Architecture School Stereotypes

Originality

The assumption is that if you use a pitched roof or a standard door in your design, it means that you haven’t considered the problem enough. You just went with the "easy" solution. Students can't know all the reasons to do something, so we copy what exists. It's not the student's responsibility to explain why things are the way they are. That's the job of the professor. Unless a professor explains the reason behind things, students aren't able to "defend" their decisions.

Examples: 

• I was criticized for using normal furniture in my design, instead of "reinventing" the chair. The professor said “I could walk into any IKEA showroom and see it,” meaning that because it's normal, it's bad. 

• A professor mistook a window for a door, and after being corrected said, “But what if it actually was a door, and you had to shimmy into the house.” Professors want students to reinvent the profession without telling them that it already exists, and there are answers to these questions. 

• I designed a square building for a project that required three rooms, one of them double in size, and the professor said “You could have chosen any shape you wanted, and you chose a square?” The expectation was to do something unusual, even if the normal solution was better.

Content

A common misconception is that learning taints creativity. It’s like a game of Clue, and once you know too much, you can’t play anymore. Content is taught in technical classes, but it isn't brought into studio. Building precedents aren't reverse engineered into design principles, so we can't apply them to our projects to test them out. Professors talk about “scale” and “proportion”, but they don't explain how to do it.

Examples:

• I checked out a book on skyscrapers, and the professor said that we don't need to learn about structure. For a skyscraper?

• It dawned on me while talking to a friend that we were about to graduate, and neither of us could design a house. We knew the basics of foundations, studs, and roof, but we weren't confident about it.

• I finished writing a paper on prayer meditations in Dominican convents, and I noticed that I had used two different dates for the English Renaissance, which differed by a hundred years. That I didn’t know which one was correct, made me wonder why I was writing about such a niche topic when I didn't understand the bigger picture.

Quality

There is a tendency to downplay quality. Students are told that their work is good when they think it's bad, and vice versa. Most crits are superficial, like focusing on line weights and font choices. What constitutes a "good" building is rarely discussed.

Examples:

• I was told by my professor that there's no such thing as a "good" design because it depends on our “intention”. So I can design whatever I want without learning anything and get an A as long as my intention is to do bad work? Isn’t it a given that everyone’s intention is to do good work that makes people happy? My professor’s response was “What about mortuaries? People there want to feel somber, not happy.”

• I described a design decision by explaining that hallways should have natural light if possible. In order to dismiss the idea that there could ever be a consensus on anything, my professor said, ”I actually prefer hallways with no natural light.” The professor didn't want there to be a right answer because then he would have to learn it and teach it.

Intention

Professors often focus on one specific thing at the expense of everything else. They want to know, "What's your big idea”? That's how Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry are introduced. Even though their work isn't relevant to most of architecture, it's good insofar as it's a sculptural success at getting attention. They choose to do that, and Lutyens chooses to do something else. One is not better than the other. They just have different intentions. How convenient because it means that we don’t have to "play the game", as Lutyens said referring to Wren.

Examples:

• A student mentioned that she made a ramp for her building's entrance, and the professor stopped her and said, “That’s your big idea! Wheelchairs!”, so she was forced to put ramps everywhere.

• A popular “intention” is to make green buildings with a roof garden. The other factors don’t matter as long as it's “successful” at having a roof garden. “I didn’t fail at architecture because I wasn’t trying to do that. My intention was only to [fill in the blank]”.

Abstraction

Abstraction buffers us from reality. It protects people who don't know how to do the real thing. Without real-world context, our lack of knowledge is less apparent because everything is abstract. Context anchors our knowledge to reality. If a project's criteria isn't clearly defined, knowledge doesn't matter because there's nothing to solve. Our purpose turns into something else, like getting a good grade or learning new software. Students shrug it off, saying, "I didn't really understand the assignment, so I just BS'd it." The premise was ambiguous, so it didn't make sense to go any further.

Workload

It's better to have a normal schedule instead of pulling "all-nighters", and then sleeping during the day. I think students stay up all night to convince themselves that they did everything they could. "If I'm lazy, then why did I stay up all night?" Students enjoy working when the assignments make sense, so they don't procrastinate.

Examples:

• Professors would say that we should keep working even if we are confused about what to do because it might "jump start" us. I think it's better to stop and do something else if we're not being productive.

• Professors were very specific about how many drawings to do, but they were vague about what to do. One assignment was to make a “ritual”, with no further explanation. But it had to be six drawings on 11"x17"!

Unserious

Learning isn't always taken seriously. Some of the terminology is unclear, such as using the word “private” to mean two different things (private access to a military base vs. private enclosure for a public bathroom).

Examples:

• Students would jokingly incorporate random words into their presentation to see whether the professor noticed.

• There were unintelligible essays by French philosophers with sentences like, “By 're'-framing the/our approach, the/our ‘result’ is not dis-similar.”

• Students watched movies while working, which proved that serious work wasn't being done since you can't think about two things at once.

Control

Professors had a lot of control over the class. When a professor talked in a disappointed tone during the review, students would pick up on it and mimic it. The professor’s opinion was sacrosanct, and it gave us tunnel vision where we lost general awareness.

Examples:

• A student accidentally stepped on her model to reference a drawing that the professor asked about because she wasn't thinking about anything else.

• A student was late setting up because he didn’t know Mac commands. The professor scolded him for not being prepared. The class knew Mac and could have helped, but at that point the student was damaged goods, so nobody helped.

• Students would yell, “somebody stole my ruler,” followed ten seconds later by, “never mind”. That the student didn't look first suggests anxiety.

Drama

If content isn't being taught, the vacuum gets filled with drama. The misconception is that drama means that work is getting done, because if it’s all fluff, why would we be so emotional about it?

Examples:

• A teacher was upset at our class for showing up late because we thought it was at a different time. But if the whole class misunderstood, it suggests that the teacher was unclear. 

• A professor said, “I know those aren’t your drawings” in reference to screenshots with the web address. Students aren't trying to publish anything as their own.

• A student wasn't emotional enough during his final review, so the professor said, "I would be crying right now if I was you."

• A student said “I moved the entrance away from where homeless people do drugs”, and he was shamed into apologizing.

• A student put a wall in front of a nursing home so they wouldn't hear loud college students at midnight. The response was, “What do you have against elderly people?”.