Since entering the workforce, albeit self-employed, I’ve looked back on my education with curiosity. I was extremely fortunate to have been admitted into some of the best schools in the country and made it to graduation at each of the schools in which I enrolled, even when my academic performance was subpar. Each school I attended took me deeper into the theoretical and further from that which I would spend my career practicing. The academic offerings of my Masters of Architecture program at Columbia University could not have been further from my vocational education in mechanical drawing class at East Grand Rapids Senior High School. Thirty-two plus years after graduating from Columbia, I am convinced this is exactly as it should be, a realization that only came recently.
Since entering the workforce, albeit self-employed, I’ve looked back on my education with curiosity. I was extremely fortunate to have been admitted into some of the best schools in the country and made it to graduation at each of the schools in which I enrolled, even when my academic performance was subpar. Each school I attended took me deeper into the theoretical and further from that which I would spend my career practicing. The academic offerings of my Masters of Architecture program at Columbia University could not have been further from my vocational education in mechanical drawing class at East Grand Rapids Senior High School. Thirty-two plus years after graduating from Columbia, I am convinced this is exactly as it should be, a realization that only came recently.
For many, many years, I felt our most competitive architectural schools had become woefully deficient in teaching useful skills which post-graduates would need when they entered the work force. During the pandemic, we hired a computer-proficient young woman who had received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Virginia, the exact degree I received from the same school in 1987, who did not know how to use an architectural scale (a triangular ruler with not so cryptic markings representing different architectural scales such as 1/8”, 1/4”, etc.). I suppose my father might have felt similarly that the pocket calculator had replaced the slide rule when it was my time to do calculations I could not figure in my head. As someone who hires and trained many recent graduates, I am in a natural position to judge a candidate’s education obtained prior to arrival at our firm. My anecdotal rankings of programs and institutions seemed always to be the inverse of the reputations of the most elite institutions. Columbia, the last institution to confer upon me a degree, held a very special place at the top of the list when I was a student, followed closely by Princeton, Harvard, and the rest of the Ivy League and a school in Los Angeles named SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Technology). I generally gave Yale a free pass as their school of architecture seemed rudderless, and at times, sincere in their efforts to teach pragmatic skills and architectural history. To be fair, the era in which I attended Columbia, the teaching of Architecture in the US was undergoing a paradigm shift away from professional practice toward research and theory and studying architecture at scales uninterpretable by triangular pieces of plastic or aluminum with archaic markings.
This gulf between professional practice and the academy placed a boulder-sized chip on my shoulder. This chip was my companion until several conversations with professors and colleagues in preparation for returning to my alma mater as a visiting critic. While the chasm is no less wide, I’ve come to understand and appreciate the drivers behind the education evolution at our top architecture schools. The schools compete for the best and brightest students, and today’s students are not seeking a vocational education. Graduate schools are particularly keen on challenging students to analyze the world and re-imagine it, and on a scale for which there are no job postings for entry-level positions. This work that students undertake is much more exciting, and in many ways more valuable than the classical training obtained by previous generations. When schools compete for the best students, they are really competing with one another, and once Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton changed direction, the rest of the top schools followed suit. And as a middle-aged residential architect, I try to think of this shift in educational priorities from vocational to theory as a generational gap and not a referendum on the profession.
Architectural education was a continuum from the founding of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1648 through the early 1990’s. Architecture was a profession, no different than engineering, the law, and accounting, and architectural students were trained in the art and science of making buildings. When I was an undergraduate student at UVA, we still learned water coloring techniques, how to construct two-point perspectives by hand, a certain amount of building technology and engineering, and the history of architecture and design from antiquity through twentieth century modernism. It was something of a grand tour of architectural education, geared toward a career in the field. When working with students this fall, I was fascinated to see that beyond their sketchbooks, these subjects seemed largely unfamiliar. Computers have replaced drafting tables throughout the design studios, and 3-D printers and laser cutters have reduced the prominence of bass wood piles, chipboard scraps, and unfinished and discarded model sections. Even if unfamiliar to me, the studio landscape in school mirrors the large-scale architectural offices in big cities that dominate professional practice today.
The change in teaching methodology is not limited to technology advancements. The subject matter has also changed, as architecture is no longer limited to the design of human-scaled buildings, Vitruvius be damned. As students, we are taught to think on a grand and global scale, and to re-imagine how we might build. Often, these explorations are aided by new technology, as theoretical projects such as these could not be conceived, computed, or rendered without the awesome power of computers.
The systemic changes in teaching methodology and substance were codified for me this fall when I traveled to Venice, Italy and Charlottesville, VA as a visiting critic with the UVA Architecture School’s study abroad programs. In Charlottesville, I met with a second-year graduate student who voiced an interest in residential architecture and who lamented that the only prerequisite professional practice class is taught in the second semester of his final (third) year. He also noted that the class does not teach a form of professional practice with which I would be familiar. Our conversation reminded me of a brief chat I had with Daniel Liebeskind when he came to Columbia as a guest critic. After a presentation on the Holocaust Museum then under construction, I asked him whether he thought the days of a residential practitioner (a ‘gentleman architect’ I recall saying) was possible. His dystopian and dispiriting reply (to me) was that he felt such a career path was over, dead and buried, and never to come back (paraphrased). This was one of many inspirational moments at graduate school that kickstarted the founding of our firm doing precisely what the wise master said couldn’t be done. The next time I ran into Mr. Liebeskind was after a talk he gave at the Harvard Club soon after winning the competition to design the Freedom Tower. I was invited by the host committee and at dinner afterwards, I asked Daniel’s wife Nina whether they had selected an architect to help with their New York City apartment renovations which I had heard they were contemplating. They had retained someone else, but it did confirm my belief that architectural practice happens at very different scales and that even someone gifted enough to design the City’s tallest skyscraper would be wise to hire a very different type of architect to design and oversee an apartment renovation.
As I have gone back to teach, I’ve had the opportunity to engage with other teachers and practitioners of different stripes and different scales. While the trend has been towards globalism, theory, urban planning, and social issues, I have been gratified that a growing minority of students pine for exposure to architecture practiced at a smaller scale. Every year, we offer to host a student extern from UVA, and this year we had fourteen students apply.
I believe Daniel Liebeskind’s design was the best competition entry for the Freedom Tower, and I am glad that our schools bring the starchitects back to teach and to inspire. But even so, he was wrong when it comes to the plausibility of an old-fashioned small town residential practice being able to succeed in this era. We come to work every day in the shadows of Billionaire’s’ Row, to a townhouse office that feels like a home, and with a team that feels more like family than staff, we design homes one at a time for an ever-expanding roster of enthusiastic clients. And yes, we still use pen and paper, sometimes, and make models by hand, always.
I look forward more than I can say to sharing this love of practice with a new generation of students and colleagues, and deeply appreciate being welcomed back to UVA by Bill Sherman, the Mario di Valmarana Professor of Architecture and Director of the UVA Programs in Venice and the Veneto.