The Disconnect Between Academia and Architecture

I had the great privilege to mentor an architectural thesis candidate this year.  It was the first time I had stepped back into an academic mindset in quite a while.  She challenged and irritated me simultaneously throughout the semester and I’m sure I was of little, to no value to her as an adviser, but it was enlightening nevertheless at least for me.  I’m sure I too often used words such as artifact and process (thanks Berk) but I just wanted her to see the value in the making of the thing.  Too many of her contemporaries were making no thing, nothing actually.   Shortly after I moved to Atlanta I accepted an invitation from a colleague to do desk critiques at Southern Poly, probably to satisfy my community service requirements for licensure, I'm not sure.  At any rate, I quickly became so completely disillusioned with it that I stopped as suddenly as I had started.  Pissed off is a more appropriate term actually.  The project that did me in that time was a pedestrian bridge between Marietta and Piedmont Park.  Seriously?  Yep.

I should preface what I’m about to say with this disclaimer.  I think SPSU is a helluva school.  My mentors at the firm were mostly Poly grads and I learned a ton from them – I consider them great architects, borderline brilliant even.  I would go so far as to say that I wouldn’t be in the position I am in now without the guidance they provided.  Maybe that’s a credit to them only, I don’t know. In the past year, we’ve hired the best and the brightest from that school and these kids hold a world of possibility and promise that they don’t even realize yet.  I don’t want this to sound like I’m slamming a particular school, even though this could be perceived as passive aggressively doing so.

To the point – what is so wrong with at least pretending we live in the real world as we are completing our education?  I only ask because plausibility appears to have taken a backseat to fantasy.  Yes, I understand that it’s your last chance to be completely out of the box before you enter the workforce but I don’t think that should mean that rational thought should be abandoned.  At the end of your thesis, you should at least be able to fake the conversation back into some semblance of reality. 

For the record, this criticism is coming from someone who quoted Moby Dick in their thesis statement. Who cited such architectural giants as The Clash and Ani Difranco and Rage Against the Machine as background to inform said thesis.  Who deconstructed laundry detergent bottles, reconfigured the pieces in model so as to understand the magnitude and purity and symbolic simplicity / dichotomy of the whale breaching the ocean’s surface.    

So I get it.  Be ridiculous, but understand that the last thing you do in college should be the first thing you show in your portfolio.  And if the first page of your portfolio is a colony on Mars, I’m not going to take you as seriously as someone who designed an actual building – on Earth.  As unfortunate as it might be, you will most likely be relegated to practicing architecture on this planet only.  If your proposal to alleviate traffic woes and simultaneously right the racial injustice you perceive Atlanta’s downtown connector to be is to turn those (5) miles into a lake but fail to give me a plan for what to do with the 300,000+ cars that traverse that stretch daily I will walk out of your jury next time too.  You are supposed to be an architect, right?  Then design a freaking building already!  If your architectural thesis doesn’t contain an actual building component, you’ve failed (sorry Jenn).  That's not a popular opinion but I think architects make buildings, not policy.

Yes, I remember being taught that a good architect could not only change the world but has a social obligation to affect the world in a positive manner and in so doing make it a better place through thoughtful design.  And I believe that to be true but if that’s true it’s not going to happen just because we want it to, it will happen through the quality of the spaces we design.  That’s our only value as a profession.  That’s our only directive.  If we believe that we are on the front lines of anything it is the social experience and if we believe that we are equal on a professional scale with doctors and lawyers et al, then we should prove it.  In my opinion, we haven’t yet.  Back to you Jenn, prove me wrong.  You actually have a thesis that might mean something one day.   

The beauty and the tragedy of one’s thesis is that it is just that important.  It was stressed to me how vital it was in a different manner than what I’ve witnessed recently or maybe I just took it differently or I was too old to know the difference.  The true nature of a thesis project, at least in my estimation, is to solidify how you view not only the beauty of but also the practice of architecture.  It is realistically the last chance you will get to say exactly what you want to say without fear of reprisal.  If executed properly, it should inform everything you do from that point onward.  It should be the catalyst that launches you into the field.  It should be a touchstone that you can go back to when the winds blow counter to your thought.  It has the power to define and direct your career but I’m afraid it’s only viewed as a big finale. 

Your thesis project should be your first step into reality, not the last epic spasm of your academic flight of fancy.  Or maybe that’s exactly what it should be.  Who am I to say, really?  As principled as I thought I was at the time, I don’t know if the values I purported to believe in then are center stage in my daily.  The emphasis was in the right place then, but I’ve probably lost the lyric between that day and this – but I still remember the chorus.

To be fair for a minute I must call the entirety of my own education into question and by extension the whole of the architectural education community.  Am I really a better architect now because I designed and constructed a boat out of (10) pieces of cardboard when I was a freshman?  It is kind of a cool thing that with duct tape, glue and a half-pack of Camels we could float (2) teenage girls across a lake at some random summer camp in Mississippi, but did it teach me anything?  One of my first assignments was to design a wall that people could inhabit.  WTF?  Do I just not get it?  Did I ever get it?  And if I don’t, then why have I been successful?  Is my success bullshit?  Am I successful?  How would I even know?  There’s a barometer for success in this country that doesn’t apply to architects.  We are and have always been so full of shit that we don’t even realize that we are full of shit, so there’s no way for us to know if we are doing well except by comparing stats with other full of shit architects.  Sounds like fun, no?  It’s not funny like on TV, and it’s not smart like it is in books.

What is it that I’m really so critical about I wonder after I’ve written this much?  Am I honestly concerned about the effect on the quality of architecture and the disparity that I fear exists between the academic world and practice or am I simply pissed off that practice doesn’t always, hardly ever actually rise to the intellectual height I was made to believe it would or should in school?  Am I concerned at all?  Or am I just trying to figure out and justify the path I’ve chosen?  Has actual practice created this cynicism or was I programmed to not feel like I got it right unless I’m published and I’m grasping for a reason why I haven’t been?  Is this doubt the reason that I busy myself with other projects – art, writing, music to fill the void that honestly exists in the very thing that I love to do the most?  I absolutely love my work.  I love the day-to-day constant struggle to get it right, whatever right might be.  But is that enough?  I’ve just opened a Pandora’s Box of questions that I don’t have the answer to.  At the end of the thought, I don’t think it has to have a capital “A” to be architecture but it does have to solve the problem to qualify. I think I qualify, but is that enough?      

When I was in school, we did imaginary projects for imaginary clients with imaginary parameters and based on how well we satisfied those parameters we received an imaginary fee, our grade.  But at least they were projects that could (usually) conceivably exist in a real world setting.  There was some attempt at a program.  We were made to believe that it was real.  We went to fictitious sites and collected sufficient imaginary data to complete the assignment, and looked really cool doing it I might add.  My strongest influence in college taught me that I should spend at least a year on a potential site before I draw a single line on paper.  I appreciate that dedication to the process, but if I would have listened to him, I would have had no idea what to do with a (6) week deadline – concept to permit when I graduated.

The loose, at best, point that I’m trying to make is that the venue and manner in which we educate tomorrow’s architects isn’t preparing them for success.  If we encourage these young fertile minds to only gallivant down whatever path feels right our profession is screwed.  There is a discipline to the practice of architecture that isn’t being disseminated to the next generation, wasn’t told to me either exactly.  There appears to be even less discipline exacted now than even when I was in school.  No, I don’t expect any school to teach in five years what I expect out of an intern on day one, but whatever education they do have should prepare them for the fire that I will hold them to immediately.  Accountability.  Ownership.  Exactness.  Can you be perfect?  Can you be fast?  Can you hold your own when a GC calls you a dick?  I want and need young architects to feel the same fire that I do.  And that’s not something that you learn in school.  You either have it or you don’t and you sure as hell don’t get it because you “designed” some cool thing.

Again and finally, I feel compelled to celebrate SPSU – their alumni taught me how to be an architect as much or more so than my own alma mater did.  Joe made me understand how important it is to be precise in every move I make.  David showed me what it really means to manage a client.  Scott taught me that design matters, no matter the project type.  Kiley taught me how to sell all of this bullshit and make it profitable.  That combined is a debt I can’t repay.  I draw from each of those relationships daily.  Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be – maybe you can’t understand what it means to be an architect until you are around practicing architects every day.  Maybe, most likely, it means something else to you anyway.

Maybe there is no disconnect between Academia and Architecture after all.  And if there is, maybe there should be.  Perhaps the disconnect exists on a much smaller scale, on a personal level that only practicing architects can affect.  Maybe it’s not the big clusterf@#$ I perceive it to be.  Perhaps, I just wrote a bunch of words that mean very little to you. Here's the one thing that I am sure of – we as architects are important.  I’ll never stop believing that.  And if I do my job properly there’s no way that you could disagree, whether you see the value in what I do or not.