Why Architecture school is useful and design is useless

Thinksolving / conceptual problem solving

Unpacking the conflict between design and construction 

A common parlance in archispeak (the way architects speak when other people aren't around) is to 'rethink' the thing which you are designing.  For example an when an firm designs an airport, they often lay claim they are, rethinking the airport.  The CEO of a well known design firm calls this model ‘design thinking’.  But designing or rethinking the airport, is kind of made up since it is subjected to real world conditions- building codes, schedules, costs, laws of gravity and natural limits of mankind, and the list goes on.   Except for projects with ridiculous budgets the final design product is ultimately compromised.  Insiders in the business refer to this as the - time / cost / quality  triangle - you can get  2 of the 3 - but not all three.  If we return to our example the airport, the end result inevitably ends up being a long hallway and usually looks like other airports. The same goes for restaurants, hotels museums etc.

Average people are more concerned with catching their flight and don’t pay attention to the overall design, nevermind how the glass is engaged with the steel.  The only people who notice the design are people who actively try to notice it.  Yet for some reason as asociety we romanticize the notion of architecture.

I had a drawing professor claim the most beautiful piece of paper is the blank paper.  Before the pencil touches the paper the paper has limitless possibility.  The finsihed drawing or in our airport example, the built airport destroys the dream that was once the unbuilt airport.  The physical building was compromised.  The possibility that the building truely embraces the spirit of change was compromised and the original intent is forgotten.  The notion that a building can propagate social change is a falsehood.  In fact architecture, built architecture as a means to reform is ridiculous.  Renaming design as "rethinking" is total bullshit.  However, there is something good we can extract from this lesson.

In all honesty, creativity is probably a more common skill than we care to admit.  When we were five everyone used crayolas, we all drew when we were in grade school.  Humans are born creative creatures and the romanticizing the creative arts is human.   Perhaps, at a moment in time, we all participate in a personal romantic dream to design through a creative outlet such as fashion, music, cooking, or remodeling our kitchen.  In the television show Seinfeld, George Constanzas claims a false identity as an architect, and goes as far to claim he designed "the new addition to the Guggenheim."  George, thinks, as many of us do, that the architect leads a superior life. Buildings are fun and easy to design, architects enjoy a high overall quality of life and architects possess superpowers, such that with the wave of the hand they can create life improving buildings for the masses  / ordinary people.  But in reality, the unspoken truth of architecture is that these dreams fall short of these aspirations and Georges alter ego perpetuate a false vision of the dream that is architecture.  George, as have many of us, is caught romanticizing architecture as a powerful instrument of social change.

The utopian vision of architecture is possible, but not in the harsh reality of the real world, but in a insular dream land called architecture school.  Nothing is built.  Everything is a dream everything is an exercise in conceptual problem solving.  

According to Wikipedia, “architecture is the activity of constructing and designing buildings and other physical structures”

Architecture is composed of 2 major themes, 'designing and constructing'.  An academic training is also broken down corespondingly.  The first is the physical construction of building and the second is a ‘creative design’ involved in designing extruded rectangles.  Construction embraces convention and practicality, the design pushes innovation and creativity.  Examining how these two themes play out at both the professional and academic level reveal a added value of academic architecture.   While architecture firms (real world) usually tend toward practical constuction and realised project  -  academic architecture programs are almost entirely creative think tanks.  Below is a short list of firms and university’s broken down by type (construction 1st vs. creative 1st) (hmmdoes this make sense?)

FIRMS

Construction / technical 1st - the Practical architect 98%

Heintges

Kendall Heating

Creative 1st the creative firm ( the dream of architecture) 2%

OMA

IDEO

Universities

Construction / technical 1st - the technical schools 2%

NJIT

NY Tech

anything with a tech at the end

creative theoretical  1st Designthinking 98%

Columbia

Harvard

Yale

think newsweek graphics red black and grey

Unpacking the conflict between design and construction though the lens of professional vs. academic institutions (bring to light something interesting  The cushioned and pampered lifestyle that the academic architecture institution can offer a student is suddenly invaluable because it was a serves as an haven for ideas, creative thinking and collaboration.  Architecture schools embed a strong fundamental comprehension of how to create solutions and use innovative thinking create . It is essentially multidisciplinary. 

The goal of both fields is to introduce you to a new way of thinking about data, and help you to gain an understanding of how to use, communicate, and interpret information  and convey a new concept model way of thought.  This happens in school, where there are 6 semester long research projects, in which at the end I gave a presentations about ideas.  Another such example occured through my work with Volume Magazine.  Volume Magazine is an experimental think tank venture.  They are devoted to the process of cultural reflexivity. Cultural reflexivity is the circular relationships between cause and effect. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional; with both the cause and the effect affecting each another in a situation that renders both functions causes and effects.  The objective was to supersede architecture and reach out toward an understanding of broader social structures and global organizations.   The project mandates an expansion of thought, culture and design.

If we return to our proverb about the blank paper an architecture can posit limitless possibilities on what the airport may be.  Contemporary practice in a university promotes numerous drawings and diagrams of how a building is dreamed to work. 

Typical design requires thinking and drawing dimensionally but the progressive schools emphasize filtering preconceived notions and processing data to discharge a powerful unseen creative vision.  And while the crestfallen architect goes back to his drawing board to value engineer his design that can’t get built the way it is the architecture student gets straight A’s.  In academic architecture there are no buildings but conclusions to research.  A scientist would a arrive at a hypothesis after an experiment about the system he is studying and at the end of a semester the architecture student arrives at a conclusion about social.  unbuilt airport holds/contains the promise of

 This is where we arrive at the term thinksolving.