Tag: architecture schools

Welcome to Zoom-world Part 2: Running a Zoom Design Studio

Welcome to Zoom-world Part 2: Running a Zoom Design Studio

Peter Raisbeck

Welcome to Zoom-world

So now I have spent the whole week in Zoom-world. I have had so many Zoom back to back meetings and classes it’s been overwhelming. I have seen so many white plaster walls and Ikea supply chained backgrounds. No wonder I dislike all that flat-packing CNC lean construction theory which is aligned with the horrors of Ikea products. Anyway, who wants to shop at Ikea now, and who would want to get their frozen tasteless Lingonberries packs home delivered.

Some people have even been sharing pics of their ugly fish-bowled and caged pets, comfy ugg-boots and fleecy bathrobes. FFS, even Tik Tok has Gucci and Prada and Wolford hashtags. Could you ever trust a middle manager architect who thinks it’s funny to flash their acrylic Ugg-boots in your Zoom screen gaze via their laptop or phone camera.

IMG_0705

My Around the house Ugg boots 

As architects in Zoom-world should aspire to higher aesthetic ideals. As architects, we really should not succumb to displaying the gross creature comforts of our domestic lives to others in Zoom. At the very least, we need to maintain our unique fashion sensibility. We cannot let technology destroy the old traditional ways of the architecture cult. We must all still wear black, cool streetwear and luxury brands.

What kind of background scene should I have? What shade of black should I wear? Where should I position my laptop? What books that demonstrate my in-the-know and amazingly erudite knowledge and erudition should I prop my laptop up with.

I vaguely remember I had Zoom drinks last Friday and it was great. I got smashed on three Vermouths. Vermouth being my current drink of choice.

I have been able to do quite a few things I wouldn’t usually be able to do. Weekly meetings with the tutors. Zoom Q&A sessions with the students and also popped into a studio or two. It’s so much more efficient to set up a Zoom meeting than meet in person. It was all great.

I love Zoom-world after a week of it. Nonetheless, I think a few more things need to be said about running the post-graduate Zoom-world architecture design studio.

1. Zoom-world space

Excellent design tutors will understand the Zoom studio operates in a different scale to the physical studio. We are not looking form a different distance when we are looking at the zoom screen. I think this affords several opportunities for better interactive feedback and criticism. A pdf file on a screen is different from a pdf seen projected from 3 meters away. Zoom-world potentially allows for greater scrutiny of conceptual frameworks, diagrams, sketches and aesthetic details. It’s much harder to hide things thing’s or present a superficial view in zoom-world.

unnamed

My kind of studio leaders 

2. Be interactive

Zoom-world studios are best interactive any efforts to sue the zoom polls or chat functions or break out rooms are really going to add to the interactive student experience. Arguably, this will help you will engage the “silent” students, who typically say nothing in the physical studio and coax them out of their shells. But you will need to build in breaks and pauses for students to also the questions. You will also need to decide how you handle private messages during the zoom studio meeting studio participants.

If you can record the studio that’s great. This will help you go back and reflect on the ideas and the work presented. Any excellent design tutor will be thinking about each student and where they are at between zoom sessions.

3. Screen view power

But the normal spatiality of the design studio has now been supplanted. In the physical studio, there is usually a spatial hierarchy where critics and students and observers sit in the same space. This has now been transformed to the screen view, which has different view lines and visual trajectories between participants and within individual screens.

While you may be the studio leader, your “authority” and power, if we can call it that, is now translated through the scale of and the gaze of the screens. It is all about communication, and I suspect that hand gestures might work well within this new screen space.

IMG_0702

Zoom background tryout

4. Short rather than long and boring 

Pecha Kucha’s and short videos from the students should be encouraged. You really want to avoid long monologues. Zoom-world studios will work better in shorter segments. This doesn’t mean, as the design tutor, you are prevented from thinking about things reflectively because of shortened time frames.

I am thinking it means your teaching will be more effective if you think about your student’s work and its development as design over a series of shorter time frames. I am not sure about spending 15 to 30 minutes on a student’s work once a week is going to work in the zoom-world studio. Structuring your program a series of many smaller design tasks might be one way to go.

5. Prepping

I would also encourage your students to prepare and submit their work before the studio session. That way, you can look at it quickly beforehand. Asynchronous learning is vital in a design studio. But as a design tutor, you will need to provide materials that engage the student in this process, and you will need to check-in and make sure the students are involved with the material. Building a shared repository of resources is a good idea. As well as creating a forum for sharing online design practices.

IMG_0700

My laptop book supports 

6. Studio tools 

Utilising the page seriality of pdfs may also be a useful and straightforward way to help students to develop good habits of design iteration. The comment function in Adobe is probably something I would use. I am told that Adobe captivate is good.

Short youtube clips will work well to illustrate things if you share your screen.

7. Watch that gaze 

Some people in the Zoom-studio will select a different view on their laptop. As a studio leader, you probably need to be wary of where your own screen view or gaze falls. This consideration is essential, especially if zoom is recording the session of your own laptop screen. (although I need to check and see how it does this).

9. Camera etiquette 

I think as a Design Studio leader I would insist that everyone be on camera and not hide their camera (unless they have really crap bandwidth). Probably okay to have people turn their audio off but maybe you want to encourage engagement with the central focus of the studio at any given time.

IMG_4490

Zoom background and costume test. 

10. Zoom studio as performance space

I can’t stress this enough; the studio needs to be interactive. If you have fallen into the traps of spending your previous studios doing “research” for weeks, focusing on over every tiny abstract gesture, and berating students over issues of functional pragmatism, then a boring studio is going to be even more annoying in Zoom-world.

Finally 

My intro banter above points to the fact that the Zoom studio is just as much a performance space as a traditional design studio, and this engenders a different kind of spatial performance. You can’t wear your fleecy beige bathrobe or Acrylic South Park tie to the studio. Hence, you need to think about the production values of the zoom studio: backgrounds lighting, camera positioning and sound. Do you have stylish headphones, do you even use them?

Online educators often talk about so-called “blended learning” and then wax lyrical about the necessary IT infrastructures and tools to support that learning doesn’t necessarily mean the studio outcomes will be okay. All very well, but don’t be deceived by those wishing to make the architectural learning into a commodified product. Doing a design studio in Zoom-world is not akin to doing a BIM model. Excellent design teachers will have an in-depth understanding of both design and the available range of teaching technologies and tools. Not just one of these things or the other.

So yes, I am thinking shit studios in graduate architecture schools will be more shit in Zoom and dickhead tutors will still be more dickheaddy in Zoom.

Oh and, as you self-isolate, don’t let your standards of architectural fashion and decorum drop.

The Vampire Factor: Are the universities ripping the architecture schools off?

The Vampire Factor: Are the universities ripping the architecture schools off?

Peter Raisbeck

Are the universities ripping the architectures schools of? Sure, the 18-20 architecture schools across the country are not the most significant revenue spinners for the universities. But, those revenues are not insubstantial.

When most people did architecture up until about 2005, there was still a strong connection between the profession and the architecture schools. This connection is still mostly the case today, but the difference then was that the architecture schools largely controlled their destinies. The schools could largely dictate what could be taught and how it was taught. Architecture schools largely controlled the agenda of architectural education. For the most part, there was a close linkage between the Architecture schools, the profession—via the Institute of Architects (genuflect and cross yourself)—and the registration boards.

 

To better understand Australian architectural education, the Australia Accreditation Council of Australia (AACA) is doing a survey of Architectural education in Australia. What is great is that the study is not only for architectural academics but also for the MANY SESSIONAL TUTORS who work in Architecture schools. Yep, let me repeat that it covers issues regarding research, university resources, career pathways, the practice-academic nexus, and what should be taught in Architecture schools. If you teach as sessional or fractional academic you can do it. This is a fantastic initiative and the AACA should be congratulated.

 Take the AACA Survey  

The blurb for the survey is below:

The brief anonymous questionnaire is open to all ongoing and sessional architecture academics and may be found at the following link: : https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/5RLYN62

It is a once-in-a-decade opportunity to shape the future of architectural education so please take a moment to make your voice heard! The survey is open until 30 November 2018.

The questionnaire will ask some questions about your teaching career and will seek your views on resourcing, teaching and learning practices, graduate pathways, and the future of architectural education. Participation is completely voluntary. You can read the participant information statement here.

This Architectural Education and the Profession in Australia study is funded by the Architects Accreditation Council of Australia (AACA), the Association of Architecture Schools of Australia and the Australian Institute of Architects, and is being administered by the AACA.

 If you have questions about the research, please feel free to contact AACA Research Director Alex Maroya on 0413 339 394 or email alexmaroya@aaca.org.au.  For occasional updates about the study, please “like” our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/aepstudy.

 This research has National Ethics Approval through the University of Technology Sydney: ETH18-2931N.

 Architecture schools no longer control the agenda. Their voice is mostly diminished within the university sector and of course, as is the habit of the profession, this is exacerbated by an increasingly fragmented professional landscape. In the past, the Architects Institute has not been much of a policy advocate when it comes to Higher Education policy. The Architects Consulting Association and Architeam seemed to be consumed, and perhaps rightly, with more local issues around membership. So who is advocating for architects at a policy level?

With the rise of, diminished federal funding, international student markets, research metrics (architects never really seem to get very many research brownie points), university managerialism (in all of its absurd glory), the architecture schools are not what they could aspire to be.

Are the Universities ripping Architects off?

 

So let’s look at a few numbers. This will help put things into perspective. I have only started working through these and happy to argue the assumptions behind them if you are interested. At the end of each year in Australia, the universities produce given that each graduate pays that is an aggregated revenue assuming each graduate pays around 36K for a place each year. As the recent AACA report stated:

Australia’s architecture schools produced around 1300 graduates from accredited Masters programs in 2017, which is consistent with preceding years.Overall, architecture schools enrolled over 10,000 equivalent full time students in bachelor and masters level architectural study in 2017, collectively bringing approximately $225 million to the university sector.

I think these figures understate the case. So let’s look at a local example.

The Subject Example

So in a subject which is 12.5 point subject out of 100 points per year that is around 4,500 per student in the subject. If I then have 280 students that’s total revenue for the subject of $1,260,000. That is equivalent to a pretty big renovation!

If the semester consumes 30% of my time that has a cost of around $50,000 per semester including all salary on-costs (using a 1.7 multiplier). If the Subject teaching budget, for tutors, is around $81,000 It will then be about $137,000 with salary on costs.

Hence the total salary costs is around $187,000.

Now let’s say that the multiplier for other non-salary on-costs such as overheads etc. (in contracted research projects this might vary between 1.7 and 2.1) is 2.5 we get total expenses of around $467,500.

Bottom line: Then the net gain to the university is, by this calculation, $792,500 a profit margin of 62.8%

The Studio Example

For a studio of 14 students as 6 hour subject with 14 students that is about 9,000 bucks per student. Hence, the revenue is $126,000 per studio. Ok, so let’s say you get 70 bucks an hour for a studio. For a 13 week semester that’s about $5460 bucks. Not a lot of bucks for a small practice. The salary on costs would be $9,282, and the non-salary on costs would bring that up to $23,205.

Bottom line: The net gain to the university for a studio is thus around $102,795 a profit margin of 81.5%.

Again, I am happy to further debate and refine these figures.

How much goes back to architecture as research dollars?

How much of this is going back to architects? This is the Vampire bit. Sure the universities support many small practitioners through sessional teaching. But how much of this is going back into architectural research?

Not a lot at all. When was the last time the Australian Research Council consistently gave anyone grants in architecture? For example, we did not raise any money from the universities for our Architeam project and getting funding for book publishing is also a nightmare.

So, I would urge you to survey as it will help present a united front on how we want to promote and shape Architectural Education into the future. But of course, the universities love architects, and I mean lerv, when they get them to brand the new campus or capital works program. Hey everyone wants that gig, But apart from that, in the meantime, the universities will keep ripping off the architecture schools and give us very little back for architectural research.

Take the Survey

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/5RLYN62

It won’t be a silver bullet but it will help.

 

What makes a great architecture school? Why its time to dismantle the pedigrees.

What makes a great architecture school? Why its time to dismantle the pedigrees.

Peter Raisbeck

So what makes a good architecture school? Everyone seems to have an opinion about it. It’s a complex area. Some architects wonder why the graduates of architecture schools are not technically skilled or seem totally useless. A largely baseless and crude accusation that contributes nothing tot he debate. Any attempt to either consult or change the curricula with the professional bodies outside of university is fraught with petty politics. Architectural academics (and most have a foot in the real world) are totally constrained by a wider regulatory regime that both hampers their ability to create knowledge and then does not fully account for that knowledge when it is created.

My life as an architecture student. 

There is still no research infrastructure to count, yes actually count for, for architectural designs and projects produced in and alongside the academy. This is scandalous and something that the wider profession needs to address. Every time I collaborate on a project or a competition it is not counted in university research metrics. In contrast it me took me ten years (more by the time I graduated) do my architecture degree. This was a combination part-time work, a year working in a sheet metal factory, self-education through reading, feeling the need to prepare for 6 months before I did the next studio and hanging out with my employer the Master smoking cigarettes. When I wasn’t driving the Mater’s car on errands (or stacking it) we often talked, yes actually talked, about architecture.  Thanks to the Whitlam program I was the first in my family to go the university.

Students are forced to pay exorbitant fees and as a result just want to get in and get out. Now more dawdling. No more leisurely processes of self-education. No more long chats about architecture and life, the universe and everything. , any attempt to educate students more deeply beyond the contents of packaged up, templated and accreditated university courses and subject’s is fraught. It’s really different now and some would argue this new environment has corroded our public life.

The contrasting idea is that architecture itself is a comprehensible system, and architecture schools embody a system of education that both shapes and  supports the canons and norms of the discipline.  It’s the Bauhaus (being a prime example of a systematised education) idea of architectural education.

Venice 

I have always suspected that a few people around my provincial town (secretly I am one of them as well) are enamoured with the IAUV and the so-called Venice School of architecture.  A school that was presided over by the provincial “barbarian” Guiseppe Samona. Think a melange of Rossi’s types and Giorgio Grassi’s realism and Gregotti, a deft nod to the theorist Cacciari & historian Tafuri, and the urban realism of Aymonino. For a Melbourne suburban boy Italian architecture is all pretty intoxicating.

Parametricism 2.0 

Of course, schools can be seen to be evil. As recently as last year Schoomee (Patrik Schumacher) was pretty pissed writing that:

This turn away from Parametricism is most conspicuous within the former hotbeds of the movement such as the Architectural Association (AA) in London and Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) in New York. Another indication is the general backlash against ‘iconic’ architecture in architectural criticism, and the recent proliferation of a frugal Neo-Rationalism. The anti-icon polemic misunderstands that an architecture that is rigorously developed on the basis of radically new, innovative principles becomes conspicuous by default rather than by intention. Both the anti-icon and NeoRationalist camps fail to recognise that the new societal complexity calls for urban and architectural complexity.

I love reading the stuff Schumaker (spelling?) writes its so kerazy and the above quote pretty much says it all and points to the grip that the “pedigreed” and branded schools have on our disciplines. Schools, whose graduates are them hoovered into the intern machines of the star architects Like his own. Perhaps, Schoomey should start his own Schumaccher school.

There are a few glimmers of hope around the place. On the West Coast. The Free Architecture School is being set up by Peter Zellner and it appears to contest the prevailing and pedigreed paradigms of what architecture schools should be like.”

“Many schools of architecture […] now find themselves mired in various forms of academic cult worship: digital traditionalisms, faux-art fetishisms, silly mannerist dead-ends, philosopher-shaman worship, and other neoconservative returns.”

“Several generations of students were robbed of their voices and their right to grow potent individual practices,”

Zellner argued that a post-studio model of architectural teaching, one which is founded on open conversation, student autonomy and critique, “now seems imperative and necessary” to unshackle students and teachers alike from the master–disciple model of teaching..

Peter Zellner is right. A really great architecture school would be self governing: students would be involved in its processes of decision making and production, it would have no pedigree except for what it night produce at a particular moment in time. It would experiment across the territories that only diversity can engender. It would generate open conversations and ideas that would be debated in civil society.  It would be a system that would produce new ideas for the discipline rather than imposing pedagogical strictures or reinforcing pedigrees.

In some ways all of these elements were present, to an extent, at the architecture school I attended. As well as the one I am now at. But we need more than just elements; we need radically different modes of teaching and learning in architecture. To say the least, the neoliberal turn in higher education policy has not really helped architecture.  A great architecture school is a crucible for all of the wild and crazy ways of architects and architecture.