Toward an ideal curriculum to reform architectural education

There is an obvious crisis in the discipline of architecture. Although subject to the general crisis in the practice, architectural education is nevertheless complicit in its cause. This manifestation and the reasons behind it have been discussed for years, to very little avail. The Boyer Report and Gutman's analysis have been received, praised ... and largely ignored.

While minor reforms have filtered through certain schools, the general trend has continued to be self-referential, intellectual isolation and a general distancing from the needs of society and the natural environment. There has certainly not been anything like a reform proposal at the level of a curriculum entire. It seems that those in a position to effect change and who would wish to do so, have been bound by institutional inertia, faculty territoriality, and accreditation criteria.

With this in mind, and encouraged by the possibility that real reform might occur in at least one place of special opportunity, a few educators called for the creation of an ideal yet real curriculum — one that would better address the needs of society, the natural environment, and places of historic value.

To this end, Bothwell, Duany, Hetzel, Hurtt, and Thadani gathered an array of sympathetic and concerned architecture faculty and practitioners, along with sociologists, theologians, philosophers, landscape architects, and regular folk. During a long weekend at Windsor, Florida, we reviewed the underlying philosophies and structures of some well-known past and present models of architectural education and speculated on new ones. This publication collects the presentations, discussions, and proposals.

The document is put forth to spawn dialogue between the various schools of architecture and those of the collateral disciplines, principal among which is planning and environmental sciences.

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