I was listening to an interview of Seth Godin as he talked about his online courses. One of the key features is that the participants are getting and giving feedback to each other.
He said that participants often said there was more interaction among students than in all their years of college. I hand an epiphany about what made the architecture and art studio education so special. The studio is a place where everyone’s work is on display in progress. Beyond the theatricality of the big critiques, daily interaction is the rule whether you like it or not.
I noticed this disconnect when I started at Rice. I did so little architectural design in undergrad that I was routed into the long program, starting with the non-architecture students. I quickly realized that I needed to dial back the way I talked about other’s work. Coming of age in the myopic architecture studio during your undergraduate years certainly has some detrimental effects on one’s maturitation as an adult, but being unaccustomed to interaction among the cohert is not one of them.
Indeed, this is one of my concerns about the modern digital age. From what I hear, studio culture is dying as people do their work at home on laptops. While the excesses of studio culture has a tendency to brainwash the participants, the loss of nightly interaction with one’s cohort would eliminate one of the key aspects that makes this education so distinctive from other fields.