| compare with the nominal discourse on killing off
| schools in india (where many deserve to be killed)
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5078527-102280,00.html
Why we must save Britain's Bauhaus
Deyan Sudjic
Sunday December 5, 2004
The Observer
The general board of Cambridge University will meet on Wednesday to
decide whether to close its school of architecture. This idea seems
perverse. The school is widely regarded as one of the top three in
Britain and its course was the most popular in the entire university
this year, with more than eight applications for every place, compared
with an average of three for the university as a whole. It is as if the
generations of Cambridge academics who suffered from James Stirling's
leaky history faculty library, who sniffed about Norman Foster's law
buildings and Denys Lasdun's brutalist concrete in the city are finally
taking their revenge against contemporary architecture.
A decade ago, the university's academics drew back from voting to
demolish Stirling's masterwork in Cambridge, but now they have a chance
to deliver an even more painful blow to British architecture. The school
has already abandoned its diploma course, the two-year programme its
graduates had to take to qualify as practising architects, leaving it
badly weakened. Now there is every likelihood that the course both the
Times and the Guardian rated the best in Britain is on the brink of
disappearing altogether.
The wave of protests that saw Griff Rhys Jones, whose son is currently a
student there, join a demonstration in the city last week, and a
letter-writing campaign that attracted the signatures of both Norman
Foster, and Richard Rogers, and even artist Antony Gormley, may make the
board draw back from finally killing off the school. But creating some
kind of meaningless face-saving formula that would see the survival of a
rump of academics pursuing research into sustainability or construction
management would be no compensation for what would be lost.
A remarkably successful school that produced half of the names of the
Guardian's list of future architectural stars published last week will,
for all practical purposes, have ceased to exist. As Eric Parry, one of
the best regarded architects and teachers of his generation, and himself
a Cambridge product, put it: 'The comparison is with the closure of the
Bauhaus.'
True, architecture at Cambridge has suffered from lacklustre leadership
since the retirement of Colin St John Wilson, who, in between his
struggles to build the British Library, made the school a place which
produced so many of the architects responsible for the best new
architecture of Britain.
But what has killed it, and threatens the position of the other leading
British university school of architecture, the Bartlett at University
College London, is the research assessment exercise.
The RAE is a doomsday bomb ticking away at the heart of the
higher-education system. Far from channelling resources to centres of
excellence, as promised, it favours departments skilled at the byzantine
mysteries of ticking the right boxes. Running a great teaching school
counts for far less than for academics to get published in journals that
nobody reads.
RAEs may make sense for medicine, biology and engineering, where the
concept of higher research is clear cut. But what does research really
mean for such subjects as architecture, art or design which also find
themselves struggling to jump through hoops they were never intended to
fit. For these subjects, practice is the measure of achievement.
What finally did for Cambridge and threatened the Bartlett, was the last
round of the research exercise three years ago, when both schools were
downgraded from a top-of-the-range five to a four. The Bartlett came out
fighting, saying it was being reviewed not by its academic peers, but by
a group dominated by surveyors and construction managers who could
hardly be expected to understand the wilder shores of architectural
theory. Indeed, the system has been changed for the next round, with
architects likely to get greater representation.
For Cambridge, it is too late. The school no longer meets the threshold
the university expects of all its departments. The immediate result was
less money and the start of a downward spiral. What really bothers the
architectural world about a Cambridge closure is that it is being told
it is no longer welcome among the serious academic players.
Architects have spent the best part of a century trying to be taken
seriously and now the subject is being pushed into the second- or even
the third-tier universities, as if it was catering or windsurfing. That
is bad for architecture, bad for education and terrible for the quality
of Britain's cities.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004