i would think it would be easier for you to get a job now and then go back to school and become a teacher later, rather than the other way around.  take a few years off from your academic career to explore the private sector, get your license to add some credentials to your resume, then go for the phd and become an academic.

i don't think a phd is going to be helpful when trying to get a real job.  if anything, it might actually push you outside of what many employers are looking for.

you can still write and publish while working for a living, you just won't be able to dedicate as much time to it.

PhD is not much like a masters degree. Its a lot more work and mostly only useful if you want to teach. If you want both worlds its difficult. To be competent in both practice and academia is almost impossible. That said, if you really want to do both then I would go for architecture first. A PhD can be done later.

In my case I did PhD starting from 35, simply because that was the cutoff age for a scholarship I was aiming for, and because the economy in London had stalled just in time to make a PhD seem not so shitty.  Of course I wanted to do PhD as well. Timing was decided by external events.

It turned out to be a good decision. I started my own office in the middle of PhD and because I have that piece of paper it means I can teach in university. The downside is that I spent a LOT of time getting that paper and it is still an open question for me whether I should have focused on practice instead. I think so, and there are benefits to being in both worlds, but its not entirely clear yet that it was necessary to have a PhD to get where I am now. Maybe...

The one serious flaw with a PhD led life is that you most likely will spend a few years working as adjunct professor for low pay and ridiculous hours/work load. If you are lucky you will then get a fairly decent position with pay, but its more and more likely that that position also will be a fixed term contract. Proper tenure track positions are hard to get. For me its cool because I have another life going on in practice to keep me happy, but for people who only work as academics its rather cruel. Academia is an amazingly difficult place to make a living. Much harder than practising architecture.

@OP, reading your post it sounds like you never set out to be an architectural historian/ theorist - that you just fell into that to remedy what you saw as a deficiency in your design education.

So the real question is what do you see as the important thing for yourself to do: practice architecture with a critical / theoretical approach; or develop the theories and analysis that will help others to understand architecture? Teaching and being involved in academia is possible both ways - and as Will says, the PhD is no guarantee of a stable career in teaching.

At least in the US it's quite common for architecture instructors to be practicing architects who have a good understanding of critical theory - very few have a PhD. I see no reason you couldn't supplement practice with lectures and writing that keep you involved in academia so that you can find such a position. This wouldn't be teaching history and theory - but it would certainly be a place where you could explore those topics through practice.

Both routes are challenging and involve extended periods of unglamorous work at low pay. So you really need to figure out whether your ultimate goal is to practice while teaching or conduct critical research / writing while teaching.

I personally found the most engaging instructors were those who practiced with a good awareness of the contemporary critical discourse and taught as a way to explore some of their ideas. It sounds like you lacked those as an undergraduate - maybe you would enjoy working in such a role.

thanks everyone for the comments, exploring practice first seems the most reasonable thing to do. however, what do you guys think of getting a FT job while doing a PT PhD?

It pretty much depends on a man's personality. I am tend to be "pragmatist" and "rational" but same as you I don' want to turn in a CAD robot.

When I did my BArch, I took some philosophy, linguistics and some urban theory classes not that because I was gonna be a planner, but most likely for intellectual suppositions.

But same time I don't wanna get my self drawn into those superficial theories which many of them are quite misinterpreted and misunderstood in the current architectural theories.

In practicing you will face the fact how hard it to apply you knowledge to a real things, and even how hard it gets as it evolves. It was so painful for me. The most challenging thing is gonna be to keep the original intellectual essence and carry it out from the conceptual sketches to the shop drawings. 

Go travel man! PhD is gonna wait :)

Have you ever seen Indian Jones? " If you want to be an archaeologist leave the library!" :)

'Have you ever seen Indian Jones? " If you want to be an archaeologist leave the library!" :)

haha

If you find "school plagued by philistinism" to be unpleasant, a PhD program will end up as torture for 1) you, or worse, 2) your eventual students.  Be good to everyone, and go into practice.

No truer phrase has ever been written. Academia and practice truly are versus one another. I personally side with practice. Actual buildings in the real world are way more impressive and powerful to me and way more worth a life's pursuit than the incessant talk and nothing but talk  that you find in the academic world.

Academia IS practice. 

Practice IS academia

Ok, sophisms apart, does anyone here think that a PT PhD is doable while working FT?

No.  If you want to do a PhD you can most likely get full funding so do it full time. You can always make up the gap in income being TA which will help you much more than a practice job.

If you look at the track record of PT PhDs completing, its very low.