Courtesy of Troy Schaum/Rice Architecture/Park Books

Design studios play a crucial role during a student's time in architecture school where students are given opportunities to gain new skills, experiment with fabrication techniques, and implement design theory, all while creating prototypes and learning how to effectively present their designs. However, not all studios are executed in the same way. Depending on the institution's focus and pedagogy, studio instructors are often challenged to create new methods of interpreting studio culture, while continuing to implement applicable themes and briefs that challenge and initiate creative thought and reasoning for students. As stressful as it is memorable, students and instructors engage in an almost symbiotic experience through studio: Both parties learn together while conducting research and experimentation through design. 

Archinect connected with Troy Schaum, Associate Professor at the Rice University School of Architecture, to discuss his Totalization studio and his recently published book titled, TOTALIZATION: Speculative Practice in Architectural Education from the University of Chicago Press. Together we unpack the studio's beginnings, the ideas that prompted the book, and the choices students have to make when pursuing a career in architecture.

Architecture is still done one project at a time. That's the power of what young architects do. They don't become experts in all these categories, but in where these areas overlap within their project. That's how I think architectural expertise is built. It's a luxury. When you're a young architect, you think, "I've been stuck on this project for two years." But it's like doing a PhD: You look at a very narrow area of the world in order to understand the whole universe

Excerpt taken from TOTALIZATION:Speculative Practice in Architectural Education: Page 121 - Section 5 "The Camaro and the Forest"

For those who aren't familiar with your work at Rice, can you talk about the Totalization design studio program?

It is a program where students are in conversation with a diverse range of specialists to support the conception of their individual studio work. The intensity and diversity of the collaborations break down the traditional concept/design/demonstrate/present sequence of a design studio. Instead, students are working in environments that are simultaneously inventive and technically rigorous.

What motivated you to work on editorializing the work coming out of the Totalization Studios and were there any new insights gained during the writing process?

More and more the practice of architecture involves situations where an architect is enmeshed in a team of experts. The complexity of the technical and human choreography involved in that process seemed to demand a new way to think about the terms for innovation and speculation in design schools.

As an architect and academic, where do you see the future of architectural education going?

The challenges that architects are facing in the built environment require deeper and deeper understandings of the relationships of the project to its environment across broader scales of investigation. The sophistication and diversity of the issues, like the urban equity, energy, environment, require an architect to be comfortable navigating large and disparate bodies of knowledge. Less abstractly, they need to know how to work with the large interconnected teams that are producing that knowledge if we are going to manage to confront these challenges.

If a student picks up this book, what do you hope they take away from it?

There are a range of issues for anyone interested in architecture. Firstly, there are some great pieces by engineers and our allied experts—Nat Oppenheimer of Silman, a structural engineer on OMA's Milstein Hall at Cornell University, for instance; Mark Malekshahi, who was the MEP engineer on the SANAA-designed Toledo Glass Museum; and Robert Heintges who has helped conceive of the envelopes for many buildings. It is a treat to understand those collaborations from their perspectives. 

Also, the book contains the work of architects at that have participated in the project, like SCHAUM/SHIEH and Oualalou + Choi. Lastly, there is great work from a variety of students and studios. 

Gaining New Perspectives Through Resistance

While navigating through the book, one chapter in particular that sticks out highlights a fascinating conversation between Troy Schaum and his teaching colleagues Tarik Oualalou, Linna Choi, and John Casbarian. During their conversation, the four discuss their experiences teaching in the Totalization studio and how the studio aims to provide students a broad perspective on the profession and on architectural work, in general. Below is an excerpt of the team's conversation, which is taken from TOTALIZATION.

Casbarian: What do you think the French schools do differently from their US counterparts? 

Oualalou: It always surprises me when people think that having a conceptual architectural idea conflicts with learning how to make buildings. This opposition is to the detriment of both people who want to go in the realm of theory and people who want to go in the realm of practice, because they both think that it's the opposite. This supposed conflict creates a friction between building basic tools and having a critical conversation, because you must at least absorb the thing before productively engaging with the second. Both students and professors are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and sometimes you have to shut down the possibility of critical conversations with students simply because they need to build tools. This "in-between" area is the hardest part of teaching Totalization. I think after a few years we found the right balance, and it has to do with the fact that Linna and I teach together. 

Schaum: We struggle with the same question in the Houston studios as well. Some students want to pursue advanced questions, but first we have to teach them what a curtain wall is and how a curtain wall is constructed. 

Totalization is an act of resistance against both ends of the spectrum, or at least that's how I look at it. It's a way at once resist the urge to exit the build-ability of architecture and to bring theoretical content into the realm of the real.

Oualalou: Totalization is an act of resistance against both ends of the spectrum, or at least that's how I look at it. It's a way at once resist the urge to exit the build-ability of architecture and to bring theoretical content into the realm of the real.

Schaum: Yes, Totalization is an effort to unify these two poles with the position that theory and training are not mutually exclusive categories. You have to have both if you're going to master the practice right?

Choi: Students have three choices, essentially, when they get out of school. They either go into corporate life or they go into academia. Most of the professors don't actually practice because their academic work load is so great. And then there is a small middle path, where the professors teach and have small practices, but because the United States doesn't subsidize public projects, you have to fight for tiny things. There's no support. The European context is very different.

Casbarian: Yes, but that has not been an issue at Rice. Our curriculum has always been characterized by the balance between practice and theory. Our consistent intention has been to deal with both issues simultaneously and interchangeably, and to prepare students for the profession by making them understand how a building is made and all the implications related to its social and environmental fit. At the same time they speculate on issues that will give them the means to innovate and lead after graduation. I think that's probably what you're seeing in the Totalization studio: the challenge of confronting thee realities of technical limits coupled with the freedom to speculate.

Oualalou: This is why Totalization exists, as an extremely important educational moment. That's why I like to look at it as a form of resistance. If you invite students to look at the whole building through the lens of something small, it may hopefully crystallize some of the things that they've learned in their earlier years of training.

Are We Experts After All? 

With a volume filled with interviews and insightful, critical discourses, Schaum and his colleagues provide practicing architects and students an easy-to-read guide book that walks readers through the origins and focus of the Totalization Studio. At various schools of architecture, design studios are developing into multifaceted breeding grounds for speculation, exploration, and resistance from traditional architecture pedagogy through a new wave of architectural research and prototyping. According to Schaum, the studio aims to be a working prompt for this type of speculation. 

"I think about Totalization as an additive incompleteness, as a 'totaling up' of constraints and possibilities [...] There's a real power in being a young architect. The power is, you're not an expert in any category, or even in architecture really yet, but you're an expert on our own project."