Why is Architecture School Detrimental to Student Health?

“Architecture is like a marathon. You don’t have time for breaks, you just keep running.”

That’s what one of the higher ups in the USC Architecture program told us. Imagine being a first year, already experiencing burnout at the beginning of a five year program and being told 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!

“All the hours you spend in studio are adding up to the 10,000 hours you need to master your architectural craft.”

Glad to know my all-nighters are beneficial, even when I fall asleep in class or start to feel sick from exhaustion. I know my experience is not one of a kind and is actually ingrained in the architectural community. There is a mindset and understanding that the work never ends and is simply necessary to produce a good project. This hardcore, live breathe and sleep mindset towards architecture is detrimental and leads to a bigger question of the architecture school system.
Architecture schools are basically all studio based, meaning there is an instructor paired with a group of students that regularly critique the student’s 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. It is very different compared to lecture-based courses where it requires listening and simply taking notes to understand the material. The 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, why are architecture majors expected to be born for their career?
All of this leads to the idea 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 ideas of prejudice, perfectionism, 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 it with their students (Stead et al.). Despite all of this, it shouldn’t become so important that students’ health is affected to such a degree. Shouldn’t students realize how much it is affecting them rather than play into these traditions that they are expected to follow. It is difficult hearing how difficult it is to complete an architecture degree, but is it really worth it if you have to sacrifice so much just to keep up?
Sleep is one sacrifice that students are regularly making in order to spend more time on completing a “better” 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, student’s 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.
To combat sleep deprivation, researchers have “suggested that students not sequester themselves in the studio and that design educators and schools teach time management skills” ( King 8). At USC, these suggestions are provided and are implemented through visits from the Kortschak Center for Learning and Creativity. However, suggestions are only that. There is no real change that occurs by telling students to do something they already know. Frankly, its redundant and useless. Especially when besides all of this, they still continue to support the belief that this is the “best preparation for design practice” (King et al. 8). It is frustrating to be told to not follow the advice you have just been given. At what point do I choose my health over my project, my sleep or subpar work just to have something to present at the next class. Do I disappoint my professor and face the consequences or take care of my health so I can somehow eventually catch up to the impossible task. There are only bad choices and it’s difficult to decide which of the lesser evils I will choose every day.
The amount of sleep is regulated by the workload assigned to be completed between one class and another. Although the amount of homework assigned between studio times should be a doable amount, when paired with other time-intensive classes outside of the major, extracurriculars and social life, the workload becomes overwhelming. Somehow the work starts to pile-up and it is hard to keep up once you miss one deadline or fail to deliver for one class period. After you miss one, the assignments and the steps in the projects start to snowball and become difficult to tackle. I speak from experience when I say that although I hate missing a deadline, sometimes it is inevitable, simply because life. It is common to get sick or have an emergency, but with architecture, there is no time to breathe between these classes. After a project is finished, most people would expect to have a short break, at least until the next class. Not with architecture. Right after we finish the last presentation for our pin-up, we jump right into a lecture about the details of the next project. 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 even worse when the presentations start to line-up with tests, especially when both are for architecture. How are we supposed to decide what to dedicate the upcoming week to. Is it better to focus most of our time on the project and accept a mediocre score on the test? Or should we spread ourselves thin trying to achieve good scores at both, only to fall short either way? Knowing that we are constantly expected to deliver something by the next class and when our final projects are, a simple solution could involve “Coordinating assignment due dates with other design faculty” (King et al. 21). They already have to create lesson plans before the semester starts and students have mandatory architecture courses they are required to take each semester. It wouldn’t be difficult to set up a few meetings and space out when these assignments are due rather than have them unfortunately line up and lead to even more stress. This solution can be implemented by many schools, appointing administrators to thoroughly check the syllabus of each class and example course loads for each year. Although they may not be able to intervene with courses outside the architecture program, there should be no reason for deadlines in architecture to overlap.
Many solutions and methods already exist, but unfortunately only tackle the results of the problems. Student unions may create events such as “‘a therapy animal visit, free weekly yoga sessions, mid-day de-stressor events in studio,’ galas and catered studio dinners” (Stead et al. 88) But how is this enough when schools across the globe are experiencing “an ‘epidemic of mental illness among students,’ and a student body faced with ‘dread’ and ‘crippling anxiety’” (Stead et al. 87). The United States is not the only country with high-pressure architecture schools. Schools in Australia and the UK experience similar reviews from its students, who are suffering “poor mental health” and looking for better solutions to improve the well-being of their students (Stead et al. 88). To help students, schools must start to be proactive and change the root cause of the problem, instead of relying on reactionary solutions. These are temporary and don’t truly make a difference in the overall student experience, and instead dismiss the real issues at hand.
I think that it all returns to the hidden curriculum. The constant idea that this 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
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.