Rybczynski idea that, "A publisher of novels doesn't have to choose between Tom Clancy and Tom Wolfe" is grotesquely fanciful, as I think any employee with a job still left at any of the major publishing houses would happily explain to him at length (and certainly those many who've recently lost jobs would). Not only does a publisher have a limited budget, even more so today, he must choose which authors will get his resources. Once paying the necessary fees to steal away a Tom Clancy, he may well not have the money left to also hire a Tom Wolfe. Worse, once he's paid for the authors, he might not then have the resources to pay for the ad campaigns for any book they produced. Then, the publishers likely would not have any money to hire authors without the fame of a Clancy or a Woolf, but might become so, if given a chance.

The idea that somehow publishing has unlimited resources, while architecture clients have strict limits is simply preposterous. There are very few fields that don't deal with limits.

Worse, I would challenge the conclusion. We don't need to expose architecture students to all possible styles. That would be huge overkill. Students should certainly see a broad rage of styles early in their career, but the let them specialize in the styles they like. One doesn't need to be able to design grass huts, yurts, skyscrapers, synagogs, and suburban houses and I don't any architect is trained to do so, just as few doctors are both brain surgeons, psychiatrists, and field medics.

Clearly, Rybczynski architecture training left out logic, reasoning, and research.

I agree that Rybczynski's analogy to publishing was questionable. There are many reasons why architects tend to stick with a particular style in their work, but for one, I think a better example would have been to compare an architect to an artist. Painters, sculptors, etc typically have a worldview which is expressed in a consistent way through their art. A better take on the 'competition' argument would have been to point out it's beneficial for architects to create a consistent identity which can be marketed as a 'brand' of sorts.

However, your last paragraph doesn't make much sense to me. Rybczynski merely argues that architecture students should be exposed to many styles and 'contemporary ideas'. You seem to disagree, yet turn around and say they should 'see' a broad range of styles early on. Huh? What's the difference between seeing and being exposed to styles? That's not overkill--that's what your history & theory classes are for. Learning to competently design in every style and for every building type (those are two different things, by the way) is clearly not possible over the course of a college education (or even a lifetime). But Rybzczynski never advocated that--you misread what he said.

What strikes me as odd about the article is that it seems to suggest that the fact that different people have different tastes is a peculiar problem that requires explanation.

Rybczynski didn't suggest students should be "exposed to many styles and 'contemporary ideas,''' as b0nnylass indicates, but that the students "should be exposed to the widest possible range of contemporary ideas in order to find their own way." It is to the "widest possible" that I object. I think sufficient exposure can occur with a good survey and then some depth on the styles and ideas that interest the student.

I suppose there might be some useful idea in Rybczynski's article, but he doesn't seem to have developed it into something worthwhile, nor chosen his words carefully. If I were his English 1A teacher, I would have returned the essay for re-write as just a first draft.

Yes, the article is surely undeveloped, and "could do better! should be written alng the bottom in red ink along with a B-.

It is curious how awful modern acrcitecture is, generically speaking, depite the incredible technologies now available.

I have observed that architects are not often very creative or imaginative people. This may be because artistic individuals are put off, or refused, places on architecture courses,. Perhaps this because of the large amout of technical understanding required.

I do believe that it is very rare for people to be both technically minded and creative- I am not certain quite why this is.

But it is amusing how ridiulously uncreative the more imaginative architects are- how "corney" they are, often using very leaden symbolism which should have been ridiculed at the planning comittee stages. I think the worst recent culprit was the architect of the appalling Scottish Parlaiment building, in Edinburgh, with it's silly nautical "symbolsm", though Libeskind's buldings are obviously offer close competition. He so wants to be taken seriously that the least we can do is deny him that pleasure!

Another thing I must observe is how rare female architects are, especially at the top. The sort of dogmatism the author writes about has a peculiarly male, fascistic air to it ("form follows function!"), and it is hard not to imagine that were more women to be part of the professon such pompousity would be rarer.

no one is saying that architects must always design in a different style, but it would be nice if in school, students were taught and exposed to architecture other than the Bauhaus.

there are a good number of architects including many famous ones that can not comprehend designing with any materials other than glass, steel and exposed concrete, maybe its personal ideology or maybe its fact that anything other than Le Corbusier, Mies and Gropius is forbidden in 98% of arch schools.

It seemed to me that writers have an easier time of it finding commercial niches to work in --romance, true crime, history, mystery, DIY-- and that a good many large publishers have imprints that specialize in the various specialty markets; they (the publishers) are not limited to publishing only one writer , and the writer, though competitive, can also seek another publisher if circumstances warranted. The resources for writers are far less scarce than they are for architects: there are only so many clients with only so many projects and a finite amount of adequate funding.

I suggest the average pay for a writer (not much, starving in a garret) compared with the average pay for an architect (prof. average, house in suburbs) would suggest there are far more writers for the demand than architects for that demand. So, despite the limited number of architectural assignments, the number per architect must be better than for writers. I suggest the barriers for entry to writing are significantly less than for architecture and, therefore, there are vastly more writers creating supply for even the much larger demand. Thus, writing is more competitive than for architects.

The Age of artistic decadence? And what about paintings or sculptures? A guy throws a can of paint on a linen, and then calls it a work of art. Maybe I'm artistically primitive, but I don't quite comprehend it.