Short Essay: On (A)rchitecture Education
2024
Contemporary Universities are among the most hierarchical institutions of Capital, who’s main objective is the sale of intellectual and creative fulfillment in the development of career expectations. Historically, many of the modernist architects were not formally trained, yet the works of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright for example, remain unequivocal in architectural history. Their work, and many others survived over time by virtue of intrinsic economic, social and cultural value, rather than based on the professionalization of design fields and the corresponding establishment of institutional structures.
The “creative” work, by definition, has its “origins” beyond conventional measure. Creative art and design programs require that all work, including creative work, must be evaluated according to a metric or program. For this reason, as in contemporary economics, professional programs are unable to properly evaluate work.
Architecture programs survive and are successful because most work can be evaluated according to certain predefined criteria. A self-referential form of reproduction occurs, where successful students are seen as a “good fit” with the program, and are therefore rewarded and proliferate in the industries and academic institutions. The quality of architectural reproduction is affected in this way, where the most successful projects are those within convention “or” follow faculty “interest”. Even the highly awarded in the profession have had the advantage of success in the schools.
Art and design education itself awards work that follows this form of self-referential reproduction. The most a university education can be expected to provide are the development of applicable skills, due to an established program’s inability to evaluate essential critical thought, or even its willful exclusion. Although frameworks in critical thought can be emphasized and improved in higher education, creativity and cognition are generally established at an early age.
Personality plays an important role, more than creativity and cognition in the student and professional success of an architect, where those who appeal to faculty interests or the general flows of popularity in the studios, will gain favour in the schools and profession. An industry that was once founded on introversion becomes “extraverted” and popularized as “heroic”. The question of “substance” then arises, where introspection becomes hollowed out and replaced with surface appearances.
The first architect of mythology was Daedalus, the builder of the ancient “Labyrinth”, who’s center housed the Minotaur. The Labyrinth represents a “map” of the world: a diagram of the unfolding history of architecture. The history of architecture represents and is continually founded on the dialectical individual (Theseus) contending with the “monster” at its center. One’s own identity is revealed through this process. Remove the monster, and the Architect becomes “hero”, where the Labyrinth takes the form of a “hollow” map: a “perfect” structural representation of an entirely extraverted system.
Refer to the section “On Economic Productivity” to determine how the creative product originates in an economic system. One may find it counterintuitive that the professionalization of the art and design fields leads to lower creative production. But it is clear that programs are averse to the value of creative production, as if chance were the only discretionary tool remaining; with independent thought only to be built-up and demolished. The “world” at large will eventually discern the longevity and duration of the creative work, by accident or design, where conditions of necessity or its opposite, are guided by “time” as the primary factor in the value determination of the architectural product. If conditions are less than ideal for creative production, time will “reveal” itself.
The profession itself seems to be going further down a path of ever-increasing regulation, education and assessment, producing further convention and control, until most architecture “is” in essence the same. If an accelerated and rapid “invention of convention” appears as a hollowed out “state apparatus”, the professionalization of art and design fields are one part in this “game”. It may be, the last of the great works of architecture occurred in the late modern period, following centuries of production, the “education” of the (A)rchitect has taken hold.
Time will reveal how its broad history unfolds, over centuries of struggle and renewal, rational structures are systematically constructed and demolished, until…as an elemental defiance of rationality, something “accidental” emerges beyond the “grey” …