Power, Freedom and Resistance: Excavating the Design Jury

Critical Analysis

In this article, the author argues that the formal architectural jury is an effective way of indoctrinating a student into the existing architectural habitus, but is an ineffective way of teaching and learning; likening the experience to Foucault’s view of power dynamics, the author concludes that the existing jury system is a ritual with little educational value.

The architectural jury process is an accepted norm in architecture education; this process is argued by professors to be a “student-centred event that supports and promotes reflective learning and thereby the construction of individual identity,” but is viewed by students as de-motivating, competitive, and something to endure. Upon examination, the educational value of the event is questionable, because students are not provided with ways to reflect on or build on what they hear in the jury. Instead, it is a process of one-way information dissemination, one that positions those who “embodied disciplinary ‘truth’” against those who “aspired to embody the ‘truth’: the students.”

This asymmetry emerges through a variety of mechanisms, all built into the event itself; these include the folklore of the event, those included, the way the room is arranged, the choreographed experience, and the language used. All of these are indicative of a certain type of disciplinary habitus, and the event itself is less about education and more, then, about inculcation. Students who performed well, or succeeded in the event, were those who understood the “game,” or were the most high-performing students; they were able to adopt the rules of the performance. This required them to “reconstruct their individual identities,” but not in a way that was personal, reflective, or self-expressive. Instead, the students formed a sense of self constrained by “the curriculum, rules, regulations, rituals, spatial configurations, constituencies, values and beliefs” of the school and of the discipline itself.

Research Value

The value of this work in informing my own research is that it:

• Provokes a question of competing cultures, such as the culture of the discipline and the culture of studio, and the idea of ownership over those cultural norms and expectations

An aside; I’ve enjoyed reading Webster’s work, and find Architectural Education after Schön: Cracks, Blurs, Boundaries and Beyond really important in my own thinking, but as I was reading this, I had a really strong feeling that I’ve read it before—and I sort of have, as it’s a huge overlap with both The Analytics of Power: Re-presenting the Design Jury and A Foucauldian Look at the Design Jury. The studies are the same, the thread is basically the same; I would put it at ~90% re-use. Maybe that’s okay in architecture research?