Learning to Quantify the Unfamiliar

Architectural education has long been a source of debate, and for good reason. It has been slow to respond to our rapidly changing world; curriculums aren’t modified quick enough, sustainability remains an add-on, and building industry failings aren’t confronted, let alone tackled. To its disadvantage, the educational system has become increasingly standardised, governed, and intellectually institutionalised, with schools adhering to a top-down framework that struggles to accommodate open innovation. 

Though architecture schools are seemingly marketed as advocates for creativity, originality, and genuine imaginative thinking, this can be difficult with the increasing significance given to 'success' measured in the form of marks and grades. With so many guidelines, criteria, and briefs to adhere to, it can be difficult to construct a space for exploration and experimentation, failing ultimately to acknowledge them as a crucial part of learning. In addition, the growing cost of education adds pressure, and it can be difficult to feel intellectually liberated and unburdened by institutional success when learning is packaged with debt that will likely accompany you long after the classroom. Education becomes transactional when you’re paying so much, learning is commodified, grades are exchanged for money and success begins to feel owed. 

The problem with an increasingly restrictive educational framework is that it becomes dismissive of anything that exists beyond it. When viewed from within this rigid structure, nonconformist outputs and radical modes of thinking can be treated with mistrust, often labelled as fanciful, theoretical, and at times, unbelievable. Such work frequently doesn’t adhere to the guidelines simply because it was conceived outside of them; when the prescribed criteria aren’t viewed as the limit, but as something to be questioned, challenged, and surpassed, the results often fall beyond our reference. It is easy to judge the familiar as it aligns with our expectations and, fitting comfortably within our understanding, it exists within a quantifiable space. In an educational climate that grants such importance to numbers and grading systems, how can we find space to celebrate unconventional approaches; the unorthodox, the non-linear, the irregular? How do we begin to quantify the unfamiliar? 

This is undoubtably a challenge within the system at present, though an important one we must continually do battle with. If the repeatable, straightforward, unchallenging, and safe are consistently promoted as a means of success in school, is it any wonder the conventions of building industry practice strive for similar results; championing speed, quantity, and ultimately, reproducibility? At its worst this results in an environment that is at risk of stagnating in predictability and short-term profitability, allowing a deepening climate crisis and the continued promotion of neoliberal ideologies. 

Truly challenging, questioning or speculative approaches generally aren’t neat, cohesive or easily representable and within the framework of architectural education, this significantly limits their validity. Architecture is inherently visual, and nowhere is this more true than in school. Ideas become images to be presented and discussed, projects often judged aesthetically on their perceived ‘completeness’ or artistic qualities. This largely ignores the unseen benefits of open, speculative work and instead paves the way for projects that ask just the right type or amount of questions to facilitate an agreeable and importantly, marketable solution.

But if difficult questions aren’t encouraged in schools, how can we begin to conceive their answers in practice? Education, and architecture, can only evolve when we create a space for the risky, and the challenging. When explorations that don't result in tidy, cohesive solutions are encouraged and not penalised, students are able to disassemble the paradigms though challenging and reworking pre-accepted standards.

Perhaps most importantly, the invitation of experimental thinking and practising involves embracing failure, the antithesis of the educational agenda. If failure isn’t viewed so negatively, and we no longer allow ourselves be ruled by its associated anxieties, we become free in our acquisition and enactment of knowledge. With this comes the freedom to adopt an approach of trial and error, where value is found within the process and not its arbitrary endpoint. 

Arguably, in schools, notions of ‘experimentation’ are often contrived, a device to suggest some fictitious process of thought before the inevitable presentation of a predetermined outcome. Yet, is it any wonder when we consider the pressures put on students to succeed, and when success is more attainable through the presentation of anticipated and expected work. Genuine experimentation is unavoidably entangled with failure, but it is only through doing things wrong that we can begin to anticipate what might be right. Learning becomes an intuitive process and there is strength to be found amid this mess.  

This said, it is difficult to embrace failure in an environment that has a disturbing tendency towards competition and the promotion of solitary success. A bizarre circumstance considering the isolation and self-identification of practitioners in the building industry is amongst its biggest failings. A great building is never the work of solitary genius, rather it requires a whole team of dedicated, passionate people working towards the realisation of a shared vision. Considering this, an interdisciplinary approach seems more appropriate, fostering a dialogue between subjects that might encompass; engineering, urban design, landscape, and even property development. Unconsciously, the autonomy of these disciplines creates incidental hostility and an inability to effectively communicate, a disastrous outcome in practise where continual collaboration is necessary in order to achieve anything. 

Architectural education, at its core, is about learning to situate yourself within the world. When knowledge is related to the everyday, architectural thinking develops a tangibility centred around our living experience. Learning becomes less about understanding what is possible, and more about deciding what you want to be possible, whereby pedagogy becomes an exercise in desire. Education, like architecture should begin from the everyday and this is rarely ever simple, orderly, or settled. In their most generative form, curriculums and briefs would be malleable, continually shaped through teacher-student discourse, whereby both are influenced by the thinking of the other. This educational relationship should be reciprocal, where direction is found through the process in a shared act, where deviation is enrichment, and outcomes become both surprising and enlightening. 

Rebuilding our architectural education is a huge undertaking, the industry-wide rumblings of which are slowly getting louder, but we can start by widening the scope of what we celebrate and how we determine value. It is our duty to expand our realm of familiarity and embrace education as multivalent, an act of participation and not a passive transferal. A space where openness is encouraged and not feared.