Insular Architecture Schools

There is no more insular, esoteric world than the elite architecture school today. With Modernism dead (no less an authority than Rem Koolhaas tells us), parts of the academy defend it with the fervor of a Stalinist or Al Qaeda.

This parallels the situation in the other liberal arts departments of academia, which have Political Correctness, diversity, Derrida and Foucault. As I mentioned above, no one can defend Marxism today, but it lives on in a trickle-down, misanthropic attitude that wants to hold down the rest of the world and force it to drink castor oil. Politically correct diversity doesn't mean a society in which different cultures and incomes are equal, but, Middle class shut up, while we berate you and tell you why you're inferior to poor minorities.

The parallels in the elite architecture schools like Columbia are two-fold. Architects like Peter Eisenman try to literally translate the esoteric theories of critics like Derrida into even more esoteric architecture. And yet because it descends in a meandering stream from Marxism, this elite, esoteric architecture implicitly if illogically tries to claim to be politically progressive. Starchitects' anti-social monuments to their own egos are presented as politically correct, usually with cobbled-together ideas about how they are "non-hierarchical" and representative of the "chaos of our culture."

The enemies of these programs are New Urbanism and Traditional and Classical architecture. Consequently, there are only three accredited architecture schools in North America which teach both traditional architecture and urbanism in depth: the University of Miami, the University of Notre Dame, and Andrews University. A few other schools like Judson College, Georgia Tech, the University of Maryland, and to a lesser degree, Yale University, have some traditional architecture and urban design in their programs. Here and there, some schools have a faculty member or two who teach traditional design in isolation.

One result is that the graduates of Miami and Notre Dame get many job offers, while graduates of Columbia often find themselves unemployable as architects.