I realized the other day that I've devoted (enslaved?) myself to this profession for about 13 years....that's education including working in offices. I recently went back to finish a MArch, on top of my 5 year professional BArch degree. So I've spent more than half my career in the academic world, and the rest in the workings of an architects office.

I think I could have answered the original question of what the point of architecture school more confidently 2 years ago. Right now, I can't think of the words at all. Part of going back to university was to fulfill that drive to continue with further design studios and academic study. Critical thinking, complex design resolution and the ability to express one's ideas eloquently have become very important to my professional life, and I've developed these skills best in an academic setting.

5 years of an undergraduate degree just can't hold all or even a significant part of what it takes to become a good architect. I'm inclined to think that this past decade has all been "architecture school", and that I'm only now equipt to talk / write / design / document the way I want to now after going through all that.

BlueG - you are 100% correct - it is a free market. That's why architects get paid next to nothing.

next to nothing? plz.

i make the most out of 4 of my friends, and i'm still in undergrad

What you consider good pay and not good pay is all relative. I look to professional degrees with comparable difficulty/dedication. Given that, I think starting at 40k is next to nothing.

i second that. it's all what/who you compare salaries to. i failed to mention those other 4 friends have no college under them whatsoever.

i still need twenty spaces.

"value" is a hard concept to grasp in a commercial world -- how much is poetry worth -- how much is art worth -- how much is Brad Pitt worth?

at the end of the day, in "commercial" terms, value is whatever the buyer decides it is -- in "architectural" terms, value is altogether a different matter to most individuals posessing an architecture degree. this makes for an awkward relationship between architects and commerce (much as poets have a difficult time in a commercial world - their art may be good / their pay typically is not).

in most (but not necessarily all) design firms, the value of an entry level graduate is determined by how much near-term contribution that individual can make to the documentation process -- that's not necessarily what architecture school teaches us to do - the firm is left to teach that skill.

in a law firm, the value of an entry level attorney is determined by how much that law firm can bill for an hour of that young attorney's time. what they teach in law school makes that value relatively high.

if flashing details are so easy, why do buildings still leak?

because it's expensive to me when buildings leak, I'm willing to (and do) pay quite a lot to experienced architects who can detail flashing on a complex building without buggering up the intended design

Blue Goose re: value: It seems to me (I may be off-base, and I'm definitely getting off-topic) that medicine in recent years has started to push the "value" of wellness, that is, not treating illnesses, but staying healthy to begin with.

Is there a lesson there for architects in pushing what we see as the "value" of the built environment?

now, is that pronounced Eeeeefus, or Eeeefs?

meta - actually, it's not even close. Lawyers are starting at approx. $150k per year and doctors can get $250k per year. MBA's are around $100k+ *

That's starting.




*my numbers are a many years old

meta

when I was in school doingh interships and being paid hourly, I was making more $$$ than many of the salaried employees who had beem at the office for 5+ yrs

well if they didn't have beam at the office (and for 5 years!), they'd probably make more.

what up garpunk?

Just trolling for typos.

You?

gads, i wish there were more time to respond in detail -

one thing that strikes me reading through all the posts so far - why is there this implied dichotomy between 'design/theory' and design/building'? if i had to look at one of the glaring issues in education, it's that we perpetuate a split between 'design (as form)' from any real material consequence. instead, we (the schools) see design as an abstracted, compositionally driven exercise which privileges formalisitic solutions (based on languages, grammars, typologies, scientific notations, etc) divorced (most of the time) from any corresponding material reality.

one of the other things we do is assume the studio is a ground for ambitious instructors to test out their own, more advanced notions of what architecture is/may be. i say assume, because they (we) aren't really that interested in teaching material that might actually form the 'core' of a discipline - something that is essential if you want to evolve a body of knowledge over time. (disagree, but if you think that the medical and legal fields don't have a core body of knowledge that is transmitted first, then diving into more speculative realms, you're just deluding yourselves). we're interested in teaching the speculative, the fringe, attacking the center from the periphery. all of these are great within artistic education, but i'm going to argue it's killing architecture as a professional body of knowledge. you simply can't make any realistic attack on the 'core' body of a discipline's knowledge if you don't know the core knowledge to begin with. maybe a professor teaching can, but a third year student simply cannot.

lastly, for now, if you're looking at the schools, you have to critique the basis for tenure and advancement within the university system. tenure is granted more on published works and research (especially for research universities, which almost every major university is classified as). there is no mechanism to recognize the applied, actual teaching skills that someone may possess. if you spend your time refining and developing the way in which you teach, you're dead. if you publish a lot, but are an awful classroom teacher, no one will care.

there's more to be said - but we have to take a commercial break...

you make a lot of good points, laru, but continue to characterize schools as not teaching basic design knowledge before getting into a more speculative realm. i disagree. in both my student and teaching experiences there was a keen awareness of the material implications of what was proposed. a lot of the 'research', in fact, was a lot about feasibility and affordability of certain systems over others. i don't think the dichotomy you question is as present in schools as it is among us who talk about schools.

the reality of school curricula is a lot broader, deeper, and more solid than this discussion has assumed. let's not set up a fictional straw man, call it 'school' and proceed to pick it apart.

well there didnt used to be a dichotomy. it used to be that architectural theory grew out of the building of buildings.

this is a good thread. <headspins>

All "real world" and waterproofing dynamics aside, is it feasible to get what Grads Schools claim to provide without actually going? I mean I know its about networking and that degree...but as for content of the education. How do you keep up with cool shit you see in studios image on Top School Portfolio websites?

Sometimes, i think upper class Masters student looks amazing from a distance , but I still question the sticker price of there tuition.

steven -

perhaps we simply have had different experiences. the schools that i've taught in, though, tended to privilege form over material, speculation over core. and, perhaps, i'm focusing more exclusively on the studio (and not so much support courses).

one other point i think we would agree on - we (the schools) don't always hold the students to real accountability for their knowledge about the more detail oriented components of making architecture.

i don't know about name-brand grad schools, ff33, because mine wasn't. but there is certainly a benefit to graduate school after you've been working for a while: the time to regroup and think about things that have become important to you - removed from the professional environment and its particular pressures - and the time to explore interests based on that more mature thinking.

from the networking angle, a regional school can provide just as much (maybe more!) networking benefit if you plan to stay in the area where you go to school. i, for example, had been in ky for a decade and intended to stay in ky. university of kentucky has ended up being a perfect choice, both for what i wanted to do in school and for expanding my network in the state. as much as i REALLY wanted to go to rice, it wouldn't have helped me nearly as much.

From laru:

you simply can't make any realistic attack on the 'core' body of a discipline's knowledge if you don't know the core knowledge to begin with

Students: read this sentence over a few times. Then a few more times. This is important to understand.

who's attacking what? i don't know many, if any, students attacking anything and really consider that another roarkian myth. laru, i would say that you are the one creating the dichotomy between practice and theory. from most of the posts i've read people agree that architectural education should be grounded in real world practice. decon has been over for almost two decades; there's no need to fight it anymore. i think the real question is can architectural theory inform real world practice; i would argue it should and does. it is what makes practice and building rich.

the point of architecture school is too keep young adults busy for a few years...otherwise we'd have a bunch of restless young, unemployed people who have nothing better to do than cause trouble for authorities.

bigger question is, what's the point of kindergarten?

what are you talking about? every kindergarten lesson is valuable in architecture school. in fact, i'd dare say it's impossible to succeed in architecture school without first having graduated from an ivy league kindergarten

ivy league kindergarten...now that's exactly where i went wrong. but i won't make the same mistake with my kids...if i'm ever successful enough to have children then they are definitely going to ivy league kindergarten

I'd say 2nd grade was my most important year. I learned to play with tanograms (triangular plastic pieces that you solve puzzles with). I mastered them, won stuff, got great accolades (and probably tons of stickers!), and now every piece of architecture I design is all pointy and triangular.

Seriously.

absolutely nothing ecept a 'craft' that breaks a person

i recommend work experience route. 6(AZ) - 10(NCARB broad experience) years depending on your situation and luck to find an architect(s) who would be willing to take you on

jafidler -

i don't know where the decon reference comes in - that's not what i'm addressing at all. and i'm certainly not suggesting to chuck theory out the window - on the contrary, great architecture expresses great ideas.

what i'm trying to suggest is that, within the academic context, there are a lot of faculty much more interested in promoting/exploring/testing their own, narrowly focused agendas in the studio than perhaps there should be. if you're a student, you are somewhat bound by the limits your studio critic imposes. if they are interested in computational form generation, well, you're looking at computational form generation. if they're interested in cutting sections through a sponge...

for example - at a school i previously taught at, there was a 5th year professor who ran the entire class (3 sections worth - the other two teachers were essentially his t.a.'s) through a series of incredibly specific exercises that went basically as follows:

choose a beetle (a pool of beetles were pre-selected).
do a series of ink-washes to render the beetle from all different angles.
do a prismacolor of the beetle (approx. 2x life size)
take a small, abstract area of the beetle that has a high positive/negative contrast ratio. render that as a rectangle in prisma.
take the small abstract area and, through minimal manipulation, create a field pattern/grid of those rectangles. render in prisma.
make a positive/negative model of the field (chipboard)

this is now your basic facade of your building (for which you have no program, etc).

do a 'wall' out of the field - figure out how to cap it and put a base on it. develop it through a few more iterations. you now have a wall section.

then, let's give you a program - small chapel, minimal interior rooms.

take the facade, exend it out to the sides of your building. develop more 'architecturally'. think about inside/outside relationships of the facade. try, if you can, to think about where the thermal barriers are.
develop a roof, an entry procession through the building, attach to an existing site wall (everyone had to put it in the same location), resolove the roof.

viola! you are done. build a 1/2" scale model in basswood, try to do a manual interior perspective, and the other regular kinds of drawings.




what we (the jurors) saw was 30ish very similar projects with incredibly beautiful facades that were barely resolved past the basswood stage. (roofs, etc. tended to be a bit more clunky). for me, this represented a sort-of triumph for the professor - it proved that he had developed a method of exploration that, when repeated, tended to produce very similar results. but what did the students get from this? exposure to a highly idiosyncratic process that 99.99% of them would probably never dream of nor use again? yes, i'll concede that it may have 'opened the eyes' of some and made them think a bit differently, but who benefitted most in the long run? the students or the professor? my problem with it is that it completely shut down any kind of self-developed process (something i would think a thesis is supposed to produce) and instead teeters on a thin line between oppression and ego mania.

now, if one of those same thesis students had produced this exact same project, through their own hard work and discovery (aided by the professor), we would have all been blown away by the kind of originality in the thinking. that, from my perspective, is the difference in school - i don't think we, as professors, should be imposing that kind of highly personalized methodology. we should be encouraging the students to think for themselves while giving them solid tools to do so.

it's not a style question - it's a methodology question and what that method is grounded in. and, most importantly, it's about a certain kind of humility on the professor's part to know when to bring their wisdom and insight to the fore and know when they are simply using the students to advance their own research.

sorry about that last post, laru. it came out far more aggressively than i intended it. the decon reference - i would argue that the most recent theory/practice schism came out of deconstructivism. whenever i read someone making that case, i think decon.

it's all a very fine line. for me, i find the beetle example you gave to be a prime example of what most critics of academia rail against, namely an exercise without any sort of grounding within the realities of building or practice, a "non-intelligent" architecture. a very good former professor of mine would call it "drawing leaves."

so i don't know...there isn't one answer to this, but perhaps allowing students to explore their own individual interests is the best that schools can really offer.

laru- i think you've described a PERFECT first or second year project. that's when the kind of foundation in methodology/process and basic lessons of how to think through transformations is really valuable.

as a fifth year project? i agree with you. not much value...

...UNLESS the whole studio had exhibited a need to be kicked in the pants (a situation i've had and which has to be addressed through 'basic principles' sometimes.)

i just started my first year at MSU and this past summer i went to a week long architecture camp called "design discovery" for incoming freshmen. seriously it completely changed my concept on the use of space and form on design. i learned so much in a week and i can't wait to see what the next five years hold.

I can't wait to hear how you are feeling in 5 years.

i find that beetle project similar to a first year project we did in undergrad (but based on eisenmenn instead of entomology). i didn't understand it then and don't understand it now. i couldn't teach that to anyone. i just couldn't. is not how i work. is not how i think, in a seriously fundamental way. teaching "process" as exterior methodology unrelated to intention just makes me shiver...

but that is mere disagreement over pedagogy. i still don't think archi-education is failing anyone as professionals.

teaching business might help, but then again some are just good at it and some are not. i know a starchitect who is fairly gifted at making money and developing interest in projects. on other hand a super starchitect came to give speech at ULI last month and he could not bring himself out of academic mode to make a point to his audience that they would understand. in the end they just dismissed him. so much for drumming up business in asia.

learning that sort of thing is, like making cd's, most easily done in real world, and even then is tuf enough. trying to get the message across in school? i don't think it is possible.

steven ward has it right as far as i can tell. school is not at its best when it attempts to be a mirror to the world. it is much more powerful as place to learn how to think. doing will come later... and naturally enough...

Architecture schools should change.
Design should be taught by real estate agents.
The remainder of the classes sholud be Building Codes, Office / Site procedures, and Working drawings. Nothing else matters.

jump (and maybe some others) will find this interesting.

I'm in my first year of a 4-year M.Arch program. I won't go into how the studios are run (I'll save that for another post), but I will say that I'm finding Studio to be really interesting.

Our first 'project' involves going to the hospital and watching dissections on real cadavers. I never expected that when I came here, but I'm happy to be doing crazy shit right now. The serious business-world stuff will happen in due time.

"The serious business-world stuff will happen in due time"

thats the problem - you will be 30 before you know it, and while your peers are begining their lives, having luxuries like families, you'll just be starting the actual learning you'll need

I'll be 31 when I graduate, so you're right. I'll be broke until then, and I won't sleep very much. I'm not a newby; I did a 4.5 year industrial design undergrad degree already. Architecture was the next natural step for me, personally.

I'm in school because I like learning. I chose this school for its experimental attitude toward design, but that doesn't mean that structures courses, and professional development courses aren't also mandatory, because they are.

The other way to look at it, evilplatypus, is that while my friends are all bored in their day jobs and looking for a fourth career, I'll still be learning for years and years to come. It's all about perspective.

i have learned so much in working at a firm for this past year. my first office job actually.

but i fully understand a need for architecture school. you really need a basis to learn off of, if you just jump into a firm your learning curve needs to be higher to get into the field. that's just my opinion.

no point just debt and paperwork

"The other way to look at it, evilplatypus, is that while my friends are all bored in their day jobs and looking for a fourth career, I'll still be learning for years and years to come. It's all about perspective."

How may I ask are you funding this Peter Pan lifestyle?

Your friends may be bored but they are making money (maybe they don’t have the financial backing to study forever??) and are contributing to society while you are flitting around school for another 5 years.

Strange how architecture’s core value is “doing good for society”, yet when you objectively look at it, SOA pumps kids full of useless (but oh so fun) archibabble and pseudo-archi-religious crap then kicks them out into the big bad world where it takes another 5 years to actually come to grips with the profession and be of any use. By now their over 30 and BANG it hits them, arch is not all it’s cracked up to be, but what now? Who can turn their back on over 10 years of “brainwashing archi-cation” and start again?

Architecture school, writing cheques it can’t cash.

what part of this profession is Peter Pan? the thing i love the most about architecture is the opportunity to learn something new everyday. to know that there are better ways to do things, to grow, to learn new technologies, new methods of creating architecture, to represent architecture, etc...so many friends i have outside of architecture treat their jobs as 9-5 endeavors, i on the other hand, take my job home with me everyday, think about it everyday, and rethink how to be better at it everyday. learning has nothing to do with school, no one is "flitting" around, if you think learning about architecture is a 5-7 year endeavor, you've clearly made the wrong life choice, school is just the beginning, being an architect is where you really learn.

sounds cool slantsix.

i dunno if the idea that the real world is starting for anyone during uni education. experience is part of everyone's career path, and i don't think there is anyone who escapes that.

i had to get a stamp on some papers from the fellow who runs our dept today. since i am in mult-disciplinary faculty (devoted to saving the world and the environment etc etc ) he is not an architect, but instead a climate historian. we were chatting in his office a bit and it turns out he studied biology in uni, then switched to history. now he mixes both, using (among other things) pollen counts in archeological sites to make discoveries about how mankind has altered the world they lived in. then synthesises his findings to better understand what modern man is doing.

so what you say? well, thing is barely even a small piece of his original education directly impacts on his daily life today as a professional scientist, but it absolutely set the standard and the approach. the scientific method is something he learned in school but he didn't make a real original contribution until years after finishing his formal education. even phd was just a beginning for him...

architecture is just the same. we all need to learn some basic stuff (process, color, cadavers, whatever...) then we need to learn how to apply it to do impt new things...why is that a problem? it seems pretty normal to me.