ABSTRACT
The professional education of architects may have never fully aligned with the reductive pedagogies of the modern university. Donald Schön argued that architecture is rooted in the apprenticeship tradition, a curriculum that integrates knowledge, skills and attributes towards the resolution of complex, situated, often ‘wicked’ problems. The pragmatist educator John Dewey observed the contradictions of educating students towards professional accreditation. In his time, normative routes to the professions included private colleges focusing on the training of practical skills or, alternatively, universities that favoured theoretical discourse. Practitioners who find university posts struggle to remain as current as counterparts in practice, often carrying heavy teaching loads that mitigate against conducting research, lowering their comparative status as academics in the view of the modern aspirant university. Hence, architecture schools have increasingly prioritised theoretical studio design projects at the expense of practical professional content in the curriculum.
