{"id":10595,"date":"2025-11-27T10:15:42","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T11:15:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rutha.org\/?p=10595"},"modified":"2025-11-28T12:26:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-28T12:26:11","slug":"five-ways-that-architecture-education-needs-to-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rutha.org\/index.php\/2025\/11\/27\/five-ways-that-architecture-education-needs-to-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Five ways that architecture education needs to change"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Students<\/div>\n

In order to save architecture the prevailing approach to architecture education<\/a> must be allowed to die, writes Harriet Harriss<\/a> as part of our Performance Review<\/a> series.<\/span><\/p>\n

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It’s a familiar refrain that architecture school doesn’t prepare students for real life, but the truth may be more damning:<\/strong> it prepares them perfectly \u2013 for overwork, self-erasure, and the slow violence of a profession built on extraction.<\/p>\n

We have mistaken harm for rigour, and endurance for excellence. Our schools train students to survive dysfunction rather than transform it. Instead of cultivating reciprocity, collaboration and care, they reinforce outdated modes of production with remarkable efficiency.<\/p>\n

And yet, as the planet unravels, the question of what architectural education is actually for has never been more urgent. If the discipline hopes to survive, its pedagogies must undergo a form of death \u2013 not collapse, but compost \u2013 so that something better can come to life.<\/p>\n

Here are five actions every architecture school can take:<\/p>\n

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1) Make care, rest and reciprocity studio norms<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many educators, themselves overworked, sanctify the student all-nighter as proof of devotion. These habits persist because they mirror the profession itself: long hours, unpaid labour, ethical compromise. We call it “professionalism” when it’s closer to pathology.<\/p>\n

If we cultivate a culture in which students must harm themselves to be seen as excellent, how can we credibly expect our graduates to protect each other, their communities, or the planet? A pedagogy that normalises self-exploitation inevitably reproduces it outwardly \u2013 in workplaces, in planning decisions, and in the built environment. Until architecture learns to care for its own, it cannot hope to care for anything else.<\/p>\n

But architecture could be otherwise. What if care, rest and reciprocity were studio norms rather than subversions? Teaching this way does not lower standards, it raises them \u2013 demanding ethical clarity, mutual support and ecological maturity.<\/p>\n

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2) Teach the architecture of finitude<\/strong><\/p>\n

An honest architectural education must acknowledge the full lifecycle of what we build \u2013 including its end. Every structure will degrade, require dismantling, or return its materials to other uses. Designing as though buildings are permanent is not only unrealistic; it is ecologically irresponsible.<\/p>\n

To deny decay is to design in bad faith.<\/p>\n

Teaching finitude means equipping students to plan for responsible deconstruction, reuse and material afterlives. It means helping them recognise impermanence as a design condition rather than a failure.<\/p>\n

When students design with endings in mind, they also design for what might endure: the systems, practices and cultural values worth sustaining. They learn that the architect’s task is not only to build, but to unbuild \u2013 ethically, imaginatively and with care. Studios become places where harmful architectural assumptions can be laid to rest, making space for regenerative practices to emerge.<\/p>\n