Contrary to the Previous Post- Dr Garry Had this to say

Dr Garry wrote this originally for the inestimable online journal ArchVoices, in response to a discussion on architectural internship, and suggestions that architecture schools should model themselves on medical schools.

Architects have nothing to learn from doctors

I'm not comfortable with the term internship (nor am I happy with the term profession, for that matter, but that's another story).

''any real debate is suppressed before it begins''

To start with, internship was borrowed from another occupation, medicine (during the 1960s, from what I can discover). It is not used outside of North America in the other great English-speaking nations; although the UK, Australia, and New Zealand have very similar systems of education, licensure, and registration.

To me the whole term is laden with implicit meanings that suppress any real debate before it even begins. Creating a word for what – to take my own case – Australian architecture graduates only vaguely think of as 'your first years in an office,' bundles a whole parcel of originally medical concepts into one term. Unwrapping all the subtle connotations, meanings, and expectations implicit in the notion of internship becomes quite difficult if you are used to thinking of them as the one wrapped-up package. I'm not talking of some fancy 'Deconstruction' of internship: just getting back to some basics that could do with a long-overdue examination.

Let's go back to the beginning. Why did American architectural educators (and those of many other university-based occupations, too) take the idea of internship from the medicos? The obvious reason is that internship is a Good Idea. Occupations can always learn from each other. But why should we think that architecture bears any resemblance to medicine in its educational needs?

If medicine were taught like architecture

If medicine was taught like architecture, first-year med students would spend most of the year describing exciting ideas about completely hypothetical surgical techniques to their tutors. Along the way they would reluctantly attend lectures about the human body and how to take someone's blood pressure. All this would be conveyed through slides. No-one would see a real body or apply a sphygmomanometer. One of the most popular subjects would be medical history. Aristotle's four humours would be studied at length. Students would write long essays about the significance of Roman medicine. They would discuss the enduring importance of Galen, probably throwing in some illustrations from one of the Renaissance editions of his works. One assignment would probably ask them to make a model of the human anatomy as Galen understood it. High grades would be awarded to the best models. A few of the students would fall in love with Galen's aesthetics, and seek to promote his ideas for the rest of their academic and professional lives.

I'm not discussing this because I feel that architectural education should be more like the medical. To the contrary: we should realise that they are different beasts. Architecture has little to learn from medicine. Many architects gaze lovingly at the medicos. The ostensible reason is to improve the architect's education, but really they yearn to steal some of the fame, kudos and wealth that they believe could only be theirs if they were more like doctors.