Could a radically open architecture school help graduates invent jobs?

The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

– Richard Buckminster Fuller

In her book Dark Age Ahead (2004), urbanist and activist Jane Jacobs asserts the deterioration of higher education as one of five signs that we are spiralling into a cultural collapse. This deterioration arrives in the form of “credentialling” (which has already metastasized into “micro-credentialling”), or the pursuit of degrees as opposed to education. She links this obsession in America to the Great Depression: fear and shame of joblessness becomes reinvented in the American Dream as over-achievement, and as jobs become one’s whole purpose in life, higher educational degrees become passports toward fulfilling that purpose.

I was reminded of her book recently when hearing that the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London has won the right to grant degrees. No doubt this is an excellent outcome all round, but it did strike me as a bit redundant, given the AA’s 170-plus-year history without them, its extensive roster of incredibly distinguished alumni and its overall reputation as a pioneering, world-renowned school. It seems, however, that the current climate of higher education values employment over any number of other distinctive qualities, so if a school strays too far from the standard metrics, it risks becoming invisible. By way of example, while we may know that the QS World Rankings 1 only include university-based programs, prospective architecture students might simply assume that AA, Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), The Cooper Union, Pratt or Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) simply didn’t make their cut.

In a completely other world, however, there is a committed and persistent idea that jobs as we know them are dead. Richard Buckminster Fuller’s quote earlier, from the New York Magazine ’s “Environmental Teach-In” in 1970, calls for us to “do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in 10,000 of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.”² Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness (1935)³ made a similar argument several decades earlier, and current echoes of these ideas put a slightly finer point on it: “Fuck Work” (James Livingston, 2016)⁴ and Bullshit Jobs (David Graeber, 2019).⁵ The consistent theme throughout is the seeming paradox that fewer jobs produce more (and more important) work.

Higher education is at its best a place for this kind of important work – for open experimentation and discovery of pathways and practices that we didn’t see going in, rather than for fulfilling prerequisites for predestined jobs coming out. It may seem a luxury to consider architectural education in this radically open way. But then again, Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen and his Canadian patron George Booth had exactly that idea for a graduate school nearly ninety years ago, and it still exists largely as they designed it. Just north of Detroit at the Cranbrook Academy of Art (where I now work), the Master of Architecture program has no required classes, no timetable and no set curriculum. In its first decade, it didn’t even award degrees. According to Saarinen, Booth’s idea was for “a great big barn where a whole lot of artists got together and they all shared their talents.”⁶ This radically open environment attracted the likes of Charles Eames, Ray Eames, Ralph Rapson, Edmund Bacon, Florence Knoll, Harry Bertoia and, of course, Eliel’s son, Eero Saarinen.

When the Cranbrook Academy opened, the focus could not have been on preparing graduates for jobs – this was 1932 and there were no jobs. Rather, students had to invent jobs by making work. Whole new types of creative practice emerged as a result, with Eames Office being the quintessential example. It is no different today – students come in with an idea, produce a lot of work and leave with practice.

Jobs may not be dead yet, but architecture school may be the best place to make that idea a reality. Perhaps all every school needs is a great big barn.