On architectural academia

I've got to be honest. I've never understood academic architecture or the culture of architecture schools. I've never understood the mysterious process by which some people end up as tutors and then heads of something and then professors, working often simultaneously at multiple universities, on the basis of a body of work which often seems slight, whimsical and irrelevant. I have occasionally taught in a guest capacity, I'm invited onto crit panels maybe once or twice a year, and I've been an external examiner (representing practice) and on a RIBA validation panel, but I've never felt inside the academic club and that club has rarely reached out to me either. 

People have often asked if I or we teach, and while my usual answer is that we lack of time and want to focus on the practice, particularly of the truth is I don't know where I would start if I did want to teach or consider an academic post. There seems to be some magical process whereby appointments get made, and the qualifications required are unclear. I can answer the exam questions of a public tender or an application form but the smoke and mirrors around most of the academic world bring out all my insecurities, so better just not to go there.

Of course, like all architects, I have experienced education as a student. It's going back a long way now, to the late 1990s, but I remember the shock of studio culture even in the relatively tame version present in Scroope Terrace in Cambridge. But everything was new to me and as I saw older students act like all this was normal, I just took on board that this was what architecture school was like and absorbed the hero-culture around all-nighters, the substances required to get through them, toughing out a harsh critic, tears and breakdowns with no support. I pretty much hated all of it. It felt like a system that was trying to toughen us up, where the people in it - nice though many were - didn't want to show too much kindness. University was also disorganised. Tutors would be late or not show up, dates and times would change at the last minute and arrangements were vague. The whole thing was confusing, exhausting and seriously undermining of one's sense of self, even at a school where the culture was far more mild than the stories we all heard from London faculties.

It was a huge relief to start working in practice and find regular working hours, professional and kind colleagues, practical real world briefs, a structure of regulations and physical requirements that felt like a reassuring framework in which design could be made purposeful as well as joyful. Having thought I was not at all cut out for architecture, in practice something clicked and I found confidence. After two years out, I then took an unconventional route through Part 2, going to the most practical and - to my mind- radical architecture programme there is, the Rural Studio, and then being kindly allowed by Robert Mull to enroll in his Free Unit for a year as a fairly token way of getting a Part 2 while holding down a fulltime job.

Since then I've reflected a great deal on what I learnt in my Part 1 - my only experience of conventional unit based education - and what those who come into our practice at Part 1 and Part 2 level learnt from their student experiences. I've also reflected on what I've heard from friends and colleagues over the years, and what I've seen, when a guest at architecture schools for crits and suchlike. There's no doubt that the culture exposed in the Bartlett report was, and is, real across almost all architecture schools to a greater or lesser extent. 

We all need to ask what part we have played in burying our own painful experiences and just going with the system culture. I don't think I've been a horrible tutor or critic, but I've heard tutors be horribly dismissive and cruel about their students and I've offered too feeble a ripost. And we all got pretty inured to seeing students crying in hallways, myself included. It has been only over the last few years that mental health has been raised up the agenda, along with race and gender based issues, that we've all collectively been looking harder and deeper at our own entrenched behaviours and assumptions. I'm naturally shy and anxious about not fitting in, and I've had to learn, over the last 5 or 6 years, to question more confidently and speak up.

It's difficult indeed for the people who are at the top of these institutions to unravel the very structures that have put them there. Perhaps the academics themselves need a programme of therapy in order for them to understand themselves better and be able to put this change in place. Like alcoholics who surround themselves with other addicts, it is likely that they have no idea how far from the shores of reasonable behaviour they have drifted. Cut them loose, and we've seen already how bemusement is turning to resentment and revenge.

In all walks of life, those who are the greatest bullies are those who fear their own inadequacy. There are, and have been, too many tutors and professors who know they wouldn't survive in real world practice, so they have held tightly to a structure that can hide their failure and dress it up as success. I do recognise that being a good teacher is a skill in itself which is different from being a good practitioner. But most architectural tutors and academics haven’t studied educational theory or the psychology of learning, or thought long and hard about how to bring baby architects into being who are fit for the world as it exists. And too many have only been interested in preserving their own position in the hierarchy, ensuring their new clothes are never exposed as nakedness, and creating a network of dependency and mutual reinforcement that protects their mediocrity from view.

If the schools of architecture, and the universities that host them, want to root out the culture that we've all lived through, they need to recognise that teaching architecture is not some weird and mysterious process which is impervious to rigour, structure, professionalism and common sense. They need to recognise that creativity, experimentation and joy can thrive alongside healthy normal relationships, sleep, kindness and respect. And that the role models they put in front of students - in the form of their tutors - should include practitioners whose work makes a real positive impact in the real world out there and isn't just applauded within the closed subculture of paper architects. Architectural academia must stop being a closed shop.