Talks and disputes about the quality of modern architecture education have been going on for a couple of years already.
A large section of the profession thinks that educators are failing at our sole task: to train students for practice. Patrik Schumacher, Zaha Hadid Architects principal and a guest professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard as well as the head of the Architectural Association’s Design Research Laboratory, criticized the existing approach to architecture schooling in his Facebook post entitled “13 theses on the crisis of architectural academia”.
In his post he accused architecture schools of being disconnected from the real world not teaching students the skills needed by architectural practice and claim that many teachers that do not have sufficient professional work or experience use their positions as vehicles for their own idiosyncratic research projects unrelated to reality.
As a result after five years of study in institutions operating like art schools “without any curriculum” and neglecting social realities and needs expressed in real briefs, students graduate with a portfolio that “might not include a single design that could meet minimal standards expected from a contemporary competition entry”.
Schumacher is certain that the current failure of architectural education is a result of a failure to transform the current educational “model of an unbounded diversity of experimentation” that worked in the 1980s into a “hegemonic, unifying paradigm”, which should be parametric design.
Apart from that, architecture education is expensive and is claimed to be the cause of a mental health crisis amongst over-worked and under-resourced students, according to a 2016 survey of architecture students by The Architects’ Journal (AJ), which reported that 52 per cent of respondents had concerns about their mental health.
Sean Griffiths, a professor of architecture at the University of Westminster and visiting professor of architecture at Yale University, argues in defense of the current system. He reminds the critics that all architectural educators are practitioners too, and that two years of an architect’s education are spent in practice in order to train for practice. Griffiths also claims that his own students express very high degrees of satisfaction with the content of their courses.
The academic believes that the task of architecture education is not to ‘mimic practice and generate workers for the profession in its present mode’ but rather to ‘carry out experimental research, to critique practice and provide the tools, skills and attitudes needed to reinvent it’.
To support his opinion, he points out that a number of studios are addressing urgent issues through imaginative thinking about forms of practice which have the potential to extend the profession’s scope. Among them, studios exploring feminist practices, queer theory and disability – e.g Jos Boys’ DisOrdinary Architecture Project, a network of artists, architects and educators, treat disability not as a ‘technical’ problem but as the starting point to think creatively about the built environment as whole.
Phineas Harper, the deputy director of the Architecture Foundation, reveals that their foundation launched a searchable database of design and research projects at all architecture schools as an ambitious crowd-sourced attempt to highlight and connect studios across institutional barriers. In Harper’s opinion, the number and quality of submitted unit briefs show that architectural education is quite dynamic and buccaneering.
It should be noted that nowadays there are alternative educational options that allow students to earn and learn simultaneously, among them the one promoted by the London School of Architecture and Sheffield’s collaborative practice model as well as architecture apprenticeships, an initiative from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and 20 British studios offering a new route to qualifying as an architect in the UK.
The new route to qualification will combine practical experience in the workplace with academic training that will be provided by universities. According to RIBA president Ben Derbyshire, the initiative will provide more accessible routes to qualification and employment opportunities for students with any background, as those on the architecture apprenticeships will not need to pay university tuition fees and will be paid a salary.
The move is likely to be welcomed by architects and architectural educators, many of whom have previously called for alternative routes into architecture, to encourage more applications from students with under-privileged backgrounds. Among them is Robert Mull, head of architecture and design at the University of Brighton, and Will Hunter, founder of the London School of Architecture.