It is easy to find fault in architecture education
Architecture education is often criticised but it remains good at its most important function of teaching design, writes Charles Holland.
What's wrong with architecture education? This is a perennial question that usually elicits a lot of hand-wringing and despair.
Generally, the arguments go like this: It's not engaged enough with industry. It is pretentious and elitist. It propagates a toxic culture of long hours and little reward. It's outdated and – like architects themselves – soon to be phased out by artificial intelligence (AI), anyway.
Design often figures very low in the list of things that architecture education should supposedly be addressing
It is easy, in other words, to find fault in architecture education. What I would like to do instead is to celebrate the things that it does well. The most important being that, in general, it is good at teaching design.
This might sound obvious to the point of banality, but design often figures very low in the list of things that architecture education should supposedly be addressing. This list is long and challenging: the climate crisis, decolonisation, elitism, de-industrialisation, homelessness, ecological devastation – the list goes on.
Not only this, but architects, we are told, can no longer assume the status of experts or unchallenged professionals, but need to learn to listen, to reflect and devolve the process of design through community engagement and co-design. So even if design is somehow important, it is no longer the sole preserve of architects.
Many of these things are necessary and important acts of correction. But as anyone who has spent five minutes in an architecture school lately will know, they also lie at the heart of many student projects and are already embedded in many curriculums. They are, in fact, unavoidable, to the point where a bigger problem might be a sense of paralysis at the state of the world as it exists.
Architecture schools are no longer aloof, elite institutions preoccupied with obscure aesthetic questions at the expense of society, if they ever were. At the UCA Canterbury School of Art, Architecture and Design, where I teach, the curriculum includes a module called Constructing for Equity, which examines the relationship of architecture to inclusivity, a dissertation which has as its theme this year the issue of seasonality and the provenance and lifespan of materials, and Future Practice, in which students are encouraged to act outside the institution and engage directly with their local communities.
These are good and important areas of education. But the common thread of how we tackle these issues, as well as many others, is through design.
I often hear the claim that architects can be anything
Here I am talking about spatial imagination – an understanding of three-dimensional composition and the ability to satisfy practical, aesthetic, material and technical questions in a coherent built object. Becoming better architects, ones alert to the challenges of today and able to address these through design, is a vital ability and should be celebrated.
I often hear the claim that architects can be anything: activists, politicians, enablers and advocates for change, experts in alleviating environmental breakdown and social inequality. A social and ethical basis for action is important, but there is hubris here.
We can also be architects and recognise that architectural design thinking is a specific discipline and a body of knowledge. If we can make meaningful, positive change, it is through design.
We can make better buildings, more beautiful and stimulating environments, more exhilarating spaces or more comfortable homes. And we can do this using less destructive materials and more progressive work practices.
Architects can and do work in related fields. They can be involved in writing legislation, forming planning policy and commissioning developments. They can be teachers, writers and researchers. These are all activities that involve design, or rather, activities that benefit hugely from a design imagination.
I have taught students that have graduated and gone on to work in public practice, private development, education and other fields. What they bring to these areas – aside from their individual, personal qualities – is the benefit of a creative design education.
I don't want architects to shrink from the challenges of the world. But I do want them to recognise the limits of their agency
Through this we can evolve new kinds of architecture, buildings and spaces that are environmentally and socially responsible and give meaningful physical and spatial expression to the things that matter most to us. A commitment to architecture does not mean ignoring societal problems but it should focus on the role that design has in addressing them.
Architects don't work alone. We collaborate with clients and engineers and consultants and communities. We work in teams and are not the imperious, aloof aesthetes of popular imagination.
What we bring to situations is the skill and the expertise of design and a way of thinking that is spatial, material and creative. Through design, architects engage with the world, interpreting policy constraints, economic limits, material and technical demands and turning these into spaces in which we meet, eat, drink, dance, teach, learn, pray, sing and live together.
We do this while trying to make these spaces not just accommodate, but also give meaningful expression to these activities. This is challenging and complex, but lies at the heart of what is taught in architecture school.
Architects cannot claim to do anything and be everything. We should stop pretending we can and instead get better at explaining and engaging people in what we do.
I don't want architects to shrink from the challenges of the world. But I do want them to recognise the limits of their agency and, in doing so, do the thing they can do better.
If we can solve anything, design is the means at our disposal to do so
The best architecture courses recognise this, stressing both creative thinking and the constraints of a world in which there are multiple challenges and diverse needs and voices. We should not, though, let these challenges make us give up the unique skills and abilities that we have.
Nor should we sideline design as some sort of minor activity to be indulged in only once we have sorted out everything else. If we can solve anything, design is the means at our disposal to do so. The core activity at architecture school is design. Rightly so.
Charles Holland is the principal of Charles Holland Architects, a professor of architecture at the University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury and a visiting tutor at the University of Cambridge. He was a co-director of FAT, where he was responsible for a number of the firm's key projects including a House for Essex.
The image shows a drawing by Monash University student Lewis Howarth.
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