Make Your Summer Count with Global Architecture Brigades
While other architecture students spend their summers strolling the streets, seeing the sights, and contently sketching, you could be getting your hands dirty, turning your designs into reality, and making a difference in a community that needs you.
Every summer, Global Architecture Brigades (GAB) activates student volunteers to work with a community in Honduras, helping them alleviate needs in health and education. The program isn’t a lesson in a charity; it’s a hands-on experience of the community-entrenched work of a designer of the 21st century.
Read more about Global Architecture Brigade’s work in Honduras, and how you can get involved, after the break…
Architecture Students Protest University with (what else) Architecture
Across the globe, architecture programs are cutting resources and raising fees in an effort to stay afloat. Meanwhile, architecture students feel powerless to demand more – to demand quality, to protest fees, to suggest how curricula could better serve them for the future (a poignant concern in this troubled economy, where even a competitive degree doesn’t guarantee post-grad employment any more).
In this Catch-22 of a situation, what can students do? Well, as any good architect-in-training, they can use their craft to form a solution.
Which is exactly what, on the 9th of April, 20 architecture undergrads from the University of Sydney did.
More on the University of Sydney students’ architectural protest, after the break…
Graduating in 2013? You’re in Luck…
Phil Bernstein is a Vice President at Autodesk and teaches at Yale (see our interview with him here). Last week, we published his “5 Pearls of Wisdoms for Architecture Grads,” originally written in 2011. This week, Phil is back to talk to Architecture students again, but this time with some updated advice for the grads of 2013.
It’s been a year since my “Winter Commencement” discussion, and just a few days since I gave my annual talk to our graduating students about the state of the construction economy and what that means for their spring job hunt. And since ArchDaily decided to repost that blog recently, it seemed timely to reflect a bit on how things have changed since December of 2011, and what those changes might mean for job prospects going forward.
And what a difference a year makes, at least for this year’s graduating class. The elections are over, most of the economic malaise, while not lifted here in the U.S, is certainly lighter, and designing, building and, most importantly, hiring seems to be on the rise again. In fact, for the first time since 2009, I suggested to our students that prospects for their employment are the brightest of the young decade.
Here’s my reasoning…
Find out why Grads in 2013 are facing far rosier circumstances, after the break…
5 Pearls of Wisdom for Architecture Grads, by Phil Bernstein
Phil Bernstein is a Vice President at Autodesk and teaches at Yale (see our interview with him here). This post, originally published in 2011 on his blog as “Winter Commencement,” offers timeless advice for architecture students about to enter the job market.
As December now rolls around it’s the eve of my last lecture in my professional practice class at Yale. Although I’ve been teaching for almost twenty-five years, I still can’t believe how quickly the semester accelerates into Thanksgiving, and suddenly it’s all over but the shouting (or, in our case, final projects and juries). About the same time as the term slammed to a closed I received a note from a student at Prarie View A&M, asking many of the existential questions that must be facing architecture students nearing their degrees. Seemed like a good time to speculate a bit about that future, and what this year’s graduates might be facing as they confront the job market in the spring, with enough time between now and then to contemplate their options and plot their strategies, so here goes:
Read on to find out Phil Bernstein’s 5 tips for future grads, after the break…
Frontier Learning: The Future of Architectural Education / Stanislav Roudavski
Yesterday’s article “Forget the Rankings, the Best US Architecture Schools Are…” argued that students should judge architecture schools for their strength in areas that are relevant to the profession today (not for their rankings). Today, we bring you an Editorial from Architecture Professor at the University of Melbourne, Stanislav Roudavski, who takes that argument one step further – suggesting that architecture students should look for education opportunities that embrace the architectural world of the future.
Those who look to the future understand architecture as a dynamic system of relationships. These relationships blur the distinctions between digital and physical, natural and artificial, simulated and observable in the wild. Such an interpretation calls for broader collaborations and a commitment to explorations outside established “comfort zones.” But the life outside disciplinary comforts can be harsh. With old certainties left behind and new potentials not yet discovered, one can feel overwhelmed by the richness and complexity of available information and practices. In the contemporary condition of constant and accelerating change, what should an architect know and be able to do? From where should this knowledge be acquired and updated, from whom and in which way?
Innovation (and the learning of the new, needed for innovation to occur) can be encouraged through various strategies. [...] Innovation can also be augmented outside existing professional territories via other types of critical, open-ended learning that is deliberately oriented towards uncertain futures. In striving to address unknown demands, such learning is necessarily speculative and risky. What strategies can be adopted to benefit from such risk-taking?
More on the future of Architectural Education, after the break…
