We asked some of our favorite critics and thinkers to answer questions about the state of architecture today. The following selection of responses was assembled to fit the space available while presenting a sum of the many and sometimes conflicting perspectives.

There is a recent petition by Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility that asks the AIA to amend its ethics code to prohibit the design of spaces for torture and killing. Should architects refuse to work on projects that create human rights violations? Or should they work to better spaces of incarceration?

There are ethical questions intrinsic to architecture and architectural practice and this is not one of them. If the petition is not an end in itself, but an instrument to open the conversation to a broader public about the ethics behind incarceration, torture, or violence within our self-proclaimed democratic systems, then we should try to find the right space and format for the development of conversations, ideas, and actions that can address and effectively change the subject at hand.
— Eva Franch I Gilabert, Director and Chief Curator for Storefront for Art and Architecture

There is no doubt that the modern prison industrial complex of the American imperial state is a travesty of architectural ambition, but I think this is an individual ethical question and should not be legislated by the AIA.
— Chip Lord, Artist

Certainly AIA should take on these issues. It’s essential to architects’ credibility that we not be seen as handmaidens to torture, state-undertaken death, and other profoundly offensive acts. Clearly today’s death penalty messiness comes from drug companies withdrawing from the capital-punishment market, and doctors’ reluctance to participate. Doctors increasingly will not participate in harm to prisoners in Guantanamo, which must lead to its closing, hopefully in the short term. Architects should learn from the process that doctors undertook to determine what should be deemed impermissible. I would like AIA to work with interest groups deeply involved in capital punishment and labor rights in foreign companies so that it can better illustrate the stakes, the issues, and the actions architects might undertake. That way any prohibitions in the code of ethics or elsewhere could be narrowly and clearly drawn. The labor-rights issue is complicated by the fact that architects usually have little control over—and may have difficulty getting information about—abusive labor practices. Those complications should not be used as an excuse for AIA disengagement, but should be considered fully in conversation with labor-rights groups and the associations for others.
— James S. Russell, Critic

There seems to be a resurgent trend in architecture schools to teach students proficiency in hand drawing. Is it still important for architects to draw by hand or is this a quaint outdated notion of production?

Pedagogical models tend to isolate structures of thought or aspects of practice as a way to understand, in depth, particular historical periods, forms of expertise, or tools to be later combined as a whole in a synthetic individual process—or in the best cases a thesis.  With the appearance of computerized drawings, hand drawing is not anymore an instrument for production. Having its function reduced to an instrument exclusively for thought—or entertainment—makes hand drawing a highly valuable pedagogical tool for its practical “uselessness”; it allows us to isolate ideas from production drawings. However, one could use any other medium to produce ideas. While I do understand the value of teaching hand drawing for its ability to isolate ideas from production, I also believe that can be done with mechanical tools.
— Eva Franch I Gilabert, Director and Chief Curator for Storefront for Art and Architecture

Hand drawing activates the “somatic complex” in ways that keystrokes, scroll wheels, and numerical repartee were tacitly engineered to bypass. But we now know that perception occurs only in the presence of movement—not only of the thing(s) perceived, but of the perceiver as well—so by compelling the hand to integrate into the cognitive dispositions of actual design practice, and away from the tunnel of the pixel/eye/nerve interface, we certainly take a step toward switching back on the enormous endowment humans received, but now routinely ignore, of their capacity to both sense and manipulate their environment. It is not an adequate answer—not even close—but it serves as a placeholder for a transformation in the ecology of design practice and the brain inevitably to come.
— Sanford Kwinter, Zone Books

The analog to digital transition that we are now experiencing is a massive cultural and evolutionary shift, but drawing, like speech and language, is a fundamental human ability. Hand drawing may have lost its position of centrality within architecture but it is still, I believe, integral to the creative act, the spark of an idea. The ballpoint pen sketch on a cocktail napkin must never be forgotten!
— Chip Lord, Artist

I am somewhat agnostic on this. For some architects, hand drawing is an essential link from brain to design, but I do not think this is objectively proven, and is certainly not true for many successful designers. I think pedagogy will evolve over time, just as digital tools will get better. For speed of thinking, there is still nothing better than a sketch. But physical models, mockups, etc. also seem extraordinarily important in understanding how the abstraction on the screen really works.
— James S. Russell, Critic

The unpaid internship is a long tradition in the profession, but should it continue given the high level of debt that students incur in school today?

I believe it was 1997 when the entire student body in the ETSA Barcelona, UPC, where I studied my masters, cut the Avinguda Diagonal—the main access to the city—because the university intended to raise the annual tuition fee from $600 to $680 (1997 conversion rate). I finished architecture school without debt, and even then I could not afford an unpaid internship. I have never been able to. To me, to take an unpaid internship was a luxury item, like going to an expensive restaurant, or buying a Rolls Royce. It was simply a privilege that some had. If I would have really wanted to do an internship with someone that did not pay, I would have found the way, but the truth is that I did not. I took jobs there where I could learn and live but I respected, and respect, the ones that make different choices.
— Eva Franch I Gilabert, Director and Chief Curator for Storefront for Art and Architecture

There are a thousand benefits that internships provide for young architects, yet the fact remains that in the current system these benefits can accrue only to those with the means to access them. One of the interesting arguments I heard at Harvard in the last few years was how they are “not a corporate school per se, its just that the debt our students accrue requires them to enter corporate offices upon graduation to pay it back.” In sum, the unpaid internship system removes as much talent from the stream as it cultivates, perhaps more.
— Sanford Kwinter, Zone Books

As far as I understand, unpaid internships are illegal and should stay that way. Some internships can be done for college credit but I think that should be permitted only as long as someone is closely minding the academic store. Architects who do not pay do not belong in business and are undermining the profession and themselves. They should be strongly condemned (including being drummed out of professional associations) if caught doing it, even if in some flimsy fashion it is legal.
— James S. Russell, Critic

What do you think of how professional practice classes are taught in school today? Do they prepare students for the actual working conditions of the office and profession?

All pedagogical structures need to show what things have been in order to imagine what things could be. Architecture is a vocation that remains timeless, but the profession is constantly in the making in relation to technical, social, and economic demands and constraints. My first day at Princeton School of Architecture, I went to the office of Paul Lewis, Director of Graduate Studies at that time, to request a waiver as I was unwilling to take the professional practice class. I was coming from Catalunya with my license under my arm and a building under construction and had no interest in learning the intricacies of practice in the U.S. Ten years after I called Bob Hillier—who has been teaching that class in Princeton for many years—and told him I needed an express class.
— Eva Franch I Gilabert, Director and Chief Curator for Storefront for Art and Architecture

It is shallow reasoning that places the onus on schools to provide training in workplace hygiene and to develop packaged personnel for design shops. Office environments are neither more rigorous nor more intellectually demanding than those of schools and there is nothing a young architect would not learn expeditiously in situ in the office and on the fly. The assets that new graduates bring to a practice are up-to-date (often software and equipment) expertise that mid-level and senior practitioners can never acquire or possess, as well as fresh ideas and approaches developed in research environments that can be transferred and integrated in no other way. These are the qualities that schools generally try to build and they are the ones offices should better appreciate and acknowledge.
— Sanford Kwinter, Zone Books

The profession today seems split between those who would use the abilities of parametric design programs to create new experiments in form, and those who adhere to the elegance of the modernist box. Where do you stand between these two poles? Which will come to define this era of design?

I hope our era is defined regardless of stylistic concerns and just in relation to architecture’s ability to enact and effect significant change in the ethical, social, and political spheres that define our time. We need a new operational transparency, where the forms, methods, and principles embedded in the making and the architectures made embody our ethical imperatives from beginning to end.
— Eva Franch I Gilabert, Director and Chief Curator for Storefront for Art and Architecture

There is no question that both of these tendencies have already indelibly marked the identity of our era (notwithstanding the megaphone claims of the former and the relative speechlessness of the latter). While both give expression to aspects of our contemporary historical context, each is also hampered by a retreat into formalist conservatism that has long ago abandoned any effort to radically transform the experience or makeup of the human user. This task has been left to other tendencies unfolding today, such as the “spatial practice” and “sustainability” practitioners, who have in turn seemingly lost any feeling or interest in formal invention. It is not the dichotomy of styles that is in question today but the broader abdication of the problem of connecting form to social processes.
— Sanford Kwinter, Zone Books