Unfortunately we all must admit the admissions criteria for an architecture program is not always the best. We have all seen the complete morons that have entered the program (undergrad I am specifying) because they had the ability to draw. I personally have witnessed a few things that have made me question "Are architects really this stupid?" my 3 examples are:

Our first day of studio a girl stood up and asked: "so like when we are architects can we.... like make houses?"

Final critique for the semester: "My concept for this design was triangles"


Studio professor warning: "If you try to do sketches from an online picture of the building and not the actual building we will know and we will fail you!"

So, what is the dumbest youve seen?

for those of you wondering i went to the university of Illinois.

chicago

I agree about the dumb things people do like Posting the same topic three times....

Just messin dude......

triangles sounds pretty good, as concepts go.

i.m. pei anyone......?
j/k
but really.

Triangles?!?! Brilliant!

*pops open Guiness*

maybe it was bruce goff's kid? grandkid?
[img[http://www.searinghouse.com/images/drawings/medium/Triangle_print_cream.jpg width=418[/img]

jamchar, i feel you bro, about half the students at uf gave eye rolling ideas for their projects, unfortunately, they are the ones who make perfect employees for those architects who have sold out and build crap for developers or are just trying to make a quick buck for themselves. and then they go on to be successful at building crap themselves and laugh at everything that holds any architectural value. i ask myself everyday why they dont just get a degree in construction and leave the designing to people who actually care.

"I am a pirate." One of our 'esteemed' faculty members discussing how cutting edge and cool he is, although he is actually a major douche.

A juror @ our final crit this spring thought a fellow student's project reminded him of a Mayan Temple. He said, " I feel like there should be a priest in there holding a stone dagger high above his head ready to sacrifice a human life...I can hear the screaming." I don't know about dumb but it was interesting considering the juror was quite serious about his comment. The Stup may be I and my fellows students who pay money to hear this.

hey ... looks here like you're going to graduate after all !

there is this one lecturer/juror member that seemed to liken most projects to a rat houses...i laughed the first time i heard it - then it just seem corny

I forgot full dialogue

S: it's effective (either cost or circulation wise)
P: it's effective? your building is elevated. do you know how much it costs to have a building elevated above off the ground?
S: well... i elevated because of geo-thermal
P: (turning red) do you even know what geo-thermal is?

anyway, it's always fun to see stubborn and unique student arguing with critiques. =)

From a review in undergrad:


Critic (looking up from copy of 'Golf Digest' that he had been flipping through for the entire review): Why didn't you just make it symmetrical?

Student: I don't really like ... symmetry ...

Critic: Do you like your face?

Crit: Those Concrete Columns do not have a large enough diameter, they could never handle the load.

My comment: Do you ever go to the main Univesity Library. A puzzled look on his face. So I carry on, well there the exact same size as the columns in the Univesity Library with the same structural bays, and that place is full of books so I'm sure the dead load far exceeds the loads being applied on this building. I believe the columns will do a fine job of holding up the structure.

That Associate Proffessor happened to be bagging a female friend of mines girlfriend. He saw me having a drink with her the week before so I think he came into that session with a chip on his shoulder. Next week he was dumped by the lady, and I always put a smile on my face when ever he encountered me in the hall way.

i'm not going to go into any other than my own, as most of them were said by my good friends. that said, let me try and piece together a dumb comment i made at asu, 3rd year, when pushed pretty hard against a wall:

"Well, it's just something about learning how to design. I feel that sometimes, in order to understand how to do things the right way, you must actually first do them the wrong way. And that's why I felt that this would be the best approach, because I knew this project would never be built."

or something like that. but it does get better. one of the reviewers, a woman from sci-arc, cut me off with an obviously disgusted and quick "what". after this, my own professor who is actually someone relatively prominent in academia [i won't say who] cut her off and said he didn't want to go into that, and then went on about how much he liked my project, and explained how it was some sort of reflection of my personality, and then referred to me as being like some type of genius.

le bossman is definitely like some kind of genius...or maybe like some kind of genie...i'm not sure the difference

good architects borrow, great architects steal



wait...no, that was the best

trace don't you mean great architects repeat the same thing they've done for the last five years in order to keep in large orders from prestigious clients who want the thing they did five years ago repeated in their site location?

The dumbest thing I ever heard, this one guy I knew outside of school told me

"why are you pursuing architecture, you know in 10 years computers are going to be doing it all, there will no longer be a need for architects."

computers can design buildings ?! what the hell am i doing with my life!

Mies who? From a 4th year B.Arch student.

Oh man. We had this one professor who used to get all pissed off when people used sexy models for scale figures... One final review she blasted this Frat boy for using all half naked women in his renderings.

When she asked him why he felt that is was necessary to use nude women as scale figures and not nude men, he said

"I wouldn't want the nude men to distract people from focusing on the nude women in my renderings..."

"Everybody likes JUGS!"

This was one kid's opening line to his thesis presentation in 4th year industrial design. He was designing a musical instrument that had something or other to do with musical jugs.

Oh, and the powerpoint image was of a female torso in a bikini.

Classy.

dia, i'm not sure who looks worse with that one, the student or the school? ouch.

"Put a sexy woman in the image" from a client.

Everyone loves a sexy woman.

Thank God.

765...hilarious!

my own personal favorite was something i said...

i'll set up the story...so anyways, we had 4-5 girls in our studio... and three in particular would not stop complaining about the workload, type or work etc. anyways, it was towards the end of the semester when they were complaining about a deadline to a professor who was pretty young, pretty reserved, but always nice and thoughtful. so they're bitchin and moanin to the prof...and i say loudly:

maybe there should be a seperate studio... for girls... that's EASIER!

that shut 'em up pretty good... enough for me to here a faint "oohhh"... and i look over to see the dean of architecture, who happens to be a woman, looking at some of our models. well, i felt like a sexist bastard and i thought i might not graduate. anyways, that's the dumbest thing i probably said at school...er wait, could be ever, let me check.

My dean and prof drunkenly confessed to me at a bar that he loves gigantic breasts, and that he's happy with his third wife because she has huge breasts and his first two wives had small ones.

I don't remember asking him anything about it, but there it was.

so i guess you know what "concepts" to use in his studio.

In History of European architecture:

Prof: What sort of differences do you see between these two buildings?

Moron: Well the one on the left is painted yellowish the one on the right is more whitish, and the one on the left is alot bigger with more windows.

we had a guest lecturer once... a jazz musician- kind of more like an inspirational guest lecturer, not an architect.

he told us his five favorite jazz musicians. then he asked a kid in the first row his five favorite architects...

he only came up with two. not because he didn't have 5, but because he couldnt think of the names of five architects. (i'll cut him some slack, it was a first year, first semester students... but still)

the jazz musician let him have it... told him he might as well quit now because if he couldnt even think of the names of five architects, he clearly wasnt invested enough.

oh and my personal favorite, coming from a juror i had on my second year studio project:

juror: so you have a courtyard there?
me: yes
j: with no roof?
m: well, yes, that is a courtyard.
j: so what happens if you want to watch the sunset and it's raining?
m: i think that answer is pretty obvious? unless i should expect the sun to be out when it is raining.

what is jazz?

Slant I heard the same thing about Alvar Aalto. One of my former bosses visited his studio with his wife and Aalto just couldn't take his eyes off of her yammers.

2nd year Studio Crit:

while holding a model in the air, spinning it around...

"it has to make architectural sex"

design III, fall 2005. This guy who never came to class pinned up his work, which was all draw on a large sheet of cardboard. yes, you read it right, he sketched his "drawings" that were awful, right onto the cardboard. the project title that he placed in the middle said "a bazaar's design".

Our design professor then said, "what's a bazaar's design?". the student then said, "it's the project title" with a weird look on his face. "son, if you would have came to class and followed the syllabus, you would have noticed the project's new name, the white room". Great times with a bunch of slackers, who later dropped out.

A bitch of a teacher not paying attention to where she was walking stepped right on someones chipboard model, crushed it.

Without any remorse she looks right at him and said if you built that properly it would have supported me.

One project I did had these slats on the roof, so there were essentially stripes of light on the interior, so pointing to a rendering I jokingly introduced my project by saying: "My concept was zebras."

diabase- the other 2, um, 'architects' at my office do not know who Mies is... Corbusier either.

... luckily one is leaving, I believe his replacement is well-educated and enlightened to the last century of happenings.

Jamchar, sounds like a prof at my school, first year prof, who actually i respected a lot...

she made a comment once which was hysterical... made on purpose mind you, but still worth telling...

for our final first semester project we were to develop 'passages' which were to be set up in sequence... an interactive kind of exhibit...
anyway, in the run up to this thing we all of course built small scale models of assorted materials... one person chose to build their model of bass wood planks and sticks but used a hot glue gun to stick it all together. subsequently all the joints had big globs of hot glue around them. First year prof walks to the model covered in hot glue and begins to talk about it. A question from the student arose... something to the effect of, how much weight do you think this part could hold? the prof replies, "well judging from the size of your ( hot glue ) balls, alot..."

one of the dumbest things i've said was @ my final thesis review!

i didn't include some small support spaces on my model but i showed them in my drawings.

when asked about this, what was my reply?

"because i didn't want to make my model look ugly!"

this was in defense of my thesis!

ha ha ha, luckily i had a good project (@ least they thought so) so i came out alright!

There are a couple of guys who are always good for a laugh, especially during final review. One's a frat-daddy who you want to hate with your whole being, but you can't help but love. The other's a total ass without a single redeeming factor.

Frat daddy Crit:

Walks in with a "final" model obviously made in the last two hours from poster board, hot glue, and various dry foods. It spins by way of a small R/C motor. There are micro machines and army men as entourage in the model.

C: What the hell is that?
FD: It's my model. It spins. Do you like it?
C: What's the suicide rate on that building?

a few little gems from the total ass:

C: What are all these arrows on your plans and diagrams?
Ass: It's "movable architecture".
Critiquer just looks at him like he's waiting on the punch line...
C: You can't rebuild the Barcelona Pavillion with room dividers on wheels and call it architecture.

C: This diagram is pretty...um...interesting. What is it?
Ass: I diagrammed light.
C: Huh?
Ass: I said I diagrammed light.
C: I got that part. I just don't get how the hell you diagrammed it and what exactly you were diagramming.
Ass: Well I just drew the light.
C: How the hell did you measure the light? What, are you doing your projects in the physics lab? Last time I checked you can't just whip out a ruler and measure light waves.

+-, cut the kid some slack. He knows 7 architects now.


there were two dumb things said at that lecture.

Lecturer: "So the Pantheon is your favorite building, why?"

Student: "Because it is old and has columns" (Or was that our first year profesor's favorite building. Where's the knee pads kid.)

funny rfuller ...cause I had several professors who actually told us to diagram light (though I understood the effects were the actual study). Studio 3...the catalyst of an entire semesters work was a diagram of light...

Well, that's not to say that diagramming light isn't an honorable pursuit and something you can learn a lot about. I wish I had visuals. It was the most terrible thing I had ever seen. Words cannot describe the madness that was the ass's light diagram.

We have a "light box" project at TTU where a whole studio is based off of light diagrams...this guy just kind of missed the boat completely.

yeah, it's one thing to actually study the solar azimuth/angle, etc. and it's another thing to diagram light by just drawing a yellow line @ 45 degrees.

hahahaha

yeah ours was about diagramming the pattern of light from photos taken on the hour (every hour) for 24 hours (that was fun- not really).

that pattern was abstracted

the abstract pattern became form

became architecture

insert program

blah blah blah

finals.

...did some cool graphite and conte renderings though.

ha ha ha, @ "insert program"

sadly, that was how a lot of projects i saw while in architecture school came to be. (i'm not excluding myself, by any means!)

the basic formula goes:

use some half assed diagrams to generate a form.

insert architectural program into said form.

tweak as necessary.

hey, presto, you've made architecture!

oooh, conte! nice!

here is a topper;

student left out 1/4 of his project plan out of the final presentation.

excuse;

ran out of vellum paper in the middle of the night and by the time art store was open, he didn't have any time to finish.

year; 1980

place;

sci arc @ santa monica

result;

incomplete project (no pun here)

that's not all...

his older graduate student brother came down and yelled at his younger brother for being irresponsible and stupid in front of everybody and hit him with a yard stick he grabbed...

i kid you not...

that's a great one, abra!

----------

we had a guy in my studio (2nd year)... who would do his drawings with 3-D cad, but didn't know what to do next... he would print screen them for the presentations, REFUSE to do plans/sec/elevations... when asked by the jury why he didn't have the nessesary drawings, he would respond:

"you just can't comprend the quality of work I am doing"

... he would get grilled, endlessley, and not a word of critique would set in... he always defended his crap tooth & nail, as if the jury had no idea what they were talking about/ expecting.

and he only had 1 model for the final presentation... it looked like a mechanical grasshopper, and in no way resembled the, um, drawings.

... he dropped out, but we kept his model above the door to the studio for a few semesters after.

(damson, you out there? I don't think I am properly recounting the humor of this guy...maybe you could tell this better?)

this one isn't from school, but rather from the table next to me at dinner tonight... the people were obviously there celebrating highschool graduation as all of the schools had their ceremonies today... this next generation of kids is gonna be sharp...

recently graduated student: what is a badget?

waiter: huh?

RGS: a badget... it says that the chicken comes with a badget?

waiter: oh... a baguette... it is a piece of bread...

you guys are discouraging me. i thought maybe if i changed schools i wouldn't have to put up with stupid shit from professors/dumb kids. but it's the same everywhere ?! ugghhhhhhhhhhh i'm special, why isn't there a special kids school?

WTT...are you changing schools "midway"....or are you going from undergrad to grad? I'm curious about the process/ difficulty of changing after you've done a year or two somewhere- especially at the masters level.

i have another one. there was a landscape studio in ugrad next to mine. pretty much everyone in there was a woman. myself and some friends were walking down the hallway, and we stopped to look at a piece of scrap wood one friend was talking about for one reason or another. right in front of the landscapers, which i wasn't paying attention to. randomly, he snapped it in half. i looked at him and said, "what'd ya do that for you c*nt?" i "felt" all of the heads turn in the room, and also noticed it in the corner of my eye. reddened, i moved out of the way of the door to the studio, while my two friends stood there staring at everyone like deer in headlights. the last thing the landscape architects must have seen were my arms reaching, go go gadget style, in front of the door and pulling them out of the way. it was a couple weeks before i walked that direction again.

That's pretty good le bossman. I've only pulled 2 all-nighters since my first studio, and they were back to back before a final crit. (Stupid enough, I know). I had been up for about 60 hours when it was my turn for a crit, and I'm told I used all 7 of the words you can't say on television during my crit. Luckily the critiquer was really into "dirty realism" as he called it and loved my presentation style. He said it took balls.

a student had some very brightly colored, almost color-blind renderings, probably due to plotter malfunction or non-CMYK color profile.

prof: about your colors, they're very...mexican...

Dithyramben maybe he was trying to be the next luis Barragan?

Professor [known by all here] rolls out the trace over my elevations and starts drawing triangles and circles. Then says, "I don't know what I'm doing here, but you know what I mean."

not school, but at work... trying to minimize the sq.footage, I recomend chopping a dittly-do off the garage (it was just wasing space, not fuctional whatsoever)... boss says, "

NO, I need that for architecture"

(so instead of chopping the useless space in the garage, we continue condensing the rest of the house, removing functional space)

we had a gril in our studio who forgot stairs in her 5 story building...

I had many people ask me how I was going to move my 2000 lb bay model into the architecture building for our final crit

This wasn't in school, but anyway...

Some years ago I was riding an 'L' train around the Chicago Loop. Sitting a row or two in front of me on the train were a middle-aged couple, obviously tourists from out of town. (You can spot them a mile away.)

As the train is passing a particularly ornate building, the wife turned to her husband and exclaimed, "Oh Bob, look at the pretty architecture on that building!"

1st yr studio, 1st crit, one of my professors told one of my classmates that he should be a used car salesman because of the way he tried to sell his project

"it looked like a mechanical grasshopper,

haha..it did!. i remember him using a 4 ft. long pointing wand during his presentation. i remember a juror being extremely confused with the model and asking him "where's the circulation?"...and he points at one of the grasshoppers legs with his wand.

e:
"Professor [known by all here] rolls out the trace over my elevations and starts drawing triangles and circles. Then says, "I don't know what I'm doing here, but you know what I mean."

Hey e, i think i know that professor, or maybe he's my boss.. or the dean...?? hahaha, so great. def been there.

(just overheard at work, my PM):

"the standard is what you make it!"

um, no.

tumbles

who said the thing about the moveable floorplates??? The building next to ours (by Wes Jones) has moveable floorplates...the building bankrupted the client who built it

"you don't need an architecture professor to accompany your studio on your architecture study abroad. my wife and i go places all the time and we learn all we need about architecture by ourselves."


w o w.

"congratulations, you got an A in studio"...fools...

group precedent study/ adaptation project: I was doing the drawings, my partner the models. She slacked off and didn't leave herself enough time to do a proper job of it, so she glued in the floorplates without any penetrations so that she'd just have to cut a simple rectangle. However she did take the time to put stairs in.

Our professor picks up the model, and says "How do you get from one floor to the next?"

Partner: "oh, the stairs are right there."

Prof: "yes, but how do you use them?"

Partner, with very puzzled look: "well, they're what take you from one floor to the next..."

Prof: "But if you're on the second floor, you can't even see them because there's no hole in the floor! So how do you use them?"

not dumb, actually brilliant (and this person reads archinect, too, so I hope she sees this):

critic (asking about the large swathes of leather in a portion of a student's project): So, tell me about these leather panels, how big a piece of leather are we talking about?

student (deadpans): Well, the only limitation is the size of the cow.

Not necessarily in line with this discussion, but I felt this was the best place to put it...

This is how my Fall 2006 semester went, and how others have gone in the past:

Concept review: "Wow, Ryan these are really strong concepts. This is really good work."

Schematic Design review: "This is good work, Ryan, but it's still a little conceptual. Let's really try and push these ideas forward, this can be a really great project."

Design Development review: "Why don't you have windows in your floor plans yet? Have you thought at all about tectonics? I'm struggling a little bit, Ryan, I mean this project is basically in a pre-schematic phase."

Final Review: "This form you have created is beautiful, but it's simply a diagram. All of the concepts you've discussed work with your form but your elevations seem like you just came up with them really out of nowhere. I mean, I don't really understand these elongated perforations at all and their seemingly random pattern. Your units don't really seem to pop like you were trying to do. Beautiful diagrams though."

dont be discouraged. sometimes you have to "dumb it down" to solve the tectonic problem and then reevaluate your concept. zoom in and zoom out.

"Hey where do you get this stuff? How much is it? I want to know 'cause I like to walk around my apartment naked a lot and I need something to put in front of my windows." -my 2nd year 1st semester studio professor referring a sheet of polycarbonate I was holding.

hahaha...I have a teacher say the EXACT same thing when I had a sheet of polygal on my desk in studio.

who knew our Profs were all so kinky...ok...i guess we did know...

"Hey where do you get this stuff? How much is it? I want to know 'cause I like to walk around my apartment naked a lot and I need something to put in front of my windows."

what did the image look like?

from a classmate in first year during a precedent study review, presenting on the villa savoye:

"i spent ages looking, but i couldn't find any information on it in the library."

why is it called "m.arch" when it starts in september? -me drunk

A) Student and B) Student having conversation in college Cafeteria.


A) Student : - " That Building was done by Mies Van der Rohe".


B)Student :-- " Really ?? , so was she a famous architect ? "

2nd semster design studio we were to design an elevated train station to fit in a chicago plot.


Prof: so how do the people get up to the platform?

Student: Well there are 3 elevators.

Prof: Elevators? Everyones gonna miss their train.

Student and B) Student having conversation in college Cafeteria.
A) Student : - " That Building was done by Mies Van der Rohe".
B)Student :-- " Really ?? , so was she a famous architect ? "

that's so IIT
just kidding

a friend of mine told me a story of a gal in an undergrad final review who had designed a specific 'spiritual space' for some sort of interaction with GOD in her building. As she was explaining this special place to the guest critics she was so overcome with emotion that she began to CRY.... aparently she continued to elaborate as she wept tears of joy....

wow

personally witnessed a good friend get smashed last year for his drawings that were started eaaaaaaaaarly that morning. After pulling FOUR allnighters putting together a great model he had little to speak of in the way of drawings: after lengthy discourse around the model eyes turned to his panels with one of the more animated reviewers saying with a chuckle... "ya, your drawings... they really are crappy"

just a moment from one of my favourite reviews to view

Hey PetePeterson,

We had to do a spiritual space far my UG too, that reminds me:


Crit: So your ENTIRE space is elevated in the air?
Student: well, yes I wanted it to be for ghosts only.

Crit: um...... so whose gonna pay to build it?

ha! man there is too much latent comedy in the review day phenomenon

I'll never forget. "Don't do it everywhere"

Now I really can't wait for grad school. ;)

I forgot the "!"

jamchar.. are you engel?

sparch

No, Im afraid not... I assume engel is someone you know?

But I did go to UIC, perhaps the projects I have described ring a bell?

Overheard at a review only a couple of weeks ago:

Critic One: blah, blah, blah, blah, envaginated, blah, blah, blah
Critic Two: blah, blah, blah, blah, testicular sac, blah, blah, blah

Damn, Smoke! Where do you go to school!

Yale

765 ... I was quoting your old boss. Guess who the respondent was?

"I am a pirate." One of our 'esteemed' faculty members discussing how cutting edge and cool he is, although he is actually a major douche."

What school was that in? First semester-first year, my critic said to one guy: "You know what this reminds me of? Pirates." and walked away.

Also heard during a review (by the same critic):

In reference to a windowless brick wall: "Is this wall here for dogs to pee on?"

In reference to a corner with a very narrow acute angle: "What happens in this corner here? Is this a space for triangle-headed people to stick their heads in?"