A framework for architectural education

Abstract

Complaints about the poor performance of architects and the declining quality of buildings have been common in the west since the Renaissance. They intensify at the end of the eighteenth century, when architectural education became institutionalized. The failures were blamed not only on the architects but on what was thought to be the poor quality of architectural education. To some these criticisms were irritating but only few thought they were dangerous or useless. In fact the criticisms ultimately became instrumental in generating major innovations and reforms in architectural education and facilitated the technological, functional, and ‘cultural’ modernization of buildings and soon after the French Revolution contributed to the closing down of the the Academie d’ Architecture, (founded in 1671) and the subsequent founding of the two most influential international educational institutions, the Ecole de Beaux Arts and the Ecole Polytechnique. Interestingly today, despite the unquestionable unanticipated, intractable, irreversible destruction of the quality of the environment, cultural, economic, social and ecological, due to bad building and overbuilding, there are very few articulate uncompromising criticisms suggesting that architectural education is to blame for the errors designers make. One of the reasons for this relative apathy, if not passivity, is that, despite the gravity of the environmental-architectural situation and the dynamic and aggressive construction