sorry to continue my flagrant quoting, but I really love what farwest just said:

"One of the strengths of architecture as a discipline, to my mind, has always been its speculative and future-oriented practice.

Much of the theorizing in architecture tends therefore to be rhetorical, polemical, and projective. This is actually one of the things I like about our profession--versus, say, engineering, where any theorizing needs to be firmly grounded in data, dry, scientific, supported. I was drawn to architecture because of writers like Le Corbusier, Venturi, Rossi, Koolhaas and Siza (who's a great writer, by the way) all of whom write in a speculative way.

Many of the architecture PhDs I've met, because of the rigors of their training, seem to regard this sort of thinking as overblown and uncontrolled"

I think this gets to the problem of endless study or research at the expense of implementation and action. All of the writers mentioned are known for their designs as well as their writings--building as well as thinking--and I think that represents the best and most influential aspects of architectural theory. The drier, more footnote-laden, research-based theory tends to be less influential and more remote. Obviously there are differences in tone between the writings of Corbusier and Venturi, for example, in terms of tone and discipline, but I think what binds them together, and a huge part of what makes them so influential is that their writings are supported by building. The goal is not just to offer theories, which they do, but to use those theories to inform building, just as the theories are themselves informed by building.

I'll quote you right back!

The drier, more footnote-laden, research-based theory tends to be less influential and more remote. Hits it on the head.

Make,

The flip side is that sometimes it's possible to get an academic job because you know no one on the inside, so no one yet hates you.

With no enemies and no friends, you're kind a floating cipher: people can project on you what they want.

Farwest,

That's true you're a cipher but 9 times out of 10, someone's buddy is in the running and the interview process is a formality. There are lot more applicants than jobs right now.

that is too bad stationery. i grew up in canada and got m.arch there then practised for several years before doing phd at university of tokyo. i run own office here now, very small and teach part time. possibly that is not normal...?

anyway, phd in architecture school here was very much a program that brooked no bullshit and more or less required quantitative material be used as basis for research. parsing text was flatly not accepted as up to standards of academia as architect. so i learned to do fieldwork and studied urban morphology in relation to theories about the compact city and sustainability. it was directly relevant to policies being enacted in the city i was studying and not at all picayune or useless. not that the general public would love to know about it, but it wasn't horribly specialised either...

Jump--when you mean 'here', are you referring to Tokyo? That's impressive to practice and teach in Japan, which presumably, you have to have a near native command of the Japanese language. (I lived and studied in Hamamatsu for a short while before).

I don't know very much about the programs in Japan so I am unable to comment. To my previous categories I should also add the difference between a more faculty-run program in contrast to a more university-wide mandated policy program. The latter refers to a set of 'universal' guidelines for phds across different departments, to the extent that the experience of a phd in geography should not vary too greatly from that of a phd in physics. A faculty-run program, well, refers to those where criteria of satisfactions are set by the faculty themselves.

yeah i am based in tokyo. japanese wife and about 5 years in a non-english-speaking office make it easy (-er). university of tokyo is english speaking school to certain extent, and i teach in english at place called waseda, so is actually not such a stretch.

professors here decide their own criteria as faculty, i would say. i never felt what we were doing was vacuous. my professor is possibly special, though i don't think so. most professors at my uni are advisors to govt and so on, so they are maybe more externally fixated than is normal in academia...

From my personal experience, Japan is rather cloistered from the rest of the world, and in that sense, have their own very unique way of practice and perhaps, governance.

You are lucky! That's a nice arrangement. Given the chance, I always want to visit Japan (again and again).

you could be right.

on other hand i was involved with symposium we had with visiting professors from Princeton last year and i was very impressed by them and the work they were doing. stan allen and jeff kipnis were for me a particular eye-opener about what professors can be, and of course stan allen is practitioner of some accomplishment...

for the theory side, and for the hell of it sticking with Princeton architecture school, beatriz colomina and m. christine boyer are 2 of the best thinkers on architecture and urbanism around. not at all vacuous and both with phds.

i know i am spoiled by the school i went to, but i didn't feel the process was anything that wouldn't/couldn't happen elsewhere. maybe the problem is only that there are not enough good schools, not that the process is inherently bad? or at least not any more bad than is to be expected of any big group project.

Jump--I don't think it is a matter of good schools or bad process, but rather, it is the lengthy phd process that is prone to be easily hijacked--whether by the mental frustration of the individual student, or by professors who are slave laborers, or by bureaucracy that simply wants to move students along regardless of the student's coping capacities, or by the entrenchment of the discipline itself not doing very much to support the activities of its young practitioners...etc etc.

I see the phd process as a truly edifying process where a young (or not so young in my case) person can spend 5-6 years (11 or 12 years writing a dissertation on Kant may be too long as I have seen in one case) to pursue a series of subjects that are intrinsically interesting. To the technically rational world, this 5-6 years is usually seen as a 'waste'. But from a human enrichment viewpoint, it is seen as intellectual development.

In this process one learns how to go beyond intuitions of curiosity towards a useful process of self-learning and self-knowing amid the university environment. I don't want to use the descriptor 'systematic' to describe this process because looking at my own process and many others, it is alot more messy but nonetheless, not undisciplined.

But my take on the phd is not the usual one taken, or at least practiced in real life. In the real version, 5-6 years are designated based on the amount of funding involved, if one is lucky. And 5-6 years is spent on a topic of disciplinary interest, which is defined by what is interesting to certain faculty and what can be added to the overall earnings made in one's life in this technically rational society. Most of the time beyond architecture, a phd is a career high note--one takes that so that it is a higher qualification for a vocation otherwise unreachable, whether working on a high velocity particle accelerator, or in the event that one is no longer interested in physics, to work as a quant on wall street.

This is why I say it is not a matter of bad schools or processes. There are simply too many factors that can go 'wrong' and warp the perspective on this phase of learning. This is perhaps why I say you are lucky for you to carry that particular perspective on the phd.

Jump, an aside on Jeff Kipnis: I had him on a number of juries in grad school. I found him always to be a pedantic, pretentious blowhard. He used the jury format as a platform for demonstrating how much he knows--his comments were both not particularly insightful nor pertinent to the topic at hand. They did, however, manage to cram many names of obscure practitioners into a single sentence.

In grad school, I assumed that because of my lack of knowledge I was missing something fundamental about Kipnis's thinking. But I've since read his widely published essays and realized that he truly is pretentious (but superficially so), and tries to overcomplicate simple ideas in the style of an earlier, and perhaps discredited, generation of deconstructivist theorists. He is also a surprisingly bad writer.

I've always taken Kipnis as the perfect example of what is wrong with our architectural education system. It often allows dilettantes with large vocabularies and little (or no) practical experience to shape the educations of young architects.

This is, of course, one person's opinion.......

aha, but i understand perfectly farwest1! he was a blowhard with us too, and i enjoyed talking to him and with kwinter although they were both blowing bubbles. they were practically frothing.

the thing was that they were challenging and, even if narcissistic, also engaged and engaging. maybe i caught them on a good day...i am admittedly a Pollyanna. I just like people in general and don't mind pomposity when directed in interesting directions....


anyway, while i do understand your point of view, i disagree. all architects are dilettantes, so being taught by one who focuses more on theory than on practice is not such a problem to me. However, i am most certainly biased. my first year of architecture school back in canada was run by a group of teachers that included an opera singer, a (very good) abstract expressionist painter, a photographer, and only incidentally one architect. in hindsight it was a perfect way to start things off.


@ stationary, i understand and agree. it is a hazardous process, especially the points you highlight. just the same here as in usa. i guess i was lucky. or just easily pleased ;-)

hmmmm, you know that latter is a real possibility - i did phd for fun, not because i had a plan based on obtaining it - i had practised architecture for several years before starting phd (it is was a preference of my advisor that all of his phd students have worked professionally), and my ambition was to practise after graduating too. maybe that makes/made me oddly content with academia.

I realized that my last post was perhaps overly critical of Kipnis.

On the other hand, I've always liked Kwinter's writing and ideas. He seems to be able to back up his rhetoric with real insight and innovative thinking (something that, unfortunately, it's never struck me Kipnis can do. He's all rhetoric.)

Interesting, though, that these two are often grouped together. Is it because both of their last names begin with K?

Kipnis - he can be mean-spirited, arrogant, dismissive and have a low-tolerance to chit-chat, but i still think he is one of the most perceptive, most insightful critics around. he does use lots of references and names - but that is because he does know what he is talking about. I can think of few other critics i would rather spend time on a jury with.

I am sure that to many, his confiscating of the conversation at juries seems like nothing more than the act of a big ego, but time after time i have found him to be the one person who gets underneath any ideology or theory to reveal its current and future consequence on architectural thought.

PhDs - it seems to me that any conversation about the value and relation of PhD to teaching, needs to take account of the new economy of degrees in architecture. Up until the mid-1980's, most schools (in the USA and Australian context) produced - as the primary degree - B.Arch. This was all that was necessary for a professional degree, leading to becoming a registered architect. An M.Arch was for those who wanted to go into more depth in particular areas of research and those who wanted to teach - based on the scholastic tradition of what a "master" meant - 'one who was allowed to teach'. A PhD was only for truly scholarly research and publishing, focused mostly on history, theory or technology.

Now we have a situation, increasingly across many schools and university systems, that have basically taken what used to be the work of a 5-year B.Arch, and re-badged it as a 3+2 M.Arch. This new (but to my mind de-valued) M.Arch is now the new professional degree - the first degree from which you can gain professional registration. As a consequence, the new PhD, has replaced the old M.Arch, and has become the necessary degree to allow for teaching. This "degree inflation" doesn't seem to do much for what is actually learned, but it does change the status and professional conditions between what happened 30 years ago and now.

"Building is the end goal of every architect" - i couldn't agree less with this. If only because it is not backed up by fact, but by opinion.

The question of why a particular individual is being denied tenure at a particular school implicates lots of contingencies; not least of which are ideology, personal relationships, professional jealousies, abilities and teaching outcomes, so without some in-depth information it is hard to know what the situation really is at "UM".

However, to then lay out of a line that suggests that the 'be all, end all' for architects is building is merely to posit a personal opinion as if it were a universal fact. The facts of history and the present day suggest that the on-going evolution of architecture is as much the consequence of theorist, 'paper-architects', teachers and critics as it is of "building-architects".

Responding first to FLM:

Actually, I cite the late entries to the tribune tower competition, which were meant a as critique of the project that was built, and were submitted after the building was already mostly complete. The second set was more than seventy years later.

But your turn to Corbusier and Scott Brown/Venturi is more fruitful for my point. When Corbu was producing his plans for the new Paris, he intended them as built projects. Even the early city planning projects which were site-independent, he meant as built works. In fact, it is reasonable to describe vers un architecture as an argument meant to support specific built projects. So I would say that Corbusier is practicing architecture, in so far as it elucidates a thought, but his works are not theory.

Scott Brown and Venturi by contrast, and at least in Complexity and Contradiction, and Learning from Las Vegas, is practicing theory. The goal of his inquiry is not a built project, it is to intervene with a new way of thinking about architecture. Let me say that more specifically – he is not trying to tell you what or how to build, but is making a reasoned argument why it might be a better idea to think about the built environment in a different way.

At the risk of belaboring my point, I’ll add a few more thoughts. It is not the presence or absence of a building that makes the project theory – Scott Brown/Venturi cites multiple built projects in their texts. I’m not saying that corbu’s work isn’t useful to theorize about. I’m also not saying that Scott Brown/Venturi should be considered theorists and not architects. What I’m hoping to establish is that there is an approach to the built environment that is not limited to building.

I suppose one could pantomime my argument as that there are three degrees of abstraction in re: the built environment. The first, building, is a direct manipulation of it. The second, architecture, is thinking about it in a fashion that is visible and available to other individuals (which could be designing a building). The third, theory, is thinking about what constitutes thinking. The last could result in a built proposition, but is pursued with the primary intent of clarifying thought.

As the deconstructionist turn has been brought up, let me add that sometimes clarifying thought requires very exacting intervention in existing discursive practices. When such an intervention is built upon an already complex dialogue, the intervention will undoubtedly rely on approaches to and constructions of thought that are only specifically intelligible within the context of that dialogue. To someone not entirely versed in that dialogue, an intervention can seem mannered, at best.

We have been expecting students to arrive in the classroom already equipped with a complete understanding of the subject a class is meant to teach – or at least the attitude that they do. After generations of “fake it ‘till you make it,” most students have learned that the best defense when confronted with an idea they don’t understand is to pretend it doesn’t make sense. Frankly, if an argument doesn’t make sense, you should be able to explain why. This is why we need theory – not only so that we have the ability to exercise informed judgment about others arguments as well as our own, but just as importantly, so that we can explain those arguments.

As I understand it, what this thread started about is another example of an individual who was a capable practitioner and yet was denied tenure because the faculty at that school was “against practice,” which several of the participants in this discussion have interpreted as being against building.

What is at stake then is whether someone who hangs up a shingle and makes a bunch of structures that nominally satisfy client needs is someone who should be given tenure. I say nominally, because if that person wanted to be a professor, they could have earned a doctorate*, and if they were reasonably successful as a practitioner, they would find an assistant professor’s income laughable (an average of $42,000 a year according to the Chronicle of Higher Education three years ago), and the work expected to earn tenure appalling (to say nothing of the politics others have mentioned).

I know nothing of the particular case or the institution that provoked this thread, but I do know people who have been given tenure on the basis of their practice, and the promotion that came with it (again, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education an associate professor of architecture makes an average of $92,000 a year) and promptly stopped doing anything – no publication, no innovative teaching, and most disappointingly, no further practice of any depth – just a few vanity projects.

This is disappointing, because the point of tenure is supposed to be to give individuals who have already made a substantial contribution to their discipline the security to take substantial risks – to buck the system form a position of security. The result is supposed to be a discipline in which a civil discourse occurs – faculty engage even the toughest of challenges by their colleagues with an open mind, because they know it is likely they will have to work with them for decades to come.

Maestro gives me a great example of why we (if this white man can posit a we) need that discourse when he says, “if ‘builidng is not the goal of Architecture’, then you are effectively saying that the goal of architecture is to not build.” What he has done is make a illicit syllogism that meets the criteria for an affirmative conclusion form a negative premise. Not only can we recognize it as a mistake, we have a term for it.

good points.