The role of Archinect’s series Cross-Talk is to bring forward the positive aspects of the polemic and allow for the resulting conflict to bring to life an otherwise still and comfortable climate of creativity—if there can be one. Cross-Talk attempts—if to only say that it did—to allow text the freedom that the image has accepted and embraced. Cross-Talk attempts to force the no, to contradict itself, to anger, to please and then anger again, if only to force a stance, to pull out the position of the self, of the discipline and of the hour as a means to begin and maintain conversations moving forward. 

In this series, we are looking at the role Practice and Academia in today's disciplinary framework and how we can begin to analyze and recalibrate their relationship. 

The conversations and positions of Architecture's academic arena and its practice-based profession are one of the most consistent avenues of conversation today. The roles of these as a means of disciplinary legitimacy has only gotten murkier. They have become intrinsically tied to each other and virtually inseparable.  

The priority and claim to legitimacy provided by academia was once the landing place for the most significant leaders of the built world. It was the locus for the lessons of architecture's highest achievable mediums to be dissected and passed down. Now the academic realm is being led by a new stream of makers, not ones who see the built object as the means of disciplinary authority, but instead focus on the discipline's new trajectories, possibilities and avenues of professional application.

The place of practice was to test, construct and build the discipline. It was to be the space for the constructed dialogue of architecture. Isms vs Isms, form vs function and modernism vs postmodernism, it was all enacted through the 1:1 scaled objects of architecture itself.

What then is today's relationship between academia and practice?  Could it be that we are in an era of practicing academia, a state in which the profession has heightened the constraints for young architects to build to the extent that the practitioners are forced to consider the arena of academia as their preferred outlet? Could it be that the practicing academic has become the contemporary model? With the increased use of installations, institutional showcases, and fellowships producing a constant flow of Curriculum Vitae fluffing, does it seem that such is the route for seeking stability in today's realm?

Tenure-track positions used to be held for those who built, those who made, and those who continued to participate in the practice of architecture. Professors of practice were those who had experience in building and were meant to be injectors of 'real' world knowledge into the institution's halls. Today such positions are being sought after by disciplinary participants who have yet to construct a single building, by minds who have not yet pursued the discipline's podiumized object of admiration. 

Just as Janus views the world in two directions, the arenas of academia and practice have long attempted to keep their focuses separate, but as the roles of historian and designer have started to find their convergence it is possible that Practice and Academia have begun their long-debated reunification. In this confluence, there is an understanding of how the practice can effectively support the discipline’s academic endeavors so that the academic framework is constructed to support the practice and practices that grow from it.

With colleagues of an architectural education being lured into industrial design, graphic design, writing, film and animation, and building; it might be time for a remapping of how the academic and practice relate and reinforce each other. This stocktaking may allow us to better understand what our discipline yearns to be.

While the discipline may be created from the overlap of practice and academia, it does not mean they are stable overlapping arenas, they may find their relationship in constant flux. Understanding this, questioning it, and producing, as means of readjustment might just be what we are in need of today.