At 16, my daughter can explain flying buttresses better than most contractors.

That’s not hyperbole. That’s Notre Dame.

Most summer camps for high school kids are fairly shallow. How much can you really teach a 16-year-old in a few days? My son once attended a weeklong design camp where they tried to teach a different design discipline every day — industrial, landscape, graphic, etc. It sounded great on paper. But the reality was wide and shallow.

It reminded me of my college study abroad program, where we crammed Poland, Germany, and England into one semester. Sounded great, but we spent most of our time in transit — train stations, brief hotel stays, and hasty walking tours. We never stayed long enough to absorb the place. In a culture obsessed with distraction, I’ve come to value pedagogical depth over breadth.

And that’s what makes Notre Dame’s Architecture School so different.

onTradition

Notre Dame is widely known — and sometimes mocked — as the flagship for traditional architecture education. While virtually every other architecture school has gone whole hog on modernism, abstraction, and digital design, Notre Dame has doubled down on classical everything. Where the others emphasize concepts and critiques through CAD, Notre Dame teaches proportion and permanence through the pencil.

The school still requires students to master hand drawing. They still study Vitruvius. They still design buildings with ornament. And it turns out — this works.

Notre Dame’s Career Discovery Architecture Camp didn’t just teach my daughter to draw a church. It showed her, in two weeks, what many schools can’t teach in four years — how to think like a builder.

Students, ages 14 to 17, learned to draw complete churches — floor plans, elevations, perspectives, and details for stained glass windows. Most of the churches had flying buttresses. Some had domes. All had substantial ornament, detailed as part of the camp.

My daughter spent five hours drawing bricks. Not photoshopping textures. Not mechanically copying and pasting. Drawing. The precision and intention required in that act left her with a skillset far beyond many college freshmen.

This kind of instruction — intense hand-drawn studio time, led by working practitioners — is rare anywhere, much less in a high school camp. Her instructor, Giuseppe Mazzone, teaches first-year design at Notre Dame and is known for his exceptional sketching ability. This was not a week of “design thinking” and glitter glue. It was full architectural training, compressed into twelve gruelling days.

The Learning Curve

For contrast, I draw buildings for a living. I’m (mostly) self-trained. I work in affordable, incremental development, and draw a lot of 600-square-foot rectangles on rectilinear urban lots. I struggle with curves — not because I can’t learn them, but because affordable housing rarely needs them. I’m fine with that. It works for what I do.

But Notre Dame didn’t impose those constraints on their students. They let them try the ambitious stuff — symmetry, form, articulation, verticality, even at 16. That tells you something about their trust in tradition — and their belief in teenagers (and, ergo, I suppose, humanity).

The broader academy often dismisses traditional design as pastiche. They say it’s not of this time. That it’s artificial. That it limits expression. That it lacks political voice. But I’ve watched modern architecture become a political voice first, with human utility and grace relegated to the unimportant. In too many schools today, students are taught to critique systems rather than build structures. They’re encouraged to think big, but not necessarily how to build anything.

So here’s the question:

• What’s lost when students aren’t trained like this?

• What happens to our buildings? To our cities? To our collective memory of how to build well?

In my work with the Congress for the New Urbanism, Incremental Development Alliance, and National Townbuilders’ Association, I’ve partnered with a lot of Notre Dame grads. One of the best is Thomas Dougherty, author of The American Alley and one of the leading voices in faith-based housing.

Thomas was hired for a Durham Charette to help us explore how churches can build housing. Armed with context and research on these narrow topics, Thomas can turn a utilitarian church parking lot into a world-class village. He came out of this program.

The students coming out of Notre Dame have skills most architecture grads simply don’t:

• They understand history and historical precedent.

• They know how traditional architecture dovetails with traditional city-building.

• They can draw.

And not just in Rhino or Revit. They draw with their hands, guided by a contextual understanding.

Grace Through Basics

I recognize that technology is a tool. But overreliance on digital tools atrophies the basic muscles of design. Nowhere is that more obvious than when you watch a Notre Dame architect design next to a CAD-dependent peer. The difference in approach and deliverables is stark. One is thoughtful and free. The other is automated and stuck, as if they are handcuffed.

Neither is inherently wrong. But one, in my view, is clearly better.

Notre Dame training seems to permit CAD, reluctantly, knowing that in most of the industry, it is a necessary skill. But they don’t let CAD detract from the basics of the profession—conveying vision, and meaning, through hand drawing.

It’s no surprise then that Notre Dame architecture grads have the highest average starting salary in the country — $70,000 to $75,000 a year.

If we want to fix our towns, our cities, and our civic buildings— we’re going to need more architects who can draw, think, and build like this.

I told my daughter before she went: “You may or may not love architecture. You may or may not love Notre Dame. But you’re going to come out of this with an opinion.”

She did. So did I.

And now I have a drawing of a church on my wall — flying buttresses and all — designed by a 16-year-old.

That’s what great teaching can do.

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North Carolina’s “Dual Enrollment” is a statewide program that encourages high school students to take college classes for college AP credit. And it’s really good. It’s generally well organized, has a huge list of class options, and allows students as young as 13 and 14 to pursue interests that the K-12 system cannot serve.

One of those students is my daughter, a straight-A 16-year-old with a stubborn determination to study architecture. Earlier this year, while taking a college-level drafting course through Dual Enrollment, she came up against a problem with the program—one that ended up seriously shortchanging her.

The issue is a state policy flaw obscured in red tape and fine print, so let me explain a bit.

THE STATE’S POLICY ON ARCHITECTURE IS INACCURATE

My daughter is deep into the Dual Enrollment program. She is on pace to earn her Architectural Technology Certificate (below) before graduating from high school. She took two Architecture courses in the fall, two more this spring, and is scheduled for at least two more next year.

She’d been told that:

1. All classes in the dual enrollment program qualify for Advanced Placement (AP) +1 bonus points—thus, an A counts for a 5.0 grade point rather than a 4.0; and that

2. All classes that qualify for college credit are governed by the Comprehensive Articulation Agreement (CAA), a list of ~500 courses that 4-year colleges in North Carolina accept for college credit.

Neither of these two claims, put forth as fact by North Carolina’s education systems, proved accurate.

Instead, here’s what is actually true:

1. NOT ALL DUAL ENROLLMENT CLASSES QUALIFY FOR COLLEGE CREDIT. My daughter, who has never received lower than an A, was devastated in January when her updated transcript showed that her GPA and class rank had plummeted—because she got two As in Architecture classes at Durham Tech. Unbeknownst to her, those classes weren’t on the CAA list, so the As counted as 4.0s, not 5.0s. And, because she was taking extra classes—five instead of the usual four at Riverside High—her GPA dropped even further.
   

2. THE STATE’S PRIMARY POLICY DOCUMENT IS WRONG. The CAA is presented as a definitive list of what UNC system schools will accept for credit, but that’s not how it works in practice. Through extensive research and outreach to the state, we documented that the architecture classes in question are, in fact, accepted for credit at UNC-Greensboro, East Carolina, UNC Charlotte, Appalachian State, and others. (See below.)

   

   

Beyond the policy discrepancy, it’s clear from other professionals in the state that the coursework is college-level. Jenn Truman—twice degreed at NC State in Architecture and Civil Engineering—said that:

“I have reviewed the technical drawings [your daughter] completed in ARC 113, and they are absolutely college-level. Her drawing is excellent, and it exceeds what most NCSU Architecture students would be capable of in their freshman year.”

Thus, my daughter has two complaints. First, the administrators of Dual Enrollment need to be more careful and precise in conveying which classes qualify for college credit and which do not. Second, the schools need to 1) recognize the discrepancies with the CAA as an error, 2) take responsibility for the error, and 3) correct it on a system-wide scale so that other students aren’t penalized like my daughter has been.

REMEDY

In the end, my daughter will be fine. But like any student who is genuinely trying to better themselves while navigating the increasingly ruthless college admissions landscape, she never would have enrolled in those classes had she known how severely they would hurt her GPA and class standing. That may not matter for getting into many schools—but for places like UC Berkeley, Notre Dame, or NC State, it just might.

At the bottom line, this is a major truth-in-advertising issue.

My daughter’s remedy and relief process with the state has been frustrating. North Carolina has three major education systems: the Department of Public Instruction (K-12), The Community College System, and the UNC-System (4-year colleges). On this issue, DPI has deferred to the state systems. The state systems have referred to DPI. And, you guessed it, at this point, DPI referred it back to the state.

Everyone agrees that something is amiss here: the CAA does not match the clear and present policies of the UNC-System member universities, but no one is taking responsibility for fixing it.

By passing the buck, these systems are telling my daughter “This is YOUR problem, not ours.”

With the exception of architecture, it appears that all other community college coursework is fully bifurcated into either:

1. Classes that do quality for college credit and are on the CAA (Spanish, Calculus, Art, History etc.). OR

2. Classes that do not qualify for college credit and are not on the CAA (Plumbing, realtor' license, firefighter training)

After the Community College System referred my daughter to DPI Academic Affairs, DPI responded by saying that the only way to fix the issue is to find one community college and one four-year university willing to jointly sponsor the change.

Telling my daughter—and her family—that we need to simultaneously align two major state institutions just to correct a technical policy error is like asking us to design and deploy a Patriot missile system—and get it operational in a few months. Given how slow and bureaucratic higher ed institutions are, this feels less like a solution and more like a polite way of telling us to buzz off.

But we won’t be discouraged so easily. In my work on policy reform, I’m used to working with non-responsive, responsibility-deflecting agencies. What could (and should) be fixed with a simple technical correction is now going to waste a helluva lot of important people’s time. Unfortunately, this reflects a familiar pattern with how things get done in North Carolina: even the most reasonable, clear-cut fixes get bogged down, not because they’re hard, but because we seem structurally incapable of doing the simple and right thing in a timely way.

THE FIX ISN’T ABOUT US ANYMORE

Any fix will almost certainly be too late for my daughter. We’ve been fighting this for 5 months, and she starts college applications this summer. At this point, the fight is for other kids who will pursue Architecture studies in North Carolina.

She feels strongly that she was wronged, and that others should not be, so we continue the fight.

Even setting aside my personal connection to this story, I feel strongly as a housing advocate in North Carolina: the state should not be in the business of discouraging students from pursuing a field so clearly tied to solving our housing crisis.

Not only is the Architecture coursework at Durham Tech clearly college-level, but the field itself requires a five-year professional degree—longer and more intensive than most undergraduate programs. In many ways, it’s more college than college.

I hope the state comes to recognize how essential the study of Architecture is, how valuable its Dual Enrollment program can be, how serious this policy failure was, and how the inability to fix it in a timely, transparent way has tarnished the program and undermined trust in its leadership.

The next generation of students deserves better.

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Next month, I have the privilege of being invited to participate in an event that brings together leaders from around the globe to ponder the future of urbanist education. The goal is to reconsider how we train students to build the places people love.

As part of the preparation, I was made aware of Patrik Schumacher, the principal and heir of London-based starchitect firm Zaha Hadid Architects, who penned a viral rant now known as “The 13 Theses on the Crisis of Architectural Academia”.

In it, Schumacher accuses modern design schools—their professors, specifically—of being self-promoting, disconnected from the real world, and ill-prepared to train the next generation of designers. And he concludes that all of this is leading to a crisis.

He is not wrong.

He made this scathing post on Facebook in 2019, and it made the rounds.

I agree with Schumacher on almost everything, though we probably diverge on what to do next. Schumacher nails the problem, perhaps as best as anyone ever has. After an examination of his arguments, which can be quickly validated by talking to folks who have recently attended these schools, it is clear that we can do better and need to do better.

Below is Schumacher’s complete list republished, with commentary through my typical lens of localism, incrementalism, traditional architecture and urbanism.

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13 Theses on the Crisis of Architectural Academia

1. Architecture Schools operate like art schools without any curriculum. Accordingly, architectural education is detached from the profession and from societal realities & needs as expressed in real (public or private) client briefs.

• COMMENT: The same lack of practical curriculum can be said of many professional schools, but it is worse in architecture and planning. Also, I have learned with these two fields: the more prestigious the school, the less practical it is. New Urbanist Developer and friend Bob Chapman once told me, “The only thing Harvard GSD teaches you how to do is promote yourself.” Putting the long-running pissing match between new urbanists and GSD aside, I juxtapose this thesis with my experiences with Durham Technical Community College’s architecture programming, which my daughter started when she was 16. Durham Tech might be the least prestigious architectural program I could name, yet it presents students with everything they actually need to know (floor plans, elevations, traditional hand drawing), places the practical theory before the critical or conceptual. Groundwork and foundations matter. In schools, a new campaign to re-couple curriculum and reality is desperately needed. It is time to touch grass.

2. Too many teachers without professional work or experience use design studios in schools of architecture as vehicles for their own, largely isolated pursuits with often highly idiosyncratic criteria of success.

• COMMENT: There is a broader problem in design and urbanism where less competent people (there are many) leverage public processes to force people to listen to them, often against their will. Clearly, it happens in academia, too. Too often, teachers focus on their needs over their students. And this is a problem, one which reeks of narcissism to me. Schumacher accuses design school teachers of “promoting their own agendas.” Why would they do this? Those who struggle to achieve desired respect in the competitive marketplace are naturally attracted to coercive mediums—often with captive audiences—to spread their seed. Who is more captive an audience than a student with a 4-year commitment contingent on making their teachers happy? (it’s actually 5 in stamp-granting architecture programs). This practice of validating the teacher at the expense of the student has to be eradicated. The focus of design training is training the pupil. Schools need to serve future architects, not failed ones.

3. Students' portfolios after five years of studying might not include a single design that could meet minimal standards expected from a contemporary competition entry.

• COMMENT: Modernist Architecture Schools operate like governments, as they are about processes, NOT outcomes. Some schools do not care, apparently, if a student with a 5-year Master’s Degree cannot actually draft a submittable permit set. They care that students went through “the process,” were indoctrinated with “the values,” and had “the right thoughts.” That cannot happen. By the time kids graduate, they should have done permit sets—probably dozens of them. They should be prepared to pass professional exams, which schools also do not teach. The list goes on.

4. This is a global crisis that cannot be fixed by universities alone as it reflects the fragmentation and disorientation of our discipline.

• COMMENT: Much like modernist American planning, which is also far down the woke spectrum and offers little hope of fixing itself, architecture schools appear to need outside help. It’s not clear how outside help would happen, but as Coby Lefkowitz noted in his excellent book Building Optimism, 90% of what schools are teaching, students don’t want. And 90% of the buildings people wish to see, schools don’t teach. What, then, can be done? Indeed, a professional mutiny would help, but that’s unlikely because a plurality of professional architects are products of this system. To blow it up would be to undermine their credentials and credibility. It’s asking lions to become dinosaurs. Change can come from legislatures, like the North Carolina Legislature’s perpetual meddling in UNC’s famously left-leaning agendas. But that’s messy, very much not in the spirit of the academy. It would be hard to imagine state senators stepping in to object to modernist architecture (modernism is linked to socialist expression, though few legislators are aware of it). But they might. The best option is competition. Each state should develop at least one architectural program committed to traditional training with traditional land planning and traditional buildings. Then, let the kids sort it out. Let them choose.

  

5. The currently dominating model of pedagogy - the model of an unbounded diversity of experimentation - is an anachronistic hangover from the period after the crisis and the end of modernism when the discipline had to brainstorm new ways forward.

• COMMENT: The way I see it, we’ve lost our way and are adrift in the desert, searching for a unifying principle and North Star, where one is unlikely to be found. Perhaps such purposelessness (rootlessness?) is the byproduct of our obscene wealth. Some think that nihilism is linked to the decline of religion. Wherever we look, we find architecture that screams to us, “fuck it, nothing matters anymore.” Students in classes I teach cannot name a single building built this century that they would describe as “inspiring.” We need some grounding principles. It starts with leaders and ends with institutions. One person alone cannot change the course of a culture. It requires convening forces. The schools can be those convening forces; I have no idea who the leaders will be. Probably some pissed-off young people.

6. The crisis will be overcome when world architecture, once more, converges onto a hegemonic, unifying paradigm that allows for cumulative research, global application and then canonisation, just as modernism achieved in the 20th century.

• COMMENT: Canons matter. While access to information is now limitless, a common body of knowledge is necessary. It’s how culture is made, defined, celebrated, and continued. What is that paradigm? What will it be? Schumacher’s canon is modernist, which is fine, though not universal. I suspect universal values might sound something like this: Cities matter. Design is humanizing. Traditions are to be honored, celebrated, and built upon. Local tastes must be studied and mastered. You can’t explore new until you understand old.

7. Only through convergence can a new basic, shared curriculum emerge, on the basis of which a multiplicity of cumulative and complementary research efforts can make a real difference for the development of new global best practice of professional and creative work.

• COMMENT: It’s hard to come to common ground on a cannon. What would those books be? What would the foundation learnings of every architecture school offer? From there, each school can branch into its idiosyncratic curiosities.

8. The paradigm we are looking for is parametricism, the discipline's answer to the societal challenges and technological opportunities of our computationally empowered post-Fordist network society. This paradigm has no viable rivals and has sufficiently matured to become a global best practice very rapidly.

• COMMENT: Parametricism uses advanced design tools to create infinitely adaptable, complex, and free-form spaces. I wrestle with this a little because so much of our bad architecture is trying to be all things to all people at all times. The results range from mixed to bad. In residential architecture, I like to design for a clear purpose. And if a room loses that purpose, it can change to another purpose. And even if the room isn’t perfect for the new purpose, that slight incongruency becomes part of the history, the story, and the charm. Pure efficiency is boring. The absolute pursuit of utility is how we get strip malls. This may be where Schumaker and I part ways. I get the need for flexibility, and I subscribe to that. But I think this is a thesis where things can go terribly wrong.

9. The current educational model made sense and was very productive during the early period, at the AA and Columbia, and indeed generated the ingredients of parametricism in the 1980s and incubated its development throughout the 1990s and early 2000s as the new viable way forward.

• COMMENT: Things change. But professional architecture seems stuck in groupthink. It’s remarkable to me that architecture and planning—the fields that are ostensibly the most creative and problem-solving—are, in practice, extraordinarily ideological, monolithic, and unchanging. Someone will break this, eventually, and I suspect it will be easier than people think. The impractical, overly intellectual post-modern values of both professions are frail: when pushed, they’ll collapse like a deck of cards.

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Architecture School cannot be Art School. The difference between architecture and art is utility.

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10. Integrated, cumulative research and design took place and started to interface with practice. However, in contrast to the successful Bauhaus transformation during the 1920s, the necessary institutional transformation away from the art school model to a science school model did not take place.

• COMMENT: In what I’m about to say, I run the risk of sounding like I’m essentializing Art vs. Architecture as “something to simply look at” vs. “something that serves a purpose.” That is not a dichotomy that holds. Art has a purpose and architecture can be beautiful. But what I’m trying to underscore is that utility (as opposed to a larger ideological sense of purpose) is absolutely, inarguably central to architecture.

  It follows, then, that Architecture School cannot be Art School. The difference between architecture and art is utility. The former implies use. It implies human interaction. It is a criminal disservice to treat students as artists, exclusively, and not teach them how to serve their clients. Clients will ultimately need them to do practical and executable construction plans for the built environment, not create statements via art.

11. There are cycles of innovation. Creative work, research, and discourse culture, including teaching patterns and personalities, in the middle of the cycle should be very different from the beginning of a new cycle. We are no longer in the infant phase of the new paradigm. Accordingly, our culture and role models have to adapt. The AA school culture can initiate but not commit to, advance, and work through a paradigm. The problem is that the seminal role the AA played in the eighties and nineties triggered the worldwide imitation of its culture at a time when these ways of working were getting in the way of further progress.

• COMMENT: I do not know enough about the Architectural Association (AA), which the German author references here. The main point seems to be that adaptation is perpetual. The only thing constant is change, and when you are stuck within a system, and vested in that system, you are naturally resistant to change. But such resistance is suicidal because you’ll lose touch with the world, specifically those you serve, which ultimately yields the end you were seeking to avoid—death through irrelevancy.

12. The lack of political adaptation to post-Fordism got in the way too: the 2008 financial crisis, the political regression and economic stagnation since have so far prevented the hegemony of parametricism just as the 1929 crisis, fascism and WW2 had retarded modernism.

• COMMENT: Fordism refers to the Henry Ford assembly line: predictable and repeatable industrialism. Schumaker suggests that his parametricism—the managed complexity that modern architects orchestrate--is off schedule from the dysfunctional politics of the time. Again, I am not sold on parametricism. Still, I do agree that messy, bottom-of-the-barrel and often-valueless politics do not help form a helpful common core of beliefs that society’s designers can act upon. Post-modernism, some might call it late-capitalism shit, is the result.

13. The political frieze on urban density, programmatic mixity and typological innovation blocks the competitive advantages of parametricism and retards its advance. These background conditions obscure the historical mal-adaptation of our discipline and of it’s teaching culture.

• COMMENT: Schumacher offered up a wonky way of saying it, but essentially: zoning sucks, placeless land planning sucks, and placeless architecture sucks. Schumacher blames politics, I blame planning (which I believe leads politics in creating bad rule-making). This freeze (Frieze must mean something different in Deutch?) does prevent us from a better future, which is widely accepted by anyone seeking to positively participate in American land use discourse.

CONCLUSION

While we can all agree that our buildings, land plans, and schools are not where they should be, we don’t seem to be able to agree on what to do about it.

Truth be told, I am not a huge fan of Schumaker’s design work. In Patrik’s defense, I like very little modernism, and I am confident he would not care what I think anyway— but I respect that other people appreciate his work. His architecture is pretty irrelevant to the societal point of his Facebook post. I do believe he is spot-on with his critique of the pedagogy: our schools just ain’t cutting it.

In my reform advocacy work, the approach is pretty simple. Like an oncological surgeon, it’s important to identify in advance how far back the cancer is. First, you deal with it in non-invasive ways. Then eventually—and this is sadly common when coping with non-responsive governments—you have to reach deep to grab all the roots of the disease. When the sickness is deep, the solution will be invasive. Sometimes the target is code, sometimes it’s politics. As Shumaker points out, sometimes it’s the schools. In the case of architecture and its twin sister, planning, the schools are a mess. That’s the real problem. That’s the origin of so many problems.

Our built environment is downstream of our architecture schools. They are manufacturing poop and putting it in the river.

If we are to prepare for the 2030s, which I maintain will be the best decade for American townbuilding in a century, it’s high time to set the academy straight.

In my opinion, a total rebuild is in order.

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