An Absurdity in Architecture

(This essay appears in See/Saw Issue No. 2)

I

No existential gulf is larger than the one that exists between the dialectical realities of architectural education and practice. Ask any young architect about their education, and they are likely to reflect fondly upon the intensely rigorous yet deeply fulfilling experience that is unique to their discipline, combining the apparently disparate elements of both studio art and technical engineering courses. Yet ask them about their nascent careers, and one is likely to receive a response which involves some level of apathy, disillusionment, or burnout. Though not all have a desire to abandon the profession entirely – some are in fact satisfied with their jobs – even those who enjoy the work admit that what they did in school hardly reflects what they do at work. Why does the profession produce such confused apprentices today? 

Comprising only a small portion of what professional practice entails, the education of an architect offers one of the strongest examples of what Paulo Freire called the dialogical learning model. Scarcely represented elsewhere in US higher education today, architectural pedagogy embodies a conversational and collaborative learning method, one that an increasingly specialized, excessively technological society is in desperate need of. Rather than leveraging this unique pedagogy, adding value to both internal operations (culture) and external products and relationships (buildings and clients), the profession all but abandons this framework for a conventional hierarchical structure. The deep schism between these two realities elicits an anxiety that philosopher Albert Camus would call the absurd. While variations of this dilemma are present in other disciplines, the promises and potentialities of the architectural education are so radically unrecognizable to the profession today that this question is worth further interrogation. In other words, if the education is so aspirational, why is the profession so myopic? 

II

Understanding the general malaise 21st century architectural workers exhibit in practice begins with the idiosyncratic principles instilled in architecture school. Embodying aspects of art and a science, the education of an architect oscillates between freehand drawing and technical drafting courses, structural analysis and urban place-making courses, developing a unique breadth of knowledge amongst its students. Though never diving as deep into structural calculations as the engineer, or intercity relationships as the urban planner, the architect must be competent in both. During an architectural education, students must not only learn about topics such as these but also are held accountable for having considered and integrated these principles into their individual projects.

Paulo Freire’s seminal text Pedagogy of the Oppressed offers clues into the potency of the architectural education as well as the existential dilemma following it. It should be noted that participants in the architectural profession are not oppressed in the terms that Freire describes. Rather, the relevant aspect of Freire’s theory is a dialogical education model, one in which two-way communication is the core of learning. This model is in direct opposition to the industrialized learning model, which Freire refers to as the banking model, one typical of other disciplines. Reacting to oppositional systems predicated on a top down, one-directional transmission of information from the “dominant” instructor to the “subdominant” student, Freire instead proposes a collaborative classroom structure. In this liberating schema, oppressed and neglected people identified their own problems and taught themselves what they determined necessary to learn: 

The problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students – no longer docile listeners – are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own. 

This model draws its strength from precluding one party learning; rather, both student and teacher learn and teach simultaneously and interchangeably, an inversion of typical power structures.

In the architectural studio environment, the teacher coauthors an architectural project with the student rather than dictating the best way to design. Studio courses begin with the introduction of deliverables (program, site, etcetera) but progress and develop through posing problems. Although there are aspects of architectural education that require direct dissemination, the majority of learning in studio consists of students discovering their own design processes and projecting their own visions. Much of this endeavor asks students to articulate individual problems, manifested as qualitative questions: What is the nature of this site? What principles will I develop to organize the assemblage of materials around the programmatic constraints? Who will ultimately use this space, and how will they use it? Through conversations with their instructor and classmates, students collectively refine, reject, and sharpen their ideas, creating a feedback loop that is less measurable by specific benchmarks and more on the assimilation of the parts. 

Not only is the development of the work dialogical but so too is the process of review, or critique. Typical courses involve prescribed exchanges in which the work, such as a paper or an exam, is handed off to the teacher, who then proceeds to privately comment on and edit the work, returning it to the student for revisions and, ultimately, a grade. Alternatively, the studio critique is a fluid experience, which, through rich discussion, ends with many uncertain conclusions. Though guest critics may arrive with their own agendas and use the critique as a soapbox to espouse their own philosophies, the conversation nonetheless revolves around the ideas and work that the student produced; the student’s work serves as a filter to test ideas through, not only their own but those of the outside critics. In other words, the ideas put forward by the student are those that define the nature of the dialogue, underscoring their autonomy, authorship, and participation.

    This kind of complex learning keeps students awake late at night, working and revising ideas, because there is no right answer. They push their visions as far as possible, knowing it will enrich the feedback during critique. While fairly simple to delineate a block of time to study for an exam with correct or incorrect answers, preparing for a critique requires the dexterity to move between testing and production, an ambiguous process that could extend indefinitely not because it is impossible but because it is rewarding. Further, the exam is performed in silence, while the critique in dialogue. This sense of fulfillment, unfortunately, is not long for the professionalized world, as it quickly disappears upon entering the workforce; the transition between these two frameworks, from education to practice, from student to worker, inherently elicits an absurd response. 

III

If education is dialogue, then practice is silent, or so Albert Camus would say. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus uses the Greek myth associated with struggle and repetition to define the absurd: “Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” According to Camus, the absurd is not just a feeling, but rather an event that occurs in a specific time and place, specifically in reaction to the gap between a need and that need going unaddressed. A form of architectural absurdity then occurs during the transition from student to worker. While studio environments are formed through their diaglocial relationships, each class of students defining a new, idiosyncratic situation in which to learn through, office environments often operate as hegemonies that expect new hires to conform to the office’s means and methods. This is a logical expectation in the context of production-forward mentatilites, yet it often leaves new workers in a state of confusion and complacency. The driving force for new studio projects in school is a blank canvas ripe for the deposition of ideas from any source, eventually winnowed down to the most appropriate solutions through an iterative process. The opposite is typically true in the office: workers are given a predetermined solution and expected to carry out its consequences through rote application. Rather than becoming full participants in the design process, workers often meet this silence by following orders and working long hours with little or no autonomy. This moment of realization is the inception of architectural absurdity.

    Practice-based models directly oppose the dialogical learning model. While many offices attempt to recreate the school studio environment through internal critiques, for example, these pale in positional equality compared to the academic studio critique. As noted previously, even the most self-centered critics must physically sit in front of another’s work during their diatribes, predicating the espousing of their ideas on another’s. Conversely, in practice, the ideas for projects are owned intellectually and legally by a firm, and in addition are at service to a client’s tastes or demands. Designs in this context are transmitted through hierarchical structures, with the expectation that the workers below will implement them through their production, returning them upstream for corrections and approval. At best, offices give their workers a sense of autonomy in their ability to manage drawing sets, consultants, and some design thinking. Regardless, those at the top receive recognition for the ideas of the collective, reinforcing the dissonance of the absurd.

Following design, production is an ancillary sphere in which the structure of practice implements its strongest forms of control. One of the greatest sources of discontent amongst workers is the long hours associated with the profession. While appropriate, if so desired, to work extensive hours on a project that one has complete authorship and control over, this ethos becomes problematic when translated to a work environment; unfortunately, this is the norm for most offices. Unsure of their capacity to engage in their work relative to the expectations created in the academy, workers are met with implicit expectations to continue working until the “best idea” emerges. This is a deception; leveraging the most personal parts of the design process formed during education, the office subsumes the ideal that design is never finished, while abandoning any notion of full participation. This cycle is the primary vehicle through which architecture continues to assert its power internally.

Architecture not only maintains traditional structures through workplace hierarchy, but also through workplace organization. While the former is to some degree designed and explicit, the latter is neglected and implicit. Though architecture sits far downstream in terms of the flow capital, rendering its ability to assert itself in the public sphere relatively weak (aside from the few exploitative starchitects who can leverage their celebrity), it is strange that the overwhelming majority of offices operate internally in a near identical fashion that has not much to do with their profession. Instead of rethinking the workplace through tools afforded them during their education, many choose to mimic the homogenous corporate open-office structure that has been the banal workplace norm for half a century. It is odd that within their most personal spheres of control, many practices fail to affect the very spaces they spend the majority of their time in, allowing production, deadlines, and cost to dictate the qualities of their places. With the increasing disappearance of physical model making and manual representation, elements that, in the past, corporeally differentiated the architectural office from others, this gap is closing at an accelerated rate, an abdication that profoundly affects all who inhabit the space.

IV 

What can be done in the face of such an architectural absurdity? These disciplinary problems exist largely because of an absence in the qualities developed preceding a career in architecture. In other words, part of the solutions to these problems is latent within the discipline. Therefore, students should begin to understand the power of their pedagogical model while they are experiencing it, a task that is admittedly difficult in conjunction with balancing projects, deadlines, exams, and student life in general. However, contemplating the dialogical method embedded in architectural pedagogy is itself a utilization of the dialogical method, giving students the ability to author their reality and diagnose the issues they will eventually face in a practice environment. In fact, it could be argued that such reflection is beginning to be more widely adopted, as many are questioning long-held assumptions about professional practice. Freire notes that this type of thinking has implications far beyond traditional learning, but also in regards to broader existential questions: “In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.” If students seek to author their future workplaces, they must first see this environment as malleable, just as they would the spaces they affect during school. It is not just buildings that they will shape, but also their reality itself, becoming either agents or producers. 

 A crucial distinction between the dialectical nature of education and practice is that in education, what is referred to as “design” is the majority, while in practice it becomes the minority. There may be small moments of authorship and creativity, but as long as they working for someone else, workers actions will never rise to the level of dialogical authorship encountered during personal studio projects, nor should it be expected that it will. As such, why should young architects be made to wait until some intangible moment to begin fulfilling the profession? Surely there must be an alternative to the ladder climbing, daily (yearly, in architecture) grind mentality, one that confronts new workers with an “I put in my time” mentality. Since workers are not owners, and many will never own practices, there is an immediacy to the question of addressing the absurd feeling workers experience in an ostensibly aspirational profession, even if in the earliest stages of the process. 

This worker-oriented fulfillment manifests itself in several ways. It emerges as a new graduate choosing to work for a practice that refuses to exploit their employees, encouraging normal working hours and participation in the design process. It might also involves a worker sketching and making models manually, subtly resisting the imposing influence of technology while leveraging the most historic architectural skills. A worker could also begin creating spaces of dialogue inside the office, spaces to share new ideas, or those that do not fit neatly within the day to day discourse and operations of practice. If these workers sought to express their personal creativity as they did in school, they could engage outlets entirely outside of the office, such as through writing essays for external publications, or co-opting the means and methods of architectural practice for personal work. Engaging with external platforms allows workers to leverage the skills of the discipline while expanding the conversation to broader audiences. Not only is the profession of architecture in desperate need of such conversations, but an external act utilizes dialogical thinking in a broader context, with it a greater potential for change. These dialogical propositions represent the potential opportunities for workers who move beyond the status quo established by their environments and consider new conditions of potential architectural practice.

V

In a discipline that in an increasingly challenged internally and externally, through increased specialization, technological proliferation, and dominant power structures, dialogical acting is particularly relevant for contemporary students and workers. Faced with managing the complexity of these issues both during the design process and through their other work, finding space to ask questions is becoming more and more difficult, thus the elevated importance of doing so. This essay, however, does not seek to impose the answers to such questions; in Freire’s terms, this would be a solution proposed by the banking model, from the top down, or, at the very least, from the outside, not from within. Rather, it seeks to allude to a potentially deeper understanding of the dialogical nature unique to architectural pedagogy, empowering individuals to author their own answers. Just as every student has a unique perspective and vision expressed through their studio projects, every practice has its own idiosyncrasies and nuances it contributes to the discipline of architecture. Though there are systemic problems associated with the profession as a whole, problems cannot be recognized without the ability to first ask the question what is wrong. 

    Questions are the impetus for challenging the status quo, hence Freiere’s interest in learning through dialogue in lieu of transmission. Those in power have little stake in asking what is working and what is not for the worker. These questions will never be asked, however, if students leave education without a thorough understanding of not only how to design a building, but also an understanding of the capacity that their education has given them to affect their worlds. One of the greatest gifts of the architectural pedagogy is its ability to question everything and envision all potentialities; to accept nothing as a given and to see every situation as an opportunity. Students have the ability to change their workplaces by creating spaces of dialogue based exchange: individuals having meaningful conversations and practices creating opportunities to make decisions based on internal dialogues rather than primarily through external pressures. If dialogue is implemented, transformation will be the measure of success; if not, production will continue to be.

Camus ends his interrogation into meaning, or lack thereof, with an emphasis on the state of Sisyphus’s being:

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Camus imagines Sisyphus happy, not because he has discovered a purpose for rolling the rock up the mountain, day after day, or because there is a greater plan behind it, but because of his ability to become aware of the struggle itself, the ultimate sense of fulfillment. Our condition too as workers is a space to enter the struggle alongside the other concerns that come with a career in architecture. Though our primary obligation as architects is to create quality and safe spaces for others, perhaps our secondary, if not coequal obligation, is to author the spaces we ourselves inhabit professionally, the spaces of drawing, the spaces of making, the spaces of being, fully fulfilling the promises of our unique pedagogy.