Love ‘em or hate ‘em, school rankings are influencing prospective students’ decisions on where to apply, and architecture firms’ decisions on whom to employ.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, school rankings are influencing prospective students’ decisions on where to apply, and architecture firms’ decisions on whom to employ. RECORD looks at this year’s survey and asks people in academia and the profession what it all means. THE MAN BEHINDTHE NUMBERS James Cramer, Hon. AIA James Cramer, Hon. AIA: Perhaps best known to architects as the chief executive of the American Institute of Architects from 1988 to 1994, Cramer founded Greenway Group in 1982 and launched it as a fully staffed organization shortly after leaving the AIA. His Atlanta-based firm operates a management consultancy that
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, school rankings are influencing prospective students’ decisions on where to apply, and architecture firms’ decisions on whom to employ. RECORD looks at this year’s survey and asks people in academia and the profession what it all means. Every FALL since 1999, DesignIntelligence — the bimonthly journal of the Design Futures Council (DFC), a Washington, D.C.—based think tank whose executive board includes representatives from some of America’s most widely known design firms, schools, and manufacturers — has published rankings of the best architecture schools in the nation. Each year, as the public cracks open the latest
I know people will be reading this in crisp October, but as I write I’m hanging on to summer in the week before Labor Day. Summer is a time for many things. One of them, for the right-minded architect, is golf. I realize that I’ll alienate some readers here, but golf and architecture are, I believe, related activities. Golf is said to be an old person’s sport — witness Tom Watson, who almost won the British Open this summer at age 59 — and as we all know, architects, like symphony conductors, tend to flourish in their later years. I.M.
Never the same shot Golf is also like architecture in that there are no cookie-cutter plans, or at least no good ones. Unlike bowling or tennis, golf is played on a surface in which every course, every fairway, every green is different. In a lifetime, you never play exactly the same shot twice. Isn’t that part of what makes the practice of architecture, too, so fascinating? Mark Twain should have tried golf. He might have come up with something to rival John Updike’s marvelous short story “Farrell’s Caddie,” in which a wizened caddie steers a callow American golfer around a
I know people will be reading this in crisp October, but as I write I’m hanging on to summer in the week before Labor Day. Summer is a time for many things. One of them, for the right-minded architect, is golf. I realize that I’ll alienate some readers here, but golf and architecture are, I believe, related activities. Golf is said to be an old person’s sport — witness Tom Watson, who almost won the British Open this summer at age 59 — and as we all know, architects, like symphony conductors, tend to flourish in their later years. I.M.
The Berlin site is woven into a dense urban fabric, but the embassy in Beijing, designed by Craig Hartman of the San Francisco office of SOM, sits within a gated island of walled space several ring roads removed from the Forbidden City.
Earlier this year, I was in the Emirates to give a lecture and was invited to visit the school of architecture where one of my hosts taught. Segregated by gender, the place was a Foucault fantasy made concrete. On one side of the building lay the studios and classrooms for women students and on the other — in mirror image — the rooms for the men. Between them were faculty offices, all of which had two doors, one to each side. The dean — natty in Armani — explained to me (as if the whole thing made sense) that the
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