subject.[8] The collapse of the guilds intersected with the rise of capitalistic tendencies and early western industrialization, yet echoes of the system, wherein one must complete an apprenticeship or internship prior to licensure, can be seen in the contemporary professional organizational models of architecture, engineering, and medicine.[9]
For over a millennium the authority of Vitruvius went unchallenged. In the fifteenth century, seeking to update Vitruvius with a more elegant and precise text, Leon Battista Alberti introduced De re aedificatoria. Inscribed in Latin, it is a more theoretical treatise, lifting architecture from a guilds-based craft to a profession buttressed by intellectual underpinnings. A de facto sequel largely echoing the structure of Vitruvius’s ten books, De re aedificatoria sought to improve and build upon but not entirely displace them: “In a Latin which was both more elegant and more precise than that of his ancient predecessor, he succeeded in framing a coherent account of the fragmented knowledge of antique architecture as it had survived through the dark and middle ages. His was the single book which established architecture as an intellectual and professional discipline rather than a craft and gave it a proper theoretical context…”[10]
Influenced by both Vitruvius and Alberti, Andrea Palladio, in 1570, published I Quattro Libri dell’ Architettura. Palladianism offered the “correct” answer to the question of design throughout Western Europe and later, the United States. Adolf K. Placzek, suggesting Palladio was the most widely imitated and impactful architect in the western world, called him, “the spokesman for the belief in valid rules, in innumerable canons, for the belief that there is a correct, a right way to design.”[11] Focused on materials and construction techniques, urban elements, and building types, Palladio’s treatise, through widespread translation and adoption, evolved as a blueprint for both technique and style: the Palladian idiom. Palladianism (and later neo-Palladianism) were popularized in England and the various territories under British influence, primarily North America and India. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson viewed Palladianism as a style appropriate for the United States and modeled his own home, Monticello, after it.
Contrasting with the encyclopedic, how-to volumes of Vitruvius, Alberti, and Palladio, the theoretical works of the first half of the 20th century were characterized instead by shorter and more concise manifestos. From single page declarations to a few book length works, high-minded rhetorical theory became the norm in the likes of Adolf Loos’ “Ornament and Crime" (1913), Sant’Elia’s “The Manifesto of Futurist Architecture” (1914), and Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture (1931). In the aftermath of the first World War, and within the newly formed German Weimar Republic, Walter Gropius’ “Bauhaus Manifesto and Program” (1919) offered a declaration binding art, architecture, and craft: “Architects, sculptors and painters, we all must return to the crafts!”[12] Recalling the ancient guilds, Gropius’ curriculum included training in a chosen craft such as sculpture, blacksmithing, cabinetmaking, or weaving, as well as studies in drawing, painting, science, anatomy, color theory, bookkeeping, and contracts. Gropius wrote in “The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus” (1923), the goal of the Bauhaus curriculum is for students to, “regain a feeling for the interwoven strands of practical and formal work. The joy of building, in the broadest meaning of that word, must replace the paper work of design.”[13] The disruptions of the Second World War and the Korean War, coupled with the rise of the military industrial complex, saw the discipline distanced from the rhetoric of the 1920s and 1930s. Bauhaus educators dispersed globally, including to the United States with Gropius and Marcel Breuer proceeding to Harvard and Joseph and Annie Albers to Black Mountain College and eventually Yale.
By the second half of the twentieth century, the increased production and dissemination of architectural literature gave voice to ideological camps pursuing differing formal and figurative languages. Stirring new theoretical discourse while engaging academics and practitioners were the landmark publications of Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and Five Architects (1972), featuring the work of the New York Five: Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier. The grey and white architectural camps ensued with, among others, Venturi and Robert A. M. Stern leading the grey camp and Peter Eisenman, et al, championing the whites. The greys mediated between low brow vernacular, pastiche, and historicist tendencies while the whites advocated modalities drawn from modernity, acknowledging and effectively paying homage to Le Corbusier.[14]
In the Introduction to Five Architects, Colin Rowe situates the “white” camp with a call for what would later be commonly termed as the unfinished modern project: “But, for all of this, there is a point of view shared which is quite simply this: that, rather than constantly to endorse the revolutionary myth, it might be more reasonable and more modest to recognize that, in the opening years of this century, great revolutions in thought occurred and that then profound visual discoveries resulted, that these are still unexplained, and that rather than assume intrinsic change to be the prerogative of every generation, it might be more useful to recognize that certain changes are so enormous as to impose a directive which cannot be resolved in any individual lifespan.”[15] For the grey camp, however, modernism was now dead on arrival, per Robert A.M. Stern in 1978: “…it is safe to say that the orthodox Modernist Movement is a closed issue, an historical fact of no greater contemporaneity than that of nineteenth-century academicism; and though messages can be received from both of these historical periods, as from the past in general, nostalgia for either cannot be substituted for a fresh, realistic assessment of the issues as they are now.”[16] The leading figures of the white/grey rivalry are defined by their highly influential practices as well as by their notable long-term academic careers: Stern at Yale, Hejduk at Cooper Union, Graves at Princeton for nearly four decades, and Eisenman in numerous chaired professorships.
By the latter years of the 20th century, theory had evolved into the discussion of architecture as a syntactic language influenced by structuralism, deconstruction and literary criticism. Strikingly, while theoretical manifestos penned by leading practitioners proliferated through the 1990’s, the 21st century has seen an inability of theoretical thought to coalesce into discernable movements impacting academia. As Richard Buday notes in his 2019 article, “How to Write an Architectural Manifesto,” “The century of robust mini-debates on form and function, meaning and intent, petered out ten years ago. Evidence that contemporary theory and practice are threads of new architectural thought is scarce. Arcade magazine published a survey of architectonic declarations and mapped thirty modern movements from 1900 to 1960, and eighty more between 1960 and 2010. At 2015, they found only two.”[17]
Prolific in both written and built works, it is difficult to overestimate the impact of the journalist, architect, theorist, and educator Rem Koolhaas and his skillful navigation of the intertwined worlds of practice, theory, and education. Indeed, Koolhaas (and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture, OMA) may well be credited with most effectively recognizing and leveraging both the academy and practice to create a unique synergy and productivity. The 1978 publication of Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan launched an extraordinary period of productivity for Koolhaas culminating in the publication of S,M,L,XL in 1996. A monograph of OMA’s written and built work, developed in collaboration with Bruce Mau, the 1,244-page tome altered the manner in which the academy, publishing, graphic design and, perhaps, the discipline, imagined itself. The trio of Harvard Project on the City books followed in 2001: Mutations, Project on the City I: Great Leap Forward, and Project on the City II: The Harvard Guide to Shopping. Projecting three views of urbanism, Mutations viewed the exponential growth of global cities at the turn of the 21st century, The Great Leap Forward studied the massive growth of South China’s Pearl River Delta, and The Harvard Guide to Shopping considered the inexorable link between consumerism and the city. These works placed the academy in the forefront of urban theory and foreshadowed the ambitious projects of massive urban expansion in Asia for the next decade. It also empowered the academy as a place of research impactful to practice.[18]
The late 20th century’s rise of what we might call “high theory” aligns with the shifting status of architecture as a discipline within universities. The emergence of master’s degree programs throughout the 1960s and 1970s (largely usurping the five-year bachelor’s degree) repositioned architecture as a discipline offering a more prestigious terminal degree. The Master of Architecture also positioned the graduate architect as a more mature professional, having been exposed to the liberal arts as an undergraduate student. Simultaneously, the emergence of PhD programs across the US provided a new and more academically rigorous path resulting in a class of architecture faculty arguably more distant from traditional conventions of practice. The rise of theory as subject matter taught by PhD faculty trained in either architectural curricula or non-architectural disciplines offered ways to situate the logic of academic work that was sometimes critiqued as being distinctly “non-architectural.”[19]
Today, the necessity of generating original research often outpaces a professor’s instructional time. Building an independent practice in this environment is also challenging, given the time frame of obtaining, designing, building, and publishing a project. Such increased expectations for scholarship and publishing have led to the rise of theory as the intellectual informant for the pedagogical approach of the design studio. Offering more speculative projects rather than the execution of a building with the conventional package of plans, sections, elevations, and details, the work of the studio is more readily disseminated and published. It should be noted, however, that one approach is not necessarily exclusive of the other, and, in fact, design studios have been successfully navigating a synthesis of the abstract (the world of theory and speculation) and the concrete (manifesting achievable solutions for the real world) for decades. The academy is populated by those who are adept at, and in fact, specialize in building bridges between worlds. This work of illuminating the middle ground between theoretical scholarship and the expression of buildings and spaces through a rigorous architectural language is at least a partial definition for the role of the academy.
Although the anticipated rise of a PhD class that would usurp professors with Masters Degrees and stints of prestigious professional experience under their belt never materialized (PhD Portal lists only twenty-seven PhD programs in architecture throughout the US), universities have nonetheless become more demanding of faculty research. And the pursuit of permanent, tenured positions, professional educators, if you will, has become more fraught and increasingly rare. Yet, coupled with the rise of less expensive, non-tenured adjunct and instructor positions within the past ten years, an unintended mosaic of approaches has emerged with extraordinary opportunities for cross-pollination between practitioners and professors. Of course, by their very nature of being part time instructors, adjuncts are less engaged in the shaping of curriculum. However, one sees their mark on the work of a school. More often than not, they are themselves graduates of the school, practicing in the community it serves. They are professionals of all ages who want to be connected to both worlds more permanently than simply attending final juries. Inevitably bringing to the classroom a combination of methods they learned on both sides of the spectrum, they are the gap’s most direct conduit, an emerging voice extending curriculum into practice and practice into curriculum.
Curriculum (The Gift)
Contrary to common perceptions, such as this conveyed by one of the aforementioned conference attendees, “Shouldn't our needs for certain skill sets be taken into consideration when developing curriculum,” schools of architecture do not develop the parameters of a curriculum in a bubble. Regularly, the curriculum is quite literally turned on its head with the arrival of the National Architectural Accreditation Board’s (NAAB) revised conditions, which are developed in close consultation with the profession. The 2014 NAAB Conditions for Accreditation defined four areas of required student performance: Critical Thinking and Representation, Building Practices, Technical Skills and Knowledge, Integrated Architectural Solutions, and Professional Practice.[20] The latest revision in the 2020 Conditions brought a new set of learning objectives and outcomes: Health, Safety, and Welfare in the Built Environment, Professional Practice, Regulatory Context, Technical Knowledge, Design Synthesis, and Building Integration.[21] The complexity of NAAB’s parameters don’t stop here. They extend beyond subject matter competencies to address every aspect of the institution including research and innovation, leadership and collaboration, learning and teaching culture, social equity, and campus resources.
Within such specificities, it is essential for a school to not just tick off boxes in a course catalogue, but to map out a coherent framework of curricular methodology, tethering the NAAB objectives to rituals of learning that unfold in real time within the studio. Constructing curriculum is a creative act wherein the faculty must collectively distill the essence of a complex
discipline into a series of discernible courses and exercises, delivering the material in a way that motivates and inspires students. Going beyond specific knowledge, we attempt to outline below the spatio-curricular framework that underpins this larger agenda of the academy, attending rather to the most universal skills of an architect. It is logistically impossible to teach every vocational skill that a future architect might encounter in their work. For example, there is little in common shared by the typologies of housing for the homeless and resort hotels, by kindergartens and big box stores, or by churches and train stations. Yet, we argue, architecture graduates arrive to the profession with the essential and timeless skills to tackle any of them.
Spatial Thinking, Aura, and Perception
Architecture as a college major is unique in that students arrive having had no prior coursework in the subject other than the now rare high school drafting class. Instead, they bring only disparate experiences of the built world around them and core classes in science, math, humanities, and technology. Only a handful of students arrive with more than one or two high school art classes, and there are no courses in their K‑12 education that address the spatial skills that an architect requires. Most haven’t had training in drawing, either digitally or by hand. Essentially, they arrive to the academy spatially illiterate. But within an architecture curriculum, contrary to an impediment, the naivete of a student is a powerful tool. All architectural schools, in one form or another, construct their beginning design studio curriculum as a rite of passage, leveraging this naivete toward the suspension of disbelief as a pedagogical strategy situated in a threshold, a construed break in continuity.
Let us think of this threshold as a liminal moment. Not the ubiquitous and fashionable definition of liminality that can be quickly categorized via Instagram posts depicting liminal spaces, liminal horror, liminal nostalgia, liminal club, liminal furniture, liminal moods, and so on, where the curatorial efforts seem to focus on the aesthetics of abandonment, creepiness, or the somehow vague and foggy. Instead, consider the definition of liminality within the field of cultural anthropology, where it is understood as a liberating, albeit disorienting, period of time wherein participants in a rite of passage are released into a temporary space of formative ambiguity, where senses are heightened by the rupture of preconceptions, and a period of creative awareness and lucidity ensues.[22]
Like the initiate in a rite of passage, the first-year student of architecture stands at the threshold between a known past and a pending future of new rituals and routines. Their preconceptions are challenged. Their identity and sense of community is redefined. It is in this threshold where the academy situates some of its most fundamental curriculum related to the practice of architecture: those that attend to notions of spatial thinking and perception. Educator John Hejduk describes the perceptual qualities of architecture as aura. “I believe that the only difference that the architect can offer our society is the creation of a spirit, I mean some kind of aura: something eternal in a sense that, strangely, is lost. Architecture also has to do with sound. Not with pragmatic sound, but with a supernatural sound, a sound of the soul. When you enter a building, it gives you the wavelength of your sound. It is something that characterizes the best architecture of all time…I once heard a lecture from a surgeon who said that when he cuts a body he is able to tell where he is spatially by the sound of the cut.”[23]
This notion of spatial and perceptual experience suggests a rare alignment of forces rendering a depth of insight and possibility, creating a strange, if fleeting, optimism — a buoyancy in the boundlessness of our discipline and a sense of the ephemeral. Aura is a liminal moment, and foundational curriculum, at its most brilliant, allows students to grasp it through the choreographed interplay of experienced and imagined space. It is the knife-edge moment that lingers in a monumental manner as described by Ignasia Sola-Morales in the essay “Weak Architecture,” “…as the tremulous clangor of the bell that reverberates after it has ceased to ring… the lingering resonance of poetry after is has been heard, with the recollection of architecture after it has been seen.”[24] While the circumstances are an intersection of the confluent forces of a carefully construed architectural experience and the randomness of a moment in time: an echo, a shadow, the sound of a busy city, the architect thus trained knows how to harness it through the control of light, proportion, and materiality within a shaped space. Great architecture possesses this delight, and the tightly scripted projects in the early studios must set the stage for students to recognize and encounter aura in their work and in the built world around them. Although s/he arrives spatially illiterate to architecture school, no architect, once taught this, has ever forgotten how to sense aura in the space of architecture.
Craft, Meticulousness, and the Inhabited Curriculum
We could speak about the structural overlap of practice and education through the lens of existing and emerging programs such as NCARB’s AXP[25] or iPal[26], preparing for licensure exams or gaining internship experience while still in school. Community design centers embedded in schools of architecture also offer students an engaged experience with decision makers and end-users be they civic leaders or residents of townships. We applaud these and do not discount their value. However, there is an enormous distinction between learning to be an architect and being an architect. That said, both actions require establishing a rigor of practice and the application of something meticulously and habitually repeated. Although it is also not a skill that any student arrives with, a practiced meticulousness is fundamental to the discipline of architecture. We would be wrong to see students as simply a passive cohort engaging their curriculum in a purely scripted manner, enrolling in whatever sequential coursework their catalogue requires. Architecture students, in particular, are much more engaged than that scenario implies, and we may think of them instead as inhabitants of the curriculum.
Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life speaks to ritualized occupation of space and associated social behaviors as a means for individuals and groups to establish a sense of self within the complex forces of modern life. Certeau’s urban “walker” is immersed in the city as part of her/his spatial routine, an experience mapped by planners, by cartographers, and by happenstance. Certeau calls space “a practiced place,” as the habitual practice of the walker transforms the patterns of the city s/he walks through. He asks us to consider the keen difference between two cities, one frozen in time and one ever-changing: “Unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present reinvents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging its future.”[27] Imagine a curricular structure like the urbanism of New York that flaunts its agility through constant reinvention. Or, in contrast, one that grows old and rigid.
Inhabiting Certeau’s walker, the student operates at the intersection of curricular practice and observation. S/he is both the occupant and the re-inventor of curriculum. The occupation of curricula is a testing ground for both student and faculty; the structured practice of each evolving as the interplay with the work matures through engaged repetition. This skill grows over a handful of years as lessons are built upon and expanded.
The academy thus serves as the place where a critical and meticulous practice is instilled. Within the performative space of the studio, Certeauean “walkers” establish a means of inhabiting and manipulating the curriculum toward a culture of disruptive inventiveness as noted by author Ben Highmore: “What characterizes the everyday for Certeau is a creativity that responds to the situation. By ‘making do’ with a ready-made culture, but also, and crucially, by ‘making with’ this culture, everyday life evidences an inventiveness.”[28] Indeed, we note the common sentiment among teachers that they learn as much from their students as their students learn from them. More than just an endearing sentiment, it is a strategy toward inventiveness, and the most agile studio instructors employ it, constantly adapting their assignments to apply what their students teach them through their engagement with the boundaries of a project. As students push the boundaries, the boundaries change.
However, while the ready-made and re-made culture within a school of architecture is the inhabited curriculum, it must shape itself within less-than-ideal conditions. Indeed, it is in the heterotopic nature of the architecture studio where we find its potential; neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but a place where students experience many things at once, collapsing, expanding, and intertwined. The concept of heterotopia is defined by philosopher Michel Foucault as somewhat different, charged, stimulating, and complex spaces or experiences. These are “other” spaces within the common cultural milieu but less experienced, less understood: cemeteries, prisons, and theme parks function as worlds embedded within worlds. Foucault used the example of a mirror in a lecture to a group of architects in 1967: “The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface… But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there.”[29]
The heterotopia of an architecture school is the setting for the practiced place. Yet, rarely, with a few exceptions, is the architecture building the most interesting example of architecture on the campus. Sometimes, either by design or by neglect, it is the least. In the 1972 essay, “Big Shed Syndrome”, Reyner Banham speaks of Sci-Arc’s (then called the New School) first home, a warehouse at 1800 Berkeley Street[30] in the industrial landscape of Santa Monica, “a forgotten pocket of the industrial grottage halfway between the Santa Monica beaches and the University of California campus.”[31] Banham extolls the virtue of the ubiquitous, characterless space enabling students to labor within its haunts, free of another architect’s vision. “What makes the idea of an architecture-free building so infectiously attractive is, of course, its freedom from architecture. It means that you won’t find yourself competing with somebody else’s aesthetic ego trip.”[32] The big shed, a pedagogical tool, presumably allows for fluid, changing models of instruction and curricular invention. It is worth noting, however, Banham’s disappointment with the use of space upon his visit: “Instead of spontaneous seminars and autonomous work groups camping out all over the Shed… there appeared to be that most drawing boards had been squashed into the old offices on the street front and seminars tended to happen in a small gallery hard up under the roof.”[33]
Thus, the virtue of the big shed, for all its grandeur and ubiquity, is less its open, democratic spatiality than its existence as a curricular muse, providing a kind of transparent box for the heterotopic notion of the inhabited curriculum: nimble and endlessly adaptable. One is reminded of the well-worked nine-square grid exercise developed by John Hejduk and fellow “Texas Rangers” at The University of Texas at Austin in the 1950s and adopted by untold numbers of schools in the years since. The project employs the simple bounds of the nine-square grid to permit endless solutions and inventiveness. Simultaneously big and small, complex and simple, lucid and ambiguous, it initiates the practiced place and integrates the discipline in an atmosphere of student invention. Whether hosted in a vernacular shed or an articulated warehouse, the studio is inherently a pedagogical instrument for an inhabited curriculum. The urban analogy finds its way in viewing the design studio as a public space with all the issues of publicness, privacy, and decorum. The big shed sponsors the ritualized practice of walking in the city and the walker creates the heterotopic micro-community within a larger collective.
Communitas
Architects are trained intensively in the areas of critical thinking and communication. Every studio project is an exercise in critical thinking as much as it is a building design, wherein students develop a line of inquiry, form speculative questions, and offer responses to the project at hand through the language of buildings and space. An architecture student will prepare no less than twenty-four formal presentations of her/his studio work across six years of study. An agile curriculum that simultaneously prepares students for the complex work of comprehensive design across scales and building types while leaving room for the application of an increasingly critical level of logic and skepticism, is the hallmark of an architectural education. Demanding an increasingly adept level of research and execution, the architectural studio sequence culminates in the master’s thesis, a student-driven proposal to develop a body of concentrated and tested knowledge. While a studio project may ask for the design of a well-researched, elegant, and adept building, the thesis asks for more.
Thesis differs from a “terminal project,” the traditional conclusion of a five-year professional Bachelor of Architecture degree, in that it is not necessarily a demonstration of formal architectural competence (students have already demonstrated proficiency prior to embarking upon thesis). Also at the point of commencing thesis, students already have a broad body of professional awareness, many having worked quite extensively for local firms during their studies. This experience often informs the thesis, as does a student’s personal history. While projects offer probing insight and yield a level of self-analysis through writing and through the operations of architecture, they also come from a sense of duty to society and humanity. Whether critiquing coming of age in a featureless suburb, offering a reading of the consumer and social media culture they were raised on, or questioning the boundaries of contested political landscapes, students are not merely occupying the curriculum at this juncture. They are fully owning it. Furthermore, due to the highly public nature of thesis presentations, often with invited guests from outside the institution, thesis projects carry a special weight, creating a history frequently referenced by younger students years later as they begin their thesis. For the institution, thesis is the performed and recorded history of the inhabited curriculum, an archived body of knowledge and representation that forms community and moves a school forward. For the student, thesis is both a culmination and a springboard toward a trajectory that later informs their way into and through practice.
In advocating for the academy as a nexus that unites students, educators and professionals, let us understand what we mean by community. The collective academic and professional community may, on one hand, be explained in terms of a certain exclusivity, attachment, or solidarity within the scope of our discipline. We might also entertain that we are bound to community by some combination of knowledge, interests, and common experience; the intimate and close knit community of the academy grafted onto the profession through our unique connection to the learned aura of architecture, perhaps. However, let us suggest community as it is defined by Roberto Esposito. The Italian philosopher draws a distinction between what he considers a common misconception of community as a homogeneous group of people defending shared territory and history, and the unstructured, and more amorphous communitas, which he describes as “the totality of persons united not by a property but precisely by an obligation or a debt; not by an addition but by a subtraction; by a lack, a limit that is configured as an onus.”[34] The void, for Esposito, is configured much as the thesis is within the academy…as a call to duty, an obligation, or a “donation of a grace.” The education of an architect, culminating in the work of the thesis is a gift to the discipline that does not require remuneration, but suggests a gratitude of a different kind.
Two related points from the aforementioned Florida AIA convention attendees are worth mentioning: “Can colleges be a catalyst for creating a more profitable profession” and “…many students want to be environmental / cultural warriors.” Graduates arrive to offices with skills and ambitions reflecting their complex reality and the current zeitgeist, which may well be out of tune with older, experienced practitioners. Perhaps the profession can receive young graduates, those who will inherit the discipline, on their own terms, if not halfway. Profitability and environmentalism are not disconnected. The AIA is the world’s largest design organization, and the “AIA Blueprint for Better” campaign is, in its own words, a call to action with the intention to increase equity in the built environment.[35] The website offers a dire warning: “buildings account for about 40% of annual fossil fuel carbon-dioxide emissions (CO2), leading to increases in flooding, fires, hurricanes, and billions of dollars in annual damage. It’s a global emergency of our own making. And if we don’t take action now, we’ll help to accelerate global warming—irreversibly changing life as we know it.”[36] It seems the profession needs a community of environmental warriors.
Architect and educator Jan Wampler often speaks of “the space in-between.” By this he means the space between buildings, the public realm, all that makes places, cities, and towns habitable. The space in-between is the space of community, the space where life is pursued and lived. In the spring of 2019 Wampler composed the “Oath for Architects” in consultation with colleagues across the country. His impetus came through conversations with physicians, who discussed the gravity of the Hippocratic Oath[37] to the medical profession. Administered upon graduation, and considered the oldest and most widely understood thesis on professional ethics, it was originally written by Greek physician Hippocrates, c. 460–370 BC. The revised modern version focuses on the physician and patient (at the expense of Apollo, Aesculapius and other Gods) and includes the promise, “I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure. I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.”[38]
Hippocrates’ call that physicians, “prevent disease… for prevention is preferable to cure” rings prescient when we consider the environmental threats we presently face. The 2023 Pritzker Prize recipient, David Chipperfield, in a New York Times interview upon receiving the award said this on the subject: “…architecture is more important than architects… we’re facing two existential crises: social inequality and climate collapse… It’s not about solar panels and insulating windows, but about making fundamental changes… All of our actions have to be measured, not in terms of economics, but in terms of their social and environmental impact.”[39]
Wampler’s “Oath for Architects” offers a pledge to the profession, humanity, and the environment. It offers a commitment and a gift to the discipline and to future employers: “On my honor, I hereby take this oath of commitment to the following principles: To maintain the highest ethical and moral standards in my life and my architectural practice; To commit my practice for the good of our planet and humanity; To practice architecture according to its basic aim to provide human shelter and enriched quality of life for all humanity; To treat clients, allied professionals inside and outside of my industry, and the general public with respect, honesty, and integrity; To respect diverse socioeconomic identities, gender issues and rights, and to not discriminate by race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, and any other basis prohibited by law; To strive to be an enlightened, passionate steward of both the built and the natural environments, address climate change, and conservation of Earth’s natural resources; To pass on to the next generation our responsibility to do good for the world through universal, sustainable design that meets the needs of all humankind and protects the Earth; By taking this oath, I have accepted my duty toward the betterment of civilization, its buildings, communities, and ecosystems.”[40]
The relatively short time spent in school compared to multiple decades of professional practice make the diverse and intertwined lessons of education particularly precious. Curriculum cannot replicate professional practice, nor should it. Existing opportunities to engage the professional world should be encouraged and expanded, but the vocational-technical education, while ultimately necessary to the success of building, is not the first agenda of the academy. The institution is charged with, among many things, introducing to students the possibility of aura; to the beautiful intersection of ideas and representation, and to wedding the poetic with the pragmatic.
The oft-cited Paul Klee watercolor, Angelus Novus, described by Walter Benjamin as looking back upon the wreckage of history while being carried forward by the storm of progress captures the uncertainty of some architecture students upon graduation: “His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.”[41] We instead prefer the image of the student stepping through the liminal threshold as suggested by Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, thresholds, doorways, and gates, for s/he simultaneously looks forward and backward, making linkages, building bridges, and connecting across the gap.