On The Other End of a Critique

The critique is one of the most essential ingredients in an architectural school. It is the culmination of many sleepless nights of drawing, modelling, sketching, erasing, iteration, anger, fast food breaks, re-drawing, re-modelling, computer crashes, corrupt files, re-re-modelling, rendering, and so on. After a few weeks you become attached to your project – you’ve been through so much together. When it comes time for judgement day, you feel reluctant to let it go, afraid that what you have worked so hard on will be rejected. One thing that became clear to me after a while of studying architecture is that negative feedback is the most valuable thing a student could receive.

I found this to be incredibly true over my years at Ryerson by receiving more positive critiques then negative. When a professor says good things about your project, it becomes puzzling. Where do you take it from there? How do I improve in phase B? I find that a positive review creates the notion in a students mind – and this happened with me- that the project becomes untouchable. Unchangeable. So most of the students who got a less then friendly review in phase A would show up at the presentations for phase B with a completely fresh new design which they were able to learn from their mistakes. Architecture is, after all, an iterative process. How do you change and evolve something that was considered good?

This is why I think a positive review is bad for a student. Even worse if it happens in a student’s early years – which is what happened to me. With the advantage of sketchup modelling skills already developed, I could quickly create a passable design and receive praise from professors. But by the time phase B or C come around, I find I might fall behind in the “race”. I could be stuck still doing what I had done in the beginning.

This is why the architectural critique is very important. Negative feedback is extremely beneficial as it allows a student to learn and grow. But it takes more than the embrace of criticism to further ones design. You need to be able to let go, and allow it to be changed. Taking a good project one step further to becoming a great project requires the designer to eliminate the untouchable notion and allow it to change. It needs to grow up, and won’t be able to if it is constantly protected and held back from evolving.