Rites of Passage: the Making of a Professional Architect.

Abstract

This case study of an architectural college in the United States explores the experience of professional education from the perspective of the students. An interpretive analysis of the institution and its system of instruction is developed in order to underst and how individuals are prepared for professional life. For this research I have used indepth interviews and participant observation as techniques to investigate the educational institution of which I am a member. In this way, I have attempted to reveal the difference between an educational reality as experienced by students, and an educational reality professed by the institution. I constructed an ethnography of the educational culture, focusing on design as a central theme in architecture and education. I have used open-ended interviews with students to access their private and public experiences as they learn, teach, and research design. As a participant observer, I concentrated on the architectural jury as a crucial public event. Central themes that emerge from the analysis of the students' institutional experiences point to solitude and sham. As students continuously confront the punishing diversity and the humiliating disregard, their previous traditions are replaced by one that speaks of irresolution. I have found that these problematic situations tend to develop habits about silence, pretence and concealment. Students inhabit, through silence, solitude and , through pretence and concealment, sham. They are introduced to illiteracy by solitude, to docility by sham, and become, in their docility and illiteracy, serving dependents. The experiences of students encountered, here, speak of similar forms of struggle and frustration in other departments and institutions of higher education. An unveiling of this concealed reality is a necessary first step towards a process of self-awareness on the part of individuals and professional communities.