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career
discovery 2002 I spent six weeks of my summer at the Harvard Design School in a program for people who think they want to be architects. Through lectures, panel discussions and studio experience we learned what we were getting ourselves into. We were exposed to two different architectural worlds. One is that of the architecture student, which we learned through daily experience in the design studio: hard work, high-flying ideas, working with a lot of world-class architects and students, and having your ideas and designs crucified by panels of intelligent people. And there is that of the architecture professional, which we learned about through lectures and panels: underpaid, overworked, often unfulfilled, and often terribly frustrated. We worked harder than I thought we would. The brochure said "intense from 9a - 6.30p" but it was actually intense from 9a until at least 10 or 11p. More than three hundred students were split into studios of 10 people, each with a current or just-finished graduate student as an instructor. I was a member of Architecture group 20, or Arch20. Cameron Wu was our instructor. By the
end of the program we had each designed, drawn and modeled a small gallery,
two or three conceptual sculptures and a large academic building for
a technical college in Boston.
When given the opportunity to create something, some people dive right in. If an instructor says, "design a gallery for this empty lot," they'll have a chipboard model (or two) within an hour. Others will have elaborate perspective sketches drawn with the building on the site. I will have two or three lines drawn on a piece of paper and a very frustrated, defeated look on my face. With every line I drew or basswood wall that I glued into place, I wanted to be sure that everything about it was correct. Instead of dumping my ideas on paper and then revising them, I desired perfection with every move. I could hear the criticism of a particular design choice before I even put it on paper, so I wouldn't draw it. At the end of an afternoon, I would sometimes have nothing. I paced, doodled and stared off into space. An assignment with a deadline that forced me to design something was rarely productive—perhaps it was even counterproductive because I was so frustrated by the end of it. Sometimes the solution would come to me a day or two later: I realized how I wanted it done and then I could elaborate. But that magic click in my mind sometimes never came at all. To design a good building, thousands of decisions must be made. Look around you at where the doors are placed and how high the ceilings are. If you have the opportunity, look closely at a Le Corbusier building or a small-scale Mies building (the Barcelona Pavilion or any of his houses, especially). In a good building, no choices are arbitrary. Choices are made carefully with regard to proper proportions, form, aesthetics and human need. These decisions should be made with experience of being in spaces, of living, with discipline, with regard to a proper language of architecture, not a language of money or cheap and mass-produced materials. I wanted to make my decisions as carefully as I possibly could. To design a mediocre building, you let the decisions get made by external circumstances. You put door openings between studs so construction will be easy, window sizes are determined by the standard sizes in which Pella makes them and wall heights and lengths are determined by the standard size of sheetrock and plywood. (It is not a coincidence that most residential rooms have eight foot ceilings—the length of a standard sheet of plywood.) This is the case for nearly all housing developments in suburbs. This is not to say that an arbitrary decision is a necessarily bad one—good reasons can present themselves later. While one student might cut four windows into the front facade of their building arbitrarily, I would spend time questioning: three, four or five? What size/style/shape? What do the people inside need? What would it feel like to be in a space with that size of a window? What does it mean to have three windows on the front? What does it mean to have an off-center entrance? On-center entrance? At the end of the day, the other student would have a building to discuss with the instructor. I would say, "I thought about windows for a long time and made no conclusions." Decision-making is the most difficult part of design for me. Even if I am only working on a sketch, I cannot easily commit to any of the many variables in a building. I badly want each decision to be perfect—to be guided by some principle or language so that I could be sure it was right. But I slowly came to realize that it's impossible to understand the implications of a decision until you fully make the decision. I discarded so many ideas from my head because they didn't meet some criteria in my brain, or because they didn't feel right. But maybe they didn't feel right because I hadn't even fully developed the idea. By putting it on paper, even without a reason, I could begin to more accurately evaluate the quality of my work. At the very end of the design process, I usually had something that moderately pleased me. The process was difficult and sometimes quite painful, but I could conclude with a defensible building. Given enough time, I developed reasons for my moves and the rationality that I sought for every step. I certainly hadn't considered everything, but I had reasons. Criticism may have been offered to the artistic form of my building, but I believe that with enough time and refinement I could have made nearly all of my designs into elegant, functional, and artistic buildings.
The design school plays a difficult role. It's a professional school teaching an artistic discipline. Compare it to law, medical or business school, and you see two very different approaches to professional training. The latter three show you how to do your job by teaching established material and asking you to emulate. The design school says "design something new." Budget isn't important. Neither is feasibility, because you don't yet know about construction methods. This is art, after all. Your process must not be constrained. Your ideas must be able to freely flow onto the paper. But if they only teach art theory and practice, the student will be unprepared for the professional architecture world where high-flying designs are shot down before the first meeting with the client. But if they only teach the business of architecture, there won't be any interesting buildings being built. In the first panel discussion, which included practicing architects from the area, the second issue to be raised was the disconnect between the education and the profession. The panelists all agreed that it is a very serious issue, but no one actually suggested a solution. They said the disconnect is responsible for the fact that students fresh from architecture school need to spend so many years working in low-level positions in firms before they are allowed to design anything. Until they learn the business (which is usually quite separated from the art), they can't be trusted. Understandable. But can't any of the business be taught in 3.5 years of school? The first thing that struck me about studying at the Graduate School of Design is the incredible extent to which your peers and instructors shape your designs, and specifically the manner in which the culture at the Harvard Design School affects your work. When choosing a design school, one must do more than go on the campus tour and taste the dining hall food. Someone entering this school with a love of classicism and the desire to create classic buildings will not be the same person after three years of peer and faculty reviews. We practice modern architecture here. All of your work in design school is subject to very critical review by professors, professionals, and peers. If the people at this school like one thing and not another, you'll inevitably go down the path that they like. At Harvard, they emphasize beauty of design, balance, and composition. This is not necessarily about creating functional, feasible, or pragmatic designs. This is about letting your mind go to create new things, groundbreaking things, things never seen before. If I decide to go to architecture school, it's unlikely that I'd choose Harvard.
It is clear to me that spending three-plus years at architecture school (especially a high-caliber institution like Harvard) would be an enlightening experience. I would love the material, enjoy the culture, grow intellectually, learn more about myself, my limits and my strengths, immensely enjoy my fellow students, and be in awe of my professors and of the world-class design happening all around me. I am far from certain, however, that the apparent fruits of my labor at the end of that journey would be a desirable reward. First, entering three and a half years of professional school is a significant financial investment. Second, I'm not yet in love with the careers one pursues at the end of grad school. The standard path seems to be that you work for an architecture firm for a few years in a low-level position, get state-certified, and then get underpaid for designing a bunch of stuff that gets compromised by the budget, the various requirements, the client and the city. One can take many paths with an architecture degree. It can be greatly beneficial in interior design, interior architecture, preservation, restoration, renovation, product design, real estate, or architectural history or theory or criticism. (Isn't it also just nice to become more educated?) Many of these paths intrigue me, but I don't know enough about any of them to jump into an expensive program hoping that I'll still be interested after almost four years. I'd rather work for a while in a field, fall in love with it, then reach a point where it becomes clear that to advance, I must further my formal education in the discipline. That's when I'd want to go to school.
My thoughts are turning now to the appreciation of the good buildings already standing. There are some awfully nice buildings out there that are in poor condition or are underappreciated. I'd like to work on them, help the owners realize what they've got and improve them. There are other buildings that are being threatened with demolition and need to be saved. I now hope to investigate the restoration/preservation field more fully, possibly with a job at an architecture firm that concentrates on improving older buildings.
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