I have kept one foot in a working studio and one foot in a classroom for most of my career, and for years I told myself the two were separate lives. They are not. Teaching has changed how I practice at least as much as practice has changed how I teach — and moving between a Paris design school and a California university’s overseas program has shown me that even the word “teaching” means different things depending on which side of the Atlantic you are standing on.
Practitioners teach differently
A full-time academic and a practicing architect stand in front of a studio with different authority. The academic offers a coherent body of thought, tested against the literature and refined over years. I offer something rougher: the memory of what actually happened when a beautiful idea met a contractor, a budget, and a client who changed their mind in the final month.
Neither is better. Students need both. But I know what I bring, and I try not to pretend to be the other thing. When a student proposes something I know will not survive contact with a real site, I do not say it is wrong. I say what it cost the last person who tried it — including me. That kind of teaching is only available to someone who is still losing those arguments in real life.
Two cultures of pedagogy
The differences between European and American architecture education are easy to caricature and worth taking seriously.
In the Paris tradition I was formed by, the emphasis fell on rigor, history, and the long apprenticeship of the eye. You earned the right to your own voice by first proving you understood everyone else’s. There was a formality to it, and a patience.
In the American program I later taught in, the current ran the other way: toward invention, individual expression, and a confident willingness to make something before you fully understand it. Students were encouraged to have a position early and defend it loudly.
- One culture risks producing careful architects who hesitate to leap.
- The other risks producing bold architects who never learned to look.
- The best students I have met, on both continents, quietly borrowed from the tradition they were not born into.
What critique looks like on each side
The design critique — the crit — is where these cultures show themselves most plainly. In the European setting I know, critique tends to be exacting and somewhat impersonal: the work is examined against a standard, and the student is expected to absorb hard judgment without taking it personally. In the American setting, critique is often more of a dialogue, more attentive to the student’s intention and the story they are trying to tell.
I have learned to move between the two registers, and to warn students when I am about to switch. A young architect who expects encouragement and receives a European crit can be flattened by it. One who expects rigor and receives warm dialogue can mistake it for approval. Naming the register is half of teaching fairly.
How teaching sharpens practice
The classroom keeps me honest. Students ask the questions clients are too polite to ask — why is it like that? why not the other way? — and often I discover that my answer is habit dressed up as principle. Defending my instincts to people who owe me no deference forces me to know which instincts are actually load-bearing.
If you are a practitioner considering an adjunct or visiting post, I would encourage it, with one caution. Do it because you want to be questioned, not because you want an audience. Teaching well takes real time, and it will occasionally wound your certainty. But a studio and a classroom feed the same appetite — the wish to understand why a thing works — and keeping both alive has made me better at each. The studio taught me what holds up. The classroom taught me why.