On Education

THE ARCHITECT -- GENIUS, CHARLATAN OR MUDDLEHEAD?

Dan Bucsescu, September 1980

Consider the following:

"Macfarlane (1964) believes that good architects are likely to be 'unsociable, humorless, severe, aloof, suspicious, cool, reticent, misanthropic, calm, cold, calculating, self centered, shut-in and fanatical' -- which certainly seems nearer to Blake's descriptions of Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies. ...this is so because great architects are likely to possess high spatial ability, and spatial ability, according to Smith, is found particularly in people of marked schizothymic personality." (Broadbent, 1973)

"...many of an architect's activities appear typically to represent an intermediary position between those of artist and of scientist... The problems and frustrations of architectural creativity stem from the role which is available to architects in our society and particularly from their socialisation into the profession through the educational habits of schools of architecture." (Stringer, 1975)

"...employment in the New York City firms is down more than 36 percent. This is leading to a significant change in the nature of Architectural practice around the country. Architects are increasingly fashioning their practices, like Kohn Pederson Fox, to "package" buildings and give their clients not merely designs but also a whole range of financial services involved in the making of a building..." (New York Times, 1977)

The increasing pressure on architectural design to become 'interdisciplinary', 'democratic' and 'scientific' introduces a special concern with the role of the architect vis-a-vis all other areas of expertise necessary to the making of the environment: business, sociology, psychology, engineering and politics. There are two tendencies in the architectural profession. The first is to expand the definition of the architect's role by incorporating other areas of expertise; thus, the division between other professions and the role of the architect is blurred. The second tendency is to narrow the role of the architect by withdrawing from concern with anything other than the manipulation of forms. Both responses betray a lack of vision and an inability to cope with the challenges of an interdisciplinary professional context. This strongly affects the very nature of the architectural profession and its products.

Both these tendencies could be attributed to a great extent to the philosophical weakness of architectural education. Architecture traditionally was thought to play an intermediary role between science and art. This led to confusion, making architects uneasy with the rational and empirical criteria of science as well as with the metaphorical and largely subjective language of art. As a result, the architect often finds himself overwhelmed by the scientific-sounding arguments of the specialist consultant, and/or lagging behind the artist in his/her understanding of the world.

Architectural education should provide a much stronger foundation in the philosophy of science and art. This could be accomplished through giving the students of architecture a better grounding in modern scientific concepts and in theories of knowledge as related to architectural design, and therefore enabling the architect (student) to evaluate critically the input of other disciplines to the architectural design and knowledge.