Architecture School 201 Once we have understood the basic structure of a school of architecture, its hierarchical—if paradoxical—composition of faculty, students, and administration, we can move on to the consideration of its content: what it teaches and why. Most schools of architecture today are ‘professional’ schools. This means that their goals, methods, and content, are aligned with the demands and expectations of the profession of architecture, as generally accepted. It is interesting that a great university, Harvard, was once reluctant to accept a school of architecture into its program, because of its professional, not academic, orientation. The goal of Harvard’s academic programs is to immerse students in different bodies of knowledge, in order to prepare them to assume active, creative, leadership roles in society. The university was and, perhaps, remains suspicious of professional training focusing on technical or other parochial skills. Even today, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) must support itself independently of the wider university’s budget. Schools that grant professional degrees must be ‘accredited’ by professional groups, notably (in the United States) the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), which is comprised of professional architects and educators approved by professional organizations—such as the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB)—who continually visit schools, examine them, and decide whether they meet the standards to confer professional degrees. A professional degree is, today, a necessary step toward becoming a statelicensed practitioner. Because most graduating architects want to design buildings that will be built in the public domain, which requires a state license, the accrediting process has an enormous influence on the content of almost any school’s curriculum. The power of a dean to lead the school in any but an orthodox direction would seem to be very limited. But, this is not always the case. A historical example of the exception to the rule is Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union, in New York. In the 1970s and 80s, John Hejduk, the dean of the school, pursued a radical architectural design program and still managed to maintain the school’s accreditation. This was not easy.
During that time, The Cooper Union faculty included Raimund Abraham, Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, and a host of lesser-known avant-gardists, who brought their ideas into the design studios. Hejduk himself was teaching the fifth year undergraduate thesis, with an emphasis on innovative concepts of space and design. Seminars by the likes of Jay Fellows and David Shapiro added depth to the unconventional approach to architectural education. Often, accreditation committees would arrive at the school on their regular visits in a hostile mood. “What has all this to do with architecture?” was the question as they saw projects that did not resemble any buildings they had ever seen. While the school’s catalogue listed an orthodox program of architectural studies, the ways in which the studios and classes were conducted were utterly unorthodox, and this worried the examiners. Yet, time and again, Hejduk—with the support of his faculty and students—was able to convince them that this was a valid, indeed a valuable approach to architectural education and practice. Hejduk’s charisma? The sheer quality of the student work, however unorthodox? The need for change, however grudgingly recognized? The allowance for exceptions in a vast field of sameness? All these may have been factors contributing to the survival of the professional degree program in a radical school. With the 1991 publication of The Education of an Architect, a book laying out the school’s philosophy and methods, a revolution in architectural education had already been effected, as many schools adopted aspects of The Cooper Union’s innovative approach. The Cooper Union story is a prime example of working within and extending the limits of a prevailing system of orthodoxy. Whether the same story could be written today is an open question. One can certainly argue that it is easier to transform an already working system of education than invent an entirely new one. But the latter prospect may be necessary, if and when the prevailing system has failed. To consider that, we should look at the institution of the Bauhaus, as well as at the more contemporary examples of experiments in architectural education.
The Great War, they were not autocratic but constitutional, with power greatly limited by democratic political processes. As the political landscape was changing, some architects believed that architectural education had to change, too, and in much the same way. The idea that architecture should be derived from the models of history was no longer thought appropriate, even adequate, for the education of architects in a world of new materials and technologies, and new social responsibilities to urban dwellers. Architecture could no longer be considered the instrument serving royalty and aristocracy, demonstrating their wealth and power in monumental civic buildings. Instead, it had to respond to the growing masses of industrial workers living in cities, who made the factories hum and brought profits to their owners. There had to be a new architecture and new schools to educate the architects who would make it. The old educational system had to be replaced. But, with what? The Bauhaus (founded 1918, Weimar) and the Vkhutemas (founded 1920, Moscow) were two schools established to enable radical social changes underway in Europe. The aim of both was to integrate the previously separated fine arts and crafts, thereby erasing class distinctions. Both flourished in the 1920s and were terminated by the powerful reactionary political forces which saw them as an ideological threat. In their brief life spans, they managed—by the combined brilliance of administrators, faculty and students—to produce creative work that changed ideas and methods of art and design for decades to come. Shorn of their ethical and political purposes, however, their advances were eventually reduced to stylistic choices. Today one can adopt a Bauhaus aesthetic or a Constructivist style without the slightest awareness of the ideas or intentions that inspired them.
Architecture School 202
There have been other attempts, more recently, at forming new, independent schools. The Architectural Association in London, which sprang to life in the 1960s and 70s was, to quote a recent commentator on this blog, “originally formed as a ‘club’ of young architects who hired people to teach them what they were interested in knowing at that moment. No tenure, no repetition, no hierarchy.” The school continues today.
Some systems and institutions become moribund. At the beginning of the 20th century, European monarchy was one of them. With industrialization and the ascent of the merchant class to social and political power, the idea of rule by an unproductive aristocracy that derived its power solely by inheritance was dying. Although a few monarchies survived what was then called
SCI-Arc (the Southern California Institute of Architecture) was founded in 1971 by “a small group of emancipated faculty and students, most of whom had rejected the prevailing institutional models of the time, in favor of a more free-form intersection of teachers and learners, a patient critique of the old idioms, and an aggressive pursuit of the promise of an ever-renewable pedagogy.” The school continues today.
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