14JUL08

Dennis.

I was very interested to read your paper on Architectural Education this weekend. I found it on the RS Means web site as I was doing some additional BIM research. For one of the very few times I can remember in my 45 years in this business there seems to be a kindred spirit out there. Thank you.

You asked for comments so I would like to offer some.

Before I do so let me give you some background on myself so you have some context in which to take my comments. I am a licensed architect in Michigan, Wyoming and Illinois and hold an NCARB certificate. I have owned my own firm since 1979.

In addition to my practice I have been a full time professor of Architectural Technology at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. This 2-year program started over 50 years ago as a drafting program. If you look at the curriculum you will see that it is quite comprehensive and our students hit the ground running. Unfortunately very few of them stop after 2 years now. They continue on for a BS degree in Facility Management or Construction Management here at Ferris or transfer, maybe 10%, to an accredited school of architecture. Transferring usually costs them between a semester and a year of credit, as an accredited program does not teach such “mundane” subjects as Construction Documents or Detailing.

Although I am, as I said, a licensed architect I have no degrees in architecture. I began college in Building Construction, ended up with a degree in Industrial Education with the idea that I would teach at the high school level. In the meantime I got a job with an MPE consulting engineer for two years while in school and two years full time as a designer after college.

Still wanting to be an architect, my original dream, I took a substantial pay cut and got a job with the top design firm in Peoria, Illinois. Within a year I was project manager on a 150-bed hospital with three architectural graduates working under me. That was the beginning of my disillusionment with architectural education.

After serving my eight years of apprenticeship I sat for the exam and got my license. Two years later I started my own firm.

As I have tried to understand the rational for architectural education methodology in this country I have experienced a great deal of frustration. Without exception all I have ever heard, or experienced, is how poorly architects are paid compared to other professions. And yet when I have tried to talk about changes in the profession to address this issue, almost without exception, including my colleagues here at Ferris, nobody wants anything about education to change. CAD was accepted only through lots of kicking and screaming and then for the past 20 years has been used only as an expensive pencil still using the same methodologies to design and document buildings that we have used for hundreds of years.

I totally agree with your opinion that there is an “ever widening gap between education and practice”. I wrote a Masters Thesis twelve years ago where I took the NCARB survey that was circulated across the country to validate the Tasks and Knowledge and Skills that a recent architectural graduate should have. I rephrased the basic question asked in the survey of employers from what an employer thought graduates should have to what graduates felt their education gave them. I used exactly the same questions. The results mirrored what employers felt was necessary and what graduates felt they were not getting. Mike Crosbie published part of this in his Progressive Architecture article on Architectural Education. And yet when I have tried to use these results to develop an expanded Bachelors Degree in Architectural Technology they have been dismissed as totally irrelevant.

I tell my students all the time that the ARchiTECture has two roots….ARt and TEChnology. One of the most wonderful things for me about architecture is that both sides of my brain are challenged to keep these two in balance as I believe people expect of us. And yet we see school after school concentrating only on the ARt end of the profession, dismissing TEChnology as something that the profession can teach. We see NAAB demanding years of design to achieve accreditation to the point that even if a school wanted to change to a curriculum, even partially, as you suggest they would probably loose their accreditation.

I think the reasons you give of why professors do not want to change are all true, I have heard them before, but unless some outside force acts on academia, it is my opinion they are not going to ever change.

I see pockets of change. At the BIM conference in Boston in May as a prelude to the AIA convention it was encouraging to see the work being done at Oklahoma State, Wyoming and Maryland regarding the integration of BIM. At Oklahoma State it was a cross discipline course in Construction and Architecture. At Wyoming it is happening in their Architectural/Engineering program.

Your curriculum would do a very good job integrating design with technology. One of the things that I think AutoDESK is doing wrong, and I have a great deal of respect for AutoDESK, so I hesitate to even express the opinion. Revit has been marketed and in my experience is primarily being used as a production tool and a visualization tool. The resistance from design oriented architects is that it is NOT a design tool. REVIT stands for REVISE IT. The critique that REVIT forces you into making decisions too early in the design process is simply not true. Working with massing is no more difficult and a great deal more powerful than working with a piece of clay or chipboard. And the planes can be revised to walls, roofs, floors, etc. at ANYTIME in the design process. It is not another CAD, it is a total paradigm shift in thinking.

In my opinion the pressures being put on architects by people like GSA, AGC and here in West Michigan the sub-contractors are beginning to pay dividends in the adoption of BIM.

I am so encouraged that RS Means is on the BIM bandwagon as is ARCAT and even SWEETS. This tool, as it continues to mature, will finally let us design and construct a one-off building, “crash test it”, as the automobile industry does, before it has to go out in the field to be built perfect the first time through.

Voices like yours need to be heard more often. Thank you again and I hope that your ideas get picked up and disseminated to an audience wider than RS Means. 

One suggestion I would make for you is to go back and have your paper proof-read. This is not my area of expertice but I did pick up the following:
Paragraph three, last sentence: revise to say “design, construct (not construction) and operate (not operation).

Paragraph nine, last sentence: revise “carrier” to “career”

Explain why you are only showing years 1-4 in your curriculum when the minimum accredited degree is 5 years with all new degrees being 6 years.

I hope to hear more from you regarding this issue.

Very truly yours,

Bruce C. Dilg, NCARB
Professor – Ferris State University

I completely concur with your comments. I jumped into the profession following the older format, apprenticed to
a master builder, learned to draw, developed my hand, moved on and sometimes up, through this CAD and that one, until yesterday when the language du jour became AutoCAD. I would add that not only are the professors of the practice unable or unwilling to adapt to these changes, but some principals are often, to paradie TS Eliot, “...between the idea and the reality” and the shadow is also falling upon them too. I could say more, but as we know, “less is more” and time is money and I am still trying to understand what the 5th Dimension means outside the BIM context of cost.