The Top Ten

The Architectural Record is the oldest architectural periodical in America and one of the world’s longest running (it was founded in the 1890s as an offshoot of a real estate periodical in New York). Once it was a majestic presenter of the best design in the world’s most powerful nation, with writers like Herbert Croly, Montgomery Schuyler, Louis Mumford, and A. Lawrence Kocher on the masthead. Today it has a small circulation by past standards, and caters mostly to members of the American Institute of Architects, for which it is the official media organ. As I’ve said before in these pages, architectural publishing is in the doldrums, and this magazine does little to raise standards of criticism. The Architect’s Newspaper, an internet and small market publication, is fresher, more informative, and far more pluralistic in its criticism. As a member of the AIA, I receive Record “free,” but otherwise wouldn’t bother reading it.

Record publishes glossy, praiseworthy articles about “top ten” architects and projects in various categories virtually every month, as if competition in the art of building could be measured in degrees. There is the annual Record Houses issue, once a barometer for the best in domestic architecture, but now a curiosity. The Progressive Architecture Design Awards, and the AIA Honor Awards are also published annually. The former was once the pride of a competing journal, but now must beg for space in its former rival’s pages. The competition these days is for space in a media forum that architects and clients respect and read regularly. Sadly, media sources are few and far between. The David Letterman Show could have fun with a parody of this situation, if anyone cared.

This month the magazine featured a cautious article about the nation’s “top ten architecture schools.” In the glory days of American architectural education, about 40 years ago, such a ranking would be ludicrous. In a profession marked by elitism and a closed network of masters and proteges, one knew the best schools as a matter of professional savoir faire. This year’s publication of academic rankings by a private communications/management firm (run by a former AIA executive director) is on the one hand a necessity in a changed marketplace, on the other an admission of defeat among the design elite who run the top schools. The old order is changing.

Despite some criticism in the article, the methodology upon which the survey is based is sound: ask practicing architects, students, clients, and faculty to rate the best architectural schools in the U.S., adding a few categories to sort out special programs. Emphasize training that prepares a student to practice architecture in the current marketplace. The results should be pretty indicative of what’s out there, and may be useful to everyone who cares about quality in architecture.

I would wager, however, that a lot of architecture professors and deans are fuming about various biases in the data. Bastions of architectural “theory” like Princeton, SciArc, and Cranbrook are conspicuously absent from all the lists. They should be, because their students are not trained to work in the profession. Classical and traditional schools such as Notre Dame, the University of Miami, and Georgia Tech are also absent, perhaps for similar reasons of bias. Only one school emphasizing “sustainability” makes the list–the University of Oregon (not a traditionally strong program). Only a handful of “polytechnic” universities (with engineering or tech emphasis) are listed.

Two of the nation’s top universities, Harvard and Yale, top the graduate school rankings, as they do in law and medicine. In both status and quality, they are undoubtedly premier programs. The undergraduate list is led by two traditionally strong programs, Cornell and Syracuse, that had slipped in recent years but appear to be on the right track again. From that standpoint we might as well be looking at a 1960 ranking. But below the top some interesting trends are emerging.

The consumer is taking charge in a marketplace once governed by rules of art. Virginia Polytechic and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo are in the top ten! Prestigious private universities are being pushed out by schools that offer value priced education, even in an elite profession. This trend says a lot about both higher education generally and the specifics of training practicing professionals today. Neither students nor practicing architects are being well-served by bastions of theory and art.

Though Record seems reluctant to acknowledge a sea change in the educational realm, its publication of “popular” rankings may signal a thawing in policies that proscribe the publication of architecture that is not by “top ten” starchitects. Unfortunately, the cover of the magazine shows a bizarre building in New York by Thom Mayne of Morphosis.  To me it looks like a giant fig leaf covering some unflattering genital protrusions. Oh, and it’s a building for Cooper Union, which didn’t make the list.

Work 2.0–smell the sawdust

“Knowledge workers,” according to the conventional wisdom, are America’s ticket to prosperity and happiness in the 21st century. Armed with graduate degrees in obscure scientific, technological and financial subjects, these new workers will sit at computers endlessly reinventing the world as we know it, adding “value” to products and services, and generating billions in new wealth.

Why then, are so many younger people jumping off the bandwagon and starting small handicraft businesses? Why has “homemade” music entered the lexicon of popular culture? Why do many sustainability gurus advocate low tech, handmade solutions?

To those of us who deal with craftsmanship and handwork as a matter of course, the answer is simple–people need to feel connected to the things they produce. This principle guided the leaders of the Arts & Crafts movement over a century ago. It has come to mean more to today’s disaffected workers as the bubble economy fades each week amidst concerns about job security. This week’s New York Times Magazine legitimized this trend with an article by Matthew B. Crawford, a young man with a Ph.D. who works as a motorcycle mechanic and loves his job.

“The trades suffer from low prestige,” he writes, “and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience.” Crawford’s positive experience is a revelation only because our society has so skewed the relationship between work and what John Dewey called “the materials of life.” As children proceed in school, their learning takes them further and further from the hands-on joys of things like gardening, woodworking, household arts, and mechanical repairs. By the time our children reach college, they have been brainwashed into believing that working with their hands is a low class option. Even when they see plumbers, stone carvers and woodworkers earning higher wages than they do, they persist in reaching for “knowledge work.”

This situation contributes to a sickness in our society. People in all walks of life are suffering from anxiety, low self esteem, despair over their future, and a general malaise in the workplace. Especially among the so-called working class and recent immigrants, the misplaced desire for betterment through “higher” education robs children of their natural intelligence when they are discouraged from working with their hands.

There is only one college in the United States devoted solely to the building trades–The American College of Building Arts in Charleston, S.C. Europe has myriad schools of this kind, and children there find alternative courses that lead to jobs in the culinary arts, handicrafts and other endeavors that do not require advanced degrees. It is time that American educators recognized the need for such avenues to self-fulfillment. Perhaps with the demise of Wall Street, we will wake up and smell the sawdust.

General Motors and the University

I spent almost 15 years in academia, teaching graduate and undergraduate architecture students at three universities as a full-time professor. When I left full-time teaching, I was convinced that the system I helped sustain was broken beyond repair. Today’s New York Times Op-Ed page confirms my assessment. Everyone who cares about higher education should read Mark C. Taylor’s brilliant condemnation of the American system: “End the University as We Know It.”

Taylor has made a name for himself as one of the most far reaching scholars in America, writing books on many topics including architecture, death, literature, and philosophy. He doesn’t teach in any of those fields. In fact, he is chair of the religion department at Columbia. At Williams College, where he spent most of his career, he pioneered interdisciplinary methods of teaching and research. Taylor is a polymath and a generalist in a field of myopic specialists, a breath of fresh air in the stuffiest of disciplines.

I have often thought that the American university was similar in its intransigience to General Motors. Both institutions have operated for decades on an unsustainable model, resisting change at every level, ensuring jobs for life for professors and line workers, and chasing immediate cash rather than looking to the furture health of the institution. Taylor agrees: “Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.” His prescription for improving the university is to dismantle the entire system and rebuild it from the bottom up. Can we do for the University of Michigan what we are about to do for Chrysler? Well, as anyone who has spent time in an academic department will tell you, changing things at Chrysler will seem like a picnic compared to restructuring a modern universtity.

Nevertheless, it is clear that if the U.S. intends to create a future that ensures prosperity and a high standard of living for its children, the university system will have to change, and change drastically. Taylor has six bitter pills that no college president will want to swallow. The last, and most important is: “Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure.” You can bet that Taylor will be getting some cold stares at the next faculty meeting. If you think that the ire of displaced automobile workers is hot, try dealing with the resentment of an aging full professor who loses his corner office and graduate assistant. It’s really ugly.

Max Bond’s Journey

Last week the architectural profession lost one of its real heroes. J. Max Bond died following a battle with cancer at his home in New York. Bond was America’s most esteemed African-American architect, and much more. In his quiet way, he paved the way for a generation of younger black designers in a profession that has been resistant to people of color. His journey was hard, but he always seemed to prevail over hardships while maintaining a sense of dignity and grace.

Bond was active in virtually every arena of his profession. He was an educator, leading programs at both Columbia and City College of New York, and impressed students with his intelligence and commitment to social issues. His service to city and community included stints on the NY Planning Commission and leadership in Harlem’s redevelopment. His addition to the famed Avalon Ballroom saved a landmark while providing space behind the building for offices and biomedical labs. He also designed buildings at the King Center in Atlanta and in Africa. Unlike many of his more militant colleagues in the struggle for racial equality, Bond was a soft-spoken leader who proved through his professionalism that his people deserved a place at the drafting table. Moreover, he went beyond academia and practice to insist on a public role for all architects in the affairs of his city.

Born into a prominent African-American family, Max Bond used education to advance his career in the 1950s. But when a Harvard professor suggested that he not be an architect because of his color, he persisted. During the mid-century architecture was one of the whitest professions, and one of the most insular. Few blacks had made significant careers–the main exceptions being Paul Williams in Los Angeles and Julian Abele in Philadelphia–but they were always under the radar. Beginning in Europe and Africa, Bond acquired significant experience outside the avenues available in the U.S. When he returned home in the 1960s, he found himself in a cauldron of social change.

He went directly to work in the community, participating in the renewal of Harlem during the 1970s and 1980s. Instead of joining an established firm, he founded his own partnership and won significant commissions despite being an outsider. By 1990 Bond Ryder James was a major player in New York. When his partner, Donald Ryder, died Bond merged with Davis & Brody, a socially committed firm which had specialized in public housing for the Urban Development Corporation. Bond became the senior partner with the deaths of Lou Davis and Sam Brody, and continued to design major buildings until his death last week.

Max Bond began his career half a century ago, in an America that closed its doors to professional achievement for people of color. He broke down the doors in his path with steely determination and unrelenting spirit. Like Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, Marian Anderson and other heroes of civil rights, he should be celebrated as a pioneer.

When will money stop shouting?

As America faces the consequences of eight years of frenzied consumption, unbridled greed and a culture of “pay to play” in all walks of life, perhaps we will learn some lessons about the significance of money. It has appeared to many in the Bushwacked age that people with a lot of gelt were smarter than those who decided not to make mammon their god. As an architect, I’ve seen this in many of my clients–success on Wall Street translated into an arrogance about nearly everything. Listening to the advice of a qualified architect was not on their agenda. Kings of bond trading and queens of derivatives went around acting like their knowledge and wisdom were boundless. Mr. Madoff has proven conclusively that a lot of them were fools.

The sheer stridency of our culture has worn down many of us who believe that wisdom comes only through experience, and that knowledge has to be cultivated in an atmosphere of humility and respect for others. Expertise, artistry, craftsmanship, leadership and other salubrious qualities cannot be purchased at auction. Moreover, he who shouts the loudest and carries the biggest sheaf of credit cards should not  be granted credibility in areas of public discourse in which he otherwise possesses no credentials.

It is time for Americans to look at civic virtue through the lense of past ages and learn from the history of greed and corruption. During the Roaring Twenties, the French Ancien Regime, the Regency, the reign of Czar Nicholas Romanov and other ages of excess those with money shouted and people listened. The results of their gullibility and short sighted reverence for the plutocracy are written in the tragic history of failed regimes and ecomomic crashes.

It will be refreshing to go forward under new leadership that does not reward aggression in any form, but especially the kind of win at all costs view of success that has characterized the last eight years. When money does more than talk, but rather drowns out civil discourse as it has in recent history, the consequences are devastating–to morals, education, politics, the environment–indeed, nearly everything a democratic society depends upon. Perhaps at the next town meeting we will be able to listen intently to a modest farmer, philosophy professor, fiddle player, or shoemaker with respect, unconcerned about her net worth or rank in the Fortune 500.

Building on a slab

In the last post I talked a bit about a new cable TV series on architecture school. I caught the next episode and it answered a few questions and raised a few others. Here is my take on the adventures of these plucky students and their teachers as they began to build in New Orleans.

Byron Mouton, the studio critic in the class, has passed my litmus test for young design teachers–he’s no flash in the pan aesthete. He knows how to build on the gumbo soil of the bayous on the Gulf Coast. And he leads his students by example, not by fiat. Even my qualms about letting the students vote for their favorite scheme to build seems now like a wise decision. Taking a relatively average, simple design and making it into a liveable house has made for some interesting television. Since designers are not always given the green light on the “best” solution in a given set, making the best of a given circumstance can teach some valuable lessons.

Following the tension-filled episode in which the class learned which house would be constructed, “Digging a Hole” was a wonderful tonic. The students got a good dose of reality when they put shovels in the ground and collaborated on the construction of “their” design (having forgotten the sting of not being chosen in the competition).  Architecture is by and large collaborative, and this exercise shifted the students attention toward the team aspect of projects. A good example of this was featured in the episode, when three students went to the house built during the previous year to decide how to finish off their exterior stairs. An intelligent group decision was reached through critical evaluation of options and a consensus on which best fit the intentions behind the design. Professor Mouton was not present, having sent the young architects off to do their own thing. Throughout this first stage of construction, the master was in the background. Filmakers asked students to explain the intricacies of the construction, including such things as hurricane straps on the sills, and termite shields. Perhaps their best moment came when explaining why their house would feature a modified version of “slab on grade” construction, with piers set to a level determined by flood and hurricane data.

Why is building on a real site such a great opportunity for young architects? First, it gives students a chance to see the process by which architecture is made from beginning to end, not just the portion that portends to art or concepts. Second, it teaches patience and humility, two key virtues not often imbued on young designers. Third, it exposes design novices to the “user” or client in ways that can’t be simulated in an average studio.

If the change in the attitudes of the students is any guage, the building process has really raised their aptitude and interest–kicking it up a notch, as Emeril Lagasse says. The concrete platform that stood after the last episode represented a lot more than just a building foundation, it was a solid basis for making a career in architecture, and one that more architecture schools should offer their beginning students.

The Next Generation of Architects on Cable TV

I spent nearly 15 years of my life teaching young architects, leaving academia dispirited and pessimistic about the next generation in the late 1990s. So it came as a pleasant surprise when I noticed the Sundance Channel Documentary, “Architecture School,” among the offerings this fall on cable television. I have watched the first three episodes. I have enjoyed viewing them and have also learned something about what is going on in the Tulane School of Architecture, a school I knew during the 1980s. I wonder how many non-architects are tuning in. If you are interested in design and the role of architecture in the real world, I highly recommend the program.

“Architecture School” is first and foremost a work of first rate film-making. It has strong themes, characters, and yet manages to present competing points of view in an even-handed way. The city of New Orleans is out front in the films, as it should be, and viewers learn a good deal about what has and hasn’t changed since Katrina. The students in a typical 2nd-year studio are the stars of the show, and they also get a  fully-rounded presentation. In a 40-minute program this kind of care and craftsmanship is rare. I give the directors an A+.

The Tulane School of Architecture, besides being located in New Orleans, was an excellent choice of venue as well. It makes an excellent case study of how architecture is taught in most of the world today. The faculty and staff are presented as smart, assiduous avocates for good design and social responsibility in a beleaguered city. The film explicates an often misunderstood teaching method that has guided studio education for decades–the jury system. What is more, it clearly presents both the positive and the negative aspects of the system in a way that any educated adult can understand.

During the first episodes, the students in a typical studio are presented with the exciting opportunity of designing a house in a lower-income neighborhood (largely African American) that desperately needs affordable housing. Like the students in the famous Yale first-year building program, these young architects will see one of their designs constructed by a local housing corporation, and will have a chance to participate in the construction process. At a time when many architecture schools are turning away from “real world” situations, the Tulane studio is a beacon for architectural education in a challenging world.

The plot unfolds as a competition between half a dozen distinct personalities in the studio–a driven, gifted Asian American, male and female examples of the college jock, a rule-abiding WASP male who presents the case for a meritocracy, and two talented but unmotivated “artists” who get by with intuition over intellect. The class is just about 50/50 male-female, with women perhaps having a slight edge–as is the case now in most architecture programs. The studio instructor is a principled, dedicated man with ties to New Orleans. He clearly has the respect and admiration of his young charges–so much so that most are overawed by his criticism.

Anyone who has attended a school or taught architectural design during the past 25 years will recognize not only the personalities but also the curriculum here. What is most interesting about the film is the implication that young designers, and their young critic, will test the efficacy of that curriculum in a community building project that has an impact on lower income, working class blacks in one of the nation’s neediest cities. The disconnect between the largely white students and their African American clients is not apparent until episode three, when they first get questions about why all of their designs are so “ugly” and out of place on a street full of 19th century cottages and shotgun houses.

After 8 weeks of heated competition in which each character sees his ego battered by interim criticism from the teachers and the dean (Reed Kroloff, a Yale educated, Prada wearing intellectual type), the final “jury” exposes the students to an even more brutal session with many new actors. The dean and his faculty are joined by members of the housing corporation and the community. Predictably, the “professional” jurors out-talk the community members by employing their opaque jargon, leaving the students with the impression that aesthetic standards imparted in them by their teachers will guarantee a successful design for the client. The professors hammer away at the importance of a strong “concept” over practical or social considerations. But, confusing the issue, several of the early favorites are taken to task for their failure to consider costs or the frugal use of space. Surprisingly, a woman from the Carribean, emerges with a simple, innocuous design that the critics see as “original,” reminding the dean of the controversial Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaus.

More surprisingly, the studio instructor takes his beleagured class back to their desks for a post-mortem and a vote on who will “win” the right to have his/her design constructed. Instead of polling members of the community or the jury of professionals, he leaves the choice to his young apprentices. Why? Perhaps to make certain that he is not blamed for any kind of favoritism; perhaps to teach his students that competitions are not always won with talent alone. The students, predictably, show little critical capacity for understanding the dynamics of real competitions, instead parroting the comments of the jurors in their own assessments of the merits of each design. The young woman with the “Rem Koolhaus” scheme is chosen the winnner. If the film is accurate about the jury, no positive comments were made about this design by community members.

This sets up the drama for the next episodes, as the young builders see reactions to their work “on the ground” in the city. Just as architects learn quickly that their notions of “good design” often go unappreciated by clients, the students see that paradigms of modernist “conceptual” art have little meaning for residents struggling to make ends meet in a flagging economy. As happened during the 1940s and 1950s, it is the poor, the lowest end of the social spectrum, that get “experimental” architecture, while the rich get what they want.  Why? Because the poor have no voice in determining the design of their environment. Just as the neighborhoods nearest the unfunded, unrenovated levies were hardest hit by Katrina, the neighborhoods most devastated by the storm will get houses that, at best, will be the untried, untested ideas of novice architects.

Who will learn most from the experiment? The students? The faculty? The dean? The community leaders? The housing corporation? The residents? Stay tuned.