I attended university at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago, Illinois (USA). This institution was founded by Mies van der Rohe, who designed the campus masterplan and the college of architecture is housed within his seminal work, Crown Hall. I chose to attend this university because it is (surprisingly) one of the few top-ranking architectural universities in the US to be located within a large city centre.
What was the most useful / important part of your years in university for your job / life?
For me, the most important part of university was to have the opportunity to explore a series of design problems in a didactic way, unconstrained by technical architectural realities such as budgets, timelines and codes.
What was a terrible waste of time?
For me, specific skills based courses such as computer classes in particular were not a great use of time as a course could give basic knowledge on a specific program. I think these skills are far better learned by being thrown head first into the studio or work environment where you have no choice but to pick up these skills on the fly. Specific software knowledge also quickly becomes outdated.
This time would be much better spent with design, studio, and history courses which would serve the dual purpose of teaching design while also giving us the impetus to pick up technical skills on our own, from classmates, professors, and online tutorials.
What do you wish you had learned but unfortunately didn’t?
The most disappointing thing for me about the university that I attended was that the school’s design attitude was a bit too technical and much of the studio work was judged on practicability (perhaps a legacy of Mies’s lasting influence on the educational pedagogy). I think that architecture school is one of the few times that architects can explore concepts free of real-world constraints, and that students should be liberated to explore outrageous concepts. Technical and code-driven training takes time from learning conceptual thinking, and it often becomes irrelevant as technologies and building codes change (and in my case, useless practicing outside the US).
Another thing that I found disappointing was the lack of internship and opportunities and a vibrant construction industry in the city of Chicago. As the third largest city in the US, I thought it would be very architecturally active, but due to economic conditions of the great recession at the time, not many buildings were built while I was there and job opportunities were scarce. I think that architecture is better learnt within the heart of a contemporary, growing city where you can see lots of interesting new things being built, and learn from this. I was lucky enough to travel the world and do overseas internships during the school holidays which was able to compensate for this.
Outside of coursework, I wish that I had taken the opportunity to engage more in the architectural community outside of school through competing in student competitions, publications. I also regret not taking more advantage of access to facilities such as the wood working shop, 3D printers/laser cutters, to get more hands-on experience designing and making things while I had free access to these resources.
Were there any interesting collaborations / networks
Some of my most interesting experiences in studio were with a series of notable professors (Jeanne Gang, Will Bruder, Monica Chadha, among others) where I was able to spend time with these well known figures which was really enjoyable and very interesting to see the way that these guys think and work.
Another interesting experience was an exchange studio, which was operated in conjunction with a university in Mexico, where we designed buildings for a site in each other’s cities, and visited each other during the course of the studio. This was a fascinating way to observe how architecture manifests in another culture, and was a great networking experience (I still keep in contact with some of the Mexican students and professors).
dormitory building at the right, and OMA’s structure has the orange & silver tube.
Throughout my five years at university, I worked as an architectural tour docent giving tours to student groups and architects from around the world for the Mies van der Rohe society. This part time job was one of the most rewarding and educational experiences that I had at university, as I became intimately aware with the history and architectural significance in the slate of important buildings on campus, gained a lot of experience speaking in front of groups, and met a lot of very interesting people. This is a benefit of studying on an architecturally significant campus and these kind of experiences are often more memorable than time spent in classrooms or studios, and I learned a lot in the process.
How much did you learn within university, how much outside in internships, volunteer work, magazines, travels, blogs?
I would consider my architectural education to have been 30% in travelling the world to look at architecture, 30% from my five internships , and 30% from actual university coursework and experiences. Personally, I found that my university studio work was much richer and more developed the more I travelled, experienced and worked, and that I learned much more than in studios themselves. Studio just became a way to test and expand upon ideas that were formed outside of the university environment.
I also spent a semester studying in Paris, which was one of the highlights of my university career. I had the opportunity to travel all through Europe during that stint, but also add a different perspective to my architectural education (perhaps the most interesting was to see architectural history and contemporary architectural critique/studio through the lens of a Le Corbusier obsessed discourse, as opposed to the Frank Lloyd Wright/Mies focus that US-based educators use). Looking back, I would have done more of my university education studying abroad in different locations to get a more diverse experience.
Another lasting memory from university was some of the places that I lived during school. I lived for two years in State Street Village, a Helmut Jahn designed dormitory building which was an interesting way to really experience a piece of quality architecture in a living and breathing way, and my final year was spent living on the 48th floor of Bertrand Goldberg’s landmark Marina City towers in downtown Chicago. It was a wonderful and inspiring studio space, and it was so interesting to see how the building works day to day and really become aware of the functionality and how architectural strategies are really experienced as a resident.
Where did you seek inspiration?
One of the most inspiring things about my tertiary education was the campus setting, which as previously mentioned was designed by Mies van der Rohe. The architecture was no doubt inspiring, but the overwhelmingly Modernist setting has also had a profound impact on the way I approach architecture, and made the shortfalls of Modernism readily apparent to me in a way that still endures in my mind.
This observation was exacerbated by the recent addition of two contemporary structures on the campus, Helmut Jahn’s impeccably detailed yet timidly modernist hostel building (which I lived in for two years, a building which has really not moved past the modernist tectonic) and Rem Koolhaas’s Campus Centre, which eschewed Mies’ rigid grid for mismatch of desire-line generated paths. The surreal juxtaposition of Koolhaas and Mies has had an intense impact on my perception of architectural theory and thinking on contemporary architectural strategies, which would not had occurred had I not studied on an architecturally significant campus.
