Wow, im suprised my school was even ranked.

What school?

Erroneous!!! These rankings area based on research performance, not quality of education attained. Erroneous!!!

NYIT, we ranked a 2. Frankly i don't know if i can disagree with that though... School for me is really more about the students and the professors than anything else. We have some really strong professors here, especially compared to U of Miami where i've also studied. The student population could use a kick in the ass or two though. I'm shocked alot of the people i thought failed first and second year have made it to third. I used to bitch about "weeding", now I see why schools do it.

hehe... great site for ranking a schools website, not what they teach!

ERRONEOUS!!! these rankings are based on the website of schools, not quality of education attanied. Errrrrrrrrrrrrr....

I'm going to spend the rest of the morning looking at archsoc...

Yeah, I got my BA in Environmental Design from Montana State, and they used to do a good job of "weeding"...but now i'm not so sure. I "weeded" myself out for grad school...

Has it really been so long since we've discussed Dr. Garry's rankings that they are new again? wow.

If you're in it for research, then yeah, this could be a useful tool. However, I have two major problems with the methodology: 1) they don't count adjuct profs, which is a huge hit to any good architecture school. Adjunct professors are the wealth of knowledge which many good architecture programs rely on, because in architecture it is key for instructors to be working professionals. Hence, I would argue that architecture schools probably rely more heavily on adjuncts than most disciplines do, so this is an especially problematic exclusion considering Dr. Garry is ONLY ranking architecture schools. 2) the "removing the stars" exclusion. I would argue that any star [i]who has been at their institution for a certain minimum time[i], say somewhere between five or ten years, has affected the school's culture of research in a long-term way, and deserves to be counted. However, if they are school-hoppers, then it's fine to exclude them.

From the website: "For a start, there are quite a many people who would argue that research is simply irrelevant to an architecture school. We discuss that at length here and here. But in the universities the schools are, and as long as they wish to remain there they must follow their dictates. Amongst these is the requirement to produce research. A lot of money and perhaps promotion may well depend on it."

I didn't do more digging, but I assume that since he searches databases such as the Avery Index, Dr. G. equates publishing with research.

I think the best professor I've have thus far in my education was a Adjunt prof, school turned her down for a job, bad for the school, good for her!

"Any school with a score of three or less. They may be the best teaching schools in the world, they may be producing the most sought-after architectural employees: but they are not the planet's intellectual leaders." - from the website

architecture employees vs. architecture freakshows of the 3rd kind

Dr. Garry's research stars :

Academic____ Research Score___ Nation
Remment Koolhaas 649 USA
Kenneth Frampton 581 USA
Kester Rattenbury 526 UK
Peter Eisenman 431 USA
Jeremy Melvin 416 UK
Peter Cook 368 UK
Bernard Tschumi 361 USA
Thomas Fisher 353 USA
Peter Blundell Jones 307 UK
Robert Stern 302 USA
Alan Powers 286 UK
Brian Edwards 262 UK
Michael Sorkin 237 USA
Anthony Vidler 175 USA
Brian Hatton 156 UK
Marc Treib 149 USA
Andrew Saint 134 UK
Robert Maxwell 121 UK
Charles Correa 117 USA
Lebbeus Woods 105 USA
Stephen Fox 102 USA

Who is Kester Rattenbury? and wow, kipnis failed to make the grade.

University of Cincinnati students are still the most employable...and they swept the Lyceum competition

the only way to judge is to have an archinect student smack down!!!

but UC student also post the stupidest things on archinect ;-)

tk- I love that James Steele and Diane Ghirardo (and probably Victor Regnier) are not 'stars' enough to make that list, yet they were 'stars' enough to obviously be left off of USC's score...

that is the most retarded survey for schools i've ever seen

i had one of those fancy teachers that did a lot of research, wrote books and stuff. the class sucked, big time.

I tend to agree with this poll. As a Columbia Alumni I can say that since Mark Wigley's entry as Dean, the school has taken research and discourse across the board a little bit more seriously. (Not that I am a 100 percent Wigley fan BTW)
But it is interesting to see that Princeton (his alma mater) ranks ahead of its "apprentice".
From personal experience I can say that my education at Columbia is still embedded in my everyday work, research and ultimately our end product.
Rather than in a formal level, it actually comes across most evidently through our discussions about and beliefs in this profession.

this is a research based rating. period. it should only be critiqued within its own terms (as some have done above).

the planet's intellectual leaders, or perhaps the academy's. I'm sure the planet could care less about much of the 'research' being done by the above intellectuals.

I think research is extremely important in architecture and to an extent i have to give props to the ivy league "architecture think-tanks" but at some point in the day you have to put your money where your mouth is. For example, Rem's project on the city has been going on at Harvard for years now and its produced alot of useful research, yet i've never seen any architectural solutions to the problems it proposes exist. Its the same problem i have with his book "Content", it seems like most of the book is an interesting geography lesson with some architecture filler even though some of his(firms) most impressive work is in there. I think the "best" offers the best blend of research/theory and real world application.

Apurimac and others, What school offers the best blend of research/theory and real world appliction?

In response to my own post, will we ever know? how would you ever figure it out? do we really need to know? ahh the "?" amazing

One must find that out for oneself...

I don't understand treekiller's list of research stars and their rankings - what do the rankings mean? For instance, Bob Maxwell and Peter Cook both appear and both are retired from official teaching, though they do the odd lecture here and there. So how do these research stars translate into schooling?

yoy can rank that shit as well on the Bristol stool scale



type 5 I reckon

The ArchSoc website referenced above is run by disgruntled ex-academic Garry Stevens. His unprofessional comments are littered across the site. It has no credibility as a ranking of architecture schools.

His quantitative criteria to rank the "Best Architecture Schools" is to count up the number of publications by academics held in libraries such as the RIBA. This limited and arbitrary measure will tell a prospective student next to nothing about the quality of teaching and research in any particular school.

Counting up publication holdings in libraries doesn't address discipline specific modes of design research such as creative works, exhibitions and curation that are currently counted in national research audits such as the RAE in the UK, the ERA in Australia or the PRBF in New Zealand.

The ArchSoc site is unreliable as a guide and should be avoided. Prospective students deciding which Architecture school to apply for should carefully investigate the research culture and teaching outcomes of any particular school they are interested in.

The academic world and practical world of acrchitecture are two completely different worlds.

If this is an attempt to measure of the strength of the academic portion fine, but I would only assert a correlation between students from the schools to their ability to research, not to actually perform in the workplace.

rankled, it would have been enough to only dredge up one of the Dr Garry threads, but all of them is a bit much...

I agree with what you're saying, BUT I also think similar arguments can be made about Design Intelligence. Probably the best thing to do is to look at as many lists as you can as a starting point, and then investigate individual schools more minutely from there.

@cjacobs - I went to MSU as well. The program is SO different now from when we went there. (I think I might have actually been in your class). It's crazy to see all the changes they've implemented. I'm surprised it's even mentioned on a list for Research.

However, in response to the actual list, how can you even rank an architecture school? Architecture as a profession/academic pursuit is so subjective that's it's rating a reputation, not necessarily performance.

this is just like a high school popularity contest. who's gunna vote for the prom queen? the fat chick with all the cash in the world or the skanky one that likes to hang out under the football bleachers?