having problems with your interns mdler?

to rack up large debts

mdler, what was the point of your Interlochen education?

I mean seriously - that might be a good point of departure for this discussion.

For those of you who don't know what Interlochen is, you should.

WHA? I'm lost. My education did not prepare me for liberty bell's comments.

LB

I think Interlochen prepared me more for the real world (had I pursued theater design and production) than my architectural education did for a career in architecture. (Ironically, I may end up using my theater background for my next professional endevour)

I bring up this topic because I think that students are very unprepared (including myself) after a 6 yr architecture education. They may come out well read, but most cant put a building together worth a damn, know nothing about business and real estate, engineering, public policy, building department, etc...

we bitch about our profession taking a back seat to developers, decorators, and builders, but I think that this is because we are not trained to be competent in the areas that our clients request us to be (getting a quality project built).

Yea, we may have read Heidegger(sp??) and all, and can do some cool flashy animation on the computer, but very little of this is going to get us too far in the real world (unless we have the $$$ support to work on competitions all day long)

academic architectural education = an environment and forum to promote theoretical exerimentation and allow the exploration of ideas that cannot be explored in reality


no bad thing


internship and early career = the only way to really prepare for the real world of architecture, through experience


if there was no architecture school how many students would be capable of progressive work? their minds have to be fetilised in a way office cannot do

i mean no one really gets to build anything till their 40/50 anyway...the world does not need 20 year old architects...and the system works...end of

i became friends with a few professors of mine, and we've kept in touch through the years, and meet from time to time over a beer, or at some school event. I started a discussion with two of them regarding the disconnect of architectural education and architectural profession. I started by suggesting entering budget, schedule and client as design "parameters" in studio as a way to start to introduce a more professional structure to design. They both resisted that idea, and both -separetly- though that the school is only given 6 years to introduce very basic notions of architecture to students, to cultivate a passion for architecture, and to teach them to develop their thoughts and path out a way to transform those thoughts into a built environment (heavily paraphrasing here) In other words, very much in line with "r"'s post above. I've been considering shifting into teaching part time (both of them had suggested that in the past) and i will consider introducing budget/schedule/client as design paremeters then...

PERSONALLY, upon graduation, i worked my first 5 years in the technical department of a design firm, and focused on learning the exact things MDLER suggested. i considered those 5 years integral to my learning architecture, and possibly more valuable to my education than the school. but imho, i had to have that design mind installed prior to meeting this "profession" of ours...

to reinforce simple's comments above, I recently attended a conference in CA, at which about 50% of the audience were representatives of the AIA (and sister organizations) and the other 50% were deans of various colleges of architecture. the purpose of our meeting was to discuss how "sustainable design principles" could be more tightly integrated into the academic curriculum.

i was astounded by the divide between practitioners and academics on this issue -- going into this meeting, I had assumed the realm of sustainability would be something already deeply embraced (at least conceptually) by academia. instead, a disproportionate % of the academics indicated their faculty really didn't want to deal with this issue, since it might negatively impact their capacity to explore form. on the other hand, practitioners felt that college would be the perfect place to steep emerging professionals in the principals of sustainable design, since there is little opportunity in practice to conduct those tutorials.

it may be true that the world of academia should only be about teaching "progressive work" -- and it may be true that "internship and early career = the only way to really prepare for the real world of architecture, through experience" -- but, if so, then it's also going to be true that firms will not pay recent graduates the high salaries they hope for because the majority of them simply will not offer the productivity required to support the hoped-for salary levels.

for most of us, the economic realities of 21st century practice simply will not support both high-entry level salaries for interns and an enormous training obligation left to the firms.

quizzical makes a really good point about high starting salaries and high training obligations being mutually incompatible.

@OldFogey - what you always forget in these discussions is that there are no givens. It sounds ridiculous, but someone invented days of the week, someone invented currency, they use giant stones for money in Micronesia, for christ's sake! Every human artifact and tradition that you now take for granted was, for all purposes designed. Don't you think that the education of designers, as the people who make the world, should include a broad look at human culture, art, and critical thought? Are you really arguing for less education for designers? Should we be less open-minded?

So yeah, 'an environment and forum to promote theoretical exerimentation and allow the exploration of ideas that cannot be explored in reality' is probably the most important thing we can give to a future designer. If we stuck to your idea of reality 10,000 years ago, we'd still be sitting around in the mud. Reality is what designers make it.

and @mdler - if someone gave you the choice between the education you got and a kind of 'Building Designer' trade school that told you how to detail EIFS, what would you have done?

Have fun building models for movies or whatever it is you keep saying you're gonna do.

exploring only form with no connection to the real life constraints of reality = waste of time

that was a crappy example, oldfogey. granted some crazy things are discussed in school, but they all have a basis in shared understandings of how things work. even theory isn't based on nothing, so 'theoretical' exploration isn't at all as arbitrary as you suggest.

i don't know that much exploration with no constraints or relationship to reality happens even in architecture school.

svensixfive

I would have probably liked the trade school...but that is me. I took a woodworking class in architecture school and was told by the head of the architecture department that I could not recieve credit for the class because it wasnt 'theoretical enough' to be considered for the architecture curriculum

sevensixfive

regarding the EIFS detailing... I went to school in a building designed by Peter Eisenman. Much more effort went into the theory behind the form than did the detailing of the EIFS.

Guess what???

The EIFS has failed, the building leaks, and is full of mold. These are real issues

who was the contractor?

if architecture school was anything like the real world, enrollment would do a nosedive.

Haha, no, I remember your DAAP/EIFS rants from other threads, just mentioning it to rile you up. :)

I'm just saying it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive, I went to school for what, 9 years? I'd rather see that get extended even more than for education in the profession to split: 'Building Designer' schools that turn out the BIM monkeys who make stuff with zero critical thought, and 'Junior Starchitect' schools that turn out kids with their head in the clouds who wouldn't know EIFS if they walked into it.

Sadly, that already seems to be happening ...

dammson

the design of the building contributed to the lack of water-proofness. Exterior walls that jutted out and created places for water to collect were a huge issue. The building is now a lovely alge green color

pretty sure the eifs was a result of value-engineering. lots of things can go wrong when the preferred system that took months to develop is changed to something less desirable and the documentation of the changes has to be done in a few weeks.

and i doubt eisenman's office had much to do with that detailing anyway. that would have been done by a very practical business- and construction-oriented production firm, wouldn't it?

Steven...your last paragraph was dead on...even if it turns out not to be true in that case!

I thought the F in eifs stood for Failing!

here's a few class ideas for Architecure in the real world.

1. seminar on finding an extra 100 parking spaces at your lifestyle center.
2. white box 101
3. How to be a Jeeves to your bosses' Wooster.
4. Flashing for Fun and Profit.

vado - how do you spell 'architecture'? Looks like you better go back to school!

Steven Ward

why, when it comes to value engineering, are the materials the 1st thing to go????

Why not value engineer the form???

the t was ve'd out of the word! don't be so pedantic.

;P

I cannot think of any major or field of academic study that after only 4-6 years prepares you for the 'real world'.

Anyone's first years in their field is very humbling. All fields require people to enter at an entry level and learn the ropes. Actually, however corny it is, you never stop learning.

In architecture it is vitally important to learn to think holistically. The profession does not have time to teach that. The schools do. Imagine if we hired kids off the street right into architecture firms- the first complaint would be the kids have no ability to think critically. That ability for the most part is learned and cultivated in school. It is the least common denominator of being and architect.

Is it perfect? Nope. But I would never give up my time in school.

I do wonder if some schools should offer a 5 year professional "theory" based degree, then a 1 or 1.5 year "technical" based masters. But it would still not make you completely ready for the real world. Its too big and varied.

And I would love to take flashing for fun and profit.
I'd love to see that syllabus.

interlochen is where the girl from american pie got intimate with her flute.

also, most of the people arguing the pros of an arch ed on this forum likely have hardly any real experience.

Oh le bossman, you naive drifter you.

i went to interlochen for one summer in 1992. i still keep in touch with my drawing teacher (she is the undergraduate of fine arts at penn) and i still use lessons in art (and in life) from that short eight weeks.

most of us would agree that architectural education should be grounded in reality, but i think there's a huge disagreement here on what that really means. most schools, even the most theoretical, will have a construction course that teaches students how to flash a building. the technical schools will harp on flashing details, bringing it into a student's studio work, basically beating it into the student, so when he or she goes out into the hypothetical real world, he or she will know how to flash a building.

the more theoretical schools will assume that the student understands the principles behind flashing a building and spend more time on the larger issues informing design. what are these larger issues? in my case where i was largely allowed to shape my own curriculum (as old fogey disparages), it centered around urbanism. i read extensively on urbanism, most of my studios were master planning studios, i learned scenario planning techniques, bla bla bla. outside of that one construction course i never thought about flashing again throughout grad school.

so here i was a couple years out of school after some poor schlep architect had had to beat flashing details into me on the company dime, and we're doing a building in downtown detroit. the building needs a sign, the biggest concern being security. (we are in "dangerous" downtown detroit.) the first suggestion from the landscape architect, put up a fence. a fence like all the other suburban type buildings around here that fear the city. the conversation turns to steel v. aluminum (aluminum may be a target for thieves). now these fences are about 7' tall with little spikes at the top, a "decorative fence," no match for any thief with any real intention of breaking in, but perfect for making the experience of walking that sidewalk that much more miserable. i suggest a low, but deep split-face cmu planter (we are on a budget), once the foliage grows in it will be far more impenetrable than any decorative fence. "nope, won't work." the architects were so obsessed with the immediate issues of the building itself that they could not for the life of them understand how the building interacts with its environment. the larger issues that inform architecture were completely foreign to them, but damn they could flash the hell out of that building. i would argue that most of the bad design in this world is from the building-flashers and not the theoreticians.

jafidler- you related to mdler? just curious...

the flashing details are the most important part of the building. If the damn thing leaks, you are screwed...then sued

you get the flashing details right and then you move on. it's an incredibly important, yet minor part of design. the people that get stuck on the flashing details are the ones that scare me.

yeah, he's m; i'm jafi. the children of mr. and mrs. dler.

architecture in america is all about not getting sued.

almost anything in america is about not getting sued.

i agree with you completely jafidler.

flashing is easy enough that even i could do it. urbanistic architecture (or similar "theoretical" pursuit ) is much more difficult. and more important.

looking back on the last decade working in offices outside of school i gotta admit there is no way my professors could have prepared me for half of what i need to know now. i don't care how amazing the program there is just too much we have to be able to do and can only learn through experience...my school abolutely prepared me to be a good architect though. they required sharp critical thought, professional rigor, and attention to detail. we were allowed to be as theoretical or as real as we liked, had a fantastic shop and access to concrete experimental labs...and i hear there is 3d printing and all the rest there now too...but the main idea was not the technical, it was how to USE the technical towards a higher goal. that is very important. technique is very impt but not a goal worth defining a profession by...not unless you really want to be competing with contractors, cuz that is about all that aproach is worth (no offence to the building profession).

to give a slightly differnet perspective, in the case of many of my colleagues here in japan, most did not go to university (it is not a requirement for licencing here); they are seriously fantastically competent and very good at flashing and basic planning, but their detailing is morbidly heavy, their buildings are poorly designed as "places" and in general pretty much represent the worst of architecture in terms of creation of banal urbanity. i love these guys, but you could not pay me to live in anything they have designed.

there may be things university should be teaching, but honestly architecture needs to be a balance between technique and theory, and fetish-ising the former is not particularly useful. neither is other extreme, but at least that stuff can be unlearned. it seems somehow much harder to teach a technician to think about social or other concerns than to teach a theorist to be careful about the flashing...at least that was the way of it in the offices i worked at.

...or shot.

coming out of school into a work environment wasn't as hard as i thought it would be. however, after 5 years of self-imposed struggle in studio, working in a situation that was a daily beatdown really wore me down. it's taken me a few years to even start talking in the office. but even then, i'm still too timid to open my mouth for fear of getting a book or pencil thrown at me.

Wow, where do you work, holz?

ha, and that was my 1000th comment! Thank you, thank you. * bows *

pick up the pace slacker! i mean, way to go 7six5

the book/pencil/nearest object tosser was a sole proprietor that's really full of himself and thought the world revolved aroud him. he had to micromanage and eavesdrop on everything.

wasn't the best place, and quitting was probably the healthiest thing i could have done.

with a great firm now (10-ish people) and i've got all this baggage - they've not said anything about it yet, so i assume that bodes well. plus i actually get to run projects, talk to contractors and am not constantly ducking whenever someone says my name. geil!

you guys realize i was joking right?

i have no idea what the polarization is about. i've been in this profession now for over 15 yrs and find that everybody makes their way in the office and learns what they need to know, no matter what their academic background. the ones who don't - those with their heads truly anchored in academic design thinking and not willing to continue learning - don't last.

i'm not sure who the practitioners are that bitch about green grads. even if you learn all the technical stuff in school, you won't know how to put a building together and how to put a set together until you're doing it. recent grads i've had who i KNOW have had a full year studio specifically in the development of cds are just as hopeless because they don't put cds together with an understanding of how the construction industry will read them, how they integrate with specs, how they work differently with different construction delivery methods, etc. i'd just as well have a form-z virtuoso and train him/her to do cds the way i learned - picking up red lines on an evolving set of drawings and keeping an old cd set on the layoff table as an example, and TALKING about why we're doing what we're doing.

the problem isn't that school isn't preparing grads - i've taught some sharp kids who go on - after a few years of internship - to be sharp professionals. the beef that a lot of practitioners are having is that these kids aren't immediately productive just out of school. you know what? neither were they. neither were you. neither was i.

i don't really regard my recent grad interns as truly productive until they have learned how to do things well enough that they can anticipate my redlines. and at that point they become project managers on their own.

I am somewhere between S.Ward and OldFogey. I, too, came into my own during decon. I still love a lot of decon, but the theory was just a superfluous piece of crap that gave some theorists a job and allowed things to be easily grouped together.

Design should be paramount. I do believe the best schools need to push the boundaries and experiment. It is an 'us versus them' mentality and I think that's how the world is.

However, I think that schools need to educate students on how to win that battle - how do you build what is great architecture without winning a competition? How do you make a living doing what you love? How do you convince and educate clients? How do you convince a city to let you push those boundaries?

The answer is pretty simple. It's business 101. You need to know how the real world works, how the politics of the built world works, how to market your ideas and designs.


Seems pretty simple to me. My solution (albeit a simplistic one) is to severly cut back the theory classes and replace them with real estate and business classes. You could probably cut back on structure classes, too, as I can't imagine ever sizing the truss with my calculations.


The problem with my solution is huge. Theory classes give theory profs a job. Take that away and you've taken most of the full time staff out there (at more progressive schools).



Just think, a business class by Mayne or Gehry? Just like the Seagul lecture thing, I'd pay a lot to hear how these guys convince clients, convince cities, etc., that they should invest in their ideas and designs. Schools should pay these guys gobs to teach this stuff.

If you ever have a chance to hear these guys speak to a "normal" audience, go and do it. It's nothing like how they speak to an architecture crowd (nothing at all), there is no fluff, but it is convincing and it is easily understood. They are smart men running successful businesses and living their dreams.

That's what architecture education should be preparing grads for. That dream is what kept most of us going for so many years and so many all nighters.

there is no simple answer. we all make our own path.

at the moment, i'm doing what i want. i have some projects that are pretty exciting from a design standpoint and which are consistent with beliefs about architecture that i was able to develop only because of a bigger understanding of architectural theory and history. i'm presenting ideas and goals in interviews with prospective clients and finding them receptive to them. i'm (finally) where i want to be.

but, contrary to trace's prescription above, i HATE business, hated anything to do with business classes, and, when i did the sole practitioner thing, was horrible at running a business. real estate talk makes my eyes glaze over. if i had been required to take those classes in school i would have lost interest in architecture i'm sure.

i made a point in school to take as much theory as i could. i thrived on theory and was hungry for more. i think that background has given me a great foundation for finding my way through the professional trials inherent in each project while maintaining a conceptual core through the whole thing.

as much as i hated structures, i think it was also an integral part of my education. when i do coordination of drawings, i know what the structural engineer is talking about. no, i NEVER do calculations. would never. but i understand enough about basic structural concepts that i can use that in the development of a project. i credit that to school as much as learning in the profession (...well, and the refresher course i took before taking the exam. thanks, peyman).

for me the answer was to work for someone else, get them to run the business and let me be an architect. you've simply got to figure out what works for you as a person, a professional, and an architect. that takes time and you WON'T have figured it out by the time you leave school.

people who think that the developers are making the great decisions regarding desing really must not have had much dealings with them. developers are under the thumb of their potential tenants and if visionary developer wants to reduce parking fields or hide them from the street, the anchor tenant will nix it. i need another 100 parking spaces! for my lifestyle center.

i don't know how schools should operate. i don't think most decent architects want robots who just are familiar with cd's. i believe they want to hire well rounded people. they don't want draftsman and they don't want prima donnas. they want someone in between. are you that someone???

you guys are fast. i wrote this right after trace, but you all beat me to the response. here it is anyway:

i don't know, trace. at my school, the real estate classes were nothing more than new urbanist tripe in the guise of pro-formas. certainly helpful to some to know the business-side better, but definitely not for everyone. a well-rounded education with options to explore varying paths makes the most sense to me. i personally could not imagine eliminating theory classes to make way for business classes. in fact, i believe i learned more about business in my theory classes than i did in real estate.

i know a lot of practioners hate academia because you cannot immediately translate the knowledge learned into billable hours, but in terms of larger goals of creating a more beautiful, intelligent, and just world, the academic component of our training is essential.

I enjoyed both business classes and theory classes. However, I had to pursue the business on my own (with much extra effort). Business, to me, is a means to an end. I can get paid and do what I want, this is what business classes taught me.

Of course everyone follows their own path, I am not suggesting a MBA, but some basic classes would be very helpful.

I think the best way to figure out what works for you is to know what each direction entails, at least fundamentally.


I should also note that I never mentioend cds, I do think many of the more daily tasks should be learned hands on. It's the 'thinking outside of the box' business-wise that I think architecture is lacking - it's all either business or design. I am pursuing both and I think those that know about both can get much farther than those that don't.

It's about having the knowledge to pursue design ideals, but also know enough about business and real estate, that you don't have to work for someone else for 10 years before pursuing your own direction (unless you want to).



vado - developers vary greatly (as I am sure you know). I work with several on a daily basis and come across those that are only in it for the business (they'll build whatever the site dictates) but I also deal with several that are in it to create great architecture. They are making a name for themselves this way (they are good businessmen).

They are not all the same, just as architects are not all the same.

seems to me we're trying to make this way more complicated than it needs to be. many of you above are using a LOT of words to discuss something that seems relatively easy to me.

isn't is mostly about free will and free market economics?

i tend to adopt quizzical's views above that schools are going to teach what the schools want to teach.

students are going to attend those schools that offer a curriculum that they find attractive or that aligns with their personal goals.

firms are going to offer starting salaries to individuals based on what they believe those individuals can contribute in the near term, discounting those salaries by what they perceive their own training burden will be.

if the schools choose to teach a curriculum that mostly prepares students for 10-15 years down the road and leave the near-term "technical" education to the firms, then starting salaries are going to remain low.

it seems to me that most of the angst among students around education is related to a) the cost of that education; b) the amount of effort that education requires; and c) the crappy starting salaries available upon receiving the degree.

unfortunately, you (we) can't have it both ways. I know a number of chemical engineers and lawyers and business graduates who also paid a lot for their educations and who also put a lot of effort into those educations -- the difference is that the work they are able to do upon graduation actually can support the high salaries they receive right out of school.