The editor’s comments from the April 2009 Architectural Record are helpful:
“Today’s students, […], had moved beyond the icon, to a finer-grained architecture. Rather than focus on a structure’s immediate physical attributes, they maintained that chief among their interests was a matrix of concerns that, for want of terminology, could be described as humane. How did a given project fulfill its social contract for the community it was meant to serve? What sorts of relationships to the landscape, the neighboring buildings, the urban fabric, or the geographic region would a project create for its inhabitants? What alternatives could it pose for its users or clients? Could its initial agenda shift over time? As a fundamental, overriding question, how could a project be described as sustainable?”
I think this is a void exists in architectural education; students often are taught to idolize certain “auteurs” and their bodies of work, or to strive towards being a “starchitect” themselves. While this may be exciting, “starchitecture” doesn’t constitute the majority of the spaces, buildings, landscapes, and ruins that we all live and work with daily, and it embodies a hierarchical work process that is often built on younger designers’ long hours and mono-tasking.
North Carolina has a rich history of “going against the grain” in search of something more “humane”: Black Mountain College, Penland School of Crafts, etc. are/were prominent cultural players. I think a successful architectural education would succeed in challenging future generations by:
- creating a new opportunity to intensely craft with both physical and digital tools
- promoting quality and regionalism instead of quantity and globalization
- enabling students to explore the existing rules/conditions with as much exuberance/creativity as generating their own rules
I think the Piedmont program could also seize an opportunity to define “Professional Practice” in a way that’s not the final class we all take as we’re wrapping up thesis projects: the architectural education of future designers needs to be as much about practice and lifestyle as about design. A program in the Piedmont could offer a new strategy of corporate or office/studio-linked education, where processes of working together in a team are just as valuable as the design of buildings. This could lead into the trends towards Integrated Project Delivery, etc. that software like BIM and intensely multi-disciplinary design projects entail.
The program could also seek to utilize new modes of funding/financial aid; students of a 5-year professional program are faced with additional financial demands beyond the typical undergraduate degree cost. The 2- and 3-year master’s versions of the architectural degree could additionally be explored, as a way to stimulate both fresh and seasoned educational inquiries.
Thanks for involving us in the discussion; I think we can all agree that this is an exciting prospect for our area.
