Throughout your years in architecture school, one thing is always true — everything revolves around studio. It’s your living quarters for five years, where you’ll succeed and fail with a small group of comrades crazy enough to choose a career path in architecture. Studio is a kind of ecosystem we learn to obsess over. Every other class kind of becomes an afterthought. Your time in school is dominated by this phenomenon, and it comes with many cultural and social nuances, things that have been passed down year after year. In this article, we’ll look at some aspects that you, as an architecture student, experience every day, whether you’re aware of it or not. We’ll also explore some of the bizarre characteristics of studio culture and how it influences your time as a student.
I think one of the most memorable things about my studio experience was all of the procrastinatory conversations I had with my studio mates. It was in these moments that my thinking truly deepened. Those back and forth debates, like whether Le Corbusier was a prophet sent from above or just some overrated plebeian, shaped so much of our convictions as young students. Or even those chats about whose diagrams looked the most Bjarke Ingels Group-ish — after all, we all thought we were as brilliant as he was (we weren’t).
It was in these conversations that we formulated our ideals about design. In an interview on The Tim Ferriss Show, Malcolm Gladwell talks about how a good college isn’t one with the best name or even the best reputation, but rather a place where one would find themselves up late talking to their colleagues about interesting things. Gladwell believes that it’s in the late night deep dialogues that we learn our most profound lessons. I agree with him.
a good college isn’t one with the best name or even the best reputation, but rather a place where one would find themselves up late talking to their colleagues about interesting things
But what about our actual school work? We do have a duty to ourselves to do well and the one thing that I remember more than anything was that most of these discussions (sometimes three hours long) always took place during times when I should have been doing my school work. It wasn’t uncommon for me to get a text from my wife at around 9 pm asking if I’d be home soon, after which I’d have to explain how I’d be a bit longer than expected because I hadn’t actually gotten to my work yet (or I was busy playing my second or third chess match).
The conversations you have with your peers will be some of the most memorable moments of your time in school, and you should have as many of them as you can. But, hence the title of this section, try not to fall into the black hole and get sucked away from your larger task — earning your degree.
“Being busy is a form of laziness — lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.”
Tim Ferriss, The Four-Hour Workweek
The all-nighter is a phenomenon that has become inseparable from most discussions about design school. The reader will probably remember visiting architecture schools as a high school or transfer student where you were warned of the inevitability of the late nights that would be endured once you entered your first year of college. Even when you start your first studio your professor tells you that you will probably have to be in late to complete your first couple of assignments, in fact, you are expected to be in studio, because it is part of the “culture” and you need to be “immersed” in the program.
But if we step back and think about it, would we really be spending ninety plus hours a week working on our design projects if we weren’t continuously told that it is what was necessary to have “good work?” Probably not. Almost certainly not. An all-nighter is the result of poor planning and a lack of time management. It is a byproduct of getting sucked into the black hole of conversations, of overthinking the details, and of buying into the mythologized narrative of the inescapability of late nights in architecture.
I can already hear the objections: but Sean; there’s just so much work, I HAVE to work on this floor plan for 60 hours before it’s right, there’s no other way. If you say so. But what if I asked you to draw that floor plan in half the time, make it extraordinarily awesome, like literally breathtakingly beautiful, AND still have extra time to rehearse your presentation. That if you could do this, I would give you one million dollars. Could you figure out a way to make it happen? Throw away the old narrative of wasting time and use your creative powers to craft a schedule for yourself — you got this.
One instance where long hours does work well is when you’ve decided you want to experiment or explore some new ideas. Architecture school is the place to let loose and try things out. Sometimes that might mean you sacrifice finishing a deliverable for one of your assignments. I remember a guy who would spend hours on Grasshopper and other programs the rest of us didn’t understand. He was at his desk every night with all of those stringy things covering his screen (yes, I realize he was building scripts, but “stringy things” sounds better). In all honesty, it seemed like the guy was never doing his actual school work. But, when it came time for presentations, he would have some masterpiece pinned to the wall, and somehow everyone would overlook the fact that he was missing a lot of the work the rest of us had. Needless to say, he has now proven himself a master.
If you’re going to spend the extra time in studio, spend it like this guy, learning, exploring, experimenting, growing. All-nighters aren’t a bad thing, wasting time is. Remember that you are paying a lot of money to be where you are, take advantage of the resources at your disposal, and have fun. When you start working full time, you won’t have the freedom you have in school. I still regret not exploring some of the extra resources my school had to offer. If you’re curious about, say, CNC milling, go check it out. Don’t worry if you’re not “the CNC guy/gal,” just set up the appointment and go learn. Be curious and allow yourself to discover new things.
I have yet to meet a hiring manager who cares about what grade a prospective employee got in studio. Unless you’re trying to go to Grad school, no one cares about your grades. Architecture is a talent-based profession, almost like music. If Jimi Hendrix had a 2.0 grade point average, it would not influence his candidacy to fill a vacant guitar spot —the guy could play. It’s the same for you, your portfolio and your personality will be the main drivers in your entry-level job hunt, not your grades. So don’t stress if you get a B instead of an A in studio. In the end, it doesn’t matter. This is a good thing. Take away some of the pressure and follow your convictions a bit more instead of trying to please your professor.
But, even though we aren’t in school to please our professors, we are there to learn from them. Naturally, the further one progresses as a design student; the more one develops stronger opinions. Almost across the board, every argument or disagreement I’ve observed between a student and a professor has been from those in upper-level studios. Once we reach third year or so we start to formulate stronger opinions about design and we begin to think we know better than our professors.
These arguments are usually accompanied by a side conversation with another student about how much the instructor “just doesn’t get it.” It wouldn’t be the first time generations butted heads. Look: you’ll have plenty of time to argue with people about design, trust me. When you’re in school really try to take in what your instructors are trying to impart to you. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have healthy disagreements, but if you receive feedback that you don’t like you should do what Frank Gehry does and “try it on for size.”
I can’t read the title of this section without thinking about the closing scene to Disney Channel’s High School Musical, but it’ll have to suffice. In the grand scheme of things, understand that you and your peers are trying to reach a common goal. It is possible to burn bridges with classmates. If you can, try to be on good terms with everyone. I talked about the importance of relationships in a past article, so to expand in terms of studio, look at the experience as one of collective ambition. See your studio mates as allies and seek to help as many people as you can while also allowing yourself to learn from them as well. I’ve learned my most effective software skills from my classmates.
As you move through this stage in your career, it can get tough. Studio is expensive, taxing, and rigorous, but in the end, you come out a transformed person. Enjoy the time and make the most of it. The end of this chapter will be here before you know it. Now is the time to grind.
Sean Joyner is a writer and essayist based in Los Angeles. His work explores themes spanning architecture, culture, and everyday life. Sean's essays and articles have been featured in The Architect's Newspaper, ARCHITECT Magazine, Dwell Magazine, and Archinect. He also works as an ...
1 Featured Comment
"Your professors actually know what they’re talking about."
Me, Brimming Optimism Pre-Masters : I concur. Such swell people.
Me Post-Masters, World Wary : No. N to the O. Some professors are strictly on the payroll because they are best-friends with _________________ (Insert-prominent-title-here) regardless of their capacity to teach or be decent human beings.
Regardless, I enjoyed the article and the first photo of a University of Florida studio. Just a whim, but I wonder what the other side of the coin is? "The Architecture Professor's Guide to Studio?"
All 3 Comments
A few things.
1. All-nighters.
While not entirely necessary as you pointed out, students don't know the first thing about time management or what's important yet, so it's up to a professor to guide the student to effectively use their time on aspects of the project that best convey the concept. What do most professors do? Tell you to spend all your time on countless permutations and iterations only to give you a critique where they throw out buzzwords and quote Jeff Kipnis. If we thought of studio much more in the way that an office works—that somehow there is an economy to our time, architectural education might be more effective for preparing students for the profession.
This brings me to my second point...
2. most professors are making this shit up as they go along
It's laughable to say that most Professors know what they're talking about. They don't. Most universities are competing for student enrollment based on the novelty of the work that their students put out which is why there is a constant merry-go-round of newly graduated greenhorn adjunct faculty members bouncing from school to school touting the same mumbo-jumbo that they just "learned" in graduate school. The old guard certainly have chops that are respectable, but too often do they fall subject to this game of aesthetic trickery and style-over-substance. Professors wax poetic about the "discipline" of architecture yet most of the time they completely fail to educate students on fundamental concepts that then take years to learn on the job. Why? We're creating a knowledge gap that can't be filled with software or project management software, and we're quickly becoming afterthoughts to generating new ideas for cities—that's now in the territory of Google, Amazon, and Uber.
Teaching design for design sake—not understanding place, tradition, program, material, and the organizational dynamics behind the architectural profession—is ultimately what's polluted architectural education.
Thanks for the comment. On your first point, I don't think you're giving enough credit to young adults in college. There are countless students who are able to manage their time without their professors holding their hands or telling them how to do so. The issue is with the current culture (hence my point in its presence being a myth) of the field but it seems we both agree on this point.
On your second point. This is ultimately an overgeneralization. By definition a professor (or adjunct instructor) is in a position to teach a student who does not anything about architecture. Even if they are recent grads it would not take away from the value they could provide to students in earlier years in their education process. This is the foundation of mentorship within schools amongst students. For a student to adopt an attitude of open-mindedness to the feedback of their professor (or peers even) can only reap positive results in the end.
This is a complicated issue, and I think we're getting somewhere, but I want to push back a little on what you're saying. I can't think of a single star student from my experience that didn't pull all-nighters simply because that's what they feel like is expected of them to deliver a project at such a high level. Who decides what's important, and who sets the standard? Primarily the academic institution, as well as the students' own manic will to create. Despite what I said earlier, it really has little to do with time management. The problem is, and I think we both agree, is the inherent value system and motivation behind what we're teaching students in the first place. We're teaching them to be architects, which is in fact quite a practical and straightforward profession despite how much we want to conceptualize it to death.
We're in the service industry to monetize our knowledge and expertise about how to build a better building than the construction industry can do on it's own. We spend so much time in our own worlds fetishizing massing studies, parametric plugins, 3D printing, edge misregistration, multiple ontologies, cartoon-plans, diagrams, and etc. that I think we get a little lost in the sauce. Sure, these are tools of the trade and how we innovate our profession, but at a certain point, are we pigeonholing ourselves too much, ultimately undermining our value in society? To your point point about studio being a laboratory, academia functions as a kind of R&D operation for architectural hype machine, but often times true innovation occurs when dealing with the reality of implementing these systems out in the built environment.
This is what I'm trying to get at: There's this false sense of security in school that just because you're being taught that something is important, doesn't mean that it's actually important. A majority of my colleagues 5-10 years out of school (across the country) genuinely feel like school didn't prepare them for the profession, yet somehow this was a punchline all throughout my education and countless other's. You might call this a generalization, but I don't think it's any secret that academia and the profession have a bit of a two-faced relationship. This starts with curriculum and studio culture. Until we take the training wheels off architectural education and treat it much more like a real working office, apprenticeship, or trade, we're going to constantly produce endless amounts of "designers" and little to no individuals that are actually qualified to be architects.
You're right. The issue is a multi-dimensional one. Your response here is making more sense though. I know plenty of students from my time in school who produced extraordinary work and did not do all-nighters. Nevertheless, it is still part of the inherent culture.
School not preparing students for the profession is a whole other issue that wasn't the focus of this article, but again, you're quite accurate, thus the importance of internships while in school, at least in my view. Personally, I think the apprenticeship model would do well in our field (and produce more robust young professionals).
"Your professors actually know what they’re talking about."
Me, Brimming Optimism Pre-Masters : I concur. Such swell people.
Me Post-Masters, World Wary : No. N to the O. Some professors are strictly on the payroll because they are best-friends with _________________ (Insert-prominent-title-here) regardless of their capacity to teach or be decent human beings.
Regardless, I enjoyed the article and the first photo of a University of Florida studio. Just a whim, but I wonder what the other side of the coin is? "The Architecture Professor's Guide to Studio?"
haha! great comment! yes, I remember being a 4th-year student and asking one of my professors why he chose to teach. Being the naive young person I was, I thought he would give me an answer of how we wanted "to give back" and "make a difference". But his (honest) answer was merely that it paid the bills and allowed him to explore his interests. But, I actually think that is okay, he still made a difference in my thinking. And there also were those teachers who had a genuine love for what they did.
"The Architecture Professor's Guide to Studio" is a brilliant idea! And to contradict myself, in regards to the section titled "Your professors actually know what they're talking about," I am reminded of the Socratic decree..."The only thing that I know is that I know nothing."
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