by AIA Director of Education Catherine Roussel, AIA
As evident in the “Transforming Design Education” article, AIA members and related professionals—both educators and practitioners—are working together to design the change between the professional curriculum of fall 2009 and the professional curriculum of today. There is more than one answer to this question.
On the one hand we are asking about changes that can be implemented immediately and on the other hand we are thinking longer term. The changes that are made to the NAAB requirements for accreditation in 2008 will affect schools and students through 2015 and longer into the future.
You can refer to the results of the Oak Park conference on integrated practice and consider some ideas from the Pomona conference on Sustainability in Architecture and Higher Education on what we could do differently:
"It is time to reevaluate the studio custom in most schools of starting with small and simple projects and advancing to ever larger and more complex ones. Usually, as students become more capable, the projects become proportionally more comprehensive and difficult. The result is that students often become progressively more skillful at making diagrams of shape and layout with increasing degrees of showiness, but not always with a deeper penetration of how the thing really works. Such an approach works against sustainability in architecture. What about delving progressively deeper instead of bigger, at least part of the time?"—Ralph Knowles, professor emeritus, ACSA Distinguished Professor, University of Southern California, School of Architecture, Los Angeles
This proposition might also work for integrated practice. Students would learn from the beginning to work collaboratively with partners from various disciplines essential to a successful project.
Similarly, a practitioner writes:
"Students should be exposed to working with associated disciplines (landscape, planning, and engineering), to bring forth the most current thinking in related fields, in a collaborative and thought provoking forum. Ideally, this would be in a studio environment to foster more in-depth solutions to complex problems."—Anne Schopf, FAIA, Mahlum Architects, Seattle
Another suggestion is to teach students about materials and structures early on in the curriculum so they are thinking of design as they will in integrated practice. Is it just a question of sequence or more about integration of these subjects into the studio?
To learn more about the AIA Educator/Practitioner Network, visit their site on AIA.org.
What do you think?
Comments (4)
I have always had one major problem with architectural education, that is if you can't build on paper what you design your not an architect, your a designer.
To many times I hire architectural graduates to find out they don't know the dimensiuopn of a 2x4 or the thickness of an 8 inch concrete block.
In return I get their answer that that inhibits their design creativity.
They don't last long with my firm.
I currentl have an intern and she's sent out to work in the field when things are slow in the office. It's where I learned and she's learning more from that expierence than all the schooloing she's been through.
Most contracvtors think we're a joke because our plans don't integrate the real wourld problems and there's little or no understanding of the built environment.
That's the biggest challange this profession and the education of future architects have to over come.
Posted by Craig M. Lyman, AIA | April 6, 2007 1:51 PM
Posted on April 6, 2007 13:51
While I agree with Mr Lyman about a lack of practical knowledge, at least some of that should be taught during internship. I see many new grads (and for that matter practicing architects) who have an incredibly limited knowledge of the science behind how buildings actually stand-up and resist environmental forces. How will BIM software and more studio time overcome the fact that many students don't have even the most basic understanding of the dynamics of heat, air and water movement; how to read a psychometric chart; the differences between convection, conduction and radiation; how structural members resist tension, compression, bending and torsion; etc. etc. We need a much more rigorous curriculm in Building Science and Structures to build a foundation for using practical knowledge and for leading an integrated design team. These issues are also crucial to reaching our energy reduction goals. If we continue this imbalance between art and science we might find ourselves simply the "Exterior Decorator" members of the team. If anyone thinks this expertise limits creativity just take a look at the work of Foster, Piano, Rogers, Grimshaw, and many others.
Posted by David Altenhofen | April 6, 2007 4:34 PM
Posted on April 6, 2007 16:34
Teenagers cannot learn about writing and history and poetry and economics and religion and music and mastering a foreign language and living on their own and traveling abroad for the first time and perhaps getting their first real job ever, all at the same time that they apparently have to understand “the dynamics of heat, air and water movement; how to read a psychometric chart; the differences between convection, conduction and radiation; how structural members resist tension, compression, bending and torsion; etc. etc.” There is a reason that virtually every major profession requires that professional education occur at the graduate level, and there are consequences to the architecture profession’s choice not to do so.
So long as the bulk of professional architecture degrees are undergraduate degrees, and so long as the bulk of professional degree graduates are relatively normal 23 and 24 year-olds, those graduates will simply not have had the time in their lives to be fully exposed to even the basics of both construction and design.
Posted by Casius Pealer | April 7, 2007 10:58 AM
Posted on April 7, 2007 10:58
I agree with Casius Pealer that architecture requires more than 5 years, but it's not like the students coming out of the Masters programs are any better at understanding building science. The architectural education community apparently does not see value in teaching underlying science, regardless of how many years they have to educate them.
Posted by David Altenhofen | April 13, 2007 1:36 PM
Posted on April 13, 2007 13:36