Excerpt from:
deans (Bannister, 1954). Some
American Architectural
Education:
The Historians' Views
Introduction
With each history of American
architectural education, historians offer
interpretations that advance knowledge
about architectural education and serve their
own personal and professional agendas.
Some histories serve professional
organizations or the institutions the
historians represent (Saylor, 1957). Others
serve a particular contingent of the
profession's education or practice arms, a
particular readership, or publisher
(Bannister, 1954; Jones, 1989). In every
case, historians also serve their own
interests, personal values and biases giving
each history a distinctive flavor, tempering
its relative credibility and attracting different
readerships. The historians are
socio-culturally diverse and carry values
based on age, gender, and the prevailing
ideas of their various disciplines. Their
agendas are evident in the questions they
raise and the themes they choose to develop.
They are apparent in the indices of change
and the chronology of significant events they
select. They are also manifest in the
definition of architectural education from
which their histories stem.
Historians view architectural education
through numerous historiographical bases.
Some view the history of architectural
education as predominantly a story of great
men engaged in heroic acts at great
institutions, like the first architecture school
interpretations amplify tensions which have
historically existed between education and
practice (Jones, 1989). Others emphasize
the power and influence of the architectural
profession and the organizations that
orchestrate architectural education, for
example, The American Institute of
Architects (AIA), (Saylor, 1957). Yet
others view the history of architectural
education as part of larger social, political,
economic, educational and cultural
movements which have swept the United
States in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries (Weatherhead, 1941; Larson, 1977;
Bledstein, 1978). However, rarely does an
author provide a canonical form of the
historiography, rather, each history is a
hybrid.
The interpretations that historians share
and those that differ affect the collective
understanding of architectural education's
history, though in different ways.
Consensus among historians more deeply
embeds beliefs into the history.
Conversely, new analyses create additional
dimensions to architectural education's
history. Equally important for the
historians, it differentiates them from their
predecessors.
BACKGROUND OF THE HISTORIANS
OF ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION
Who are the historians of architectural
education? In some cases, they are
students writing doctoral dissertations
(Weatherhead, 1941; Larson 1977; Jones,
1989). In others, they are faculty
undertaking scholarly endeavors (Gutman,
1988), grants by foundations (Bosworth and
Jones, 1932) or funded commissions
(Larson, 1983). They are architecture
department administrators representing their
academic and professional associations
(Jones, 1945). Or, they are architects who
represent the profession and its
organizations (Bannister, 1954; Saylor,
1957). Before turning to the varying
themes, definitions, chronologies, and
indices of change these historians use, brief
backgrounds through which their agendas
are assessed should be useful. Frank
H. Bosworth and Roy Childs Jones were the
authors of A Study of Architecture Schools,
1929-1932. At that time, Jones was the
head of the department of architecture at the
University of Minnesota. Bosworth was the
former dean and current professor of
architecture at Cornell University. The
study was undertaken for the Association of
Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA),
the first of its kind by the organization and
the first important history of architectural
education. It was funded by the Carnegie
Corporation of New York.
Arthur Clason Weatherhead was the
author of The History of Collegiate
Education in Architecture in the United
States, a 1941 dissertation submitted in
political science, philosophy, and pure
science at Columbia University. Little
other data was found about Weatherhead.
Roy Child Jones, FAIA who was
co-author of the first cited study, was author
of the National Architectural Accrediting
Board (NAAB) Report - 1945. Jones, a
participant in three major studies of
architectural education, was at this point, a
Fellow of the American Institute of
Architects (AIA) (an exclusive honor for the
times) and National Architectural
Accrediting Board President, as well as
Dean of the School of Architecture at The
University of Minnesota.
Turpin Bannister, the author and editor of
The Architect at Mid-Century: Evolution
and Achievement was architecture dean at
a number of colleges including The
University of Illinois, The University of
Florida, and Auburn University. He was a
respected architectural historian,
practitioner, teacher, and author of
architectural dictionaries and textbooks.
Like many administrators of his day, he
was actively involved in the AIA and served
in leadership capacities on AIA national
committees.
Henry Saylor, FAIA was the author of
The AIA's First Hundred Years, written in
1957. Saylor was a well-known author of
architectural books, wrote an architectural
dictionary, and edited numerous magazines
from early in the twentieth century. He was
called the "dean of architectural editors",
published his own architectural magazine
briefly, and served as editor of the AIA
Journal, the magazine of the professional
association. He left the AIA to return to
practice, during which time he also authored
this history. Like Jones, he was a Fellow of
the AIA. Notably, the cited history was
written in 45 days, as a centennial
supplement of the AIA Journal.
Robert Geddes, former professor and
dean at Princeton University is an important
contemporary architect. Geddes was
co-author of A Study of Education for
Environmental Design, better known as
"The Princeton Report", published in 1967,
and funded by the AIA. The report has had
substantial impact on architectural education
since that time. His lecture cited,
"Reflections on the Start of the Century" was
given at the Association of Collegiate
Schools of Architecture Administrators
Conference in Key West, Florida in
November 1988.
Magali Larson is author of The Rise of
Professionalism, A Sociological Analysis,
and "Emblem and Exception: The Historical
Definition of the Architect's Professional
Role". The former was Larson's
dissertation at University of California at
Berkeley, completed in 1977. The latter is
an article written in 1983 while on the
sociology faculty at Temple University
where she still teaches and engages in
research on the architectural profession.
Michael Anthony Jones is the author of
Models for Educating Architects in this
Century and the Next, a dissertation in
architecture completed in 1989, from the
College of Architecture at Georgia Institute
of Technology. He now serves on the
faculty at Texas Tech University.
Robert Gutman, author of Architectural
Practice: A Critical View, published in
1988, is a sociology professor at Princeton
and Rutgers. Author of numerous books
and articles on architects and their
education, Gutman is a frequent lecturer
nationally at universities and conferences of
architects and architectural educators.
It is notable that most of the historians of
architectural education are not historians per
se. Though some use canonical historical
research methodologies for their work, for
the most part, they are writers of particular
histories rather than historians in any
disciplinary sense. The diversified
backgrounds of these "major" authors
suggests something of the variety of
interpretations they bring to their historical
themes. It may also suggest that if this truly
constitutes a major body of the work on the
subject, then, the history of architectural
education has been little studied indeed.
The work of other historians, specifically
social historians of professions, will also be
cited throughout the essay to place these
historians in context.
QUESTIONS THE HISTORIANS
SOUGHT TO ADDRESS
Over time, the questions that the
historians have sought to address have
shifted substantively. Usually, they reflect
scholarly interests. They also mirror the
prevailing paradigms of the time,
circumstances of the historian, or the needs
of those funding the study. In each text,
questions have been addressed both
explicitly and implicitly.
A Study of Architectural Schools
1929-1932 is a case in point. Ostensibly,
Bosworth and Jones set out to provide
American architectural education's first
descriptive history. They gathered data
about the schools, their students, faculty,
curriculum, teaching methodologies, the
relationship of architectural education to the
university and to the profession and how
each factor had changed over time. Their
explicit purpose was to document the history
and current state of architectural education.
However, the study had implicit purposes
that come to light when concurrent studies
of professional education are taken into
account (Flexner Report on medicine, 1910;
Reed Report on legal education, 1921; and
the report on dental education). The
Flexner Report is generally regarded as a
seminal moment in the history of medical
education; a point at which it became
centrally controlled by the profession,
thereby giving the medical profession a
"monopoly of competence" (Larson, 1977).
Like the Flexner Report, A Study of
Architectural Schools 1929-1932 was
underwritten by the Carnegie Foundation.
Similar revolutionary results in architecture
may have been anticipated (1). Like the
Flexner Report, Bosworth and Jones point to
the disparity of resources (human, curricular,
and physical plant) which characterize the
schools at that time. They suggest that the
continuing disparity will have a deleterious
effect upon architectural education.
Through identifying the gross disparity of
resources in medical education, the weak
schools were eventually eliminated.
However, Bosworth and Jones' work did not
produce the same result. More similar to
the Reed Report for legal education, its
effects were minimal. To answer why, the
politics of the study must be considered.
Unlike Flexner's relative detachment from
the medical profession, the integral
relationship of the architectural historians to
the ACSA proved problematic to a rigorous
critical analysis that might have proposed
tighter quality control on the schools. The
ACSA was a body established for the
fellowship of architectural schools. Both
Bosworth and Jones represented member
schools in the organization's fragile early
years.
Arthur Clason Weatherhead's historical
dissertation, The History of Collegiate
Education in Architecture in the United
States, provides a description of
architectural education a decade later. In
addition, Weatherhead's work offers the first
body of truly critical inquiry and the 1941
text reflects contemporaneous "systems"
thinking in other disciplines.
Due to the nature of the times,...there is a
need for a careful analysis of the sources
and background of all features of the system
as they exist.
In Weatherhead's conception,
architectural education can be analyzed as a
system, much like other analyses by doctoral
candidates and their mentors in other
disciplines at Columbia University. The
questions addressed provide contextual
interpretations as well as systemic. He asks
what role the larger American context
played in the formation and development of
the schools. What were the internal
problems confronting the schools during
their first formative period? How were the
schools able to progress from relatively
small unimportant departments of larger
university units to a position of
administrative rank and prominence in their
respective institutions? The need to
develop contextual understanding may have
been a product of Weatherhead's philosophic
foundation as well as a product of his own
context. Major American universities like
Columbia were the contexts for operations
research, Marxist economic interpretations,
and other contextual filters for American
cultural phenomena in the 1930s. This is a
history with very different sensitivities than
its predecessor. At the time of the
Bosworth and Jones descriptive study, the
survival of architectural education may have
been a paramount concern. The
predominant educational path to becoming
an architect was via apprenticeship rather
than through formal higher education.
Weatherhead's critical study of academic
structure may suggest that architectural
education's institutionalization and
consequently its self-perpetuation had been
reached (2).
The history of architectural education
forms several chapters of the two volume
account of American architects, their
history, and practices in The Architect at
Mid-Century by Turpin Bannister. The
1954 work built upon and cited both of the
preceding histories. Bannister continues
exploring questions about the linkage
between European models of academic
architectural training and their development
in American schools of architecture. He
adds to the history by addressing questions
concerning the profession's move from
favoring apprenticeship and the atelier
(evening studios given by architects) to
higher education to train its initiates. A
distinction between training and education
emerged in the professional literature at this
time and is reflected in Bannister's text as
well. Further, Bannister is keenly interested
in the continuing education of the architect,
and devotes substantial attention to the
architect's training after graduation.
Though this is not the first appeal for the
profession's commitment to life-long
learning (Hudnut, 1942), it may be the first
that received widespread readership and
acknowledgment by AIA leadership.
Bannister splits from his academic peers
over the issue of leadership: who leads in
ideological changes that will impact the
profession? The profession or education?
Bannister questions the ways in which
architectural education changes have
occurred. In response, he posits answers
which would be generally acceptable to the
professional organization's relatively
conservative leadership. The work was
underwritten by the AIA and reflects
continuing yet unwritten policy of being
descriptive and non-critical. It is a stand
that some contemporary writers of
architectural education's history have found
complacent (Geddes, 1988).
In Henry Saylor's The First Hundred
Years of the AIA, historical questions
germane to the centennial celebration are
addressed. The work was commissioned by
the AIA and served to inform AIA members
about the significant value that the
professional organization had created for the
profession and society during its century of
existence. The 1957 text was seemingly
commissioned late and written quickly for
publication, reputedly in six weeks. Saylor
was then recent past-editor of the AIA
Journal, the AIA's monthly magazine. He
addressed the importance of the AIA's role
in the history of architectural education.
The portions of the text devoted to
architectural education are replete with
instances of AIA members starting and
sustaining schools of architecture.
Similarly, the AIA Committee on
Education's role and influence is amplified.
For other historians, the fact of their
membership would have been less, if at all,
relevant. However, for Saylor, it was a
consequential factor of those who founded
the first schools. Though Saylor was
well-known for several literary
accomplishments in architecture, most
notably his dictionary of architecture, The
First One Hundred Years of the AIA is not
noted for its scholarship. It is a narrowly
focussed effort, unencumbered by insights
from previous studies.
Several current social historians of
professions, have included architecture in
their writings. They too have asked
questions germane to the history of
architectural education and have broadened
the scope of possible inquiry by placing
architectural education in the context of
education for the professions, as well as in
the contexts of larger cultural, social, and
political movements.
In The Rise of Professionalism, A
Sociological Analysis, Magali Sarfatti
Larson viewed professions and the
educational system on which they depend
through a Marxist economic lens. She
inquired about the economic forces that led
to the rise of the professions - conditions of
the marketplace in nineteenth and twentieth
century America, the consequent values of
the subculture of professionals, and the
means by which professionals collectively
achieved their goals. In Larson's view, the
collective will to achieve is synonymous
with the unconscious desire for dominance.
The questions addressed reveal a
historiographical interpretation based upon a
power and influence model for
understanding the history of professional
education. In that regard, Larson's context,
may have played an important role. Larson
was a Vietnam War-era student at Berkeley.
Critical political inquiry about American
values were typical at Berkeley and many
similar institutions at the time. The context
became the filter through which Larson
interpreted the evolution of American higher
education. Addressing questions of
collusion between government, business,
and higher education of professions in
creating social inequality in America would
have been both timely and de rigueur.
Similarly, Burton Bledstein, author of
The Culture of Professionalism: The
Middle Class and the Development of
Higher Education in America, inquires about
the relationship of the middle class and
higher education. Why did the middle class
cultivate and generously support the
American university? What impacts did the
middle class have upon its distinctive
character and structure? Further, he asks,
how did society make professional behavior
accountable to the public without curtailing
the independence upon which creative skills
and the imaginative use of knowledge
depend? For Bledstein, architectural
education, like all professional education,
emerged in the university during the
mid-nineteenth century to support the
middle class' drive for status, compensation,
and independence. Written
contemporaneously with Larson's text,
Bledstein's questions may likewise reflect
those most interesting to his constituencies,
both middle class baby-boomer students at
the University of Illinois - Chicago and
faculty peers.
The critical sociological inquiry of Robert
Gutman, is directed specifically at
architectural education and the profession.
In his recent text, Architectural Practice: A
Critical View, Gutman, a sociology
professor at Rutgers and on the architecture
faculty at Princeton, asked questions about
the appropriate relationship of education and
the profession - the continuing schism of
theory and practice, the number of students,
the supply/demand and preparedness of
graduates, and administrative issues
internal to architectural education. The
historical content of the text was used as a
means to answer questions about the
profession's present and future. Are too
many graduating for the health of the
profession? What will be the impact?
What internal pressures within the university
are causing the graduation of so many?
What societal factors make architectural
education so attractive? Contextually,
Gutman's inquiry may be seen against the
backdrop of the 1980s unprecedented
economic successes for American architects.
Increasingly business notions of the
profession - marketing, supply and demand,
networking, liability, etc. - become
legitimate underpinnings for questions to be
addressed about architectural education.
In Robert Geddes lecture "Reflections at
the Start of the Century", the critical
questions concern exemplary historic
models of architectural education and their
appropriateness today. Geddes asked, what
have been the successful models of
architectural education during the twentieth
century? Are they relevant? What future
courses for architectural education do they
suggest? How have education and practice
acted interdependently? Are the current
maladies of practice perpetuated in
architectural education? Among the
historians, Geddes stands out as a premier
practitioner and educator. For some, he is
the ideal model of the late twentieth century
architect with feet firmly planted in both
practice and the academy. He is an
exemplar of the best that the "old guard" had
to offer in architectural education.
Contextually, the questions addressed are
undergirded by assumptions that all relevant
models from the past can be found in the
historically exemplary institutions at which
Geddes has been a moving force. The
questions suggest an historiography focussed
on the roles of the great men and their
institutions. With the increasing diversity
of architectural education and the seemingly
unpredictable distribution of talented
students and faculty alike, it may be an
increasingly problematic history.

This summary presentation of the were leaders with stakes in architectural

questions addressed by architectural
education historians demonstrates notable
similarities and differences among the
historians. They differ in the varying
degrees of descriptive versus analytical
content of their efforts. They also differ in
the degrees to which previous work has been
used as a catalyst for new questions. The
critical inquiry of a dissertation differed
from those of the other studies.
Significantly different political ideologies
and relationships of the authors to
architectural education are apparent in the
questions addressed. Bosworth and Jones
education's future. Critical analysis of the
infant enterprise might have undermined
their careers as well as those they
represented. They tried to foster
architectural education, not limit it. In
contrast, Weatherhead was a student outside
the emerging power structure of
architectural education, with neither a stake
in the preservation of architectural education
nor power to change it.
Conversely, contextually responsiveness
characterizes each of the histories.
Historian's questions reflect prevailing
values evident in their larger societal
contexts. Both the time of and the critical
distance from architectural education affect
the analytical rigor of each study's questions.
Finally, in each there is an implicit question
addressed concerning the power of a study to
change the course of professional education.
For some, it is an opportunity embedded in
the construct of the study itself (Bosworth
and Jones, 1932; Bannister, 1954).
However, substantive effects have been
minimal.
THE THEMES OF HISTORIANS OF
ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION
Over time and with the maturation of
architectural education in the university, the
themes that the historians have developed
have likewise shifted substantively. Those
shifts have occurred due to expanding areas
of inquiry and expanding databases of
available information. The shifts have also
followed the shifting agendas of their
historians and the perceived demands of the
contexts in which these historians have
found themselves.
Some histories, like Saylor's are
thematically monolithic. Their agendas and
themes are one. History serves to affirm
and justify the professional organization's
continuation. Architectural education
resulted from the impact of the AIA and its
membership throughout the history. The
theme is clear, and the historian's intention
transparent.
Others historians are similarly reductive.
In both of Robert Geddes'
historically-related pieces, history is used
to explain contemporaneous crises in the
profession. In 1967, the crisis that had
evolved was the irrelevance of the
curriculum to the current needs of society
and the profession, ergo, the need for
curricular shift to architectural education as
graduate-level studies. In 1988, the problems
in architecture have become lodged in the
profession and echoed in the schools.
Obsessive originality, obsessive
privatization of property, and an obsessive
disjointed incrementalism in the way cities
and towns are built have become the ills of
the profession and the environment, and
architectural education is doing little to heal
them (3).
In his lecture "Reflections on the Start of
the Century", Geddes prescribed from the
two historical schools of thought about
architectural education that, he asserted,
have dominated architectural education
since its major shift in the 1930s: (1) the
establishment of a relationship between
architecture and the humanities, notably,
history (Hudnut, 1942): and (2) the city as a
laboratory for architecture, thus architecture
as a part of the sciences (attributed to
Holmes Perkins, former Dean at the
University of Pennsylvania). Presented as a
lecture, this particular history reduced eighty
years of history into a single duality, leaving
larger contextual issues, and smaller
education-specific issues out of its themes.
Other historians' works are
more thematically diverse and
reflect broad inquiry.
Weatherhead's hybrid
historiography encompasses a
variety of themes. Great men
created great institutions and
attracted students.
Weatherhead writes,
This history is one which is so dependent
upon the personalities of great leaders
......in each of the individual schools, it is a
story of unusual personal sacrifice and
loyalty to the ideals of the profession.
 For him, the economic, political, and
ideological contexts of architectural
education have been critical to each phase of
development. In addition, an intellectual
history is part of the hybrid. Important
philosophic texts are a part of an architect's
education. Weatherhead states, "In many
respects, the schools have attained a
position in accordance with the best
educational thought of the time." Further,
Weatherhead asks questions about the
organizational history of architectural
education. He asserts that the growing
emphasis upon the national organization, the
tendency toward standardization, and the
greater number of schools, caused individual
institutions to become far less important in
the latter periods, thereby diminishing the
roles of the elites in the history.
Similarly, Bannister's themes suggest a
composite historiographical approach.
Movement from an apprenticeship base to
higher education were inevitable outcomes
of economic pressures within the profession
and a response to larger societal pressures.
Bannister's history is also one in which
architectural education is the result of
confluences of great men, great books and
great institutions, both European and
American. Architectural education is an
inclusive process embracing several
complementary stages: education,
internship, and continuing professional
education. It is an education that should
strive to prepare graduates who could grow
to professional maturity. Bannister's
themes show a keen sensitivity to the needs
of the profession and his AIA sponsors (4).
Rich thematic tapestries of the
professions and professional education are
written by social historians. Their writings
have provided general themes through which
architectural education can be better
understood and, in each case, their
personal/professional agendas can be
surmised.
Burton Bledstein's perspective is
exemplary. For him, there is an integral
historic relationship between the American
middle class, the professions, and higher
education. The American middle class has
been a culture of strivers; striving for status,
compensation, and independence by virtue
of the acquisition of expertise. The
American university, he asserts, came into
existence to serve and promote these middle
class drives for professional authority in
society, and it has remained there, perhaps
even in Bledstein's classroom (5). The text
may also be read as a kind of mid-1970s
period piece, when middle class
baby-boomers attended college en masse,
American values were being turned over,
histories were being rewritten, and heroes
were being demythified by scholars. Class,
race, and gender interpretations were used to
write new American histories. Some, like
Bledstein's ascribed developments not so
much to heroic individuals as to an entire
class. Notably, it was the children of the
middle class that were largely part of the
turmoil of the day. It is also notable that
they largely populated the college classroom
of the mid-1970s. They would seem to
have represented a natural constituency for
this text and its bias (6).
Larson's themes are embedded in a dense
academic text. Beyond synthesizing
information from a broad spectrum, her
themes affirm a marxist interpretation of the
peculiarly American phenomenon of
professions. For Larson, there is a causal
relationship between the evolving nature of
capitalism and the consequent rise of the
professions in America. American
institutions formed or transformed with the
professions: federal government, business,
labor (industrial trade unions), and the
education system. Similar to Bledstein,
Larson asserts that the professional project
fundamentally transformed skilled labor into
something we call "expertise". And
through expertise, the middle
class/bourgeoisie acquired the semblances of
power and status. For Larson, the creation
of this marketable expertise can be seen as a
crucial element in the structure of modern
inequality.
Larson's themes are valuable to an
understanding of the history of American
architectural education because they shed a
wholly new light on who architects have
been in the professional project and the roles
they continue to play in its perpetuation.
Professions, she contends, tie educational
credentials to occupational functions as a
meritocratic legitimization of social
inequality. Larson writes concurrently with
Bledstein, though at a more highly
politicized institution, a university which
played a large role in questioning the
American reality in the 1970s. To some
extent, Larson shared those values and wrote
to meet the expectations of a political
science faculty at Berkeley from a doctoral
candidate in the 1970s?
In summary, three thematic areas are
prevalent in the histories of architectural
education. First, there is a seemingly
organic metaphor for architectural
education. It has responded to both internal
and external forces and there has been
"survival of the fitting" (Morgan, 1986).
Second, each history asserts that the
development of architectural education can
be presented as a series of rational responses
to perceived needs or pressures. With the
exception of Bledstein and Larson, the social
historians, none have considered that
irrational motives, selfish agendas, or
complex indeterminate systems might have
precluded the likelihood of explanation with
any certainty (Cziko, 1989). Third, like the
questions addressed, the themes are products
of the historians' contexts whether they are
universities, funding sources, or professional
affiliations.
INDICES OF CHANGE
The units that historians have used to
measure change in architectural education
reflect both varying syntheses of selected
data as well as the differing scopes of their
own agendas. Different yardsticks yield
different measurements. Further, the units
of measurement determine the measurement
itself (Cziko).
For Weatherhead, change in architectural
education is measured in formative periods
marked by paradigm shifts in social values
(i.e., degrees as credentials to acquire
status), technology (the industrial
revolution), business (monopoly capitalism
giving way to corporate capitalism), and
higher education (from engineering to arts
based architectural education). Curricula,
department organization, and the character
of instruction change within each formative
period. Architectural education's gradual
independence within the university is
marked by movement from dependent
department to independent schools and
colleges of architecture. The appearance
and disappearance of heroic figures signal
the crests and troughs of programs. Efforts
toward standardization are followed by
sweeping movements toward
experimentation. Curricular differences
with engineering programs mark substantive
differentiation for architectural education.
Weatherhead demonstrates that most change
that occurs in the schools trails the major
attitudinal and stylistic changes in the
profession. His indices are generally long
formative periods during which change
results from confluences of circumstances.
A striking contrast is readily available
with the indices of change that Henry Saylor
used sixteen years later. In nearly every
case, changes in American architectural
education can be measured by actions of the
AIA and its leadership. For Saylor, the
founding of the AIA in 1857 is the gateway
for architecture schools to happen ten years
later. All early schools are founded due to
the efforts of AIA members. The efforts of
leaders to create significant institutions, like
those of prominent Chicago architects
McKim and Burnham to organize the
American School of Architecture in Rome,
signal major shifts. Recommendations by
the AIA Committee on Education to the
schools of architecture also form landmarks
against which changes in American
architectural education can be measured (7).
Yet other AIA activities are seen as
substantive in the formation of collateral
organizations that impact architectural
education. The AIA National Convention
enabled the creation of the Association of
Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA).
The National Architectural Accrediting
Board was organized by the AIA, ACSA,
and the National Council of Architectural
Registration Boards (NCARB) to raise the
standards of architectural college courses.
The initiation of a mentoring system
ultimately led to a national architects in
training and internship program managed by
the AIA and NCARB. Thus, the creation of
policy by the professional association or
organization driven activity were Saylor's
indices of significant change.
Though he is also wrote for the
professional organization, Turpin Bannister's
indices were quite different. Acts by
government, broad social movement, and the
tenure of critical leaders provide the
confluence of circumstances whereby
schools of architecture made substantive
change. Government acts like the Morrill
Land Grant Act cleared the way for the
schools to begin. The GI Bill cleared the
way for the mass entrance of students.
Movement from ineffective apprenticeships
to economies of scale of the university-based
design studio enabled the profession to
dramatically accelerate its growth and
competitiveness within the building
industry. Cornell, MIT, and Illinois were
gifted with talented leaders that create fertile
ground from which their programs grow.
Thus, the hybrid nature of his historiography
is further demonstrated in Bannister's
indices.
For Robert Geddes, the indices of change
were the formalization of ideas in the great
institutions (in his case, Harvard, Penn and
Princeton, all of which he either attended,
taught, or led). Change was measured
through great men, the power and ideas they
brought to these institutions, and by
inference, subsequent similar efforts
nationally. For Geddes, the achievement of
departmental autonomy from the rest of
Harvard University rippled through schools
nationally. Experiments with collaborative
professional activity there had similar effect.
The creation of the study of environmental
design, initiated at these same institutions,
signaled the radical departure from the
French ecole methods and curriculum that
characterized architectural education until
the 1960s. Geddes "Princeton Report"
offered methods and languages for
architectural education that likewise
sounded new directions for programs
nationally (8). For Geddes, changes in
continuity, scope, method, and connection to
reality were indices whereby architectural
education's history could be measured.
The social historians measured change in
professional education through larger
socio-political indices. Burton Bledstein
measured the changes of American middle
class values to index differences in the
publics' and professions' relationships to
higher education. Steps toward the
acquisition of status, compensation, and
independence were critical. Differentiation
from artisans, abandonment of
apprenticeship, formation of professional
associations and professional education, and
creating licensure each provided substantive
measures (9). Over time, new values
became pervasive and were ultimately
institutionalized.
Social historian Magali Larson marked
change in professional education citing both
apparent and actual changes.
apparently classless organizations
transmuted power into authority by invoking
the legitimacy of expertise, thereby
creating a new set of ideological
legitimizations of inequality.
Her combined political and socio-economic
indices marked the institutionalization of
social inequality that characterized the rise
of the professions in America. Her indices
of change were periods of time that had
distinct values and equally distinct internal
contradictions or bitter ironies. Regimes
with apparently virtuous mandates are
characterized by corrupt realities (Lincoln's
administration, for example, declared
emancipation while the crystallization of
status and social hierarchy was being
accomplished) (10). Larson also measured
change with the maturation of the
professions. Their infancy was
characterized by the formation of
associations. Adolescence was seen in the
collective organization for power by the
professions and maturity witnessed in
corporate capitalism and the consolidation of
professional power.
There is significant distinction among the
indices of these historians. Formative
periods, policies of the AIA, acts of
government, the tenure of critical leaders,
the formalization of great ideas, changes in
middle class values, or economic strategies
to perpetuate social inequality are all used to
measure change in architectural education.
These "yardsticks" are as much reflections of
historians' purposes in writing histories as
they are matters of fact. They support
themes and they were used to support
causes, contexts, and sponsors.
HISTORIANS' CHRONOLOGIES OF
SIGNIFICANT EVENTS
Like the themes, indices of change, and
questions addressed, chronologies reveal not
only historians' climactic points and seminal
moments in their subject. Equally, they
affirm the historians' underlying purposes.
For some, extended periods of time with
evolutionary development and the accretion
of critical masses of support constitute the
chronology of historically noteworthy
"events". For others, numerous seemingly
smaller incidents form the chronology.
For Arthur Clason Weatherhead,
architectural education's significant dates
were both internal and external to the
architectural education "system". For him,
there were three distinct periods in the
history of American architectural education,
each of which corresponds to a major
division in the history of American
architecture (11). However, their essential
characteristics were largely the products of
the successive social and economic
movements in this country. For
Weatherhead, it is the larger context that
determines the critical moments.
Turpin Bannister prefaces the American
chronology with the European. The
important events are the establishment of
significant institutions (the Ecole des Beaux
Arts in Paris, for example) and enactment of
significant concepts of education (pupillage
in England). The American chronology is a
series of seminal events in four subject
areas: (1) foundings of programs and
specific curricular types; (2) tenures of
significant architects at important
institutions; (3) significant government acts;
and (4) the foundings of significant
architectural education organizations,
policies, and reports (12). In contrast to
Weatherhead, nearly the entire chronology is
specific to a history of the schools and the
events that directly would have effected
them. The broader context is not
considered an important attribute of the
chronology.
Saylor's chronology predictably suggests
that the major breaks in time are all
connected to specific AIA resolutions,
events, interventions, or recommendations
(13). All events of consequence to
architectural education were those catalyzed
by the AIA.
For Robert Geddes, time is punctuated by
both the presence of great men shifting the
directions of the great institutions and by
landmark publications internal to
architectural education. In 1946, with new
leadership, Harvard made a significant turn
toward autonomy from the rest of the
university, experimenting with collaborative
professional activity, and inspiring other
schools to like activity. A new curriculum
at Princeton broadened architectural studies
to include environmental design and had like
effects. For Geddes, Bannister's The
Architect at Mid-Century, is a landmark
publication. However, it is a landmark "lost
opportunity" To him, it was a complacent
document, negligent because it missed its
opportunity to create significant change. As
a consequence, increased disassociation
between the profession and education
ensued. In contrast, Geddes pointed to his
own comparatively successful event of his
own publication a decade later. Rapport
between the AIA and ACSA was poor. The
AIA was probing into education
distrustfully. Hundreds of regional
conference were being held about
architectural education sharply focussed on
its failings. The "Princeton Report" offered
new methods and languages for architectural
education and briefly assuaged the tensions
between education and practice (14).
Bledstein and Larson, the social
historians considered longer periods, though
their periods are specific to social and
economic histories respectively. Bledstein's
identified eras of professional education
characterized by specific collective action
(for example, the "guilded age" during
which professional associations were
formed) (15). Larson's chronology included
periods specific to individual professions
(16) and generalizable across the
professions. Invariably, the seminal
moments reinforced the theme of the
professions' role in institutionalizing social
inequality. Each period had internal
paradoxes, disturbing ironies, and rhetoric
that substantiate the theme. Periods overlap
in Larson's chronology due to varying
degrees of impact from larger external
factors and difficulty in determining actual
culminating points. Thus, historians
establish chronologies internal and external
to architectural education. The internal
chronologies seem necessarily great
person-oriented, great institution-oriented, or
significant manifesto-oriented. The external
chronologies are more broadly issue, value,
or policy-oriented. Both types have their
internal paradoxes. The external events are
often identified as moments in time, though
they usually reflect many years of work
(Geddes and Spring's 1968 study followed
nearly ten years of work by various
committees). Conversely, internal acts are
often aggrandized, presented with a quality
of enduring, though ironically they can be
pinned to a relatively brief moment.
SUMMARY AND IMPLICIT
DEFINITIONS OF ARCHITECTURAL
EDUCATION
From the questions addressed, themes,
indices of change, and chronologies that
historians use, implicit definitions for
architectural education emerge. Inevitably,
they reaffirm the aforementioned
observation of dual purposes. For some,
architectural education is narrowly defined
by that which is offered in university-based
professional education programs. For
others, broader or more life-long definitions
are implied, if not overtly stated.
Implicit in Weatherhead's text is the
belief that collegiate schools of architecture
are the only important factor in the history
of formal architectural education.
Whatever they teach is architectural
education.
Bannister frames his definition of
architectural education in the broader
education terms, referring to Whitehead's
The Aims of Education. Bannister writes,
Education is the acquisition of the
art of the utilization of
knowledge......It must impart a body
of meaningful facts and concepts and
expound the principles which
interrelate these data. It must
develop those skills, insights, and
value standards which will enable
knowledge and principles to be
applied most effectively to the
problems of purposeful living. In its
fullest scope, therefore, education far
from being limited to formal
schooling, continues as long as
experience teaches. Its ultimate
goal is understanding, judgment,
wisdom, foresight, and culture.
For Bannister, the definition includes the
architects' training as an interns and
professional development initiatives
architects makes during their professional
lives. He writes,
The objective of architectural
education becomes the development
of architects, who, as enlightened
individuals, responsible citizens, and
resourceful professional men, will
serve their society in attaining a
worthy architecture.
For Saylor, like Weatherhead, that which
takes place within the school of architecture
is architectural education. However, once
again, the definition is permeated by the
AIA's needs. Further, the implicit
definition seems subject to change.
Architectural education is that which
changes to meet the professional
organization's recommendations.
Geddes implicit definition is somewhat
similar to Weatherhead and Saylor.
Architectural education is a changing
phenomena responding the needs of society
and the profession. And in its
responsiveness, it enables the student.
Architectural education is the learning of
relevant curriculum taught using relevant
methodologies by people operating out of an
understanding of those operative behaviors
and ideas. It is always current, strives to
improve, and is progressive. For Geddes,
architectural education most effectively
occurs at the "consequential" institutions.
For Bledstein, education is a tool that the
middle class used to enabled
professionalization. Education was "an
instrument of ambition and a vehicle to
status in an occupational world." The
middle class saw independence,
self-reliance, natural accountability, and
self-determination applied to education as
well as to every other sphere of social life.
Higher education gave a young man an
undeniable advantage in both career and
social mobility. Thus, education into the
professions became:
the cultural process by which the middle
class in America matured and defined
itself......(developed its) own forms of
self-expression, peculiar ideas, and devices
for self-discipline.......(and) a set of learned
values and habitual responses by which
middle class individuals shaped their
emotional needs and measured their powers
of intelligence.
For him, the schools served to legitimize
middle class authority an attribute of the
definition that would have affirmed and
disturbed Bledstein's constituencies.
Similarly, for Larson, education is a
component of the system of professionalism.
When it is combined with appropriate
credentialing, it results in expertise, a
marketable commodity. It also serves a
gate-keeping function differentiating
professional "haves" from "have nots".
The historians whose views this paper
has considered, undertook their work
between 1930 and 1990. They began roughly
fifty years after the first schools were formed
and have continued with an irregular
unpredictability since then. Early
historians, like pioneers, grappled with
creating order out of chaos. Their
histories, laden with data and statistics,
attempted to not only shed new light on
architectural education; they attempted to
give a legitimacy to the enterprise. Later
historians, those with more critical distance
and those with the facility for
interdisciplinary crossover have deepened
the field with more penetrating critical
inquiry. As interdisciplinary methodologies
are adopted by historians of architectural
education, this body of work will rapidly
grow. Already, the impacts of
deconstruction from literary criticism and
chaos theory from physics are appearing in
lectures and writing by architectural
scholars. The comparative richness of their
syntheses has not been a product of age or
the experience of these historians, nor will it
be for those historians who follow. Rather,
it has proved to be a product of time devoted
to the study, varying sensitivity to the
relationship of the study to its context, and
the ability to seamlessly web personal and
professional purposes.
FOOTNOTES
Questions Addressed footnotes
1. Unlike the Flexner Report, however, the
architectural education study was not
initiated by the profession, but by the
Association of Collegiate Schools of
Architecture (ACSA), then, an infant
organization of the schools, colleges, and
departments of architecture. The source
point may account for the very different
impact of the study. Two speculations are
suggested. First, perhaps the profession did
not undertake the studies because the
profession was enjoying a period of relative
prosperity, thus the need for change was not
apparent. Second, a study equal in
proportions and impact to the Flexner
Report would have given the ACSA (and the
study's authors) significant credence with the
profession and among the many departments
of architecture who were not yet members.
However, that was not to be.
Neither Boswell nor Jones were
historians. Nonetheless, there is significant
historical content in their work and it
established for the first time, American
architectural education's brief history.
Further, it is notable that the study, which
took ten years from inception to completion,
follows the collapse of efforts to standardize
architectural education within a single
academic model. Ten years earlier the
study would have coincided with the
"Standards Minima" (an act by important
members of the profession that had basically
standardized architectural education) and
might have been prescriptive rather than
descriptive. However, because the study
was released during the downturn in efforts
to standardize architectural education, and
coincided with new ideas in architectural
education emerging with European
architecture that swept the profession and
schools from the late 1920s through the
1930s, its limited impacts were inevitable.
2. It may also suggest that changes in
academic structure accompanied curricular
changes. Many schools had moved away
from the standardized Beaux Arts
curriculum and onto more experimental
"modernist" models of architectural
education; a movement that disempowered
the New York establishment dominating
architectural education.
Themes footnotes
3. To solve these contemporary maladies,
Geddes asserts, architects must emphasize
group practice and correspondingly, the
schools must emphasize team work.
Leadership and creativity must be focussed
upon societal considerations, more than
aesthetics. Architects must debate the value
and role of originality in design; that is,
originality versus appropriateness and an
enduring vision. For Geddes, practice must
move toward education and both must
become more knowledge-based. Like the
ideal of other professions, architecture and
architectural education must become the art
of acquisition and utilization of knowledge.
"To that end, architects," Geddes strangely
asserts, "must become imperialistic. They
must take the lead. The imperialist model
must replace the interdisciplinary
collaborative model. Architects must be
modern architects, in the classical sense of
the word."
4. Bannister neatly masters these troubled
waters on the profession's behalf. For him,
change in architectural education has
historically implied criticism of the
prevailing methods. Further, he states that
the evolution of content of educational
teaching has long been accepted and
embraced. He writes,
the real significance of educational
experimentation seems to lie in the fact that
it underscores the duty and opportunity of
an alert faculty to seek continuously the
most effective adjustment of educational
process to professional and social needs.
However, he asserts, objective consideration
and systematic redesign have been less
frequently attempted. This suggests that the
changes have been idiosyncratic and
individually driven rather than stemming
from larger organizationally driven
directives. Here, Bannister's organizational
bias to his themes is shown. It is a filter
through which the themes he develops must
be considered.
5. Careerism, competition, the
standardization of rules and the
organization of hierarchies, the obsession
with expansion and growth, professionals
seeking recognition and financial rewards
for their efforts, administrators in the
process of building empires: basically both
the values and arrangements within
American universities have changed little
since 1900.
For Bledstein, there were tradeoffs that the
middle class had to make, however, the
benefits clearly outweighed the costs. He
writes,
what the middle class sacrificed in high
quality, fine craftsmanship, originality, and
durability in the work of its producers, it
gained in the publics strenuous support of
middle class authority and the credibility of
that authority over time.
6. It was an audience whose interests would
have been piqued by thoughts like
the competition of life in America
relentlessly chipped away at the
confidence of individual, it degraded
their intelligence and demoralized
their self-esteem, and no one knew this
better than young men.
Or
schools in America were to establish
objective standards for achievement by
banishing partisanship in mental labor
and eliminating monopolies of thought.
or
from the beginning the ego-satisfying
pretensions of professionalism have been
closer to the heart of the middle class
American than the raw profits of
capitalism.
One may also speculate on the contextual
reasons for Bledstein's position as a faculty
member at the University of Illinois at
Chicago. What were it's publish or perish
dictates? What were its internal
departmental competitions like? Or
similarly, what relationship to the
distinguished faculty up the road at
University of Chicago play?
Indices footnotes
7. The committee recommended that
architects should have to pass an
examination. Similarly, it recommended
that an adequate architectural education
should consist of:
1. a year of preparatory study when this has not
been acquired in school or college;
2. four years in a school of architecture;
3. at least one, and preferably two or three years
studying advanced design in Paris, Rome, or
in American ateliers; and
4. at least a year of travel in Europe.
It also recommended that prerequisite to
receiving a degree in architecture the
candidate should show a reasonable
proficiency in Latin. The committees'
urging schools to step from the four year
course in architecture to five years, is also
seminal to Saylor.
8. It developed performance criteria,
outlined an open/modular/jointed structure
in lieu of a monolithic one. Further it
proposed performance goals:
1. students would exit and be able to work in
present day practice
2. students would comprehend social changes and
growth; and
3. students could formulate concepts of better
architecture and society
9. Educated intelligence and knowledge of
general principles became regarded as more
beneficial than years dedicated to
refining specialized craft skills.
Collectively, the ambitious middle class
persons seeking a professional basis for an
institutional order caused major measurable
change in education. Bledstein writes,
in a nation without an effective apprenticeship
system and without a significant gentry, the
school diploma more and more served as the license
with which an individual sought entry into
the respectability and rewards of a
profession.
For Bledstein, change is measured by
pervasiveness. By 1870, Bledstein writes,
there were more institutions, awarding more
degrees than in all of Europe, signalling the
rapid expansion of the professions, including
architecture. Bledstein notes that between
1870 and 1900, the number of architects
increased fivefold.
10. For instance, a predominance of
local interests, conditions, and markets
characterize "The Distended Society" of the
Jacksonian era. For Larson, it is a period of
common man rhetoric. In reality, social
inequality was being institutionalized. It was
a time that signalled the rise of the political
marketplace. Laissez-faire fused with
democracy was vested with a function of
moral and social restoration. The
professions were in a phase of transition.
An anti-aristocratic public, resentful of the
professions, supported leveling the
movement of professionalization in what
Larson describes as the first powerful
manifestation of anti-intellectualism, and
resentment of monopolized knowledge. As
a consequence, Jacksonian education was
utilitarian and anti-elite. Professions were
regarded as imperfect and undeserving.
By the time of the Civil War, the unequal
distribution of wealth had led to the
crystallization of status and a recognized
social hierarchy. The contemporaneous "age
of associations", signified the birth of
collective effort to crystallize the
professional "project" for Larson that is
resolved in the subsequent era of
"organization resolution" in which those
associations became a fixed part of the
American landscape and enjoined
government regulation as a means of further
support.
Likewise the rise of corporate capitalism
led to the consolidation of professionalism.
Structural changes in society and the nature
of work corresponded to a shift in ideology
toward new forms of legitimization of
power, specifically, the rationality of science
The Progressive era provided yet another
new context and new ideology: efficiency in
the service of moral uplift. It provided the
means of reconciliation between
progressivism and large industrial
corporation in what for Larson is the "expert
era"in which there are new central
institutions of the social order: the
bureaucratic apparatus of the state (including
education), large business corporations, and
the university.
An era of efforts toward standardization
gave way to what Larson identifies as a
"combination movement" arising out of fear
of anarchy and risks of competition.
Finance capitalism, "scientific management"
(scientific expertise as a transcendent
principle and as a potential basis of
professional autonomy), an ideology of
efficiency (science/systematic knowledge
that ultimate was a legitimization of
practical choice and led to the rise of
managers, rise of experts and with
emancipation from class
allegiances/interests) and bureaucratization
(that structural support for diffusion of the
ideology of efficiency, which included:
efficiency, regulation, and expertise).
Chronology footnotes
11. From the Civil War to 1898, there
was industrial and political expansion, free
individual competition, pioneering efforts,
adoption of Ecole des Beaux Arts methods
and Neoclassicism. Next, the period
1898-1925: the age of capitalistic control,
fruition of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in
America and an accompanying eclecticism.
Finally, there was 1925 to the present
(1941), the time of the Modern Movement,
accompanied by the collapse of US
economic system, readjustment of people's
focus from the collective good to the
individual, and all professions in grave
trouble.
12. Example of Bannister's chronology
1814 Jefferson's proposal for a
professional curriculum in architecture
1817 Military Academy at West Point
with an Ecole-like polytechnic
1835 first degrees in Civil Engineering
from Renssalaer
1846 Richard Morris Hunt at Ecole
des Beaux Arts
1852 Yale School of Engineering has a
number of architects graduate from
engineering schools
1862 Morrill Land Grant Act
stimulates first schools of architecture
1868 MIT, Illinois (German models)
and Cornell founded due to Morrill Act
1894 Society of Beaux Arts Architects
formed
1912 Association of Collegiate Schools
of Architecture formed
1914 standards minima begins to
assure standardization of students
1916 Beaux Arts Institute of Design
founded in New York City
1930 ACSA undertakes the first study
of the schools
1932 standards minima abandoned
1936 German Bauhaus founder Walter
Gropius appointed at Harvard
1938 Mies van de Rohe appointed at
Illinois Institute of Technology
1939 Young Goldsmith Report, second
major study of architectural education
1939 National Architectural
Accrediting Board established
 consistently pressed for equivalency
13. There is the period from the between office apprenticeship and the law
founding of the AIA until the founding of school training
the first schools (1857-1868), followed by
period during which AIA members founded
the first schools (1868-1898). 1900 marks
the beginnings of the AIA Committee on
Education recommendations to architectural
education. 1915-1940 marks the era of the Implicit Definitions of Architectural
divestiture of responsibility for architectural Education footnotes continued
education to the ACSA and the other extant
collateral organizations and so forth. 17. Bledstein writes,

14. It developed performance criteria, in a country where there is no titled class, no

outlined an open/modular/jointed structure
in lieu of a monolithic one, and sought, in
Geddes words to establish continuity, scope,
method, and a connection to reality.
15. Civil War to 1900 - the "guilded age"
when professional association mania which
swept the country; 1870-1900 - the
American university became a vital part of
the culture of professionalism in which it
emerged and matured, and so forth.
landed class, no military class, the chief
distinction which popular sentiment can lay
hold of as raising one set of persons above
another is the character of their occupation,
the degree of culture it implies, the extent
to which it gives them an honorable
prominence.....education was an instrument
of ambition and a vehicle to status in an
occupational world.

16. Example. Larson's chronology of

legal education

1870 NYC Bar formed

1878 ABA formed "to make the profession
more respectable"
1880s lawyers begin to appear on
corporate boards
1896 undergraduate degree required at
Harvard before law school (effective 1909)
1899 Harvard: institutes a 3 year law
program with strict examination
1920 2 year college required/ law school
required for the BAR, standardization
begins
1921 ABA requires only high school
graduation until this date. ABA
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