The Very Short Life of Architectural Science

My life in architectural science

Architectural science was an attempt to bring the benefits of science both to architectural education, and to the profession (as you can read here). It was founded in 1953 by Professor Henry ‘Jack’ Cowan (1919–2007), a structural engineer. You can read a generous assessment of Dr Cowan in this obituary (Sydney Morning Herald, 27 August 2007).

As the department grew it brought in experts in acoustics, lighting, thermal and wind studies, environmental psychology and computing.

“a noble experiment doomed to failure”

I had a great time there; but now, looking back, I see that it was a noble experiment doomed to failure. There is no doubt that the people there were (and are) world class in their field. The question is: what was the field? I don't think that architectural science constituted a valid and unified body of knowledge. It was a ragbag of quite separate disciplines, united mainly by the fact that the people were in the one building. There was some cross-fertilisation, true; for instance, between the environmental psychologists and the lighting people.

Apart from propinquity, the only unity is that they shared a common object of study, the built environment. A glance through the department's house journal, Architectural Science Review (ASR), would show a great variety of articles, with very little linkage between them. Much less than, for example, the articles published in the Journal of Architectural Education or the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. A general reader of the latter two could understand with little effort every paper published. A reader of ASR would have great difficulty comprehending any article outside his or her own specialty.

The educational legacy

The attempt to educate architects in the ways of the sciences sounded like a good idea. It took me twenty years to work out why it was a failure, and why it had to fail. Rather than produce architecture graduates with a deep appreciation of the physical properties of buildings; who would be aware of the effects of lighting, the weird ways of the wind, and who could design for energy-efficiency; we instead produced generations of students who deeply resented having to take courses they found dull and irrelevant.

Teaching architecture students

Why? Several reasons come to mind. First, while we tried hard as teachers, I don't think we were that brilliant. On the other hand, we were more than competent, and we knew our stuff. What I didn't work out for many years was that architecture students do not want competence: they want charisma. Architecture students are, frankly, not the brightest bulbs in the pack. They yearn for inspiration, not facts. The most highly regarded design teachers are always the ones who airily wave in front of slides of their masterpieces. No multiple choice assessment after these classes, thank you!

Second, as I have shown elsewhere, architecture students regard most favourably those courses in which they can demonstrate their class position. And the last place they can do that is with science- or engineering-oriented courses. The ones who most objected to our courses were always the ones from the most upper-class families.

Sustainable design

There is irony in dollops that the very topics we attempted to enthuse our students with are now hot-to-trot in some architectural circles under the name of ‘sustainable design’. We were talking about energy efficiency and economy of materials thirty years before architects ever heard the word ‘kilowatt’. The irony redoubles when we learn that the students who were most hostile to these very concepts are now their most ardent proponents. You can read more about this here.

The professional legacy

More successful was our attempt to provide services for the architectural occupation. Wind tunnel tests, facility management assessments and the like were worthwhile functions of the department.

However, the department failed utterly to integrate these into the culture of architecture, any more than structural design has been integrated into practice (every practising architect foists this sort of stuff onto the nearest engineer without question). They were regarded as purely external services offered by outsiders to the profession.

Perhaps the department's forte was its suite of postgraduate offerings: audio, computing, facilities management, lighting and many others. As the University of Sydney demanded that its departments attract ever greater outside funding, the department responded by producing a wide range of popular and profitable courses.

The research legacy

The department prided itself on its research outputs. Unquestionably, these were fine intellectual products. The issue was whether they are of any practical use. In many disciplines this is an irrelevant consideration (how useful is Latin poetry?), but architectural science purported to assist the very practical task of designing and constructing buildings.

Research in the real world

A few realities about research were brought home to me after I joined Australia's largest building automation research firm, James Hardie Building Services, in 1995. I was struck by how different research in academia was from that conducted in the private sector. At James Hardie we were very focussed and strove to produce solutions to real-world problems. We aimed to produce the best solution at the cheapest price using the fewest resources. We had real customers looking for real products.

Research in academic fantasy-land

Academia is the opposite. Sure, DADS produced papers and books, but very little made its way into the real world. And even less of this was used by architects: engineers and others, perhaps; architects, no. Academics crowed about the size of their grants, about how many postgrads they have working for them, about how much equipment they have bought: in short, about their inputs. The raison d'etre of academic research seemed to be to get money.

The outputs never seemed to materialise as anything except ponderous prose in obscure academic journals; each paper ending with a lament for further funding from the taxpayer. No one ever asked: well, what have you done with six man-years of effort (unpaid postgrads, of course), and a hundred thousand dollars? At James Hardie, you had to have a bloody good answer, or you were out on your backside.

Death of the discipline

As I foresaw in 2000, there was little future for the discipline, nor for the department that bore its name. Dear old DADS, the flagship of the discipline, is no more. As far as I know, there is only one department of architectural science remaining in 2007, that of Ryerson University.

The term pops up every so often, (such as here), although it is clear that these are recent coinages, without any knowledge of the original disciplne that Henry Cowan so proudly established in 1953.

Mistake 1: Dr Cowan strangled his own child

Architectural science–the department–and the discipline, were doomed by two mistakes. First, DADS allowed its founder to hang around for 20 years after his retirement. When I mentioned this to colleagues some time ago, I was accused of ageism, of criticising the old for being old.

Not so. The point I was making was that Dr Cowan imposed his vision of the discipline on his successors, well after he should have let others have a free hand to change and grow. Although he supposedly retired in 1985, he was a significant influence over DADS for a further 20 years. The pioneering journal he founded in 1958, Architectural Science Review, laboured under his withered gaze until a few months before his death, almost 50 years later; moribund. The issues he thought were the Great Debates of 1958 still heaved across his asthmatic editorials in the twenty-first century. His student successors and acolytes at the journal (unburdened by fresh ideas, and themselves approaching retirement) were happy to let the old man carry on. After all, what did they have to offer?

When Dr Cowan came to the school of architecture he brought some dazzlingly fresh ideas about what architects should learn, and some innovative ways of teaching it. But decade after decade, the department taught the same content with the same pedagogy. In the decades after his retirement, Dr Cowan still kept his hand in with desultory lectures: the same ones he gave when Elvis had his first hits. His slides were fading with age; his demonstration equipment and models elegant but mouldering relics of the brass-and-mahogany era.

There was a certain sad charm to it all, but also an implacable determination not to move with the times, not to acknowledge that the world had changed; and a profound failure to understand that there always comes a time to let go so that others may forge their own vision.

By not letting it grow and develop, Dr Cowan strangled his own child.

The student is never right

Like most other full professors I have met, Dr Cowan thought himself omniscient. Although his training was in concrete design, he believed himself an authority in everything from sociology to history. (Mind you, I have met sociology professors who have thought themselves experts in concrete design, so there you go.) I also suspect that his deep political conservatism was a factor. Like many eastern European emigres (such as my own father, a refugee from Hungary after the War) he was rabidly anti-socialist.

Here is why I mention this: Dr Cowan refused to extend the contract of the very best structures lecturer the school ever had, Mr Patrick Healey, when Dr Cowan learned that Mr Healey was a card-carrying socialist. It takes quite a gift to make structural analysis appealing to architecture students, but Mr Healey had it, and in abundance. A mass protest and petition by the entire student body could not sway Dr Cowan. I remember being at the meeting called to persuade Cowan to change his mind. Several students put our case. The omniscient one condescendingly smiled at the hundred or so students in the room and said five words: ‘No, I don't think so.’

Students? What do they know? I have always been annoyed and frustrated by the way that academics dismiss student criticism of their teaching. In any other occupation, the client is king, ‘the customer is always right’. Not in academia. There, the customer is an idiot to be ignored.

A better exit

A fine example of a graceful exit was set by Dr Cowan's contemporary in the school, Professor Peter Johnson, who broke all ties when he retired as Dean, Professor and Head of School. He moved on to other places and other activities. I admired Johnson hugely for that.

Mistake 2: Architectural science becomes design science

The second mistake, from the discipline's point of view, was to appoint as Dr Cowan's successor a professor with little empathy for the culture of architecture, and almost as little for architectural science: a few years after he won the position, Dr Gero persuaded the university to rename his chair to ‘design science’. No doubt Dr John Gero had a fine mind, was a dazzling administrator and would have adorned any university with his coruscating intellect; but by his own admission, he prefered to be a professor of ‘design science’, not ‘architectural science’.

Like most Australian academics, Dr Gero found the charms of his very first tenured posting so alluring and so comfortable that even the most enticing of offers was resistible. Dr Gero took his first job in DADS in the year that Pamela Anderson¹ was born.

After some years of cogitation, in 2007 Dr Gero moved to one of America's most exciting universities, Turd Blossom's beloved alma mater George Mason University² in the Old Dominion, no doubt contemplating a happy, avuncular, and productive golden age.

We should all be grateful that he still manages to keep up his prodigious academic output: just for the first half of 2007, his site lists a stupendous 20 publications, magnanimously shared with 14 co-authors.

DADS, under Dr Gero, produced world-class research in computing. I find it odd that, in all my years in the real-world, private-sector, IT industry I have yet to meet someone who has been with the one employer for more than five years. Three is more the norm.

I find it ironic that the academics who claim to be leaders in such a dynamic field have been stuck to the one spot for decades. So we find the delightful conundrum of a collection of ageing academics cemented to the one job, the one employer, the one position, lecturing us about how dynamic and how youthful their field is—for everyone except themselves.