In this episode we address the affordances and constraints of architectural academia. This generation highlights the important freedom academia provides to work through ideas that are not directly applicable to architecture as a service industry, but they also acknowledge the ways that labor structures like the tenure track process, or fellowships, push designers towards exhibitions, installations, competitions, and speculative work instead of a building practice. The group also comments on how the broader context of higher education in America, it’s neoliberalization and ballooning tuition costs, impacts architectural academia as a space of learning and a space of architectural production.
Download“Most other places, to my knowledge, don’t have the luxurious academic positions that we have access to as designers, meaning early in our careers, we can acquire a teaching position that affords us time and space to work independently, with resources, financial and student labor at times, with stability and without oversight. And what that comes at the expense of is doing the work in a material way that engages with the realities of the built environment.”
“Our job is to educate students in all of the aspects of architecture that no client is ever going to pay them to learn on the job. And I believe in all of those aspects of architecture.”
“Academia does need to be a space of exception, and I think it does need to be a place where you can have time and space to work on new ideas.”
“I have a huge problem with the way that we teach architecture. I know what the problems are and I don’t think that we’re preparing students to be great architects or to even be great workers.”
“Why do we start with words and diagrams and concepts first as opposed to construction or buildings, or these other things I think are probably more expert. When I’ve ever been hired by somebody, rarely do they say: tell me all your ideas, your concepts. They want to know, how is it going to work?”
“There’s also a hyper specialization and a pressure within the academy to be hyper-specialized that I feel it’s very unique to my generation.”
“There’s a real demand to identify what it is that you are doing and render yourself distinct from other practices that are contemporary to you … that was always a burden for me and going through this process of applying for fellowships, applying for teaching gigs and so forth.”
“5-years is not very long in architecture and buildings, it’s very long in writing and images.”
“The pavilion or the installation for the exhibition …That’s the thing that academia has created as a way to test out some of these ideas in a kind of limited built format.”
“The economy of building is so hostile and intense. There’s not a lot of space for offices working that aren’t at a corporate level.”
“It’s always peculiar how many of my friends think of themselves first as architects and secondly as academics. I suspect most of them are academics first and practicing architects second.”
“I do feel a responsibility to have some level of connecting our work to an academic discourse. Because I think that that is how we can ensure that the work is in dialogue with others.”
“We are explicitly pursuing more and more building projects and we’re saying no to the kinds of projects that maybe we’ve done in the past that are more academic. Exhibitions and these kinds of things. Because we just have such limited time.”
Interviewer
Joseph Bedford
Producer and Editor
Tim Cox
Writer
Tim Cox
Narrator
Tim Cox
Interviewees
Curtis Roth, Andrew Holder, Michael Meredith, David Eskenazi, Michael Young, Kyle Reynolds, Kyle Miller, Hans Tursack, Katie Macdonald, Kyle Schumann, Jaffer Kolb, Kelly Bair and Kristy Balliet, Bryony Roberts, Meredith Miller, Anna Neimark, Neyran Turan, Michelle Chang, Ashley Bigham, Erik Herrmann, Jerome Haferd, Clark Thenhaus, Paul Preissner, Stewart Hicks, Brittany Utting, Daniel Jacobs, Mira Henry, Matthew Au, Jimenez Lai, McLain Clutter and Cyrus Peñarroyo, Andrew Kovacs, and Jon Lott.
Senior Editor
Joseph Bedford
Music
Background music Dreamsphere 1 by Sascha Ende has been used under CC BY 4.0.