David Clarke The Architecture of Alienation: The Political Economy of Professional Education.
Transaction Books, 203 pages, $29.95
There has never been a shortage of grumps and grouches in the architectural profession. The tradition of public grievance begins with Vitruvius, who sought a privileged standing for architects above masons and craftsmen. In recent years, with the irruptions of postmodernism and deconstruction, the steady growth in such literature suggests a pervasive sense of disenfranchisement from the public. David Clarke, while not altogether convincing as architecture’s curmudgeon-at-large, provides some startling insights into the reasons for architecture’s relatively deserved isolation.
Clarke’s book is composed of two long and two short essays, followed by a series of “Little Manifestos”—brief reviews and notes published between 1974 and 1991. Each of the major essays represents a variation on the subtitle’s premise: that architectural education, and indeed professional practice, is a market activity and is subject to substantive distortions when the market process is misunderstood or willfully ignored. The first essay represents an informal attempt (despite the author’s seemingly rigorous methodology) to quantify investment vs.consumption spending in contemporary American architectural education—that is, the amount of time and money each student is forced to spend on courses dedicated ostensibly to generating professional return as opposed to “gut” courses. The second essay is a historical and descriptive (and rather rambling and redundant) account of the travesties of centralized bureaucracy for architectural education in France. The next essay, “The Marketplace and the Academy,” discusses the unintentionally