Whether it’s called a crit, a jury or a review, the practice is almost universal: At the designated time, everyone falls into their role like a carefully choreographed performance. The presenting student pins their drawings to the wall and stands in front of them — and across from a seated row of critics comprising professors, practising architects and, occasionally, graduate students. Their peers sit behind the jury, watching and listening as the production unfolds. The presenter holds forth, the jury responds, rinse and repeat. As the winter semester comes to a close, architecture students around the world will experience a version of this exercise.
The crit asks a lot of its participants. It requires students to summarize up to 12 weeks of work for an audience in five minutes or less, and to come prepared to receive feedback — publicly — with humility and gratitude (never mind the fact that they have barely slept in the days prior).
Architects undoubtedly offer valid, experience-based insight, yet the lack of multidisciplinary representation on panels perpetuates the assumption that practitioners are the only arbiters of good architecture, and this excludes valuable perspectives — of engineers, urbanists and other subject matter experts, and even the building’s intended users — that better reflect the collaborative approach to real-world practice. Plus, their subjectivity becomes a double-edged sword when comments are made based on taste alone.
On paper, the crit represents a rare and beautiful opportunity: a time dedicated solely to reflection on one’s work. Receiving critiques has made me resilient — the practice has thickened my skin, if not left it slightly calloused. But I always found it ironic that a profession so enamoured with critique has rarely questioned the methods by which it teaches and moulds new practitioners. The reality is that crits don’t play out in a vacuum. They embody and reproduce very real power dynamics and, according to some academics, they’re overdue for a rethink.
It goes without saying that the world looks much different than it did when architecture programs were formalized in the late 1800s. Yet the studio — and, by extension, the crit — have remained practically unchanged from their origins in the master–apprentice model.
Despite its shortcomings, the crit is still the predominant form of student evaluation in architecture programs. In a conducive setting, it works — but we need to ensure the right people have a seat at the table. And while it has historically been the main vehicle of feedback delivery in architectural education, it shouldn’t be the only method in play.