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This article was originally published on Common Edge.
The vast majority of practitioners I’ve known over the years seek well-trained graduates who are ready on Day One to be productive employees. But that’s not all an architectural education needs to deliver. Michael Monti—who for the past 20 years has served as executive director of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), which represents 5,000 architecture faculty teaching more than 30,000 students—stresses that architectural education needs to rest on strong foundation of shared values and ethics in order for graduates to make meaningful contributions to what he describes as a “civilized life,” promoting the dignity, freedom, health, and well-being of the people who interact with architecture every day.
Michael J. Crosbie spoke with Monti about the tensions between architectural education and practice and the obligation of schools to produce the next generation of citizen-architects, not mere technicians.
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MJC: Michael J. Crosbie
MM: Michael Monti
MJC: Your focus has been on the need for a holistic, values-based architectural education, which suggests that’s not the case now. How is holism in architectural education lacking?
MM: My concern is not that architecture schools don’t have well-considered curricula. What’s broken are the terms by which the purposes and value of higher education are measured, particularly in the world of practice. Universities are responsible for educating the whole student—the knowledge and skills needed by graduates of a professional architecture degree program. A curriculum needs to be holistic but it also needs tolerances for electives inside and outside the program, and extracurricular activities outside the classroom or studio. This works against the idea that there’s a holistic way to educate an architect. That’s why you have to start with a fundamental vision of what architectural education is: Whom does it serve? Is it primarily oriented toward the profession? Or do you think of it in the context of a wider discipline? The diversity in approach and the National Architectural Accrediting Board’s [NAAB’s] principle of not prescribing pedagogical approaches or curricula allows for a lot of variations in approaches and outcomes. I think that’s a good thing, instead of a uniform vision of how architecture should be produced.
MJC: So architectural education needs to make foundational values and ethics central. Aren’t these addressed in the NAAB criteria?
MM: The Conditions for Accreditation show what’s important to NAAB and what’s less important. The word “ethics” appears just once in the 2020 Conditions, under the rubric “professional practice.” According to research we did with the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards [NCARB], most students take only one professional practice course. There are more general requirements in NAAB’s “program criteria,” such as “Ecological Knowledge and Responsibility.” But there’s a lot more that should be included in the architect’s responsibility, such as material specifications that address how the profession contributes to an exploitative building industry, or an awareness of the complicity of architects in the history of exploitative land use. Architects alone can’t change social problems. But shouldn’t architects be obligated to understand the more complex issues around the built environment, especially if others in the building industry don’t? We should engage clients and the public in these discussions. If we take on more obligations, then architects ought to be given more respect and control over our scope of practice.
MJC: What core foundational values should be more central in architectural education?
MM: Tatiana Bilboa, at the opening of ACSA’s international conference in Mexico, spoke of architecture as “a collective act that provides a necessary and primary form of care.” Foundational values flow from seeing the profession as helping people to live well, based on the most basic practices of living on the earth, in common with others and the natural environment. Calling practice “a form of care” is not unique to architecture. We see the word “care” being used in other disciplines to describe forms of individual and collective praxis, whether it’s taking care of your kids in the morning to get to school, to various social institutions: healthcare, education, transportation, food networks, housing. Now there’s a push in NCARB to treat all pathways to licensure as equal. But my position is that licensed architects who don’t have a professional education aren’t the same as those who do, because firms don’t have an obligation to educate their employees on the licensure track in the foundational values, ethics, and history that differentiate architects from others involved in creating the building environment. Fifteen percent of newly licensed architects don’t have accredited degrees, according to NCARB’s recent statistics, but if that becomes the norm or becomes greater, architects will diminish their role in the built environment and society, because we won’t have the knowledge to engage clients and the public in broader issues that ultimately influence the health, safety, and welfare of everyone.
MJC: Otherwise, architects are just technicians.
MM: Yep.
MJC: What kinds of knowledge and expertise should distinguish architects from others involved in the creation of the built environment?
MM: Architectural education involves design at many scales, not just the building itself. That variety of scales and concomitant issues should be the basis of professional education and the services that we’re paid for. Good architecture communicates clarity and order. But design is also complex because projects have various intertwined layers. For example: site design, envelope, urban presence. These layers are found across the curriculum in architectural education. The building and its location are brought into an active set of relationships with the people who use it, or live around it, the natural environment, the context. Architects with a professional education should have the knowledge and skills to be accountable for these kinds of relationships, throughout a project’s many layers, rather than responding just to the immediate needs of the client. It’s difficult for this kind of education to happen in a typical architectural practice business model. You have to respond to the client’s budget, and your own internal practice budget. But at the same time, the architect has larger responsibilities. This is why architects are licensed: because they bring these other dimensions/obligations to the project.
MJC: You’ve noted the importance in architecture to provide “a civilized life” by upholding shared values of dignity, freedom, health, and well-being. How do we define that civilized life through shared values? Is this a teachable skill?
MM: Yes. Michael Bayles, in his book Professional Ethics, writes that people need professionals and professions for a civilized life. It’s not intended as a slight to other occupations. But people live in community, and professional expertise is required for everyone to live with dignity. Most people can’t manage their health, or draw up contracts, or get justice if they’ve been wronged, or design complex buildings. People are vulnerable, and that’s one of the main reasons for professions. Professionals are licensed and given a specific scope of work, and they can’t just give clients what they want. Professionals have “dangerous knowledge,” to quote Daniel Friedman. Buildings can harm people if they fall down. As an architect, you need a professional education based on ethical foundations and values to contribute to a more civilized life. Educators need to inculcate these values in their students. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to call what architects do “sacred work.” People trust in what we do because they have faith that they can’t do it themselves, and they need someone with broader knowledge and skills to do it for them.
There are lots of gaps in what you learn in architecture school that a young architect can apply in practice. I know from ACSA programs that many faculty want to engage students in issues such as social and ecological justice. A lot of such studio projects involve working in communities. But there aren’t a lot of NAAB accreditation student performance criteria that apply there. Practicing architects find this puzzling: Why are students spending so much time doing community-based work, such as understanding how food is sourced, or ways to connect with elders about the history of the land that they’re on? Why are students learning about that, they wonder. What does that have to do with practice?
MJC: Your position is that the public doesn’t seem to understand that architects have a core role in promoting shared values. Why is that?
MM: The status of architects in the public’s imagination is amorphous. All of us—the ACSA, the AIA, NCARB, the National Organization of Minority Architects, NAAB, the American Institute of Architecture Students—wring our hands over this. Architects often end up doing more than the client wants, because they have technical expertise, but also broad knowledge and creativity. But whether the public identifies architects as having a role in promoting shared societal values is questionable. Architecture firms are economic engines. Nationally recognized, award-winning firms that promote these shared values in their work are great examples of how to change the public’s understanding. So when you’re involved with new public, highly visible projects, I think it’s important for architects to be active in public debate about those, engaged civically about the impact of design decisions on the public realm. The challenge is questioning the client’s agenda—and architectural education has a responsibility to promote that role in graduates. We shouldn’t underestimate long-term impacts of values-based education on the profession. For example, students are questioning architecture’s resource usage, focusing on such issues by designing net-zero buildings in studio projects. When they go into a firm, they’re going to ask questions about this issue that will directly or indirectly push the firm in this direction.
MJC: You’ve pointed out that architecture graduates need to be multiskilled communicators to communicate to others involved in the project—most importantly the client—how social factors come together in design.
MM: We spend a lot of time in the ACSA board talking about “over the horizon” changes in architectural education. A big question is: What will be the status of the design studio, its primacy in the curriculum, how ideas are debated, etc. We are way past the point where the measure of good design and architecture is purely aesthetic. We’ve moved from image to evidence. Architects are being held accountable in their designs for building performance. Public speaking and writing by architects are probably more effective in educating clients and the public. It raises the question: What’s ultimately most important in architectural education? Is it spending lots of studio time working on iteration after iteration of a design project, or working on a studio project but also focusing on how we can communicate to make it accessible and comprehensible to others? Architects and faculty certainly aren’t the best of writers—or even spellers. That needs attention, by doing more of it in the curriculum; part of the holistic approach we spoke of earlier. Also, how can we externalize our scholarship and research, making it more accessible?
MJC: You have a particular focus on the architect’s obligation and accountability to larger questions in architecture—the big picture. How are architects accountable?
MM: Architects hopefully do their best to understand the environmental impacts of their projects, for example, but we can’t control everything. Concerning the big questions of the impact of the built environment—at the macro scale it is easier to call out the profession, but what does that mean at the micro scale, where practitioners have obligations to carry out their client’s wishes? In the last decade we have started to see a newly rising consciousness in different sectors of the profession concerning social equity and justice in the built environment. Groups such as Design Justice and Dark Matters University are openly questioning the ethics of the profession. For instance, the AIA Code of Ethics states that you shouldn’t design places of torture, but it’s silent on the question of prisons. The ethics code leans toward professional behavior that’s illegal. But the law is the not the measure of ethics and morality. The law is a low bar, the minimum that should be expected. But the profession should be better than just the minimum when it comes to the health, safety, and welfare of the public. We need to do more than that—not in a self-righteous way, but to show that architecture is a primary “form of care.” The reason to focus on an issue like resource usage is because society will suffer social and ecologic impacts of decisions that architects are complicit in. We can’t just see ourselves as neutral service providers that do what our clients ask of us.
MJC: Which means that the time is ripe for a re-evaluation of architectural education. What should be the goal of such an assessment?
MM: Education needs to make changes before someone else does it to us. It prompts the question: Why should students choose to study architecture if the schools don’t take a hard look at the current state of architectural education in relation to practice? Economic and geographical accessibility to architecture schools is an issue. ACSA is looking at the potential of community colleges being part of the education sequence—changing the ecosystem of architectural education to include them because they’re more geographically and economically accessible. Otherwise, we’re going to see drops in enrollment that will threaten our current existence. We need to better articulate the values of studying architecture to students and society in general. For today’s students, social impact is important. But there’s pressure from NCARB to increase the number of architects, and AIA seeks a more diverse profession. These are good reasons right now to have a conversation about the alignment of education with practice, what the stakes are. What we’re hearing is that architectural education is too expensive and it takes too long. At the same time, practitioners say they want graduates who understand what to do on Day One and can step into roles and take on responsibilities. So conversations about alignments between education and practice that consider inclusion need to happen now.
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