 It captures people's imagination, I think, first and foremost. Architecture does affect people in ways that maybe architects understand only after a building's built. People perceive architecture as simply being an object or a vessel within which people are housed. And that's clearly not what our sense of architecture is. What the hell is an architect? What does an architect do? What is the difference between an architect and a builder? We concretize the world. We take human activities and we make manifest the physical structures that accommodate all manner of human activity. The design studio is a place where individual action and individual creativity is measured very directly by the people around them. The students are doing their job. They're shifting the focus of how we're talking and thinking about architecture. When you come to architecture school you sort of have this idea about objects and things like that. And then once you get here it becomes all about space and all about occupation. People sort of see architecture sort of sculpturally and there's a point at which you stop dealing with objects, sort of things to stare at and start dealing with occupation. I have a lot of friends who find it really hard to understand my schedule here and how we function here and being here in strange hours of the day and working environment and what studio space is like. And a way of working too. That's really important. And also the idea of being critiqued. Being critiqued is a really important concept. The design studio is a place where students have to perform on their own. They have to create something from their own imagination. They have to create something in response to a set of problems that are either given to them or they have to even invent the problem. There's no other place that you can get this kind of culture. And we've been together for five years like the whole group, right? So we know everybody. Everybody knows everything. It's like a second home. It's like a second community of people who are all struggling with the same questions. Now when I worked at home there was so much lacking in the projects. There's nobody to bounce things off of. The inspiration is at a minimum when you're on your own. Architecture education in the U.S. is one of the best because of the studio system. Always students hang around their own studio and talking and learning from others. That's the most important space for the education of architecture. It's like they were hating on Robert Moses because he's so insensitive and he tore down neighborhoods and this, that and the other. It's like, you know what? Get in a car. Drive on the West Side Highway. Take the Tribural Bridge in a manhattan and then you will understand what he was trying to do. That visual procession in the automobile. Spectacular. No. It is spectacular. You're thinking about it now because the autumn, oh yeah, of course. Now we sit in traffic and we look at it. But back then the city had to make that transformation. The great thing about architecture schools is it still takes place in a kind of space where people discuss the work together in a kind of both a personal way, a one-on-one way and in a very public way. Ultimately there's a kind of arena. There's a public arena where the work is discussed, where students can present themselves personally to other people and show that they have a stake in the work and what they really think about the work. And that's extremely important, I think, to the development of an architectural project because that's ultimately how architecture at certain points is really developed in the real world. And it's both an important lesson but it's also a way in which, you know, through that kind of intensely personal and human contact that the work gets better. The culture of studio happens at the most random times, like the most random hours. I hope that, yes. I think the humor adds another level of energy, you know, that you can bring. So you got moments where, you know, we're all, like, joking around and, yeah, we're doing the work and we're joking and we're vibing and whatever. Some guy will come in here like, well, you know, that's why you guys don't get any work done because you're always doing the shit. And you're like, f*** you! Go and do your project then and, like, you know, live in your little world by yourself. Because the humor brings the interaction and the interaction brings the energy and the energy, you know, creates an output between everybody, you know, that we can all feed off of. Everyone's tea's late, everyone's hanging out and smoking cigarettes and drinking a lot of coffee and not really necessarily at your desk drawing or whatever. Architecture school is a really strange, specific environment. You can't possibly put that much work into something, like hours and hours on, you know, one drawing or whatever and make it be productive. You know, you could tell an architect that it's due tomorrow and they'll put in the 12 hours and it might actually look the same as if they spent a whole week on it, you know. I should have gone home earlier than I did because I just, like, every five minutes I would take a little bit of glue and put it somewhere and then stop and figure out what the hell it is that I just did and then start decorating. I have this terrible thing that happens to me that I call the design high where I can't fall asleep because I can't stop thinking about my project and it's like I get home and the whole walk home I'm exhausted. This news I brush my teeth and wash my face and get into bed. I need to go back to the studio. Your health is kind of put on hold to make room for your ideas. Architects are masochists in some ways. You're in there to all hours of the night. You're cutting yourself at three o'clock in the morning. You're rushing to the hospital to get stitched. I mean, you're putting these models together that you're tearing apart and then putting them together again and then you're going through this iterative process of evaluation that is incredibly personal but yet also very public. And you're constantly putting yourself on display, opening yourself up to attack and criticism. I mean, it's intense. Why would you subject yourself to that and put yourself through that if you didn't love it? That's a conceptual mistake. A structural system does not separate between each unit. Usually the standard of structure encompasses three or four units or maybe more. I understand but I don't see why that has to necessarily be the case. It doesn't necessarily have to be the case. I understand that I don't have to think it's important for the role of resolution. It's fine. It's wrong. Why is it wrong? Tell us why it's wrong. Economically. It's not wrong. Systems. We could critique his whole project in terms of the economy. But you're done. Basically, there are these walls. In terms of his diagram. Yeah. Those have to be out of the third role of structure. I mean, that completely ruins the areas. It doesn't ruin anything. It wasn't necessary to have that conversation. The point was made and then that's it. I understood the point. They understood my point. I thought he understood my point. I thought that should be the end of it. And then there were more important things to talk about and other people that had to talk to them. And still talking about it for 20 minutes. One thing that I always have an issue with is students get so frustrated if they don't have a good critique. I think they misinterpret what a good critique is. I mean, by definition, it's a critique. It's a criticism. So if you go and do a critique and all the critics, all they can do is blow hot air up your ass and tell you how great the project looks, that's still not to me. That's not a good critique. They didn't criticize anything. To me, a good criticism is if you can inspire enough thought based on what they see and what they hear. If it inspires enough thought, then they will criticize. Not criticize in the sense of attacking. They're going to criticize because whatever you showed them inspired enough thought that they have their own opinion about the thing now. That's a criticism. I'm not going to argue with you because I have a feeling it wouldn't be productive. We could go on all night. We could. I know that's not the point. You would stop and listen occasionally. We'd be able to find some resting spot here where we're kind of talking about the same thing and you allow us to help you. The other thing I think is sometimes very negative is the idea that the student should be trained to do a sales bitch in this jury process. I think that probably the student should at first be silent and the jurors should really start to ask questions about the drawings and try to understand the project in a more socratic way rather than this sales bitch followed by criticism. If you're a smart architecture student, you're listening very closely because you're not only interested in how that work is coming out of you but also how other people are seeing it. The best architects in my view are the ones who bring a coherent view of the world to design. Those are the folks that become the best architects in the sense that they're the ones that progress the profession, innovate, create new ideas. The most important thing about being an architect is learning how to think clearly. To think clearly to practice architecture. There's a tendency to see people as singular. If you're artistic, you're not practical. If you're practical, you're not artistic. That's totally preposterous. I mean, architecture is embedded in both worlds. And if anything, architecture is the connective tissue between these two kind of spheres and it'd be impossible to live in one or the other. One, you'd be practical and never produce a piece of work of any interest. The other, you'd be producing work or no connectivity. I think design requires a certain kind of smartness that holds those schizophrenic views simultaneously in one's thinking. Even as a young person, you know whether you can do that and as you mature, it's quite rewarding to have those opposing views in your mind at all times. There's not just one role for an architect. There are all different kinds of contributions an architect can make in the culture. The question of what's a good architect, I think that there are many different perspectives that come at a project as it's developing. And what's important for the architect is to be able to listen to people outside of themselves and take that and then give something of themselves to a project and make something incredibly unique and wonderful. It has to be a person who's really willing to learn in a way that architects need to learn, which is they need to learn something every day for the rest of their lives. You've got to be in a sense kind of driven by that, in a sense kind of inner force, but I think you also have to have the ability to kind of work through something and to be able to look at particular problems and be able to kind of listen and learn and examine with great patience some of those questions. So again, it's a kind of left brain, right brain kind of dichotomy that is constantly, those demands are constantly placed on you as an architect. There are other disciplines that bring other things to the table, but I think our ability to envision or imagine something that is not there, it's almost spooky to people. This notion that you can look at a site or look at a parking lot and see a building, I think it's an extraordinary skill and we are one of the few disciplines that can do that. I would not trade for anything the skill set that I learned in school because it's very, very, very unique to our discipline and that's what we bring to the table. I don't believe schools of architecture either historically or today have particularly prepared young architects for the realities of architectural practice. Again, referring to this notion of safe space where one can fail, where one can push the envelope in a sense, I think the academy always needs to be that. In a certain sense, you're a bit freer of the constraints of the real world. We need to understand that those constraints also have to be brought into the academy so students can begin dealing with them in an inventive and creative way. I think the academy should be a kind of idealized space but it also has to be a kind of laboratory, a testing ground for the real world and I don't think we're so good with the latter. I mean, we are still that ivory tower. Sometimes I think we lose a little bit of the reality of what our job is and what our profession is really about. I think people really forget the reality of what it's going to be like to be working as professionals. Architecture school is really unique because it's probably the only time that many of architecture students get to work on their own projects because after that it's architecture is basically a service industry. I think that the profession is a lot different from the education in that you never work alone. It's hard to design an entire building by yourself. There's always other people that you have to network with or design with or consult. That collaboration is not usually present in school, which is a good thing and a bad thing because during school you're trying to develop your own sort of way of working. Their education is not preparing them to become kind of architects in the full sense of the word architect being both poets and practitioners. They are wonderful, they're talented, they're smart but tragedy is that the students are not sufficiently prepared to be independent thinkers. They either function at the poetic level or they function at the pragmatic level. The two shall never meet. So we have to kind of help them put those two together. Like a series of overlays where you'd start to see if there's different spaces like this, how they would interact. The walls are retaining walls. They're retaining earth. If you give me a word like that we can respond to it. Why are they working just to put these things? They're making things. And they're making things because they want to create something of value. Why do they just want to put it in storage? Do I think I might not be an architect? Sure. The likelihood that I work in an office after I graduate is pretty high though. I don't think that people have to be stuck there for like three years and then get their license and then they do their own stuff. I want to start doing my own stuff and work in an office. I look forward to... I look forward to seeing what's going to happen. I'm excited to see what my signature ends up being. I want to teach and I want to write and I want to work for a firm that will let me do all of these things. I want to get some experience in a larger firm to see how they work and see how they operate. Do that and then hopefully the long-term goal is to start my own practice. The remarkable thing to me is how optimistic students of architecture are. How they sustain that optimism. And again, it's almost a bit like an actor or actress that they still cherish that belief that they're going to break out of the chorus line in some way even though the reality as it is on Broadway is very, very different. In part it could be how they very quickly embody this notion of the star architect and this belief that against all odds that they might be able to make it. Today I think a lot of people when they think of architecture they think of what star architects they think of the handful of brand name architects they might have heard of which to me is rather limiting. People only know Frank Gehry, you know. I mean there's other architects out there that are doing better work, greater work, more important work than Gehry. The problem is that the way we teach architecture right now is we sort of train everybody to do that exact same thing. The whole sort of pedagogical model right now is around creating the next generation of star architects. That's actually a flawed model. For many years everyone wanted to be like Frank Gehry. They wanted to create great sculptures in the landscape. Whether those sculptures worked or not was largely irrelevant. The ability to use aerospace engineering to come up with forms that hadn't been built before was considered to be a primary task of someone coming out of school. That's over. That's over. I would argue that this current generation of beginning students of architecture have the capacity to reshape a world like we've never seen before. And they need to have access to as much technology and as much discourse, meaningful discourse surrounding these techniques and these tools so that they're fully prepared to go out into the world in the future to do something positive and productive. Students are coming out. They're working with individuals around the world who need shelter and who need ways of living that are affordable and supportable and sustainable. The students themselves have been pushing to force faculty to think differently about the way faculty see the environment, use the environment and create objects that serve not just the aesthetic interests of the architect. It's fundamentally an optimistic profession. You don't go into architecture if you're a pessimist, if you don't actually believe that the world can get better. So I think you've got a bunch of optimists that go into this design profession who actually believe that their buildings are going to make the difference in somebody's life. I think that the building environment is something that people have such an appreciation for. If you don't care about this, then what do you care about? It's about understanding human behavior, human desire, human want. Architecture is what you experience in your daily life on the street, the space of the street, how you navigate the street, how you relate to the buildings around you. People tend to think architecture is done for and by other people. It's also done by you if you decide to maybe put a new window in your house or change the traffic flow in your house or your office. In architecture school, you've got the freedom to you don't like something, do something about it. That's what they told you for five years. Do something about it. It doesn't matter what. Just do something about it. The school is kind of about a way of thinking and what you're going to do in architecture school is not what you think it's going to be. You know, that you're not going to go in there and be designing colonial homes and things like that. We don't just need shelter. We need atmosphere and we need to be inspired. I think one of the most important things you can take from this school is not to lose your ambition. It's not just, you know, four walls and a roof. There's more into it. There's like a life to it that I think we get here and we should really take with us and everywhere you go. You're going to come to architecture school. I hope you understand the creative process. I hope you understand the transformation that your mind and body and psyche is going to go through. Because there is nothing absolute about this. Think about that. Mr. Doc Boyd. Make it a movie. Sure you are.