Architectural education varies widely across the world in terms of focus, emphasis and outlook, but one thing nearly all architecture programs have in common is their format. Universal to the experience of architecture school is a dependence on individually oriented, open-ended design studios at the core of every student’s education. The studio format plays an outsize role in architectural education, but the primacy of this format may be detrimental to the public that architects ultimately design for by encouraging a reliance on intuitive claims over evidence-based results. A sensible correction to this circumstance should be to reduce the dominance of design studios in architectural education, making them part of a more balanced whole, as opposed to occupying the central position they do today. The supremacy of design studios in architectural education is worth questioning, especially in the earliest stages of schooling, when students likely know very little about buildings but are asked to design them anyway. While learning by doing is an especially effective social teaching method among students who will eventually become colleagues, this knowledge gap can breed a culture that favors individual expression over pragmatic solutions, eventually leading to a detrimental divide between the people who design buildings ...
more on
Architizer
