We sometimes welcome young people into the office who arrive at work, oddly, with a cultivated, seemingly sophisticated sense of resignation, even dread, often even defeat or just disorientation. They are like deer in headlights.
How can there not instead be a sense of anticipation, uncomplicated enthusiasm upon the initiation of a lifelong learning experience, of getting to work on something—finally-—that will be put out there into the real world? While we can’t know for certain, we at least know that what these young people have in common is their having recently attended architecture school. We suspect that their schooling has something to do with it and might ask what goes on in their schooling that would engender such premature and precocious weariness?
Schools are among our most important institutions and have been for a while. They probably had their origins in the “beit sefer” or “house of the books” of ancient Aramaic and Hebrew societies—spiritual places of learning founded upon the shared desire to figure out what the heck the bible meant. Then in the west came the philosophical academies (most famously Plato’s) in which the topics were morality, ethics, mathematics, and psychology. Then, with the fall of Rome cloistered abbeys and monasteries assumed their place as the centers of learning and remained so for almost a thousand years.
In Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries Platonic academies were re-established by the Medici in Florence among others elsewhere. Also around that time, art academies modeled on medieval trade guilds spread across Europe, then morphed into academies of fine arts. Most famous of these is the École des Beaux Arts in Paris whose hegemony over the art world lasted a few centuries until a century ago when the modern movement threw it under the bus, the “avant-garde” having dismissed it as old school, the word “academy” becoming forever associated with all that is exhausted and irrelevant. Wounded by the assaults and insults and its own stultification, the academy in America limped into the 1930s and 40s until it got absorbed into the universities as schools of architecture, where modernism flourished. The academy became modern, modernism now is the academy.
In the 1970s and early 80s there were good reasons to be involved in the architecture schools, two of which were 1) it was where, however briefly, all the reasoned re-thinking of modernism was happening in a serious way; and 2) the post war economic surge of building in America had ended, stagflation had set in, there was very little work, it was a steady source of income. Architecture schools in universities were dynamic places for a while but then they degraded.
More than the humanities or the sciences, the university environment is for the study of architecture a particularly harmful environment—in which it is especially inappropriate that it is only your peers who are your audience. It distorts your view of who you serve, who are as an architect, anyone but your peers. And yet to survive within the academy, prestige among your peers is crucial. And even as it is only your peers who you want to impress you still crave relevancy beyond your peers, for without it the academy and your prestige (and any hope of securing work outside of the academy however unqualified for it you are) withers.
To compensate you pronounce on areas outside of your discipline. You delude yourself that from the safety of an architecture school you participate in solving the world’s problems—be they social, racial, ethical, or environmental—without participating in the world’s problems. You want to sound experienced without having experience. Your solutions never come to pass, but it does not matter because it is only ever a performance and peer prestige is the applause.
Along the way captured by the academy’s insularity and the corrosive social dynamics within it, exploited by the inside-game of competing self-interests –rarely in support of the academy and more often at its expense-- corruption sets in. And instead of thriving on agency what festers is impotency. We ought not wonder then how it is that students having sublimated such powerlessness arrive at the beginning of their careers deflated and defeated.
We do not regret the experience of the schools we attended; we are in part who we are because of them. But we have over the forty years we have spent in self-imposed exile distanced by and from the architecture schools (at first reluctantly and now happily), come to accept that it has been enough to have created our own academy--our monastery, our practice -- in which ideas and their execution are debated, our values shared but not so much as to have devolved into some kind of pointless echo chamber and instead evolved into a lively place in which to practice and learn.
It is only with practice from which ideas, points of view and values—and crucially a sense of agency in the world--- emerge. We are all, no matter how well educated, autodidacts. The role of school should be to provide a place in which self-initiated learning can flourish but at least as far as we can tell it is only in practice that it does. This is the kind of learning that after only a few months our exhausted beginners begin to embrace and consequently thrive.