Teaching Abroad

Practising architects should be welcomed into British schools of architecture, says Patrick Lynch

The opportunity for younger and older architects to engage with each other as equals in discussions about design is one of the best ways in which we can continue to learn and develop as designers. This rarely happens, and almost never inside schools of architecture in the UK, since most part-time tutors are just setting up in practice (it is assumed that after a certain point you become too busy, and rich, to teach). Full-time academics actively resist the intrusion of practising architects upon their theoretical turf.
After conversations with older colleagues, I've been thinking more about Hannah Arendt's essay 'The Crisis in Education' (see Lynch's column in AJ 17.01.08). She writes: 'To educate, in the words of Polybius, was simply "to let you see that you are altogether worthy of your ancestors," and in this business the educator could be a "fellow-contestant" and a "fellow workman"… Fellowship and authority were in this case indeed but the two sides of the same matter, and the teacher's authority was firmly grounded in the encompassing authority of the past as such.' Arendt concludes that 'an education without learning is empty, and therefore degenerates into moral-emotional rhetoric.'
I've been lucky enough to work alongside some much more experienced architects recently, yet it's only my good fortune that an enlightened client chose to allow me into a discussion with them. None of these architects teach in this country, and unless you work for them you'll never see them outside of a lecture hall. But, like other eminent colleagues, they all teach abroad. Without apologies for being blunt, the best architects in Britain are welcomed at Harvard, Yale, Penn, Delft, ETH, Mendrisio and Lausanne, but not here. I fear that we are all suffering from lack of contact with the best minds in
British architecture (see Kieran Long's observations of a Yale crit on pages 24-29).
Looking back over my career in education, as a teacher and a student, I can count on one hand the number of times I have had the privilege of being witness to the discourse of good architects in Britain. I know I'm beginning to sound like my father now ('the grass is greener in Ireland' etc.) but recently I was lucky enough to crit with Glenn Murcutt, alongside some of the best architects in Ireland, at the Dublin Institute of Technology, where he is a visiting professor. O'Donnell + Tuomey and Grafton Architects are among my colleagues teaching the final year at University College Dublin.
So how do the best British architects manage to avoid teaching in Britain? One reason might be that Irish final-year students, like other European students, do a thesis project, which makes them responsible for selecting their own site and topic – something the unit system here obscures. It also means that each tutor has around five students, whom they see for half a day a week. But what a good use of half a day!