My graduate program was terrible (or perhaps it was just terrible for me). I wonder what this says about how I view my job skills as I continually hunt for employment. Like, sure, I have a Master’s degree, but I feel like it is mostly a piece of paper that represents finally acknowledging the culmination of the multitude of courses I took for my other degrees parallel to architecture and independent research before grad school than what I learned in my graduate program. A program that I felt was trying to get me to drop out for 2.5 of the 3 years it took to complete.

After the end of the second year they had us fill out a “how are things going” questionnaire with such questions as : “do you feel like you have a mentor with one of your professors ?” To which all I could think about was when, half-way through the first year, the studio profs called me into the office and began that meeting with “do you even want to be an architect ? Because you don’t seem to have any interest in architecture.”

Thus was born our little group of Enfants Terribles as three other students were also called in for similar meetings. The two Black students of the cohort and another non-traditional student who was interested in exploring metaphysics and biophilia. All four of us had Fine Arts as our previous academic background. When the time came for us to get internships with local architecture firms (one of the leading components as to why I applied to this school) 3/4 of us didn’t end up with internships with local architecture firms. I ended up in a research lab connected to the university, which was okay, but when we were supposed to apply the skills we were taught at firms the following years I struggled to keep up with coursework while attempting to teach myself these missing skills.

I was recently reading something about someone who lost their job in 2008 and ended up working as a manager for a retail shop at a mall. They were horribly overqualified for the position, but with the Great Recession it was what they were able to find. A problem that they ran into being a shop manager was that they were frequently being blocked from upward mobility. As they put it, the middle managers above them knew that they were overqualified to the point that they could easily leapfrog over middle management into a higher position, so middle management worked to keep this person stuck in their shop manager status. Side tangent that this is, I wonder if my consistently asking questions outside my profs’ expertise caused this middle-manager syndrome in an attempt to “put me in my place.” Because, I would definitely argue, I don’t think anyone who knows me would say that I show a lack of interest in architecture.

For some context on this studio in question where I got called into the office : the building of the quarter was a sports complex the size of a city block in the center of Seattle’s dense urban artsy gay neighborhood. The class’ initial site examination showed that the neighborhood already had a surfeit of small gyms containing all the gym equipment we were to fill our building with. In a city in the midst of a housing crisis, in a neighborhood struggling with gentrification, the idea of a massive university-style gym building was confusing to me. When I posed these feelings to the profs, I was told to think of it as designing the “Walmart of gyms.” (Which didn’t help me feel any better about the assignment.) So, I attempted to explore sport and physical activities that were missing as options from the neighborhood. I discovered that our requirement for a basketball court was similar in size to the court for roller derby (where the local Seattle team, Rat City Roller Girls, had been displaced to outside of Seattle). It was also similar in size requirements to a bike polo court (which had a historical connection to Seattle and was frequently played on an ill-sized tennis court in the park behind the site). I also expanded the program to include spaces for dance studios, a massive climbing wall as a visual element to shape the form of the building, and a bath house to connect to the displacement of the neighborhood’s gay bath houses due to gentrification. And then included small ground-floor commercial spaces because nothing in the central commercial core of a dense neighborhood should devote a whole city block to one use unless it is a museum or government building.

The reviewers at the end of the quarter seemed to get lost on the fact that I gave the building a pitched roof. And that my one moment of glass curtain wall at the ground level was actually for viewing the climbing wall and not the entrance (which was depicted as a pair of swinging doors next to said curtain wall).

Anyway, as I sit here in a cheap AirBnb in Scotland burning away my life savings to explore the aspects of architecture that I feel my graduate program lacked, I wonder if my three years in that graduate program were worth it.

I felt like I had finally done my school selection the proper way by interviewing profs of the university and practicing architects who graduated from the program before I even applied. I wanted to see if the program would meet my requirements of wanting to focus on dense urban architecture with an emphasis on sustainability. Everyone I interviewed said that this was exactly the correct school. But once in the program, my known knowledge of dense European city design after living in France was somehow incorrect and sustainability wasn’t something that I should worry about. (And definitely not focus on.) So, my drive became to get the degree because with the paper I could finally find a job in architecture. By the third year I had learned that even if I knew the answer to a question, I was to keep quiet. Even if I had a question about the material, I was to keep quiet. If I knew something we were being told was incorrect, I most definitely needed to keep quiet. Because if I spoke, I’d have a prof focus in on some innocuous detail and fixate.

Architecture is an unadorned glass box. That was the conclusion the Enfants Terribles discussed as we struggled with the profs. Every move we made outside of a glass box needed precedence. But not the kinds of precedence we could provide. On one project, I wanted to include a hexagonal corner element and referenced a building from 1890s Spain for precedence that a friend of mine had just visited. I was told that I couldn’t reference this because “they used slaves to build that back then, and we don’t use slaves to build anymore.” The only acceptable response was to nod and design it back down to an unadorned glass box.

In interviewing people before applying to the program, I remember talking with one practicing architect about how they enjoyed their studio projects because they were able to explore ideas and concepts without the restrictions of developers or cost.

I completed the program. I got the paper in the end. I have the desire to work in the field. But I’m finished with Seattle. This architecture program wasn’t the only reason for this conclusion to leave Seattle, but it sure comprised a significant nail in the coffin. If the profs are all working architects in Seattle and all of them made me feel like I was unwanted, why would I want to work for them ?

Once again, discovering that I’m a weird fish in the wrong pond.