Peter Gluck *
Peter Gluck has a problem with the AIA. He has a problem with architectural education too. Really he has a problem with the whole profession of architecture as it is currently practiced. Economic exploitation of youth. Big ideas in service of the highest bidder. Callow young CAD monkeys trained in archispeak. Designers who don’t know how to build. Engineers rescuing forms untethered from reality. He doesn’t seem like an angry person: he’s a sort of laid-back father figure with a gentle demeanor who appears to relish his work. But don’t get him started on the irresponsibility of architects and the way the profession is practiced. Or do get him started: you might learn something.
“I don’t belong to the AIA,” Gluck says during a BMW station-wagon tour of his recent New York projects, among them a campus for Bronx Prep, a charter school for 800 students in the South Bronx, and a center for the Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service, a nonprofit that works with poor families and immigrants in East Harlem. “I think they’re the problem, not the solution. It’s a group of people who get together to promote themselves; they’re not interested in really looking at the profession and trying to see where its problems are.”
(...)
Gluck’s harshest words are aimed at the masochistic educational and professional system that trains architects to speak like idiots but fails to train them to build. “It usually takes them a year before, all of a sudden, their verbose language disappears,” he says. “After they’ve been in the office for a year, they don’t talk so much anymore. It’s either there or it isn’t there. It isn’t that there aren’t narratives to our buildings, but the buildings either express what we’re trying to do or they don’t. So the learning part of it is frustrating because I wish people had the knowledge to start with, but they don’t.”
The poor state of architectural education also explains why after paying more than $100,000 for a degree, graduates are forced to apprentice for three years while other people sign off on their work, and are finally charged another $2,000 to get a license that a professional degree should prepare them for in the first place. “That’s the kind of shit the AIA would do,” he says. “The profession is already built on the backs of young architects—if they were really concerned, the last thing they would do would be to punish young people coming into the field.”
* , via Formiga
“I don’t belong to the AIA,” Gluck says during a BMW station-wagon tour of his recent New York projects, among them a campus for Bronx Prep, a charter school for 800 students in the South Bronx, and a center for the Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service, a nonprofit that works with poor families and immigrants in East Harlem. “I think they’re the problem, not the solution. It’s a group of people who get together to promote themselves; they’re not interested in really looking at the profession and trying to see where its problems are.”
(...)
Gluck’s harshest words are aimed at the masochistic educational and professional system that trains architects to speak like idiots but fails to train them to build. “It usually takes them a year before, all of a sudden, their verbose language disappears,” he says. “After they’ve been in the office for a year, they don’t talk so much anymore. It’s either there or it isn’t there. It isn’t that there aren’t narratives to our buildings, but the buildings either express what we’re trying to do or they don’t. So the learning part of it is frustrating because I wish people had the knowledge to start with, but they don’t.”
The poor state of architectural education also explains why after paying more than $100,000 for a degree, graduates are forced to apprentice for three years while other people sign off on their work, and are finally charged another $2,000 to get a license that a professional degree should prepare them for in the first place. “That’s the kind of shit the AIA would do,” he says. “The profession is already built on the backs of young architects—if they were really concerned, the last thing they would do would be to punish young people coming into the field.”
* , via Formiga
posted by AM at 7:12 da tarde
2 Comments:
:)
um abraço, F.
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