Academia

Rarely does an architect achieve the status of cultural figure without some academic affiliation. Conducting research and teaching in academic environments complements the service-oriented aspects of professional practice, which are often driven by finance. Research supported by academic institutions is a way for architects to enhance or extend their professional efforts without concern for profitability. Likewise, teaching, in addition to carrying the responsibility of educating future generations of architects, offers possibilities to work collaboratively with students on new ideas or technical investigations that do not have a place in commissioned professional projects constrained by budgets and defined timelines.

Typically, architects who teach regularly can practice architecture in a more idealized way—as a sociocultural act rather than only to earn money. In the United States in particular, long-term and permanent positions within academia come with a tremendous degree of freedom and financial support. In opposition to their counterparts in Asia and Europe, the youngest architects in American academia have freedom from the beginning of their teaching careers to determine the content of their courses and research, often with little oversight or direction from senior colleagues. This freedom sometimes results in architects using academic environments as testing grounds to construct their identities. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, for two reasons. Exposed to preferred aesthetic sensibilities and methods of design, students may be left with less opportunity to cultivate their own aesthetic sensibilities. Additionally, academic architects may feel less urgency to make names for themselves through professional practice. This latter effect may explain why younger architects in the United States lag behind their peers in other countries with respect to recognition received beyond academia and the number of built projects in the first decade of practice.

Though many emerging architects in this group have teaching positions, they are conscious of and pushing back against these potential risks, especially by separating teaching from practice and working actively to materialize their ideas in the public realm. To be seen is how this group of architects achieve at a high level in academia and practice simultaneously. While some embrace academic affiliation and situate practice as a secondary endeavor, others are slowly distancing themselves from academia with an understanding that a successful commercial and cultural practice requires an elevated level of commitment.

Adam Frampton:Jia Gu:

We have mixed feelings about the role of teaching and academia in our practice. On one hand, teaching and being connected to and supported by an academic environment facilitates and enables research. But on the other hand, teaching takes a lot of time. It’s rewarding on many levels, but it sometimes feels difficult to devote enough time to both ends, as a teacher and scholar in the academic world and as an architect striving to make significant contributions to the built environment.

James Macgillivray:

There is an economic relationship between practicing and teaching. I think people who teach and practice are more willing to take risks with competitions and even with private clients. You can present things that are more conceptual because you always know that it’s not the only job. It also creates opportunities to apply our academic research in our professional work from time to time, effectively allowing us to transcend simply providing a service. We can test design concepts in a client-based situation, and if they don’t land, they can be offloaded to our academic research.

I like to think of practicing, teaching, and research not as separate activities, but as different modes of production that engage with similar sets of issues in architecture. So, some activities, like teaching, are opportunities to provide, share, and reflect on certain forms of foundational knowledge— however that is defined within a pedagogical practice. Other activities, like curating, are about bringing architecture and public audiences closer together. Both are opportunities to reframe what we think we know in architecture.