How to Improve Architectural Education (In 12 Steps)
1. Obsess with keeping current. Provide a campus program for faculties and staff that updates the latest statistics and metrics about the design profession. For instance, compensation metrics and the business metrics of success. Bring students, faculty, and administration together to share knowledge on the current realities in the professions. Today’s graduates should come to understand the real opportunities and set goals accordingly. Get rid of the stale mythology of a profession that doesn’t exist anymore. Sadly, some educators are discouraging their students for all the wrong reasons. For instance, students should be provided with the transparencies about latest benchmarks on designer compensation, bonus and ownership equity models. We don’t need to hear another story about Lou Kahn’s business failures as if it’s the end of the story. It is only part of the story. The biggest part of the story is to learn from failure and to study success. Today there are hundreds of stories providing case studies about the successful architect. It’s time to understand this reality.
2. Teach leadership in addition to design education. Yes, business leadership and communication skills should be taught to every student before graduating. Every graduate should be able to stand up at an AIA or association meeting and provide a confident synopsis of their background and areas of interest. They should be able to establish eye contact and use the current language of professional practice. They should study video tapes of themselves in school (or enroll in a thespian acting or debate class) until they have confidence in their own communication skills. Students should learn that in reality, designers are in the communications business. Without this, the value of the designers in society and around the business table lacks the virility — the voice — to advance the future.
3. Learning by doing, hands on programs, cooperative education and the like may be difficult, but its value cannot be denied. For when it comes to areas like building on-site supervisory experience, cost analysis, fee and business adjustments to scope changes, and day-to-day project management, the best way to acquire the necessary understanding of how buildings are made is by practicing the art and science rather than studying it. This will not be easy. The recession has hit cooperative education models and internships hard. However, the tenets and principles will certainly evolve. Becoming a successful architect or running a design enterprise are not endeavors that translate well into lectures and academic analysis.
4. Maximize what I’ll call the design enterprise/continuing-education offerings that bring practitioners into school both digitally and to campus. Create social and intellectual programs that build bridges between the profession and education. A surprisingly small number of successful practitioners actively teach. It need not be a lost resource. The profession also needs high quality continuing education. This provides an opportunity to bring together compassionate and relevant activities between schools and the profession.
5. Veteran and tenured faculty are in need of renewal. Some schools admit to a percentage of dead-wood faculties. It doesn’t have to be this way. An exchange program between schools could be established for veteran and tenured faculty needing some regeneration and new surroundings. Every school can participate in this program, which could have a twelve month to twenty-four month schedule. This could be coordinated by one of the associations such as an AIA/ACSA joint staffing model. This initiative is important because complacency has no place in design education if students are to get the value they are paying for. Educators and practitioners alike should always be unsatisfied and hungry to participate in the unfolding future of the profession.
6. In studio, teach the current metrics in finance, marketing, professional services and operations. This is the Design + Enterprise model. Make it a part of every project in the studio environment. Imbedded into every studio should be lessons that reveal project management information that firms use now to stay accountable. This includes costs, construction time, design efficiency, square-foot metrics and the likely marketing overhead the project brought with it.
7. Special lecture programs should show the best talent in both design and business practices. Balance them. If for instance there are eight big-name lecture programs in a term, insert the practice management leaders in front of the students, too. The learning objective should be not just to understand what the firm does and its outputs but also how the firm does it and its processes. Ask the firms to cover the budgets of award winning projects and how they work. Ask them about profit and if they are meeting their goals. Ask them to have a candid conversation with students about value migration and strategic planning, fee shifts, social responsibility and new delivery process strategies. Ask them to cover the owner/leader transition issues in their firm.
8. Faculty should be encouraged to establish formal roles with firms. This would get educators into firms on a regular basis. The profession needs to reach out to educators on this — not unlike affirmative action. Educators can be on the policy board, perhaps, or an advisor on technology or as expert to the firm on a specialty area such as acoustics, lighting, contract negotiation, ethics, etc. There should be more give and take between professors and the professional practice. Firms need to pay for these policy and advisory services from the educators. Schools should set the goal that every faculty member becomes a board member or advisor to a professional practice, a construction firm, a product manufacturers or another industry player. This will provide relevant give and take and provide value and new insight into the system. It will also create rapport, respect and admiration, some things we need to have more of between schools and the profession.
9. Every firm should make a financial commitment to the college program of their choice. My own opinion is that every firm — even the smallest — should contribute a minimum of $2,500 per year to higher education. And for medium, large and extra-large firms I recommend setting a preliminary budget as a percentage of net profits. A typical firm earns a profit of 9 percent. A percent of that could flow to schools of their choice. As the return on investment grows, even more investments can be made. Underlying this strategy is the attitude that there should be more development flowing from practice to education. Chairs and endowments should be much more aggressively established. Once this happens it will tend to make programs stronger and more valued within context of building the profession for the future. It takes only a little imagination to see how valuable this can be, and it can be argued that the future of the profession depends on it. With discipline, more than $25 million in annual gifts can be provided to our accredited schools of architecture annually.
10. Establish a meritocracy system of rewards with staff and faculty. It is not time well spent to challenge the tenure system, frankly, but there can be energized leadership coaching around meritocracy, high performance and pay for excellence. The focus should be on what can be done. The profession should support this with endowments and chairs and gifts without strings.
11. Facilities in colleges and universities should, at minimum, mirror those in professional practice. Good design, good housekeeping and the latest tools should be in place. Spaces in design school should inspire, be well designed, well curated and not be allowed to decline into an anything-goes mess.
12. Digital and distance learning is a reality and it should have a legitimate role as an option in architectural education. Set a marketplace responsive role to enable the non-accredited degree graduates to catch up and qualify for licensure.
There will always of course be better and worse schools. This is also true in practice. Just as some students get an inferior education, some employees in practice are not mentored well. The future demands more if we wish for a stronger profession. This is one of the biggest opportunities for change. It can re-energize the design profession of the future. Respect for design education can be exponentially enhanced. We should encourage leaders to set targets that they may never meet. We are in a race with change and as new value niches are discovered we need to seize and deploy these. We need a strong link between education and practice around the issues of shifts, foresight and actions that can improve the future.
James P. Cramer is founding editor of DesignIntelligence and co-chair of the Design Futures Council. He is chairman of the Greenway Group, a foresight management consultancy that helps organizations navigate change to add value.
Reprinted, with permission, from DesignIntelligence.