Architecture School 1990 - 2012

The Future that is Now: Stan Allen, (Design Observer)

"What is required to comprehend globalism today are not tired generalizations, but close study of specific places, cities and cultures. It is worth remembering that architecture remains rooted to place"

I've been meaning to post this with extended commentary for some time. Unfortunately I don't have the time to address all of my thoughts on the state and future of architectural education right now (this will have to come piecemeal over time). I will say that Stan Allen has done a nice job of summarizing changes in the discipline over the last 20 years.

Absent from this essay, however, is any real acknowledgment of what I'm not alone in perceiving to be a genuine crisis in both the academic and professional aspects of the discipline. Enrollment in Architecture programs continues to rise even as employment and licensure declines. In effort to become more "inter-disciplinary" architectural education has attempted to fold aspects of countless other disciplines into its spectrum (linguistics, film, performance art, digital media, computer science, naval and automobile design techniques, biomimcry, geology, ecological patterns and systems, etc.).

The result has been not an understanding of architecture's relationship to other fields, concerns or movements, but a diluting and disorientation of the discipline's strengths, opportunities and weaknesses. Countless young architects conceive their projects as emerging from or embodying fluid processes instead of letting the architecture relate honestly to phenomenon that are far too ephemeral and fast-paced to mimic in built or even "paper" form. In a crisis of insecurity that's been all to obvious since the 1970's, architects have continuously attempted to steal attention away from more timely aspects of global, consumer-based culture (commodities and contemporary digital communication). All that is solid melts into air. And, in an attempt to embody all aspects of our visual/consumer/digital culture, too many of us seem to have forgotten that architecture is not the performance - it is the environment or the stage where these performances take place.