Final Reviews

I was lucky enough to be asked to participate in the final reviews for the University of Waterloo Architecture School's first-year studio yesterday. The quality of the work was extremely high - I met that class on their first day in architecture school and, 8 months later, they were presenting multi-unit housing projects on difficult sites. The best of the work wouldn't have been out of place in a presentation by a firm.

Whenever I sit on crit panels I learn a bit more about the subtle art of criticism. As a student I always wanted to be scheduled for the morning, before the critics got enough coffee in them to be properly awake. With the benefit of hindsight, I was fortunate to wind up late in the day so frequently - I don't know why that happened, some freak statistical effect?

The morning sessions were spent mostly on correctly small errors and delivering short lectures on the architects' responsibility to the city. I hope the students learned something. I didn't but maybe they did. One of the great things about working with students who are just starting their training is almost anything you tell them will be something they haven't heard before. That takes some of the pressure off. By the afternoon we (the critics) had slowly worked our way to as close to the heart of the matter as we were going to get. The best projects contained somewhere in them, often hidden or a seeming aberration, a thesis about how to live - a kind of projection completely out of place in the veneer of professionalism the rest of the project presented. I won't credit myself with this insight, it was the studio's coordinator who pointed it out. The most interesting thing about even the most polished project was the little error or subtle mistake - the faculty started calling it the monkey fist, in reference to the famous anecdote about how to catch a monkey with a coconut.

When I was thinking about the day after it was over, it seemed odd to me the students had tried so hard to bury that wish or instinct they had to create spatial relationships that didn't conform to their ideas of what was expected. But that's often how education works. I think about my four year old nephew. He has the seemingly-odd (and often amusing) habit of asking a question and then repeating the answer to you as if it was something you couldn't possibly know. The strangeness of it, and his limited acting range, is what makes it funny and odd. That's how high school works. And, unfortunately it is often how Universities work. They teach you the answers, then ask you the questions and reward you for delivering the answer they just provided you. It's kind of absurd.

I can remember countless times when, as an architecture student, I would complain, "Why don't they just tell us what they want?!?" In essence, I wanted to play the same game I now play with my nephew. I ought be ashamed of that I suppose. I'll use it as an example in the future to shame students who ask that question.

The weakest projects were those that dedicated themselves entirely to trying to provide what the student thought the professors wanted. They were frequently well done and well drawn, and will necessarily receive high marks - students who think that way are always careful to fill all the project requirements. My favourite projects were those that didn't give a fuck about what the professors might have wanted. The projects with plans that made no sense at all because all the attention and effort had gone into developing a really cool proposition about massing. Or the ones with no real effort to provide plans or elevations because all the effort had gone somewhere else entirely.

If you are an architecture student, this is the most important thing I can tell you about surviving and prospering in architecture school - what your professors want, more than anything else, is for you to care about the work you are doing. If you have to change the program they gave you to find something you can care about - do it. If you have to ignore the project requirements, do it. If they ask for a hotel but you want to do an elevator to space - do it. Your marks might suffer but you will prosper. Your profs will love you and you will enjoy yourself. I tell students follow your fascination every chance I get.

There is a story I could tell to prove this to you but I won't. I tell it too frequently. And it isn't really about me; it's about a friend. I sometimes fear my friends will get resentful about how much of their lives I turn into stories. Anyway...