BARNARD'S ARCHITECTURE
DEPARTMENT
A Lens on the World
Examining cultural and social issues through architecture
"We don't want to sound snobbish," Karen Fairbanks interjects as she and her colleagues reflect aloud on the program they've built. Fairbanks is the chair of the Barnard architecture department, which is housed at Barnard College, though it also serves Columbia College and the School of General Studies. But certain advantages that grace her department—well, they must be frankly acknowledged.
Architecture studio, Barnard hall. Photo by Craig Cook.
For starters, there are the students Fairbanks has to work with. "The students are really so top. Just to get into these schools, they are so smart, and just incredible to teach," she says. Then, of course, there's the faculty that teaches these students. "We have such a large adjunct pool here in New York and we've cultivated a really wonderful group of people, a cohesive group who have spent a lot of time teaching together." Also, there are the external resources that the department has at its disposal. "The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and the program in art history both support our students. Some of our students are taking classes with some of the top architectural scholars in the world. And Avery library is one of the top architectural libraries in the world. And we're in New York. Put it all together and I don't know how you can beat it. We have everything."
The program, which Fairbanks has run since 1996 (it became a full department in 2002), regularly sends its graduates to the highest-ranked graduate architecture programs in the country—those at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and Yale. But those aren't the only places that Barnard sends its students. Roughly half of those students majoring in architecture actually go on to become architects; the others go into a broad range of fields, including law, medicine, academia, or business. That might have something to do with the fact that the Barnard architecture department grants a liberal arts degree, the bachelor of arts, as opposed to a five-year bachelor of architecture degree granted by many other, more specialized, undergraduate programs.
Fairbanks received her master of architecture degree from Columbia's graduate school in 1987. She taught at Columbia from 1989, directing the undergraduate program there, until coming to Barnard in 1996. She has been teaching here ever since, even while building her own award-winning practice with fellow Adjunct Professor Scott Marble. Their firm, Marble Fairbanks, is, as Fairbanks puts it, "finally" designing larger scale public and institutional architecture. The firm won a 2001 international competition for which it designed a pre-K through eighth-grade school in Chicago, and is also designing the Glen Oaks branch of the Queens Library, as well as a project for the Journalism School at Columbia. This emphasis on public design ties into the issues that Fairbanks encourages her students to think about. "We want to convey the really broad range of issues they can address through architecture—looking at the complexity of urban issues and the whole range of contemporary culture."
"Our job isn't to train people to be architects," Fairbanks notes. "We teach them to think about broader cultural issues through architecture." Architecture becomes, as Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies David Smiley puts it, "one lens for learning about the world." The students acquire a whole new visual language. They learn to draft and model in three dimensions, and otherwise learn the skills necessary to begin working in the field after graduation. But a narrow emphasis on the business of making buildings waits for graduate school. Undergraduates engage in a wideranging inquiry about the way the built environment shapes the world.
Smiley integrates architecture, urban planning, design, and history—closely related fields that are often studied in artificial isolation from each other. Baxi's nontraditional practice emphasizes the overlap of art and architecture, with a special focus on the role of digital information technology in reshaping the discipline. Computer modeling now permits architects to control aspects of the design and construction process—such as the actual fabrication of individual building elements—at a whole new level. This makes for new structural possibilities that the discipline is only beginning to explore, says Baxi. "I began my education in a bachelor of architecture program and later branched off to become more multidisciplinary. I would have loved the opportunity to begin with a broader approach."
Supplementing the core faculty is a pool of about 15 adjuncts, most of them practicing professionals who teach design studios. Fairbanks singled out former adjunct and assistant director Joeb Moore as playing a crucial role in helping build the department. Some current adjuncts are recent alumnae who remember their own experiences fondly.
"The professors there can really mesh academic learning, theory, and attitudes toward art history and philosophy with an understanding of the real world, New York City, street life, and observation of the outside world," says Janette Kim '97. Kim is one of many students whose lives were shaped by the program. "There's an incredible relationship you have with both your peers and your instructors," she says. "You're so involved in the process of your work and you're also talking to your classmates about your work. It's a really collaborative process that you all have together—you explore ideas, invent ideas, test out different possibilities, and you're always doing it in dialogue with other people. It's a really strong environment, both intellectually and socially." Kim went on to Princeton after graduation. Her own practice, Town/Kim studios, recently won an international competition to design the National AIDS Memorial by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Kim also teaches courses at the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia.
Barnard's broad conceptual approach to teaching architecture is being emulated elsewhere. Betsy Williamson '92 teaches as an adjunct in the University of Toronto's architecture department. "We're looking at Barnard here as a model for the types of undergraduate courses we want to teach," says Williamson. She planned to be an architect when she was choosing undergraduate programs. She turned to Barnard specifically for its broad-based teaching, which serves non-architects and architects alike.
"The senior seminars and architectural seminars prepare you to be a leader in graduate school and in the field," she says. Williamson went on to Harvard and her own practice in Toronto. The Architectural League of New York granted her firm WilliamsonWilliamson the Young Architects Award in 2006. At Barnard, she exhausted all the available undergraduate classes and took several seminars in the graduate school. "I was so in love with studying it that I just couldn't stop," she says, recalling the energy and intensity of those years. Her recollections nicely summarize the experience that so many have encountered at Barnard. "It's just an ideal situation for undergraduates," Williamson says.
—by Wesley Yang