The Hidden Curriculum of Architecture School
Why is Architecture School Detrimental to Student Health?
“Architecture is like a marathon. You don’t have time for breaks, you just keep running.”
Imagine being a first-year, already experiencing burnout at the beginning of a five-year program and being told, by a higher up in USC Architecture, that this is your life now for the rest of your career. That despite all the people next to you deciding to leave because of the difficulty, you can push through if you just keep running. How encouraging!
My experience is not one of a kind and is actually ingrained in the architectural community. On the outside, many may think architecture is a fun and creative major that creates a tight-knit community. However, underneath all that is a hardcore, eat-sleep-breathe mindset that is detrimental to student health and leads to a bigger question of how to eliminate these hidden standards to produce a happier and healthier architecture student body.
Architecture schools are basically all studio-based, meaning there is an instructor paired with a group of students that regularly critique the students’ work each class. There are constantly people in the studio working on the assignment due by the next class (a.k.a. in two days), but remember, the final project is due in four more weeks when you have to pin-up and get more critiques. This time the critiques hit harder since you’ve worked on it for far too long. Right after finishing a project, we jump right into the next one. Without having any time to breathe, students start to feel discouraged and burn out faster than usual. A common complaint is simply that there is no break. If architecture is a marathon, then it’s an uphill battle without water to keep us going.
It is very different compared to lecture-based courses where it requires listening and simply taking notes to understand the material. At USC Architecture, judgments are highly subjective and dependent on the professor you have, even when the assignment is supposedly the same across all the studios. In comparison to the architecture education of Lithuania, there is really little difference compared to the United States form of education. Researchers claim that at these schools “Only highly motivated or exceptionally gifted students can adapt to such conditions and achieve good results, and the rest, who are the majority, in such circumstances associate their personality subconsciously with the “secondhands”” (Augustinaitė 67). Imagine constantly being told that if you can’t handle it is simply because you aren’t gifted enough. Being able to achieve good results should be through hard work and passion towards a subject. Nobody goes into college being a natural at their chosen major and fully knowing exactly what they are doing, so why are architecture majors expected to be born for their career?
All of this leads to the concept of the “hidden curriculum” that Philip Wesley Jackson popularized that outlines the “norms and cultures implicitly taught within architecture and adopted by students as a rite of passage” (Stead et al. 88). This includes detrimental ideas of perfectionism, prejudice, and more specifically that “‘doing really good work takes a lot of time, therefore the more time you spend the better the work is, and then that leads to a kind of cycle’” (Stead et al. 91). It’s important to highlight the hidden part of these ideas. They are reinforced unintentionally simply due to the past experiences of professors and educators who are sharing them with their students (Stead et al.). Despite all of this, these ideals should not be prioritized over their affect on student health. It is hard constantly hearing how difficult it is to finally complete an architecture degree. Is it really worth it if you have to sacrifice so much just to keep up with their unrealistic ideas?
Perfectionism is futile. And yet it is the backbone of architecture education. All the teachers unknowingly expect you to reach the perfect project, the exact solution to a problem they created. They try to guide you and shape your project and ideas towards what their ideal solution is, but honestly there is never an end. Your project can always change, improve, and become better in some way. The mantra of working to reach perfection is unrealistic and just weighs on students negatively. Rather than striving to improve, they are pressured into thinking that their project isn’t good enough and will never be.
To reach this unachievable standard, students regularly sacrifice sleep to spend more time on completing a “perfect” project. It is one thing to stay up late to complete a project or pull all-nighters once in a while after procrastinating work for a few days. However, students in a studio culture environment are almost encouraged to constantly sleep less just so they can create a “good” project. Architecture is not the only major that suffers from this mindset, and it goes across to other majors with studio cultures like design students. A study was conducted that revealed students in studio based majors “have elevated rates of insomnia and long periods of sleep restriction” (King et al. 8). This poor sleep is linked to “declining physical and mental well-being” and a “negative impact on creativity” (King et al. 9). These issues would harm any student but are especially restrictive to architecture students. Since architecture is so design and project-based, it is really important to be able to constantly produce great ideas and successfully explain them. Without proper sleep, students will underperform and produce work that doesn’t meet their expectations. Imagine how difficult it is to know that you’ve worked for hours and hours and yet the work you’ve produced is still not enough.
Added onto these unrealistic expectations for perfectionism are the prejudices against minorities in architecture. Historically, architecture schools were limited to white, male students, limiting the diversity of people in the profession. Author Karen Keddy included a study of diversity and the hidden curriculum where “researchers point out that acquiring the architectural habitus of a white male may operate quite differently for women and persons of color” (Keddy 190). This implies that architectural education is shaped around white males and does not cater to the diverse population that schools may start to have. Although in the past this may have been the only demographic that schools were familiar with teaching, times have changed, and being able to understand your students and their diverse arrays of backgrounds should be acknowledged throughout the educational process.
These are not unique situations. Worldwide, students are experiencing situations of burnout as a result of these difficult standards. Students from Scotland and the U.S. are protesting because they watch “friends burn out and lose days to recovery” and are being told “not to expect to see friends or family during the school term” (Block). These are alarming statements to acknowledge, especially when professors are encouraging them. However, not all professors feel the same. Some professors and architects in India, the Maldives, and the UK feel that these “institutions perpetuating exhaustion in any student bring shame on our industry” and must “eliminate machismo behaviour in schools of architecture” (Block). This is such a widespread issue of the hidden problems of architecture and so many people are against it, but how can we start to bring about change?
To start, it is important to initiate a discussion. A dialogue must occur between people who recognize the hidden curriculum and its detrimental effects. Perfectionism and sleep deprivation go hand in hand, and creating a more welcoming environment when critiquing and viewing student work should be considered. Just telling students to not take critique against their work “personally” will not make the comment less harsh. Acknowledging the students’ hard work and giving constructive feedback will go a much longer way. Additionally, reminding students that they should not strive for perfectionism, but instead focus on creating a project they are passionate about and reaching their own solution. Even in my two semesters here, I have seen a stark difference in the ways that teachers critique and I have valued and generated better work when my professor emphasized focusing on including a design aspect that I created rather than what they preferred.
In order to combat prejudices, there must be a deconstruction of them to begin with. Simply ignoring their existence only allows them to flourish more in those who falsely believe them, and enhances the struggle of people with those harmful prejudices against them. Keddy argues that this can only be achieved through a “comprehensive discussion of the impact of classism on the students’ education process” (192). Starting by discussing with a professor about the high costs of supplies, and how to mitigate these costs can start to produce awareness for students who come from lower income families. Suggesting lower-cost materials for models, and waiving fees for programs can begin to level the field among students and prevent anyone from feeling purposefully forgotten or ignored.
Globally, students are all suffering greatly from these issues and need to form an alliance to reform this hidden curriculum and status quo. As a new generation of architects arises, how can they promote inclusivity and a healthy studio culture to prevent future students from suffering under unrealistic expectations? Beginning with a board at every architecture school that focuses on all of these issues, promoting positive work-life balance, diversity in education, combating financial discrepancies among students. Schools should also create a new curriculum or class when training professors to deconstruct harmful stereotypes. Teachers should be at the forefront in encouraging these changes in their studios and improving their students’ experiences. To keep them accountable and evaluate the effectiveness of these methods, there should be a way for students to review their teachers and the curriculum, anonymously. This option creates a dialogue that prevents the hidden curriculum from resurfacing without proper action being taken against it. Students and teachers alike can foster better partnerships and create a new ideal studio environment for the future of architecture schools.
The constant idea that there is a necessary passage and struggle that all future architects must experience is genuinely harmful and exclusionary. Architecture should be something that is shared and valued since it is so integral to human experience. I understand wanting to try to find people who are truly passionate about architecture and using difficult classes to weed out those who aren’t genuinely interested, since this is a tactic that most majors and colleges do. However, applying the methods to the extent that architecture does is detrimental to the students that are truly passionate and are still struggling to finish their degrees. Changing the mindset of past and future generations to realize that this level of suffering and these standards in education aren’t necessary to create stellar architects will bring about a much more encouraging, energized and powerful group of students that are even more prepared to excel in their careers.
Works Cited
Augustinaitė, Dalia. “Challenges of Innovative Architecture: Education and Practice.” Journal of Architecture and Urbanism, vol. 42, no. 1, 2018, pp. 63–69. doi:10.3846/jau.2018.1989
Block, India. “Overworked Architecture Students Have ‘Considered Suicide.’” Dezeen, 21 July 2019, https://www.dezeen.com/2019/07/16/burn-out-design-education-mental-health/.
Keddy, Karen. “Beneath the Umbrella of the Hidden Curriculum.” 89th ACSA Annual Meeting Proceedings, Paradoxes of Progress, March 16–20, 2001, Baltimore, MD, edited by Christine Macy and Thomas Fisher, Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2001. https://www.acsa-arch.org/chapter/beneath-the-umbrella-of-the-hidden-curriculum-the-underlying-premise-the-existence-of-homogeneity-and-the-deconstruction-of-hierarchy/
King, Elise, et al. “Sleep in Studio Based Courses: Outcomes for Creativity Task Performance.” Journal of Interior Design, vol. 42, no. 4, 2017, pp. 5–27, https://doi.org/10.1111/joid.12104.
Kurt, Sevinc. “Assessing the Quality of Architecture Schools.” Quality & Quantity, vol. 52, no. 1, 2018, pp. 863–888, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-018-0695-8.
Stead, Naomi, et al. “Well-Being in Architectural Education: Theory-Building, Reflexive Methodology, and the ‘Hidden Curriculum.’” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 76, no. 1, 1984, pp. 85–97, https://doi.org/10.1080/10464883.2022.2017699.
