Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better. - Robert Camus
I believe that this is a perfect example of why I want to be freed from the constraints of architecture school. Even a program that’s main purpose is to create individuality and foster creativity in each different student will still create norms in all of them. This is not always a bad thing, such as creating architects who are environmentally responsible with their designs. However this still breeds similarities in all of them. This is why each school of architecture tends to produce a certain type of architect. For a modern architect, pick a graduate from IIT, the school of Mies van der Rohe. For a architect like Frank Loyd Wright, pick a graduate from Taliesin. Regardless of steps taken to prevent this, all architects will pick up similar traits to those who went to school with them as well as traits of those who train them. This is an unavoidable problem in the current state of architectural education.
The world I imagine is one where I can be an individual and simply create. No rules. No people saying that the engineering isn’t possible or cost effective. No head designers saying that this is wrong and I should design more like them. All these things constrain my creativity and I am forced to conform to what certain people believe is good and beautiful. I must conform in order to graduate and to move on to where I am finally able to live in the world I imagine where I might someday become my own boss where I make the rules.
But I fear that by then I will have been shaped too much. I will have become the exact thing that I have tried to escape throughout my own education. Now I will impose my own rules on others and will tell them to be more like me and to design more like me and that mine is the right way and theirs is wrong. I will have forgotten my own struggles and become the overbearing teacher or the stubborn lead designer. Things will come full circle and the student will become the teacher, and the whole process will begin again. Some will rise above this circle and truly create something new and exciting and beautiful. I hope that this world I imagine will become my reality soon enough before it is too late for me and I forget what my true creative self is like. Before I become just another graduate from the U of M architecture school.