Architecture School: The Latest Architecture and News

Architecture students have long groaned (or bragged) about the long hours and all-night work sessions demanded by their chosen major. Surely, we’ve all thought, no other major must be working this hard – right?

Now, thanks to the results of Indiana University's National 2016 Study of Student Engagement (NSSE), those assertions have been backed up with some numbers: architecture students were found to work an average of 22.2 hours per week, more than 2.5 hours more than any other major.

At its best, architecture can be a dream come true: the physical manifestation of the creative architect's most exquisite design fantasies. Nowhere is this kind of creative liberty more pervasive than in architecture school—with few practical concerns for cost, policy, or even structural integrity, architecture students are free to execute the purest and most complex proposals their imaginations will allow. And indeed, as their representation and spatial skills progress, students gain the ability to realize more advanced interventions over time. In the real world, though...not so much.

Are the rigors and tribulations of architecture school causing serious impacts on students' mental health? A new student survey conducted by Architect’s Journal has found that more than a quarter of architecture students in the UK are currently seeking or have sought medical help for mental health issues related to architecture school, and another 25% anticipate seeking help in the future.

The results have prompted Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor at the University of Buckingham and a mental-health campaigner, to describe the situation as “a near epidemic of mental-health problems.”

The classroom and the office are the two main settings where we learn about the practice of architecture, yet both expect the other to fill in more than a few gaps. Maybe schools shouldn’t emphasize the “technical details” and instead focus on teaching how to design; or maybe a little technical knowledge would be great preparation for that first job out of school (where you won’t get to design much more than a straight line). No matter which ideology you subscribe to, there will always be a disconnect between the classroom and the office.

The Danish Building & Property Agency publishes the design contest notice for the restricted design competition for the "NEW AARCH", the new School of Architecture in Aarhus, Denmark. The restricted design competition will take place in 2016. Read the design contest notice here.

With a clear international outlook and universal approach, the UIC Barcelona School of Architecture's Bachelor's Degree in Architecture offers students a holistic approach to architectural education, improving competitiveness by encouraging multiple skill sets, teamwork, responsibility, and entrepreneurship. The university employs a unique teaching method, where each student is tasked with undertaking a project at every step of the process.

QS has released its annual World University Rankings for 2015, covering 36 individual subjects and sorting based on "academic reputation, employer reputation and research impact." The company, which claims to explore the top 800 universities in the world, began publishing academic rankings in 2011. Read on to see the list of top universities for architecture, and be sure to see the full, sortable list at QS's site.

Looking for a professional degree, post professional degree, or want to learn the difference? Want to see what a degree in architecture can mean for your future? On April 25, 2015, from 1:00pm - 5:00pm ET, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) will host the ACSA Creative Futures: Architecture School Webinars Series. The four, 30-minute webinars will cover the following topics:

The Global Schindler Award is a new competition for students that will explore questions about universal mobility and access amidst rapid globalization and urbanization. In its inaugural year, a real site in Shenzhen – a booming commercial and industrial area adjacent to Hong Kong – has been chosen as the subject of the urban design proposals. Entrants are being asked to re-imagine the city as an inclusive urban environment and will be vying for portions of the $150,000 prize fund.

Over the course of nine months, graduate students at the Strelka Institute studied the urban landscape of Moscow and the daily routines of its inhabitants, focusing "on new, little-noticed, and as-yet unresolved contradictions." The main goal of the projects was to come up with solutions that could be applied in practice.

The research projects, collectively entitled "Urban Routines," were presented at the end of this past June at the graduate show. Program director David Erixon said that while the theme might seem naive, "when you start looking at seemingly trivial things in a new way they are not so trivial anymore." For details about the individual research projects - covering Cars, Retail, Dwelling, Offices, and Links - keep reading after the break.

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Although university is meant to be a place of educational exploration, paths, particularly for architects and designers, tend to be extremely prescribed. In "Notes from the Dean," originally published in Metropolis Magazine, Executive Dean Joel Towers describes how the Parsons New School for Design is pioneering a new design program that is more reflective of modern design approaches: "The world has changed; the role of design has changed. And the way that designers are taught to engage with the world must change, too."

Every generation is presented with challenges specific to its time and place. We live in a world changing in ways that were unimaginable at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when design education first began to take shape. Technology (aided and abetted by design), advances in scientific knowledge, and shifts in social and cultural norms shaped design in the twentieth century. Our problems today involve more complex and interconnected systems—climate, cities, resources, networks, flows—and call for a new paradigm. Design in the twenty-first century is of critical importance in both addressing these challenges and transforming them into opportunities to remake the world around us. To do so, design education must change.

Design schools have traditionally adhered to a model that builds programs based on a foundation year, a well-defined and contained introduction to the basics of material, form, and color. And while that foundation is an important cornerstone of design education, it leaves little room for the more exploratory methods of cross-disciplinary and technology-based learning, and for understanding and applying design in the context of the larger world. That old model needs to evolve to reflect design’s enhanced role as a catalyst for innovation and creativity.