Are you saying that school group project are indicative of how real collaborative work is an architecture office? because it's just objectively not true. There is honestly zero relation between how group projects in school are and how a real architecture project is run, where you might have multiple team members, each knows what part they are contributing to, there's a team leader who can coordinate everything. When you work with consultants (who are also part of the team), you have some sort of hierarchy of who gets the final word and how you approach a solution for different problems. It's something else entirely, really.

In architecture school it's just a random group of students mostly who need to find a common interest somehow, and there is no real predefined tasks for everyone. It's almost always uncoordinated and not so fun. Architecture school are not doing group project to simulate real life architecture office environment, they do to so they don't have 40 projects to crit.

Not saying it's all bad, you learn a lot about how you can communicate with different minds and develop leadership skills, but mostly it's just meh.

Yeah, I think the absence of an overall senior person in charge really differentiates group work in school between project teams at work. The lack of hierarchy and supervision hurts a lot of student group projects - especially with everyone vying with each other.

I think the point of doing group design work is to get people accustomed to - working in groups - :: gasp:: Nothing in architectural school prepares you for working in an actual firm. All it does is give you the minimal base knowledge to function in a firm.

Group work in design classes have been around a lot longer than 10 years. I've been practicing since 2002. We had group design work when I was in school.

Wow, is this a new trend? I've only heard of a max of one group studio for Core, with Options depending on the instructor. The majority of student work was individual.

You're not going to find your own architectural voice while in school. Not a real one anyways. What you'll find is your own process and a bit of architectural preferences.

Business schools actually have coursework in personality types and negotiation that facilitate people to successfully work in groups. Arch. schools need to look into that if they are going to force people into cockamamie group design projects. In my day, the only group work you did in arch. school was in tech and structures classes. The projects just about always sucked ass in both process and end product because very few young people had the people/management skills to pull them off.

So your view that group work shouldn't be done because young people suck at it? Then what about when you get into your first firm and need to group work but have never experienced it? 

I'm not saying that group work in school is going to teach students how to do group work well. It is needed though. 

When I was in school the group projects started off slowly and took a few years spread out through several projects and studios.  The entire class working to build a large site models for a project we'd all use. This progressed into teaming up with the landscape students for a shared project. Then finally it was a full 12 person group project were we had to masterplan city and create said masterplan. Throughout this entire process the professors various lectures on how to do group work.

No, I just think the schools need to be teaching the kids effective collaboration techniques before throwing them into group projects. Maybe some are doing that, but it looks to me like many are not. My undergrad and grad sure didn't. The sink-or-swim method is unduly painful for the students.