This spring, the first year of classes came to a close at a new undergraduate program in architecture at Bard College, a 2,000-student liberal arts school in rural Annandale, New York. According to the co-directors, Professors Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco and Ross Exo Adams, designing Bard Architecture’s new curriculum has been an opportunity to rethink architectural education by asking: “What is architecture in the first place?”
After submitting a proposal in 2018, Santoyo-Orozco and Adams, who met while studying at the Berlage Institute in the Netherlands in the early 2000s, were hired for the 2019–2020 school year to develop the new academic program, which is not accredited. Housed within an undergraduate liberal arts college, their pedagogy understands that “architecture is entangled with and operative in worlds beyond its disciplinary boundaries.” As a new field, architectural research is inherently interdisciplinary. Teaching in a way that fully benefits from these varied intellectual roots can be a challenge in schools offering professional degrees, due to stringent NAAB requirements.
In developing the courses, they sought to interrogate their discipline’s relationship to the present political moment, drawing on the methodologies and embraced by adjacent disciplines like geography, sociology, and anthropology.
Yet, without these constraints, Adams emphasizes that he and Santoyo-Orozco were free to “go all-in” and challenge the traditional model for architectural education, which prepares students to work in architecture firms. In developing the courses, they sought to interrogate their discipline’s relationship to the present political moment, drawing on the methodologies and embraced by adjacent disciplines like geography, sociology, and anthropology.
They say “the timing is very important” because of the “internal stressing of the discipline,” referring to the abrupt culture shift and various demands for institutional change that have occurred in the past years. With the immediate political context inside and outside of the college—the increased urgency of racial and climate justice in wake of the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the US’s exit from the Paris Climate accord under the Trump Presidency—the co-directors report “positive reinforcement” for their project.
Counterintuitive to those inducted into architectural culture through all-nighters building models for studio pin-ups and final juries, Santoyo-Orozco and Adams aim to “de-center the predominance of studio culture” with its emphasis on “productive labor.” They argue that de-emphasizing studio, the cornerstone of design education and professional programs, has allowed them to tackle head-on what Santoyo-Orozco referred to as “questions we were meant to have asked twenty years ago” about racial justice and climate justice, topics that are only recently gaining traction in mainstream architectural circles.
This is in contrast to influential 20th-century architectural educators like Colin Rowe, who believed “in the centrality of the design studio and of its issue, the presumptive physical product.”1 Not only did Rowe believe that architectural education should foreground production, but he was also skeptical of “architects as errand boys of the sociologists and architects as cosmological systems men.” In plain English, Rowe didn’t want architecture to become a social science, and he was afraid of utopian ideology.
Santoyo-Orozco and Adams aim to “de-center the predominance of studio culture” with its emphasis on “productive labor.”
Architectural education is like a family tree and through the mentor-mentee relationship fostered by educators like Peter Eisenman, this political ambivalence has been passed down the generations. Nevertheless, architectural culture is not monolithic. By the late ‘90s and early 2000s, many designers and professors of architecture were infatuated with the aesthetic and productive potential of digital technology. Indeed, Adams recalls his disappointment with graduate programs at the time. He left MIT, which he saw as dominated by an “introspective” culture focused on “making crafty things.” This was different in Europe where Adams and Santoyo-Orozco found an architectural culture in the early 2000s that embraced conversations about “space and politics.”
Speaking about the intellectual and political origins of the Bard program, the Bard co-directors reflect on their time at the Berlage Institute where they have become part of a different lineage. In the Netherlands, they found Pier Vittorio Aureli and Elia Zanghelis who both “had a clear agenda,” says Adams. That is, they took legible political positions in their teaching, writing, and design.
Adams admits that US schools have improved, moving beyond a fixation on autonomy, yet he says it’s important to oppose the American framing, the dichotomy of “inside architecture and outside architecture,” or deliberations on “its limits.” The problem in the US was that there was “no contact between different positions,” says Santoyo-Orozco. Reflecting on her time at the Berlage, she says that there was a “true institutional debate,” that went beyond architecture as styles or design methods. Nevertheless, in architecture, when it comes to these conversations, the difference between style and ideology can be difficult to define. If Rowe’s skepticism of ideology and social-political engagement defined much of late-20th-century architectural education at elite East Coast schools (and Texas), even within the mainstream, the tides began to change in the 2000s.
In a 2009 essay for The Journal of Architectural Education, architect and educator Joan Ockman writes: “While architects have a minimal responsibility to do no harm, they may also aspire to do some good.” Connecting this careful statement on the role of practice to education, she continues: “The role of professional schools if they aim to be anything more than inculcators of styles and techniques is to nurture this type of practitioner.”2 Ockman uses “style” in a pejorative sense. Her statement recognizes the need for architecture to accept some social responsibility, without demanding that they be agents of change or that the discipline leads the charge.
...in architecture, when it comes to these conversations, the difference between style and ideology can be difficult to define.
Bard Architecture is part of a liberal arts school known for its progressive politics. According to Santoyo-Orozco, the college has long had an “experimental ethos.” Indeed, according to the institution’s homepage, “Bard College seeks to inspire curiosity, a love of learning, idealism, and a commitment to the link between higher education and civic participation.” This outlook (or branding) can be seen in several of Bard’s initiatives: the founding Bard High School Early College DC in Washington, D.C.; the creation of the Bard Prison Initiative, which has provided a liberal arts education to people incarcerated in New York State prisons since 2001; and the Center for Human Rights in the Arts, which works with scholars at risk.
The conversations that Santoyo-Orozco and Adams had in their seminars benefit from varied students, some studying architecture, others not. The program’s courses are open to students across the college, not all of them “moderating” in architecture (the term at Bard for a student’s major). They have a diverse set of skills, design abilities but also bring their experience in other subject areas.
The
coursework is equally varied. Seminars include "Architectural
Entanglements with Labor and Architecture as Media" with
Santoyo-Orozco; "Architecture between Body and World and Housing and
Collective Care: Constituencies" with Adams; and "Situating
Architecture" and "Of Utopias" with Olga Touloumi. Design coursework
includes a studio on Campus Dwelling with New York-based Interboro Partners; a monthlong design workshop addressing utopias called
Islands, aimed at developing representations skills; and a course
practicum that involves students with the work of the nearby Kingston
Housing Lab with Kwame Holmes. Thus, architectural education is less
about developing a specific set of production-based skills and more
about nurturing “a way of seeing the world,” says Santoyo-Orozco.
Santoyo-Orozco emphasizes that their goal is to provide all necessary supplies for students so that they can just show up for design courses, without additional costs to build models or purchase computer software.
This year’s most popular texts included Silvia Federici’s “The Reproduction of Labour-Power in the Global Economy,” and Katherine McKittrick’s “On Plantations, Prison, and a Black Sense of Self.” Santoyo-Orozco believes that outside of Gender Studies, few fields have taken on the issue of reproductive labor, and the ideas resonated with Bard students.
Nevertheless, Bard is not unique in offering architecture courses or even a B.A. in Architecture within a liberal arts college setting, where students are often exposed to pared-down versions of professional degrees that emphasize design studio. According to Adams, to follow the model of these “barebones versions of a professional degree” would be “a complete missed opportunity.” These programs can seem like a light version of a full-fledged professional program, offering a smattering of studios and a few seminars but ultimately assuming traditional practice as the end goal for students. The B.A. programs certainly offer a more academic version of architecture, which may also be related to the increased number of academic architects.
Describing the development of the ETH Zurich’s gta and MIT’s HTC program, two of the primary institutions to develop robust doctoral studies in architecture in the 1960s and ‘70s, architect Ole W. Fischer argues that the criticism of modernism that led to postmodernism also led to a “crisis of architectural education.”3 In his comparative study of the two institutions, Fischer frames the development of new academic programs in architecture, alongside extra-academic institutions like Peter Eisenman’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, and the Graham Foundation in Chicago. These institutions supported an internalized critique, which ultimately led to an acceleration of architectural discourse—a growing ecosystem of extra-academic discourse, grants, and exhibitions.4 In academia proper, as architects took the reins from art historians and intellectualized their discipline within the academy, they produced more books, more talks, more coursework, more dissertations—and eventually more academic programs.
At Bard, 94% of students receive grants (as opposed to loans) and the average student debt is $29,270. The school is on the road to equity, but still has a way to go.
Furthermore, architectural education’s proliferation of self-critique cannot be separated from a broader trend towards the privatization of education writ large. According to Fischer, in the ‘90s, the “global marketplace for architecture” saw two seemingly contradictory tendencies in education. On the one hand, education became more standardized “emphasizing sets of skills and tools” due to the “hardening grip of the licensing and accreditation bodies (NAAB/AIA in the US, RIBA in the UK, the Bologna bachelor and master system in the EU).” Fischer argues that MIT “pursued the institutionalization of history, theory, and criticism … as well as a form of intellectualization of the practice of architecture.”5 Many other doctoral programs have followed and this institutionalization of the academic study of architecture has become widespread in the US.
Thus, the growth of B.A. programs like Bard’s (much discussed in Archinect's discussion forum) is also connected to a shift toward requiring more education. According to educators, the curriculum has the capacity to train designers and citizens with critical thinking skills and the ability to draw connections across academic fields to analyze and affect the politics of contemporary society. This education also requires more tuition, with architecture students increasingly paying for Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees to practice (or seek other employment). This is similar to an overall national trend, with people increasingly paying for more degrees, devaluing Bachelor's degrees, and rendering the Master’s degree the new gate for many jobs. This is what Laura Pappano identified as “credential inflation” in her 2011 article “The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s” for the New York Times.
...without the rigid expectation to practice architecture, the program re-imagines the discipline’s skill set as “a way of seeing” that can be applied to many different jobs or courses of advanced study—some, perhaps, more highly paid than architecture.
At Bard, 94% of students receive grants (as opposed to loans) and the average student debt is $29,270. The school is on the road to equity but still has a way to go. Santoyo-Orozco emphasizes that their goal is to provide all necessary supplies for students so that they can just show up for design courses without additional costs to build models or purchase computer software. Furthermore, without the rigid expectation to practice architecture, the program re-imagines the discipline’s skill set as “a way of seeing” that can be applied to many different jobs or courses of advanced study—some, perhaps, more highly paid than architecture.
Regardless of architecture student’s career paths, the primary political imperative of architectural education—indeed, of all education—should be to make it free, or at the very least to make it equitable and affordable to people of all class backgrounds and economic conditions. If not, all of this social science and critical thinking will only serve to reinforce an existing status quo, in which architects’ work serves the interest of an elite few.
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Dante is a PhD student studying the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. He is a licensed architect in New York State.
1 Comment
To restate briefly, from the perspective a Black architect practitioner/educator and believer in Isabelle Wilkinson's book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, the Bard degree is an ideal prerequisite for entering a IPAL structured MArch program with a heavy emphasis on finance tech.
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