Archinect - Features

Deans List: Stephen Phillips on Complementing Architectural Practice With Academic Discourse and Vice Versa

2020-01-06T14:18:00-05:00

Archinect's Deans List is an interview series with the leaders of architecture schools, worldwide. The series profiles the school’s programs, pedagogical approaches, and academic goals, as defined by the dean–giving an invaluable perspective into the institution’s unique curriculum, faculty, and academic environment.

For our latest installment, and in conjunction with Archinect’s Spotlight on Los Angeles, Archinect spoke with Stephen Phillips, Director and founder of the Cal Poly Los Angeles Metropolitan Program in Architecture and Urban Design. The 30-student program offers fourth-year undergraduate students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo “an urban experience highly suited to an advanced architecture education” that compliments SLO’s more traditionally collegiate educational offerings while also offering an integrated design curriculum that includes a 20-week internship experience at some of the city’s top architecture firms. Phillips writes: “We position our students within the profe...

Understanding Architecture Internships

2019-06-10T14:35:00-04:00

Architectural internships are modern day’s reinterpretation of the late apprenticeship model, but with some modifications. In earlier centuries, when a young person wanted to pursue a profession or craft, they typically enlisted in a seven-year contract with a “master” who took them under their wing and trained them up as professional practitioners. This was the young person’s education. They didn’t go to a school, get a degree in the craft they wanted to pursue, and then go and ask the masters for a job. Instead, they obtained their mentor from day one and learned everything from him. Today, our approach is quite different. We decide we want to be architects and then we enroll in a school to study it. After about five years, we graduate and go out and ask the marketplace to hire us. But we quickly realize that we don’t really know anything about architecture, or, to be more fair, we do not know anything about the practice of architecture.

The internship test or: why even become an architect at all?

2016-04-06T09:11:00-04:00

The question of internships frames something of a litmus test in architecture – although they tend to indicate more about the hiring firm than the hire. Exploited labor or necessary rite-of-passage? It’s a debate that’s been raging for decades almost exclusively through this binary, even as the context in which it’s been waged has transformed considerably. While certain practices have moved to institute fair compensation into their intern programs, life for many architecture interns today remains a struggle.

Is Twitter the architectural intern's unofficial labor union? Exposing the reality behind unpaid internships across borders and industries

2015-06-11T12:15:00-04:00

Social media has been accused of being many things: a time-waster, an intelligence-leveler, a privacy-invader. However, in the field of architectural employment, social media has oddly become a kind of virtual worker’s union, helping to expose unethical hiring practices. A recent leaked email from Japanese firm SANAA advertised an unpaid internship for three months consisting of 12-hour days, 6-7 days a week, with the intern providing his or her own computer and software. Juan Herrera tweeted the email on March 23rd and it quickly garnered extensive press coverage.