What's The Big Idea?

TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE - that's why most kids decide to go to architecture school. But most architecture schools sabotage that by placing an emphasis on "being different" and "being modern." "Modern" means things like flat roofs, horizontal windows (in other words, style) and things like "the big idea" (watch the clip above).

It's easy to show that most kids don't arrive at architecture school with those ideas. But pretty quickly, their professors have practically all of them sounding like Howard Roark. And that means that when they deal with someone other than the upper middle class, they're usually imposing unpopular ideas on their clients.

The Sundance Channel has a new program on the Tulane architecture school, which should be at the center of helping its city rebuild after Katrina. But watch the first program here, and clips from future shows here. The students go in with big hearts and good intentions, but come out with "prototypes" that are expensive and often unwanted and that therefore will never be repeated.

The woman running the organization that builds the houses says, "What I want is 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and a 1,200 square foot house."

The professor running the Tulane program says, "I want innovation, I want affordability, and I want a really bold gesture" — and during the series we see that affordability goes out the window because of innovation and bold gestures.

The professor asks the students why they're being so cautious, and tells them that "as a good designer you're required to be much more inventive." And he talks about the big ideas in buildings like Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum and Louis Kahn's Salk Institute, without explaining that these are public buildlings, rather than urban fabric like the private houses the students are designing. Or that Wright's "big idea," the ramp, is usually considered a bad solution for an art museum.

"I keep asking you, 'What's the big idea? What's the primary concept of this scheme?'"

Not surprisingly, the students respond to this simplistic question with abstract ideas that mean nothing to the people who live in the house, like "a folding plane," or say "My concept is shifting volumes both vertically and horizontally."

One student says, "Hopefully all of us that are designing are taking into mind the scale of the neighborhood. But you're always trying to push the envelope a little bit and come up with things that are a little more exciting."

The clip below shows what some of the residents of the neighborhood think of this.

"I think they're ugly. Put [the neighborhood] back like it was," says one.

"Make a left by that odd house that looks like it's from outer space," another tells people when she gives them directions to her house.

"Experiment over on St. Charles" (a rich man's street) a longtime resident says. But architects experiment on the poor, who have no choice. The question is why socially conscious architecture students let their professors give them simplistic concepts like "the big idea" when these concepts fight against socially and urbanistically acceptable solutions.

No city in America has residents with more devotion to their buildings and their neighborhoods than New Orleans. Tulane's esoteric contributions to this are too rigidly ideological to allow the qualities that make their city so loved. Sad to say, not one of the buildings designed by the students will ever be loved the way the old shotgun houses are.

What's the big idea that we think that's okay?

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