PREPARATION FOR PRACTICE: THE UNWANTED ORPHAN. A STUDY OF THE SPECIFIC CONTENT GAP BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION AND PRACTICE

Statement of Problem. The range of, and emphasis on, the tasks, knowledge, skills, and abilities characteristic of contemporary architectural practice are not suitably reflected in the subject content and the skill emphasis of professional architectural education and, due to the magnitude of this content and emphasis disparity, the appropriateness of the basic training given students who wish to become practicing architects, and who are enrolled in first professional degree programs to do so, is severely threatened. Procedure and Methods. Information on the objectives and the subject content of a sample of currently-accredited, first professional degree programs was gathered from administrator correspondence, institutional catalogs, program pamphlets, and intradepartmental evaluation studies. This data was grouped by credit-hours under general subject headings to develop content distributions for each type of professional program. Information about professional practice was assembled from the data gathered by the NCARB 1981 Survey of the Practice of Architecture. A series of rank-order lists of architectural services and knowledge and skills was developed based upon their frequency and importance to clients and the public. The curriculum content distributions were then compared with the information in the practice rank-order lists to find out the magnitude and nature of the specific content disparities. Results. Contrary to popular opinion, the training of architects for professional practice was explicitly stated as a program objective for only 55% of the first professional degree programs surveyed. Of the top one-third of the services whose frequency and importance to both clients and the public make them critical to the practice of architecture, 65% were in the group of services with the least exposure in professional degree programs. Similarly, of the top one-third of the architectural knowledges and skills most important to clients and the public, 51% were in the group of knowledges and skills with the least academic exposure. Conclusion. If architectural education chooses to continue to give professional degrees as public recognition of student accomplishment, the focus of its programs should be narrowed to the goal of providing students with the type of preparation demanded in practice today