NCARB announced last year that it would work with architecture schools to create a path to licensure upon graduation, and since then, it's approved 14 programs – the latest being at the University of Kansas. These programs are already NAAB-accredited and don't guarantee licensure upon graduation, but instead make it easier for enrolled students to complete IDP and ARE requirements while still in school, by adapting content to fulfill licensure requirements. This is part of NCARB's so-called Integrated Path Initiative.
As of now, NCARB's Licensure Task Force has accepted the following schools' plans to offer licensure upon graduation:
Catch up on NCARB's Integrated Path Initiative:
15 Comments
Just another way Architects are lowering the bar for our profession. This does nothing to help elevate our profession in the eyes of the public. I guess we will continue to devalue licensure until anyone can call themselves an Architect. It's already hard enough to expalin to cleints or potentional cleints what our value is to their project, now we have to compete with inexperenced and untrained "Architects" right out of school. This will be used against us to show how Architects are not worth the money we are paid.
^ lol
cleints would know, don't worry, even potentional onces.
you overestimate what clients know.
most people don't know what architects do.
the result of this: state boards will require more than just NCARB's standard stuff in order to grant licensure.
mdav007, I'm assuming you read every one of the 14 school's proposed curricula and found them substandard to the glorified rendering training many schools now offer as a 3-year MArch? Can you tell us in what ways you find them lacking?
What difference does it make when a person gains licensure? They are still passing the same tests. Are you concerned that this will create a shortage of cheap labor?
Everything is antiquated, lumbering, and obsolete until the moment it becomes part of my personal history, after which point it must be cemented as such for perpetuity.
That's what you sound like, mdav.
Woodbury University is proud to be among the first 14 programs offering an Integrated Path to Architectural Licensure Upon Graduation. Here is what Woodbury School of Architecture Professor and Dean, Norman Millar, said: “We see NCARB’s Integrated Path to Architectural Licensure initiative as an important stepping stone to improving the diversity — including gender diversity — of licensed architects. We embrace the opportunity to work closely with a consortium of architecture firms and our state board in the process.”
I feel the need to weigh in on this very important topic affecting our profession. NCARB is not the gate keeper of our vocation though try they may. The profession is a body of individuals that have proven the necessary skill, aptitude and reliability to ensure the health, safety and wellness of the general public. People always attack that last part, especially the young who can be forgiven for their ignorance of the fact that not long ago Architects did the critical design on the majority buildings built in this country. We did (and some still do ) their own engineering and mechanical design hiring engineers as consultants to consult, not shed liability. Engineering was a task done inside the Architect's studio by us or an engineer in our employ. This was and is our true power center as a profession because it is how we fulfill the mandate to protect the health and welfare of the general public, make a real dollar and earned god dam respect. In this age of great size be it the big firm, the big bank, the big government agency, there exists an ever increasing desperation to control, everything, including our profession but the folly of this age is that control is fleeting, destroying the very thing it means to protect. I've been in this business a long time and it's never been as hollow as it is now. There is no work. You may see tower crains in your city participating in one of the biggest multifamily, higher education and hotel expansions in the last 50 years but there's little need for us on the other end of that process. I have managed 20 architects which was a medium sized studio at one time which can now be done by 5 people. I used to sit at the right hand of the client at meetings and now sit at the middle of the table behind the boxed lunch, superintendent, manager and contractor. I didn't willingly give up my stature, you, the educators did that to us. Maybe you never like us or were just unhappy people. For 40 years the schools in the country have one by one abandoned a solid, principled design education buttressed by engineering, mechanics, art and history in favor of fashion, style and modish education pumping out graduates in such huge numbers that ranks have been bloated for decades and mostly with human flotsam. For 15 years this profession has been shedding 5%-10% of it's members per year and yet the schools keep turning out more desperate debtors guaranteed to give up and find sustenance in another field about 2 years after the first kid comes ( I've seen it more times than I care to remember). Fees have never been thinner while staff asked to do more. If you existed in the wholly private sector in 1999 you probably don't exist anymore. I cold called over 120 developers in 2 states last week and have 2 potential leads for maybe something they are looking at next year - that's as good as nothing. As a firm owner I am now asked to hard bid architectural services against 5 or 6 firms routinely because we are just a spreadsheet entry. In my office complex there's been a never ending stream of young Architectural start ups come and go for the last 20 years - some even ballooning to 40 or 50 people before spectacularly exploding with broken lives, failed marriages and massive debts. Those were the good times. I get so many resumes today it's like 2009 never ended, and you should see them, Harvard! For Christ's sake. How bad is it Harvard grads want to work on power center outlots or some TOD apartment where we struggle to get 10 inches more out of each unit? This is the reality the educators want to release a fresh new wave of debt ridden dreamers into, a reality wheres there's maybe 1 job for 10 people and the irony is you just might get that job at graduation, and then that's it because I don't have room for you beyond drafting and modeling, I've got 2 guys with over 20 years each for that, the other firm owners in my local AIA chapter certainly don't have room, so where is all this "demand growth" occurring because revenues aren't indicating this? Of those developers I contacted last week over a third now do design in-house. Your school probably told you the future was design based, no need for hard knowledge right? Well guess who's doing that now - your clients. If you were around residential in the 90s you saw the home builders take design in the residential single family sector, then it spread to retail shopping centers, now it's everywhere. Marketing firms now offer architectural design, and increasingly win it. So good luck with that hot handed design skill you polished for 6 years, your going to be drafting for a MRED with a knocked off copy of auto cad. And if you think interior design is going to offer some relief your right, it's one of the only profit centers left for my firm but I employ 2 interior designers to do interior design, not architects. Sadly I have found through the years Architects, especially young ones, cant hold a candle to most interior design graduates when it actually comes to thoughtful, saleable design. Hell most cant even draw any more or do a simple marker sketch but the interior design kids all can and it's still the best jaw dropper when sitting across from a client - human talent. You can draw and they cant. To conclude my ranting I just have to say NCARB, the schools, the people on these committees, they are all either misguided or worse. I would hate to call it a financial fraud but we live in an age where fraud is the norm. From the fountainhead of debt springs power, debt is the master's whip in this age. The country stopped expanding about 30 years after we built out California and it's been bullshitting itself ever since. The banks know this, we don't make a whole lot anymore so YOU and your debt is the commodity to being bought and sold keeping this old dynamo of capitalism going. The school administrators know the game is coming to end as enrollments started to level off so they needed to sweeten up the promises. Just remember - promises make debts, but debts make promises. The best act of defiance you could possibly do is to tell the educators, "No, I will not be a victim of your fraud", because I can assure you there will be no Architecture profession left for you to enter in 10 years, but you will still be paying the price of admission for at least 20.
Blaming educators is a lazy scapegoat and blaming the youth is tantamount to blaming illegal immigrants for the decline of the middle class.
The main cause of architectures decline is our big/cheap/throwaway culture combined with an overall political/economic trend towards corporatism/fascism...If you want to find out why architects have lost value, ask what their value is to the overlords..if it is not about increasing bottom line then it has no value to the corporate machine that finances the architect...
There is no future in the game. We must break out of the service model or just roll over and accept our fate as cogs to the oligarchy...
As I have said, the 20th century was looking "towards a new architecture"....the 21st will/should be looking "towards a new architect."
Do you propose removing the architectural licensing law because the laws as they are written are not designed for the "new architect". As a matter of fact, if the role of actual responsibility is going to contractors and engineers then it means architects no longer performs that crucial responsibility that licensing laws were originally written. It was written at a time when architects DID these responsibility. They were the sole design professional on most projects. Engineers being consulted was almost strictly relegated to engineering trusses, lamella roofs, and space frame roofs or an unusually complex Mechanical or Electrical. Now, the architects are practically having engineers on EVERYTHING. Even the most basic residential electric for a 2 room cabin which may have a 15 amp service for three light fixtures (kitchenette area, living/sleeping room and the bathroom. three circuits for 6 three-prong duplex wall outlets at 20Amp each. One circuit in the bathroom would be GFCI.
How hard is that to prepare the electrical plans for?
Well.... when licensing laws was enacted, that was something that nearly EVERY architect performed. Today's architects, that might be 10% of them.
Once an architect has no responsibility to HSW that they must directly perform under their DIRECT supervision without passing off to someone else, then before long, the architect is merely a space planner and interior/exterior designer in one. Those three roles largely has no HSW responsibility warranting of state licensing in most states. When you only have those three roles... what are we?
I would argue that when that becomes the case... then we must consider repealing architectural licensing because the roles are no longer the case and the preparation of architects does not lead to a professional qualified to really meet the intent of the licensing laws when they were written.
This is always controversial to discuss because those who are licensed would find that appalling but 5 years (hell, 50 YEARS) of glorified art school doesn't make you qualified to be an architect according to the intent of architectural licensing and the basic responsibility of architects when the laws were enacted. These laws required architects to perform the engineering of buildings because the role of engineers had nothing to do with buildings. Back in the day, Architect was also Architectural Engineer. It is very much the same as the meaning of the word used in Japan for 'Architect'. Back in the day, buildings didn't use a lot of trusses throughout so a structural engineer was only brought in to deal with engineering complex roof trusses. Although an architect may perform the basic trusses for roofs. Very seldom did MEP engineers were ever involved. Even in the domain of basic civil engineering is often done by the architect when it is associated with architecture including retaining walls that are appurtenant to that of the architecture being designed.
I can understand in instances delegating to engineers as consultants for more complex matters but to some extent architects aren't performing the practice of architecture. Their insurance companies are. When the insurance companies are controlling the decisions of the architects, then is that a problem? Grave problem.... possible.
(pause)
Over time, people had figured out ways to bypass the architect altogether because when the customary practice of architects is basically.... space planning, interior and exterior design (all three of those practices doesn't require architect license) while the structural and MEP stuff are performed by engineers. People had figured out how to eliminate the architect especially when a perceived vast majority of them never listens to what the client wants or desires like when a person wants a craftsman/prairie style / regional style flair in their design that the design result is something reminescent of something Frank Gehry would cook up that has no balance and hardly even fits into place and even to a point.... embarrassing to the client, the neighborhood and the community at large because the architects are all about their artistic ego and vanity.....not about the client's needs. In a service profession, you have to lead and be responsible in following through the project.
You can only hide behind other professionals so long before the client and market catches on to the game and see your value compared to the past. You can't expect to be paid the same percentage of construction cost (for example) and do less. If you want to be valued as architects were in 1919.... you must be THE DESIGN PROFESSIONAL !!!!
You can't just delegate your way out of the hard stuff that "American culture" values to be worth significant money. If you want to be an Artist then you must accept living a poor life because your value doesn't happen until you are dead... generally. Art is considered easy like a child can make art. American adults are paid to do child stuff. We are paid to do the hard stuff. We are valued not because it is easy but because it is hard. That is the nature and vision that clients want to see in us before they pay us.
People value you when you do the hard stuff that the client doesn't want to do themselves or sees as tough and difficult. Most people know how to draw and design to some level because a lot of people take art classes in college. Therefore, you need to have value in something more than just sketching.
jla-x brings up this point of a "new architect" but I would repeal the licensing laws as we have it and then based on what the role of the "new architect", then maybe it needs licensing... maybe not. It depends on what that 'new architect' looks like.
licensure laws have stifled the profession by allowing the stale old conservatives to stay in power while simultaneously creating a culture of indentured servitude among the youth...It is a shitty model , and the proof is that is hasn't elevated the profession as all of these complaints suggest...
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