I read through the 13 points made by Patrick Schumacher on architectural education. It never seizes to amaze me when nowadays people choose to address a wide public audience in a manifesto-like way. It’s quite alarming that the very structure of the text alludes to the “five points of architecture” by Le Corbusier; an autocratic system of principles that lead to an “hegemonic paradigm,” as Schumacher chooses to call it. I just cannot seem to bring my self to identify with this degree of certainty especially when we all agree to be living in such an uncertain and fluid, post-fordist world. And isn’t it ironic that now of all times, someone should claim to have found a uniform/canonic/normative way of doing architecture?

Schumacher condemns the “anachronistic” way we teach architecture today, and he allocates this anachronism to continuous experimentation. But experimentation in general isn’t the enemy here, is it? After all parametricism is a product of experimentation itself. Perhaps experimentation on form specifically, is anachronistic. Because arch schools have indeed promoted and appraised originality of form for years thus producing practitioners whose only interest lay in impressive yet un-realizable design solutions. And yes, that is perhaps what created this unevenness between academy and practice; the persistence of the value of form. But isn’t this also one of the shortcomings of the extended use of parametricism in some schools and design practices?

So are we really supposed to fully converge to an educational paradigm that has has already cost us part of this void? How about trying to overcome the anachronism by striking to its very core; relieve the students from the burden of originality of form towards an understanding of architecture as in “what it means to be fully human” as Pete Buchanan has eloquently put it.

I can see many schools today struggling to bridge this gap; design build studios, live projects, hands-on workshops and practice-led research studios in sensitive social neighborhoods appear at all continents in an unprecedented rhythm. Isn’t this a way to get over the lack of practical skills or social awareness and relevance that are so much needed to an architect? I have also encountered numerous paradigms (many of which I’ve described in this very blog) of newly formed arch schools that experiment with getting students to work in world renowned practices and actively participate in ongoing projects to gain experience and insights of how arch is actually being produced: talk with clients, organizations; even travel around the world.

And then there is also another issue; if we are to converge, are we seriously supposed to share curriculum between different countries, people, political regimes, economies, cultures? This is where I read convergence and I hear compliance. Because if we are indeed experiencing life as in the continuous process of becoming, are we to think that we all need to reach the same place? Isn’t the beauty of diversity what makes this world so interesting? Isn’t it its complexity that motivates us as how to better understand it?

To introduce a shared paradigm undermines the very meaning of learning especially today when education is becoming all the more open, and people can freely learn from each other. Restricting education to a single core defies the personality of the learners, their peers contribution to their learning and their relation to the rest of the world. Why not set some principles, give them all we can and let them decide who they ultimately choose to be.