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How to Teach Architecture (or anything, really)
We run our education backward.
A lot of people feel a certain frustration once they leave the University and enter their first jobs. They feel like the University didn’t prepare them well for the reality of their profession, and their inflated ego suddenly crashes. Basically, they realize that after spending four, five, or even more years at school (and acquiring a large amount of debt, if in the USA), they are still beginners.
At least that’s how I felt when I started at an architectural office. And only now am I beginning to see why.
While researching for the article on Socialist Housing, I came across lectures from my professors. Some just as uploaded slides, some as video or transcript. I remember enjoying many of them, and it was a nice nostalgic moment for me. All those years listening to Le Corbusier, Ravnikar, Mies van der Rohe, their lives, and philosophies, then everything about ancient Greeks and Romans (you know, the foundation), Michelangelo, and Brunelleschi… So beautiful and poetic, but did it — at the time — help me become a better architect? Hardly so.
In the absence of any serious vision on the part of the faculty as a whole, one reason for this is that professors orient their lectures around what they want to lecture rather than what students need…
