It's safe to say that nobody knows what the future of architectural education will be. These days it's hard to know what next month will bring us. Few people would argue, however, that academia is ripe for change, as are many facets of modern life that have not evolved at the pace the world has changed in recent decades.
To address this necessary change, we invite you to join us for a special discussion this upcoming Monday, from 1-2 pm EST / 10-11 am PST, featuring a distinguished panel of leaders of architectural education. Deans from across the country will be addressing, head-on, the change they hope to see, and the challenges they currently face to make that change.
To RSVP for this virtual panel, please click the "reserve" button at this link. Space is limited and registration is required to attend.
Hernán Díaz Alonso has been the director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture since 2015, where is held the position of distinguished faculty member since 2001. He is also the principal of the Los Angeles–based architecture office HDA-x (formerly Xefirotarch). His multidisciplinary practice is praised for its work at the intersection of design, animation, interactive environments, and radical architectural explorations.
What’s very different now is that many, many disciplines are sharing the same language. The tools that we use are exactly the same if you’re in fashion, architecture, car design, or even medicine" - from The Deans List: Hernan Diaz Alonso of SCI-Arc
Dr. Harriet Harriss (RIBA, FAIA, Ph.D.) is a qualified architect, writer, and historian, and Dean of the Pratt School of Architecture in Brooklyn, New York. Prior to this, she led the Architecture Research Program at the Royal College of Art in London and from 2009-2015, the Masters in Architecture Program at Oxford Brookes.
In some senses, architectural education is the love child of conflicting epistemologies, from the humanities and the arts, the natural and social sciences, and it is this hybridity that ensures architecture graduates possess an unrivaled foundation in interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary thinking" - from Deans List: Pratt's Dr. Harriet Harriss on Academia's Role in Preparing Architects of the Future
Michael Speaks is dean of the School of Architecture at Syracuse University. Previously, he was dean of the College of Design at the University of Kentucky from 2008-2013; director of the graduate program and founding director of the Metropolitan Research and Design post-graduate program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles from 1998-2005.
Students need to be conversant in the language of real estate, finance and development because, as a practical matter, it will empower them to act" - from Deans List: Michael Speaks of Syracuse Architecture
Mónica Ponce de León, AIA, NCARB, is the founding principal of MPdL Studio and dean of Princeton University School of Architecture. From 2008 through 2015, she was the dean of Taubman College at the University of Michigan. For over 12 years, Ponce de Leon taught at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.
Architecture should be more like the legal profession. After graduating from an accredited program, our students should take the ARE exam, and become licensed" - from Mónica Ponce de León on the Future of Architectural Licensure
Lesley Lokko is a multi-talented architect, best-selling novelist, architectural educator, and the current dean of the The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York (CCNY), New York City's premier public architecture school. Just last week, however, she publicly shared her decision to resign from her leadership role at CCNY, claiming, "I was not able to build enough support to be able to deliver on either my promise of change, or my vision of it." She will address the reasons leading to her decision during the panel.
Living and working in South Africa, one of the world’s most unequal societies, over the past decade has given me renewed and profound respect for the power of students to engage, shape, and question their inherited future - from "Decolonization Is a Gift"—CCNY's Lesley Lokko on Questioning Architecture's Inherited Futures
To RSVP for this virtual panel, please click the "reserve" button at this link. Space is limited and registration is required to attend.
5 Comments
The architecture profession and the schools have failed to reflect underlying social demographics through a rigged licensing process and a narrow education pipeline.The future of architectural education should focus on that first.Afterall architects should be designing for people.
I look forward to this. It will be interesting what the thoughts are.
Architecture should be taught like the craft it has been throughout history before modernism turned it into an ideologically based pedagogy detached from the building industry. And this isn't a matter of style. Whether it's a modernist mall or a neo-classical addition, there are so many jobs that builders and developers design simply because architects are not trained to deal with the practical aspects of work such as zoning, programs, budgets, practicality, and beauty as commonly understood.
There's room for work that explores conceptual questions, but teach those skills that will ensure architects can find work first. And if you're worried about equity as one should be, giving lower income students an employable skill that doesn't require them to luck into a starchitect office or have their own "studio" that does nothing but competitions will go a long way of attracting kids who think building is cool. Teach architecture, not ideology, please.
This was an interesting conversation over all, but-
-needed to be longer in general,
-had some moments of grand standing,
Personally, the moments where people started spouting off about the time commitment that architecture students have versus other majors was frustrating. Because -
a) Architects don't have a corner on time demands. The average undergraduate student has about 26 hours of work to do daily if you do all the math re: credit requirements and the extra-curricular to stand out.
b) What someone is really saying when the swagger around this point is that they're ok with risking the mental health of their students because they it looks good to the potential employers and sounds courageous in non-designer cocktail parties. Meanwhile your non-design advising/counseling staff is picking up the pieces...
Also, the off the cuff argument that Speaks made about architecture being the last liberal arts degree was wrong.
a) I've never knew that a liberal arts degree was frame by professional guidelines. In fact, I thought that was counter to a liberal arts degree.
b) The suggestion that history doesn't matter because there's nothing physical is crap. Synthesis, context- and revealing context matter, and it's a different form of rigorous research.
c) The dismissal (or attempted cooption?) of fine arts is annoying. Materiality and ephemera come in a broad range of shapes and forms- and also require rigor. And there's that nasty bit about professionalism again...
Access to recording seems to be broken or removed. Anyone have an alternative link to the recording?
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