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.

I do this solely for input for what works, what doesn’t or what’s deficient.  However, even after more than 10 years of this in various architectural faculties, I can hardly find much that I can use from the comments to work on.  That’s because there seems to be a consistent reappearance of the same set of comments over and over again, regardless of the students output.  Probably there was a much earlier time when those comments could have been taken on board to work on though in retrospect, I strongly doubt it.  Reason is because they were comments that were abound even during my diploma years in ITM almost 30 years ago, of which I had made sure my students would address each time I tutor.

 I find these comments that jurors make no longer reflect the shortcomings of the students but unfortunately highlights those of the jurors themselves.

1.     That the students spend too much time on making nice images.

I’m always asking students to produce large 3D representations of their designs, both exterior and interior, and montages so as to illustrate their desired effects and intentions.  This also includes 3D construction details for students to have a more real world visualization and appreciation of them.  However, there will be at least two persons every session who must remark that the students should spend less time making them and spend more time on more ‘architectural’ matters.  There’s even a killjoy or two [or three or four, etc,] that even declare that the students are only good at producing nice images.  Bloody cheek!  One particularly obnoxious lady even stood in front of a partition full of interior montages and was going on about how the students should spend more time developing their spaces instead of making all those nice images.  She was standing in front of interior montages.  Interior montages. Interior would be the spaces within the building.  A whole 2m x 2.5m partition full of them.  And she still talks about making more spaces and less images.  How does one present spaces without images?

Why this makes them look bad.
The average final project would be at least 9 weeks long.  I would never have seen any of those nice images during those 9 or so weeks.  That’s because the students would have to produce a design first in order to make all those nice images; because after all, those images would have to be of their design.  Therefore, if they say that the students spend so much time making nice images, then it appears that they are disregarding the actual design that was produced in 9 weeks that those images represent.  They can’t see design – all they see are just nice images.

However, I should say that this actually make the students appear really good because they produced images of quality that the jury thought would take 9 or so weeks to do; while we know students only had 2 or 3 days/nights to come up with them.  Kudos to the students!

2.     Harping on about drawing conventions.

This is such a common comment that more or less reaffirms the previous point, and is especially for jurors who just keep going on and on about it throughout the jury.  Now, we know that drawings would have only been done at the very last stage of a project.  For a 9 week project that would have begun after the 8^th or even 9^th week itself, simply because students need to come up with a design first before they could draw something.  Therefore such comments on drawings would be only  for the last stages of a design project.  So why so much emphasis on this last stage which is only about a week or so instead of more input on the design which made up at least 90% of the project time?

Why this makes them look bad.
Okay, so it seems that we are in an academic culture that seems to prioritize in producing worker ants; students are groomed to be proficient and efficient for the office.  Some actually say that students are expected to know everything about producing buildings from drawing conventions right up to authority submissions, fire regulations, contractual matters, etc.  This is particularly disturbing if the person saying it studied in a western country because they themselves would not have been trained as such.  And that is because such matters would not have been heavily imbued academically because it’s best picked up through actual working experience.

So it appears that to such jurors students are simply potential office machinery.  They appear to disregard the design acumen and skills displayed and can only see production quality but not content.  That’s assuming of course that they can actually recognize content in the first place.

3.     Insisting on the basics.

I can’t say enough how despairing it is to hear my contemporaries continually asking students for basics.  Actually, I no longer know what these basics are that they request or need to see so badly.  So I’ll address this in general.

In a nutshell, basics are what you would acquire in formal subjects such as building construction, structures, services, materials, drawing, theory etc.  They are the fundamentals to your understanding of a subject matter.  But come Design Studio, you should not merely regurgitate those basics into an architectural design.  I would expect students to explore, exploit and expound on those basics to come up with their own creative design solutions.  As far as I’m concerned, the only basic or fundamental rule that I insist they comply unequivocally to is gravity.

So naturally the students would have designs that are very far removed from those illustrated in books on the various subjects.  I would even encourage students to explore presentation techniques to the point of even seeing it as an art piece for some.  They should explore communicating moods and effect above the technical information.  But the moment the works display beyond the overtly familiar, the students are under immediate suspicion of ignorance of basics, without due or fair process for what is actually on display.

Why this makes them look bad.
Best guess is the juror can’t see beyond the dry and the familiar.  To be fair, they are most probably conserving mental energy especially if they are to see more than 3 students at the session; because looking at the non-familiar does take more mental energy to process.  It’s just a crying shame that they choose not to look close and long enough at how far the students have come ahead from the basics.

4.     Remarking on the lack of architectural clichés or the generic in the students work.

This point is very much in tandem with the previous one.  I’ve actually written on this before after a particularly mind-numbing jury session.  This is where they insist on seeing what is familiar in the architecture around them within the students’ work and a refusal to accept anything that is not immediately recognizable.  Furthermore, they actually dismiss and disregard the justifications by the students for their respective idiosyncratic solutions.  They just brush aside what they don’t like simply because it’s different – to them.

This also include clichés such as insisting that it goes without saying that one has to relate when within vicinity of historical or heritage sites without the possibility of responding or reacting to it,  even if one finds said site to be simply horrendous.

Why this makes them look bad.

What’s ironic is that these are jurors who would encourage students to be explorative and innovative in their design.  It’s just that somehow when presented with something new, they ask for the more familiar and the generic.  I wonder what does the word innovative actually mean to them?  Whatever it is, one thing’s sure – they don’t think the students can be so.

This is also a symptom of those who see architectural design as a design by catalogue process.  That means that they have established architecture as a process of putting together pre-catalogued clichés and components into ‘creative’ configurations.  Thus they could never see newer solutions – just new formations.

5.     Accusing the students of mere form making.

I’m more interested in students seeking newer solutions by constant reassessment of familiar problems, rather than students just coming up with new forms as envelope to the usual, normal solutions for usual generic problems.  Traditionally, this is called critical thinking.  Examples of this covers everything from making actual office spaces exciting rather than just their main lobby, making circulation interesting rather than just merely keeping it short and convenient, to even reassessing the necessity for economics and compactness of toilet and service core design.  This is an integrative process and hence generates and evolves new and exciting forms.  What that means is that if the form captures your attention, you could trace it back to how it is a product of response or reaction to what is inside.  Of which if you don’t do so, then all you will see are just exciting forms and not much else.

Why this makes them look bad.
They did not do so thus all they see are exciting forms and not much else.

-       ‘How An Exposition Exposes Itself’, Umberto Eco.

With a sinking heart laden with grievous despair, that my fellow Malaysians is an unadulterated photo of the Malaysian Pavilion currently standing within the Shanghai Expo 2010.

Let’s see now, I really should be objective so what would be a likely interpretation of the pavilion or the circumstances behind it?

1. The way to peoples’ hearts is through their stomach, so getting our pavilion to look very much like a roadside Tom Yam joint should bring in the masses?
2. As a display of sustainable correctness, Malaysia told the Expo organizers not to demolish the temporary site office because with some red, yellow and brown paint, we could make it our pavilion?
3. Someone mixed up the drawings and built the housing of the workers for the pavilion instead of the actual pavilion?
4. We thought we might be able to boast having the highest number of hits or visitors by making our pavilion look like where the public toilets are?
5. Someone misread the brief for the expo and thought that the requirement was for a pavlova instead of a pavilion, hence we ended up building a design meant for a dessert?
6. Rather than go through the rigmaroles and formalities of putting up an official pavilion, we just snuck in and made a squatter pavilion?
7. There was a pondok Pak Guard somewhere that was such an epitome of Malaysia that applying the digital technology of mirror-duplicate and resize to it would result in a pavilion that would be such a showcase for application of technology onto the vernacular?
8. The pavilion intends to attract shopping tourists to Malaysia by giving them a precognition of the kind of buildings to look for when they want the really, really cheap and tacky stuff?

If architecture is a reflection of the peoples, in this case a nation, than what is the pavilion saying about us?  No matter really, because I believe many of us already know that it wasn’t designed in Malaysia.  So whatever it says of us, it is not us who said it ourselves nor want to be said of us.  However, it does say that whenever Malaysia wants to have something to show the world, Malaysia gets others to do it for them.  In that case, what it DOES say about us is that we are most definitely a third-world nation.

Nevertheless, even if that was the route Malaysia chose to take, couldn’t the choice have been made with a sense of aesthetic or integrity higher than that of a street peddler of cheap imitations?

Oh, and by the way, here’s a portion of it at night, enough to illustrate the creative technology of illumination from Malaysia, as would be familiar to anyone who had a budget for blinking lights from Giant or Mydin during a festive season.

Or of course, anyone who has patronised a roadside Tom Yam joint.