Photo of the Week: Alphabet Sky

One of the great things about design and architecture is that it is historically a path for both intellectual, creative, and financial mobility in our society. You can start in architecture school at a community college and; if you've got acumen, intellect, and curiosity; can be enticed to finish at whatever school you want to go to. This is a good place to study architecture but you should be good enough to succeed anywhere in architectural school. I started at UT-Arlington and finished my education at Columbia. I like to move.

It is part of the lore of these programs that we send some of our very best students to the very best schools for their final professional years or for post-professional work. Some of us see this as a way of validating and promoting our college. In addition to the great students who study here for an M.Arch. there are students who have graduated in the last three years who are in Princeton's graduate program (2 of them), Rice's graduate program (3 of them), UPenn (2 there), Yale, Clemson, Columbia, Pratt, California College of Arts and Crafts, and UCLA.

There are 23 students from the college that I know of this year who are applying to other schools to continue their studies after either a B.Sc. degree or a professional M.Arch. They are applying to the best programs in the country- Harvard, Berkeley, UCLA, Cranbrook, Yale, Rice, UMich, UMinn, Clemson, Princeton, SCI-Arc, MIT, Cornell, Penn, and RISD.

This picture is part of a project by an architecture student at Yale. She took pictures of the sky through buildings to make the alphabet. It should be a font.

I only tell you all about these people because it is exciting to see some of you really excel in your work and I want to encourage you by pointing out what you all ae earning in this degree program. You're studying for a professional program. If trends hold, in three years about 60 of you will graduate with a B.Sc.Arch. (pre-professional) degree. In four or five years 40 of you will graduate from our college with a professional master's degree. In three or four years 3 to 10 of you will be studying at Ivy League schools. Any of those accomplishments are exceptional and few people work hard enough or study enough to be literate in architecture culture, to understand the discipline of architecture, and to be a licensed professional in our society. A focused, articulate, architect / designer is a status, responsibility, and a privilege that can't only be measured in pay scale. It does take work. You've really got to like this sort of study or this will be an unbearable haul to get a degree in something you do not enjoy actively doing. It is an honor to get to watch your careers, no matter where you all go, unfold. You'll be a memory here before you know it even if you stay as long as you can.

John, if you're out there, and I hear you are, give us a comment on this post's subject matter or just tell us about what's going on in New Jersey.