It’s that familiar time in the year when students will be asking me for my thoughts as to whether they should pursue their architectural education locally or overseas. I never profess that I would have the definitive answer to that but I will share here the way I see it by the options offered for the choices they can make.
To me it depends on how you ultimately see yourself in the profession especially in the unforeseen future; and that stems from the old adage on whether you see yourself as a worker or as a leader. That would mean, can you only see yourself working as an architect within an architectural practice, or do you ultimately want an architectural practice of your own. If your sights have not been cast far enough then you really should do so before you decide. Let’s see if I can highlight the different perspectives here.
The Worker Ant
If all you can see now are the prospects of earning a living and establishing a lifestyle built around loans, hire purchase and monthly repayments with the view of fulfilling all the expected social forms of being a spouse, parent, etc., as soon as possible before granny-grandpa dies, then chances are you’re more of a worker ant disposition. If that be the case, then you really need not venture any further than within the shores of your homeland.
The curriculum in local architectural faculties are really geared around preparing you into the workforce rather than developing you as a potential architect in the true sense of the profession. Not to say that you could never become a true architect if you studied locally; no, that is not at all true. It’s just that if you are to be an architect of such merit you’d have to discover and develop that more by yourself while the faculty concentrate more on your office proficiency skills. You can realise this for yourself despite what the faculties profess by the way they stress more on task than objectives, production rather than perception, technicalities rather than concepts, conventions rather than convictions, discipline more than discovery, process and procedures rather than actual content – you get the picture. If you can’t than you can find further evidence of it here.
Even local architects have unreasonable expectations from local architectural graduates. They actually expect the latter to have all the answers at the tips of their fingers and toes upon graduation while unfairly disregarding the fact that most of these answers are to be embedded by actual working experience. A part 2 graduate should enter the workforce as apprenticeship to develop through stark reality what the schools can only initiate or introduce. Unfortunately, the moment they are under salary they are deemed as machinery and expected to dispense data that the employers themselves could not immediately recall despite being in the profession for umpteenth more years.
So if your dreams are as far as being an architectural staff par excellence, then that is what you really need to work on and you can do it within our national borders.
[-Your Name-] Architects Sdn. Bhd.
So the inverse of that would imply that universities elsewhere would approach architectural education differently? Well, I can only speak for UK and Australia through actual and twinning experiences respectively; and in that respect the answer is yes.
Though the syllabuses and curriculum may not be much different on paper, the teaching attitudes and approaches do differ vastly especially in terms of emphasis. There will be more emphasis on objectives rather than mere task completion; perception rather than mere production of ideas; technicalities are integral with concepts; the sturdiness of students’ convictions more imperative than just the conventions of how they present them; discovery unbounded by homogenization; content above mere process and procedure – you get the picture. If you can’t then, probably you should just continue locally. The reason is that a fundamental disposition that would facilitate the description above is individuality. Big topic to discuss, but let’s see if I can quantise it to more digestible doses.
Local architectural faculties stress so much on task, production, technical, conventions, discipline, process and procedures. All these are essentially neutralizing criteria to facilitate homogenization. That means they are factors that would direct everything towards a uniform, similar or even singular form that would be easier to gauge and assess. For instance, it’s easier to assess students’ production by the quality of their presentation and the conventions they use, rather than by the individual ideas behind what they’re trying to achieve. The physical extent of how much or how well a students task is completed is quicker to gauge than to scrutinise each abstract objective – it’s easier to see if the student has complied to the drawing requirements by drawing count rather than if they have fulfilled the design objectives. Formal process and procedures are more immediate to assess than underlying content. And objective technicalities are more accessible than subjective concepts. And the beat goes on.
So it appears that locally the individuals are neutralised and homogenized rather than taken on as individuals. A common task that illustrates this are site analyses. The sun will rise and set the same way for all, the wind will blow the same, as will the traffic flow. Demographics, topography, geography, morphology, etc., would be the same for everyone for the same site. The whole class is then broken down into groups to present the various criteria and factors of the site that all the students would agree on. In short, the task is simply presenting common data that all would have experienced the same. And students are marked as to how well their tutors agree with the fulfillment of the task.
But isn’t the true objective of a site analysis is to collect data for students to initiate their individual design processes? That means, that the data from site analyses should be for them to response in order to develop their individual designs. Therefore, marking students presentation of site analysis is simply marking the task, whereas assessing students response to their site analyses in their design is assessing the objectives. That means, if you were to go to an architectural school in the UK or Australia and presented a site analysis as you would locally, you would learn the true meaning of the word redundant or the phrase ‘waste of time’. They would be more interested in how you would react, response or relate to the site rather than just what you saw when you were there.
The approach to individuality therefore is a fundamental difference between doing architecture here than doing it there. That means that you would be developing to function as a single identity overseas rather than be made into just one of the team locally. And I hope this helps you see how strongly it can contribute in developing someone who eventually want their own practice rather than someone who just want to function in someone else’s practice.
As to my recommendations on whether it should be the UK or Australia? I’ll reiterate what I’ve always said. To the right of UK is Europe, and to its left is America. To the left of Australia is the Indian Ocean, to the right is the Pacific Ocean. You decide on the geographical advantages.
