Transect Presents: What Does It Take? with AIAS-NJIT
Peggy Deamer, Erin Pellegrino, Sean A. Gallagher, Thomas Petersen, Jacob Swanson, and DHruvi RajpopatOn November 16, 2023, Transect in partnership with AIAS-NJIT convened a roundtable entitled “What Does It Take?” as a part of Volume 5’s exploration of architecture pedagogy. Sitting alongside other Hillier College of Architecture and Design-organized roundtables throughout the semester associated with the college’s 50/15 Anniversary celebrations, the event was intended to add a student’s perspective and concerns to pedagogical discussions.
In preparation for the event, panelists prepared short statements responding to a list of topics that included their personal experiences in architecture school, the state of the profession and discipline, architectural agency, architectural labor, and the practice/academia split. Panelist statements and an edited transcript of the event are presented here.
Panelists were Peggy Deamer, Sean A. Gallagher, Erin Pellegrino, and Thomas Petersen. The roundtable was moderated by Jacob Swanson (Editor in Chief of Transect) and Dhruvi Rajpopat (Managing Editor of Transect and AIAS-NJIT Chapter President).
Statements
Architecture School is the best thing that ever happened to me. It gave me eyes to see what is around me and comrades who see the same thing. It exposed me to texts exploring the relationship between the physical and the cultural/social. It gave me a map by which to interpret the world.
How is that reconciled with my critique of the discipline and the profession? It is with the fact that when the school set me up to expect a career that never materialized, I recognized two options: bring schools down to the realities of the profession or bring the profession up to the expectations put forward by schools. I have chosen the latter and want others to as well.
What does this mean? It means that we architects need to build up the power to be taken seriously by the developers and government officials responsible for the built environment. It takes having the facts and vision to redirect their neighborhood-destroying projects and ecologically unnecessary developments.
This does imply changes for education, but not ones that will dampen exuberance. Rather, it is a reframing of our education to include competencies that range from social/organizational skills, to shifts in subjectivity from victim to collaborator, to understanding how architecture functions in capitalism. It is not a matter of bringing expectations down to reality but, rather, seeing the expanse of those expectations.
School can and should model the work we want to be doing in the future.
–Peggy Deamer
It is an exciting time in history to be a young designer of the built environment. For the first time, global society is dependent on architects and urban designers to quickly change their priorities and practices in order to preserve the health and vitality of our existing communities.
Over the last century, the Industrial Revolution has exponentially expanded humanity’s influence on Earth’s biosphere. Today we understand this influence has destabilized the evolution of our planet and initiated a Sixth Great Extinction. In response, communities around the world are searching for ways to drastically change their industrial practices in an effort to slow the rate of habitat loss and climate change.
The architecture and urban design industry is responsible for over half of the destabilizing practices driving the change in Earth’s biosphere. Without our industry leading this global effort to change these practices, there will be little hope for success. The hidden challenge is the need for a rapid change in our education system. We are educating our young designers with curricula constructed around modernist principles, practical code, and drafting technologies, with some elective courses around sustainability. This is a recipe for failure.
The entire pedagogy needs to be replaced with bold new visions for how to educate architecture and urban design students. No longer is the educational mission to produce thoughtful designers that are competent in delivering universal building typologies, but rather to breed innovation in design and construction strategies that are self-sustaining and contribute to the overall health of the surrounding environment. We have more to learn today from ecosystems and material sciences than Le Corbusier’s Five Points of Architecture.
Architecture and Urban Design programs should build core curriculum content around regional cultures, earth studies, and material sciences. Such a change can take different forms within each university, but every variation of it will require bold leadership to clean the slate, reprioritize, and build new from the ground up. I, for one, am excited for this paradigm shift and see a far greater opportunity for our youth to have a meaningful impact in today’s profession than ever before in history.
–Sean A. Gallagher
Historically, the role of the architect has shifted with the demand for innovation within society. From Imhotep to Alberti to Koolhaas, the need for agile and acute minds to interrogate the issues of the built environment has proven to fall often within the scope of the architect.
As we move into the next generation of designers, the traditional methods of honing craft both in school and in practice must be challenged. The architect’s ability to problem seek and problem solve, to orchestrate, to organize and coalesce, makes today’s young designers able to interrogate the methods of the past to bring them into the future.
Idealizing the architectural profession as one of noble artistry, creative genius, and inherent progressivism disguises the failings of firms as businesses. The uncomfortable reality is that many celebrated works of “capital-A Architecture” are propped up on the labor of overworked designers, unpaid internships, and exploitative business practices. The emotional, financial, and physical sacrifices of overtime-exempt designers have carried the most lauded architecture firms of our time for too long. When our people cannot sustain healthy work schedules, relationships to work, and other fulfilling aspects of life, we fail the society we serve. When we do not take care of ourselves, we cannot begin to engage positively in the world.
Let’s start having conversations in school about healthy work habits, setting boundaries and expectations, talking about money. Let’s normalize a culture of discussion, debate, enhancing our collective value, and communicating that to the outside world.
Maybe then there is a chance that we, as architects, can change it.
–Erin Pellegrino
Architecture school should offer students an opportunity to learn the many different possibilities of architectural practice and help direct their professional journey. During my time at NJIT, there were two specific learning experiences that have informed my career. One was Professor Anthony Schuman’s Architecture and Social Change course which exposed me to architects working outside the traditional model of practice who were using architecture for good in the world. The second was a comprehensive studio with Professor Stephen Zdepski in which each student selected a city in the global South and developed a program relevant to that city. I struggled to understand how my selected city developed into its current condition of informal settlements abutting historic downtowns and the impact my project could have. This was the first time the inequities of the built environment, especially in cities, became apparent to me.
Through my career focus on housing, and specifically affordable housing, I have learned that the housing models in New York City and across the country are outdated. Housing is considered a commodity rather than a constitutional right and the housing system has perpetuated inequities. A home is necessary for the stability and generational wealth of its residents and architects must provide dignified living spaces for vulnerable populations.
–Thomas Petersen
Event Transcript
Transect
What do you think your education prepared you for? How did your career end up being different from that?
Sean A. Gallagher
What is really great about being educated in the school of architecture is that it teaches you to be critical thinkers. It teaches you to be aware of many things. Normally when you pursue a certain profession, it hyper-focuses you. Architecture basically throws you into an abyss and says “find something you are really passionate about; Throw away all your preconceptions and start from scratch.” That is really advantageous because what the built environment requires is not just people who build buildings or people who plan cities. There are many different layers of stuff that make communities work. Many of the people that I went to school with are not actually architects. They are great thinkers and they are leading in their fields. I think that's the real value of architecture education–it allows you to be a critical thinker and lead out in practice more than I think any other profession does, where you are more of a cog in the wheel. Here, we are questioning everything and trying to connect it to some social thing that is meaningful.
Leaving school, I was a little bit at a loss. I felt there was an urgency that I did not really see out there. But school gave me the ability to understand that I was lost and I was looking for something more. That is really great about architecture education. We always have this conversation. Maybe it is just because I am old but architecture school is losing that a little bit. So this whole revolution hopefully inserts a little bit more of that into it.
Erin Pellegrino
If I were to answer the question shortly, school taught me how to fail productively. I went to school in what we called the “Frozen North.” It is the opposite of being in Newark in a sense. It is a really monastic landscape. There is not much to do besides work. I was completely enmeshed in it. The process and what we learned to do there is to deep-dive on things, to go off the deep end for a little bit, then come back and try to understand what you are doing. School gave me the time and space to do that so that I could see the world differently. We have rationalized that approach out of architecture by calling architects “expert generalists.” We get really good at learning enough about a subject to coordinate people who are way smarter than us in their areas of expertise towards a solution that approximates solving the client's problem. It is never perfect, it is never done–you iterate, you iterate, you iterate, which is wasteful both of material and time.
Architecture school was an incredibly enriching experience because it was antithetical to how I was taught K-12. There, there is a rubric. You do XYZ, you get XYZ grade, and you are onto the next thing. In my education, there was a more amorphous understanding where sometimes we did not even know what the problem was. It taught you how to, one, be somewhat skeptical about what people say the problems are, and then two, empowers you to do something about it.
There is a dark side to that, though, in thinking architects can do everything, and that is really bad. I think all of the points that Sean brought up earlier in his statement, that there are huge, intractable problems that we need to solve, I do not think the discipline of architecture is going to solve them alone, and I do not think we are very good at expanding the discipline. We are at an academic institution right now in a room mostly full of academics, but architects often are really bad academics. We do not do a ton of scientific research. It is starting to change, but the people who taught me were thinkers, not material researchers. They were theorists, and I learned a ton from them about problem-solving, about concept and form and space and the human experience through space, and I absolutely love that, but the problems we are facing today cannot be solved by that alone. I do not know that the majority of architecture firms out there are able to hire research scientists into their practices or collaborate with them daily to really lead that charge. I would like to get to a point where we can do that, but I think there is a little bit of a trap in thinking we could do it all on our own. I would like to think that we can change that. Expanding what it means to be an architect or to practice in the built environment is a part of that, celebrating when someone says, “I am really into the detailing of a façade” or “I am really getting into what polymers we can use to create sustainable plastic, and I want to go off and do that.” If we can celebrate that more and not just say you need to go through year one to five, get licensed, and go into practice, I think we can start to change the discourse around how architects can have an impact beyond the bounds of traditional architecture.
Peggy Deamer
I agree with some of that, but I do not agree with all of that. I felt that my architectural education, which was very, very formal, had embedded in it an idea that what we did mattered. It mattered at a profound intellectual level, a profound aesthetic level, a profound psychological level. I feel totally indebted to have experienced that. I would not take that away from anybody. What then I found was a practice, a world that did not care as much about those things as we did. It was a surprise to me that nobody else cared as much about design, but also things like philosophy. So for me, the effort has been how to get the rest of the world to care about those things as much as I cared, or we cared, or that we were educated to care.
The part that I disagree with is that I do not think it is science. I really do not think that is it. I think that theory absolutely matters because theory is where we are told about a subjectivity that gives us agency, that gives us critical attitude, that makes us not believe what the politicians are telling us or what the economists are telling us. That is theory. If we do not have that as part of our approach to how we interact with the world as architects, we are impoverished. I do not think it is a whole new set of information in terms of the courses that we need to teach, like on climate justice. My feeling is that it is a different attitude about how we as architects go out in the world and persuade people to do the things that we have learned need to happen. For me, it is an education about subjectivity more than it is about the material that we are learning.
SG
I do think that the foundation to our education system is critical thinking and the ability to go out and get people enthusiastic about something that is going to help society. I think that, in the education system, we have become lazy. I think that the things we need to understand in order to build better for society is changing and we do not want to recognize that. If we were to adopt an engineering curriculum as the core, then yeah, that would be a big problem. It would be a huge problem because like Peggy said, we are responsible for getting the talent together and understanding the big picture in order to move society in a direction that is actually more meaningful. We need that foundation.
However, doing that without changing the core curriculum is a recipe for failure over the next hundred years. It is not just about climate justice, but improving how we build over the next hundred years in a way that is meaningful to different cultures around the world. We cannot say “here is the core curriculum based on certain histories of how we built in the past, here is a little on being responsible, here are classes about structures, And oh, by the way, we will have electives and we will put sustainability in there. We will put regional cultures in there. We will put justice in there.” At this point, a lot of the traditional history that we are learning can become the electives and a new core curriculum can be developed that is still just as critical as it was previously, built on theories of aesthetics. We have new issues today and I think the core curriculum needs to be built around that. Do not take me as saying it is all about climate justice. It is critical thinking at the foundation, but we have to be more bold with reimagining how we educate this century.
PD
For me, it is not just about the subject matter. It is about how we understand education and part of that is all the things that you are saying. It is cooperation. It is recognizing that architects are not alone in the world in getting buildings out in the world. We are in a system of building production and procurement. For me, it is an adjustment about how we think about our material as opposed to the subject matter.
Thomas Peterson
I fourth, at this point, the critical thinking aspects of architectural education. Peggy said that architecture school is so design focused, and you are led to believe that design is the most important thing, but a lot of the conversations that we have with clients are not really about design. They are about program, room sizes, more mundane things, which, I think, is unfortunate. The other thing that has already been mentioned is collaboration. To get buildings built takes a lot of people. In studio, there is this mindset of the sole designer, which is not really the case in practice. Collaboration is also very important.
T
To the profession from education, how would you sum up the profession in one word?
PD
Frustrated.
TP
I would say stagnant. I have not been practicing for that long but I feel like the modes of production of architecture, how buildings get built and building program, have not really changed all that much. And as everybody said, they really do need to.
EP
Broken.
SG
I am going to say ripe. I think it is ripe for change.
PD
Can we elaborate on that? All these things I agree with absolutely. I think that because the profession is dealing with the real world–it is dealing with the economy, developers, zoning–it tells us in academia what we really should be worried about. I do not want to dismiss it. It is shedding light on those things that are profoundly important. They may not be dealing with it in the right way, they might be complicit, they might be too timid, but it is not the case that the profession is dismissible. It is dealing with the real stuff.
EP
I totally agree with that. Unfortunately though, the profession, which is rooted in the gentleman's profession of the nineteenth century, is coming to terms with how we get it to look more like the society that we serve, be more representative of it, and be more engaged in it. It is really difficult, whether in school or in practice, but particularly in practice, to get architects who are either working for someone else or trying to run their own small business to do all of these other things–to be the advocate, be the activist, be the community board member, find ways to be the client, find ways to advocate for the client, find ways to advocate for the environment. It is a lot to take on individually, in small groups, or even in large firms. There are firms that try to do the most good that they can, but this disparate network is not enough to really move the needle on the things that do need to change. It is more productive to look into the profession and say, what can we do within this grouping of ourselves to be better at how we serve the externality?
That is not to say that it needs to be a diametric opposition. I think we are too insular–I went to an elitist school, I think the profession can be pretty elitist. We do need to change that. It is changing, but I am impatient and I do not think it is happening fast enough. I am incredibly heartened by the students we work with here at NJIT, but the most disappointment I felt was going into the profession, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as a twenty-two year old, and seeing that, oh, this is not what we get to do. If I want to have agency, I need to make a ton of money and go buy a bunch of land and then be able to be the decision maker or be a really good salesperson and convince my clients, assuming I get them with very little sleep, very little capital, and very passionate workers under me who I am not paying very well because that is market. I think we need to clean up our own house simultaneously. And that is not on students at all but you will be a part of that change. I think it can only happen from the bottom-up. I am very skeptical about it happening from the top-down.
SG
Our discipline moves at a glacial pace. It always has and it probably always will. We are responding to what culture is doing around us and saying, “how do we enclose that and make it better for them?” Then it is a long-term document of what is culturally significant. So it is not so bad that the profession seems out-of-touch because it gives us a stream to swim up. I know that does not make a whole lot of sense, but we are still, as a profession, as a practice, trying to document and deal with things that changed in our society twenty years ago. We are always way behind fashion, way behind product design. We are the last of the last, and urban designers are the last of the last of the last of the last. Cities will change even slower. I think it is okay that the profession is out of touch every once in a while. That should not get you down. I think you do have to realize that this is something you want to be part of. It is not gonna be immediate, even though here I was making a call to throw out the curriculum and start over. It is not immediate. It is going to take time to do anything, but you need to have that passion in order to swim up river and make the change and it happens over time.
PD
I do not think it has always been the case that the profession has moved so glacially. Vis-a-vis the Industrial Revolution, the Beaux-Arts was a revolution. They completely changed how they were educated in response to new programs, new state funding, new materials, new glass. We can very much lament that we are still in a Beaux-Arts model, but the Beaux -Arts itself was a revolution in architecture education that responded to a very, very particular economic, material, and political moment in time. I am optimistic that we can actually not move glacially. And it is for many of the reasons that Sean is talking about, because we are in a third or fourth industrial revolution.
I think it is important to distinguish the profession from practices. I think the profession is the institutions that we are all very frustrated with, whether that is NAAB, NCARB, or AIA, that are largely interested in maintaining the status quo and making sure that their little institutions keep operating. That is very different from the practices. For the most part, whether large, medium, or small, they are frustrated too. They might still be playing the game the way they need to play the game in order to get the jobs. I want to really be critical of the profession and I want to be much more sympathetic to practices that are operating in the same context that we are all trying to criticize.
SG
Yeah, Peggy, you hit the nail on the head, our education system can change quickly. Practice–and that depends on how you define practice, profession, and the education system– practice does not. We were still building in masonry because people could not afford steel for another thirty years. It takes time so I do not want people to get disappointed that things are not changing quickly enough to tackle the bigger issues we have to tackle. If we just keep the energy up, it will. But the education system, I agree with you, should change immediately, and that is what I see as the hidden challenge, and that is what I see as really problematic right now.
T
What role does the university have in moving architecture beyond technical and client requirements, and how does it do that in today's world, so that architecture actually reflects societal conditions? What does the university have, beyond its pedagogy?
TP
There is an opportunity to present students with practices that are outside the traditional method of architecture. I think that is important, just getting those things in front of students and having them understand that those are viable options.
EP
I think I see the benefit from a dissection and a criticality around profession, practice, academia or discipline. I think that is the diagram in the Architect's Handbook of Professional Practice. But the overlap and synergy is really important. I do not think the academy can change practice and the profession alone, but there are isolated moments in our practice and in our teaching where we start to show how things can be different. The academy is a really great place for that. This is a safe space to try again, to fail, to try to fail. I tell my students that, as a student you have a halo over your head to reach out to people, ask questions, and go out into the community. People give students the benefit of the doubt more than you realize and that is powerful. That said, the work that you do, particularly if we are able to publish it, get it out there, submit it for awards, participate in a discourse, I think can start to trickle out and be inspiring for ways that the practice and the profession can change.
But I will put a lot of responsibility on the profession–AIA, NCARB, NAAB–for the fact that things are not changing. I agree with being super sympathetic to practitioners, mainly because we are a small business and it is very difficult to do that. To be honest, AIA is a lobbying group. They are supposed to be the ones interfacing with the government and laws that are being made to make our practices better and the built environment safer for the general public. We have to respond to NAAB on how we educate you in order to go into practice. NCARB is essentially keeping the profession back from being more equitable in terms of class, race, gender. It is very expensive to get licensed and if you are not in a position or a firm where you are being supported, that is a gate right there. That said, I do not think that means that they can not change. Again, anecdotally, the studio we taught where we designed and built a tiny house here in response to the shipping container village that was housing twenty-five unhoused people during COVID-19 inspired Newark to change the zoning code and allow ADUs, which is great. It did not change the building code and the building code still does not allow for them, but I guess we will get there. That was a moment where fifteen students over fifteen weeks did something and it had a local impact. I think that empowered the students to say that the work I do out there can matter. But that is the tiniest drop in the biggest bucket in how the three-legged stool needs to integrate.
SG
It is an important drop in the bucket, for sure. That is why it is healthy that academic studies are different from what is happening in practice. If we start trying to change the way that we teach to help people get the skills they need to get a job right away, I think we have lost. The way the education system is set up is that you learn how to critically think, you learn how to be more thoughtful. That you can bring new things to our field is way more than important than teaching the technology of the day. If we did that, we would be feeding a machine that will not change because no one is questioning the idea that we have to meet our bottom line in the real world. We need young blood to challenge that notion and find other ways to still meet that bottom line and think differently. So I am okay with the tension between the two.
PD
I took the question to be about the university not schools of architecture. If we are going to be talking about universities, we have to identify the fact that we are all operating under neoliberal universities that are basically complicit with and supporting businesses. So the emphasis on research is not research in any theoretical-humanitarian-liberal arts way. It is research that has to do with STEM, has to do with science, has to do with getting money to facilitate innovation. Architecture schools in the neoliberal university suffer. Again, if I want to distinguish between practices and profession and be sympathetic to one, critical to the other, I want to be sympathetic to schools of architecture and be really critical of the neoliberal university. We schools and colleges of architecture are suffering. We sit within universities in an uncomfortable way–sometimes we are engineering, sometimes we are with art, sometimes we are with environmental design. It is like they do not know what to do with us. That ambivalence about what we do within our knowledge economy can be our strength because it means that we can be rising out of it. We can be invasive, we can go all over the place if we actually thought about ourselves in an undefensive way.
One more thing about NCARB and NAAB, all part of the problem of the profession: it is interesting to me that NCARB and NAAB do not agree and are at each other's throats. NAAB is the one that wants to make sure that we come through with a certain standard of education. It is a very high standard. NCARB wants everybody to be able to get into the profession because they want the money from those licenses. So one is really making it hard and the other one wants it to be democratic. It might be really difficult to understand that NCARB is democratic, but just to say there is a tension there that we should exploit since they are going up to each other's throats. We should actually let them go at it.
T
All of you have brought these critiques of architecture that are outside of the major core of our curriculum, which is studio. Should studio still be the central experience of architecture school and if it is what should it look like?
SG
My simple answer is yes. Absolutely. It has to be because otherwise we are training people to do something with many different seminars. In a studio, you are taking all that knowledge and trying to apply it to something you are really passionate about figuring out on your own. The problem is if you do not have that time to think about these things critically, you are just trying to balance a curriculum without a focus. Then I do not think you will be able to grow the way you need to grow in order to lead big teams out in the world.
PD
I guess I think that either everything should be studio or nothing should be studio. Right now the way the studio is defined is about aesthetic expertise and I think that is the problem. If we allowed the things that are now being taught in history, in theory, in structures, in professional practice to invade studio, that would be great. And so that is the everything. If we did not call it studio, which is now the be all and the end all, it would just be “architectural investigation.”
TP
I agree with Sean that, in theory, studio is where you are supposed to be synthesizing everything you are learning everywhere else. That time for exploration is extremely important. I alluded to this before, but I think one way studio could be improved is to make it more collaborative. I think that is one way that it could move forward.
EP
I am willing to be challenged on what studio is supposed to be but I do not know how else to learn all of the things we have talked about taking away from our education as being invaluable as architects, as designers, as humans, as citizens. I do not know another way to teach that. Studio is inherently about doing. I totally agree on the collaborative side. Architecture is a team sport. The more that we can get people to grapple with some of these really uncomfortable parts of problem solving or the process of design–again, you fail over and over again. It is like guess-and-check but in a really iterative, deep, passionate way. I absolutely love that. When you can get comfortable in knowing that you do not necessarily know what the solution is or where it is going to come from and then in doing that with others as a team.
I think one of the bigger issues I found with my education was that a lot of it was very solo, which is siloed and isolating. For the most part, practice is not like that. Even if you are a sole practitioner, you collaborate with your contractors and your clients.I do not know how else to approximate that in an educational setting that is not studio. I think there are a lot of ways we can challenge what studios are, what we investigate, who we bring in outside of the discipline to enrich that process but I do think no matter what, you need a practical side of it. Other professions have it–if you go to medical school, you do not just learn from a book. You deal with the clinical side of things. You take anatomy classes. You cut open bodies. There is an inherent side of doing that we need to embrace. I run around covered in dust, so I believe doing is really important.
SG
I would take it one step further, actually. I think the thesis year going away is a really bad thing. I see it going away in a lot of universities. For example, the M. Arch program at Columbia University does not have one. I felt that was really strange when I went there, because you need the time to bring your own curiosities to the group of people who are teaching you how to critically think in order to improve the landscape of ideas that are in the profession. I think this move away from thesis years, to now questioning studio, is pretty dangerous for what we do.
T
With this understanding of studio being this exploratory device for students, there has also been an increasing attention to the issue of student debt. NJIT tuition costs range from $19 ,000 to $35 ,000 per year, and many students work while attending to afford these costs.At the same time, licensure requires years of more study, expenses beyond the degree, and architect salaries lag behind other licensed professions. So is the view of school as a purely exploratory space, and then internship on the other side of it as professional job training, is that view outdated? Is there a way to merge those things, and is there a benefit to either or keeping it separate or trying to merge them?
PD
It is outdated and they should be merged. Licensure upon completion degree.
EP
Talk about money with your colleagues when you are going after your first job and negotiate. Holistically, across the board, architecture is undervalued, and architects are underpaid. Particularly, that burden falls on you coming out of school with a ton of really great skills that need to be molded into an employee who can produce what needs to be produced within the office. That training period is important. It is. You learn a new set of skills when you go into an office, but you go to a school to prove that you can learn and that inherently has value. I rail against anyone who is told that out of school you have no value in an office. I think that that is bullshit and you should not work there. Not everyone has the luxury of choosing where they get to work. We switched topics, but Peggy said something about schools not just producing students that go right into the profession and can get a job. Fundamentally, I do agree with that, but also new graduates need jobs. They do and they need to be paid and they need to pay off their student debt and be able to afford where they live. Unfortunately, right now, no, the profession does not have a place for that. The starting salaries in New York City, according to the AIA, are still in the 50s to the low 60s. I think that is frankly optimistic.
We need to get into the habit of talking about money more. You should feel comfortable going to a professor and saying, “I do not know what I should be making. This firm is offering me 45 should I take it?” And someone should be there to help you craft a message and a response and the confidence to say, “no, I am worth more than that” and find a place that can pay it. The more people that do that, the more pressure it will put on you getting paid.
That is not very fair to practitioners who are trying to run businesses at very low margins, which means that needs to trickle up to advocating for more value, not just this race to the bottom of accepting the lowest possible fee for a project. Unfortunately that burden falls on you, but the only way you can do something about it is to talk more openly about money. If you get an offer, tell your friends what it is. This competitive secrecy around salary only hurts you and your colleagues. Independent wealth should not subsidize the value of this profession. It should be able to communicate that value. Go after what you are worth and find it. If you need help with it, reach out to your mentors and if you do not have one, you know where to find me.
SG
What Erin said.
PD
Most European countries do not have internships. They get a professional license upon completion of degree. But that does have to do with their education being different. That is part of what we are talking about.
TP
The one thing I will add to that is as far as education and experience, there are schools that have externship programs where you are required to go work in an office for summer. Expanding on that concept could be one way to merge those things.
SG
On that note, actually, I think it is very important to work over the summer. Do not only look at other architectural practices or try to work in that field. Work construction. It is just awesome.
PD
And it makes you smarter.
T
Peggy, when you talk about merging the profession and internship, is working as part of the degree what you are talking about?
PD
Yeah, it is. But also, if we are talking about studio being more than it is right now, we could have studios where you actually bring in fabricators and construction workers. So that you are actually dealing with the realities of what it means to get something done. It is not just the work outside, but it is a different idea of what you are learning when you are “designing.”
T
Does anyone have any questions?
Audience Member #1
I am a first year student and I already see some pack-like behavior forming between the young men in my studio. As a woman, I often feel left out and excluded. I wanted to know what you all thought about the patriarchy in the profession and how that affects pedagogy and how students learn, especially how young women perceive architecture and their roles in the field as compared to young men.
PD
Thank you. I will say it breaks my heart to hear you say that. It seems to me that the discourse now has been in place for enough time that regardless of what subconscious biases we might have or the profession might have or teachers might have or your colleagues might have, we know enough not to express them. So, I do not know what to say except to have an open conversation about exactly that so that we are not deceived about how enlightened we are. I do not know.
EP
Thank you for just asking the question in this room. That is important. I think as faculty in studio we can do better but we are not here all the time. A lot of studio culture is outside of the studio hours. I will ask the male-presenting students in the room to do something about it in a healthy, productive, open, collaborative talking way. I also think that stressing the need for mentorship, us faculty being good mentors and also supporting one another as students.
We are coming out of COVID it has made us all a little bit weird about talking in society, in social settings. That is what I am personally finding and it may be unfair, especially for the younger students who went through a significant amount of their formative years online. It is not an excuse to say people forgot how to act. I do not think that that is a fair statement, but we are seeing a lot of behavior that may have gotten nipped in the bud did not. There is nothing you can do alone aside from having the courage to stand up and advocate and ask questions like that. That is your job and you are doing it. We need to be better, I say we faculty. I am a licensed female architect and I will offer to be a mentor to you or anyone else who is dealing with that in the school so that we can figure out a way collectively to do something about it. But that also can not be imposed from the top down either. We are not here 24/7.
I see a lot of my students in the back of the room there, you are fourth and fifth years. You need to set an example for the younger generation in the same way that we faculty talk about how we can set that example because good examples have been set for us. I am going to put a little bit of it on you guys as well to say that we need to model better behavior, because you are going to get into the professional world, and you will be the small fish in the big pond. We need to get a better culture and better camaraderie around how we deal with it. And it starts with having the courage to talk about it. So thank you.
Audience Member #2
I wanted to ask about the tension between the ideals of architecture and the theory of architecture versus the very mundane realities of having to pay for college, having to teach students to be architects, or having to manage a firm that does not go under. Can you comment a little more on how we can bridge that gap so people do not get left in the lurch, how we do interact with reality but can also teach architects to be idealists and try and drive a profession forward.
PD
I do not know if this is the answer you are looking for because it is not practical, but if we educated you all to think differently about what you do–that you are active agents, that you are powerful, that you have expertise that you have paid for–that you would be encouraged to be more powerful persuasive people. It is a real dichotomy, but I do not think it is a necessary dichotomy. I want to have a different picture of architecture students than as victims. That is the wrong way to see what we are supposed to be educating or what it is that you are supposed to be doing out in the world.
SG
I think that this generation is going to have a more meaningful impact than any other, since the 1950s or 1930s. I think that you are going to see that tension actually work to your advantage, enabling you to find ways to actually influence what people are doing within the office more than anybody else in the past. The profession is actually moving at warp speed in getting things done a different way. Everything is being rethought. I am hopeful that you are actually going to take it and run with it.
EP
I think inside every realist is a disappointed idealist. It is important to merge that higher, lofty, ideal level thinking and never lose it but you do not want to do it such that you shortchange yourself and your needs. It is a balancing act. When I figure out the balance, I will let you know. The ability to be passionate and care and want for things to be better, this profession attracts that more than many other professions. It is the merging of art and science of architecture that make this a really beautiful profession. I would hate to lose that but the advice I will give you as a young professional is that balance is really important. You should not bow at the altar of architecture so much that you are constantly hunched over. See the world with open eyes but still have the idealism that it can always be better and that you have the agency to do that.
TP
I will certainly agree that balance is important and your ideals are also important. There are always compromises and it is a give and take but keeping your ideals is important.
Audience Member #3
The B.Arch curriculum here has a few history and theory electives, a few technology electives and then there are students getting minors in sustainability who take four to six sustainability electives. My question to Sean is, assuming everyone should be environmentally conscious, should the minor in sustainability be canceled?
SG
We are designers of the built environment. That is what we are here to think about so everyone should be aware of the environment in a hyper-sensitive way. There are lots of different meanings to the word “sustainability.” It is a little bit more corporate now, about doing certain things. I think the idea of thriving within an environment and tending to it so that more people and more communities can thrive is what I think about, whether it is thriving socially or economically or in health. I did say that I think the core curriculum should be changed. And yeah, sustainability should not be an elective. You should be exposed to emerging building practices with different materials as part of the core studio process that you have, absolutely. I think the answer to your question is yes. Why not? What else are we going to do? I mean, do you want to learn about how structural forces go through steel beams and the depth of a W24? I can tell you that. I think you should be interested in what else can we do besides steel that is more appropriate to that region or that culture. And I think that should be a lot more driven into the conversation than it is today.
June 17, 2024: This article was updated to correct the date of the panel. The roundtable was held on November 16, 2023, not November 16. 2024 as originally published.
Peggy Deamer is Professor Emerita of Yale University’s School of Architecture. She has lectured widely on issues related to labor, design, and psychoanalysis and organized events and publications that emphasize the misunderstood worth of architectural workers.
Erin Pellegrino is a Professor of Practice at NJIT, where she co-leads design/build studios alongside Charlie Firestone. She is the co-founder of Out of Architecture, a career resource network and is the principal of Matter, a design/build studio that explores design problems through small-scale investigations.
Sean A. Gallagher is a Principal and the Director of Sustainable Design at Diller Scofidio + Renfro. He is also an Adjunct Faculty at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation where he focuses his research on developing new strategies to improve the social and ecological health of urban communities.
Thomas Petersen is an architect at David Cunningham architecture planning in Brooklyn, NY focused on housing. He is also an avid fan of live music.
This transcript was published as part of Transect Volume 5: Pedagogy (2024), Jacob Swanson, Daniel Girgis, Dhruvi Rajpopat, Fatima Fardos, Jimenna Alcantar, Elizabeth Kowalchuk, eds.