Archinect - News

“Is studio culture for everyone?” asks Virginia Tech's architecture director

2022-02-01T12:00:00-05:00

Architectural educator, critic, and author Aaron Betsky has published an editorial reflecting on the value and failings of the studio culture in architecture schools. Betsky, who is Director of the School of Architecture + Design at Virginia Tech, published the piece on Architect Magazine, the journal of the American Institute of Architects, under the title “Don’t Kill the Design Studio — Make It Better.”

From the Archinect podcast archive: Banal Sex Mansion: talking about sex and architecture with Aaron Betsky, on Archinect Sessions #62

Betsky’s piece explores the question of whether the studio culture in architecture schools is “productive, efficient, or even fair” in its current format; a question to which Betsky categorically answers “no.” Much of Betsky’s argument centers on the high financial cost of an architectural education relative to many other degree programs, including the need to high-spec laptops, drawing and model material, and travel expenses.

Archinect Feature:...

A potential future for the School of Architecture at Taliesin begins to take shape

2020-05-06T18:59:00-04:00

Back in early March, it was announced that the Board of Directors of the School of Architecture at Taliesin (SOAT) had turned back a decision it made in January to shut down following a protracted tenancy dispute with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

In a press release announcing the initial plan to close down, the school wrote: "[SOAT] will cease operations after this semester, after a gut-wrenching decision by its Governing Board [...] The School of Architecture at Taliesin was not able to reach an agreement with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation to keep the school open."

Previously on Archinect: "Taliesin School of Architecture Board votes to rescind planned closure." What will be the fate of Frank Lloyd Wright's Beloved School of Architecture at Taliesin? Image © Flickr user Christopher Michel.

The school's initial decision to close down came as SOAT struggled to raise additional funds to keep its operations going, a circumstance that changed following the groundswell of sympa...

Aaron Betsky appointed new director of Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design

2020-03-12T17:03:00-04:00

Acclaimed architecture academic, critic, author, and curator Aaron Betsky has been appointed as the new director of Virginia Tech's School of Architecture + Design in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies.

In a press announcement published on March 10th, Richard Blythe, the current Dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies, shares, "Aaron is a proven leader with demonstrated dedication to cross-disciplinary exploration, academic excellence, and educational innovation. His international standing and connections in architecture and design are considerable and will undoubtedly help the college expand its global reach, activities, and influence. Aaron's career path exemplifies the Beyond Boundaries approach of disciplinary interconnectedness and depth, as well as breadth."

Betsky’s move to Virginia Tech follows follows his decision in November 2019 to leave the School of Architecture at Taliesin (SoAT), where Betsky served as the dean from 2015 - 2017 and is current...

Frank Lloyd Wright's School of Architecture at Taliesin shutters its doors after 88 years

2020-01-28T14:27:00-05:00

The School of Architecture at Taliesin (SoAT), which maintains campuses in Scottsdale, Arizona and Spring Green Wisconsin, is closing down following an 88-year run as the institution tasked with carrying on the intellectual design legacy of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

What happened?

An announcement from the school states: "The School of Architecture at Taliesin will cease operations after this semester, after a gut-wrenching decision by its Governing Board on Saturday. The School of Architecture at Taliesin was not able to reach an agreement with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation to keep the school open." The school is currently directed by educator and critic Aaron Betsky.

David and Gladys Wright House back on the market

2018-09-11T14:17:00-04:00

Phoenix, Arizona–based developer Zach Rawling bought a Frank Lloyd Wright–designed house for $2.3 million in 2012, when its previous owner wanted to demolish the landmark. In 2017, Rawlings donated the David and Gladys Wright House to the Taliesin West School of Architecture, but in June of this year, Rawlings and Aaron Betsky, the architecture school dean, announced in a joint statement that the donation was being revoked due to fundraising concerns.

Image via davidwrighthouse.org.

In their joint statement, Aaron Betsky and Zach Rawling wrote:

The relationship between the School and the House is formally manifested in the David Wright House Collaborative Fund, a supporting organization of the Arizona Community Foundation. The principal focus of the David Wright House Collaborative Fund was to develop a vehicle to raise the $7 million endowment on which the pledge of the House for the benefit of the School was conditioned. Over the past year, we have learned that the fundraising timetables of both parties do not lend themselves to a joint campaign. With the School in its fledgling years, the prevailing thought was that the divergent donor interests would effectively divide its support base rather than enhance it. Uncertainty regarding future capital improvements at the House and the long-term cultural development of the site in Phoenix increased this concern. For this reason, by mutual agreement and out of mutual respect, the Scho...

A Spiralling Frank Lloyd Wright house in Phoenix has been donated to the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture

2017-06-12T12:21:00-04:00

Last week marked what would have been Frank Lloyd Wright’s 150th birthday. Celebrating the occasion, Zach Rawling and his family donated his Wright-designed home in Phoenix to a foundation under the auspices of the Arizona Community Foundation to benefit the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.

The house, designed for the architect’s son, was saved from demolition by Rawling and, with its distinctive spiraling ramp, is seen as a precursor to the Guggenheim Museum in New York, according to Aaron Betsky, dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.

The donation “will allow us to use that great legacy to be a living laboratory in which we will figure out how to use what Frank Lloyd Wright taught us about living in the desert Southwest, to make the life in this desert and in this community even better in the future,” said Betsky.

Rawling bought the property back in 2012 for $2.4M in order to save it from demolition. While he wanted to restore the building and turn it into ...

After a tough couple years, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture has a new lease on life—and a new name

2017-04-24T20:41:00-04:00

T he Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture has had a rough go of things the last few years. The school, which is located at the historic winter home of Wright, Taliesin West, almost lost its accreditation because it wasn’t financially independent from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Things got so bad that they temporarily suspended new enrollment.

Then, the critic Aaron Betsky took over the deanship and was able to fundraise enough to keep the school accredited. Now, to mark their new, more-removed relationship to the Foundation, the school has been renamed the School of Architecture at Taliesin.

“Adopting this new name, the School of Architecture at Taliesin, helps us to secure our identity as an experimental, forward-looking architecture program that is deeply rooted in the Taliesin Fellowship,” Betsky states. “The process in which we developed our new relationship with the Foundation and our accreditors has been an opportunity to closely examine who we are as a school and ho...

Banal Sex Mansion: talking about sex and architecture with Aaron Betsky, on Archinect Sessions #62

2016-04-28T13:56:00-04:00

This week we’re joined by special guest co-host Aaron Betsky, author of Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire and Building Sex: Men, Women, Architecture & the Construction of Sexuality. As a strong presence in the architectural discourse of gender and sexuality since the 1990s, Betsky discusses with us a few of our recent Features published under April's special editorial theme, Sex, including:

Betsky was last on the podcast in his current professional capacity as the dean at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture at Taliesin, to talk about the school's then-uncertain future. You can li...

Let's be Frank: Archinect Sessions Episode 15 with Aaron Betsky, Taliesin's new Dean

2015-02-05T14:29:00-05:00

It seems as if the tumult and intrigue that ran through Frank Lloyd Wright's life has lived on at Taliesin. After being embroiled in accreditation issues, suspending Fall 2013 enrollment, and working through rocky fundraising plans, Taliesin recently appointed Aaron Betsky to lead the school and help it regain solid footing. Betsky was previously the Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum and has quite the art/architecture pedigree: he's served as the Director of the 2008 International Architecture Biennale in Venice, SFMOMA's Curator of Architecture and Design, and the Director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam.

Betsky joined Paul, Amelia, Donna and Ken on the podcast to talk about his plans to make Taliesin the best experimental architecture school in the world, and its role in the changing tides of architecture education. It also turns out that Betsky is quite the DJ.

News this week was also rather Wright-ous, with the nomination of 10 FLW structures to the UNES...

Session 14: His bjark is BIGger than his bjite – A chat with Bjarke Ingels at the opening of BIG's "Hot to Cold" exhibition

2015-01-29T15:25:00-05:00

This episode is a doozy. Paul and Amelia left the temperate sunshine of Los Angeles for Washington, DC's frigid monumentality, to interview Bjarke Ingels on the eve of his "Hot to Cold" exhibition at the National Building Museum. The 40-year old architect shared some quick-won wisdom about scaling a business, the Danish condition, and the indispensability of humor and play in architecture.

Donna and Ken joined Paul and Amelia to speak with Lian Chang about her recently published visualizations of the Archinect Salary Poll for the ACSA, in charming emoji-based data sets. The Sessions co-hosts also discuss Aaron Betsky's new appointment as the head of the deeply troubled Taliesin West, and what Thom Mayne's demolition of Ray Bradbury's house means for architecture preservation and sentimentality.

And for another climatological analogy, Paul and Brian Newman, Archinect Sessions's legal correspondent, poke at the tip of the iceberg concerning issues of copyright in architecture.

A remind...

Weekly News Round-Up for January 19, 2015

2015-01-26T20:46:00-05:00

Sunday, January 25:

Aaron Betsky To Lead Taliesin West: Effective immediately, Betsky will "set the intellectual tone or the School " as it undergoes a rough and potentially definitive funding period.

Friday, January 23:

Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House to reopen once again in February: So culminates a six-year and nearly $4.4M restoration project, to return the house to its early 20th century state.

Thursday, January 22:

Megataaaall Shanghai Tower enters final construction phase: It's 632 meters tall, symbolizes China's Future, and is flanked by two other skyscrapers repping China's Past and Present.

David Chipperfield pledges to carefully "optimize" Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie: Chipperfield also renovated Berlin's Neues Museum, and plans to "keep as much Mies as possible".

Wednesday, January 21:

'Can of Ham' skyscraper coming to London after all: Delayed since 2008 after the financial crisis hit, the hamscraper will sit in close company to London's Gherkin.

Monday, January...

Aaron Betsky To Lead Taliesin West

2015-01-25T19:10:00-05:00

“I look forward to continuing the tradition of experimental architecture he did so much to define.”

Betsky seems to be the man of the hour these days, writing popularly discussive articles in defense of architecture and participating in social media. Congratulations and looking forward to seeing what becomes of the heavily branded institution in need of a new life.

All those new museums? Now, the facts…

2014-11-13T15:07:00-05:00

In 2010, the Fondazione di Venezia—a well-endowed and entrepreneurial foundation with its historic roots in Italy’s regional banking system—launched an architectural competition for a cluster of buildings in the centre of Mestre, one of the mainland urban areas of Venice. [...] The three accompanying essays, by Marco De Michelis, Aaron Betsky and M9 architect Matthias Sauerbruch, are less granular. They provide an overview of and perspectives on the museum-building boom [...].

Archinect rounds up critical reactions to Koolhaas' biennale

2014-06-19T11:42:00-04:00

This year's Venice Biennale of Architecture, curated by Rem Koolhaas, officially opened on June 7, under the theme "Fundamentals". The deluge of criticism and reporting coming out of the Biennale will surely continue until it closes November 23, but so far reactions from the architectural journalism community seem pretty consistent. Critics seem at once relieved that the biennale is not given away to preening and doting upon architectural personalities, but instead focused on "architecture, not architects", as per Koolhaas' design. The flip-side of this could be seen as replacing objects of starchitectural value with a too-safe generalism, imbued with the self-importance of Koolhaas' cult of personality. Responses seem largely concerned with interpreting the man at the same time as his Biennale, rather than investigating the interplay of national pavilions' personalities under a unifying theme. But we've got many months to go, and this is only the beginning.

But with the sheer mass o...

Book Launch: "L.A. [TEN]: Interviews on Los Angeles Architecture 1970s-1990s" author in conversation with Aaron Betsky, Sylvia Lavin

2014-02-06T12:34:00-05:00

Last Tuesday's book launch for L.A. [TEN]: Interviews on Los Angeles Architecture 1970s-1990s at the A+D Museum brought author Stephen Phillips in conversation with the book’s publisher, Lars Müller, and architecture critics (among other things) Aaron Betsky and Sylvia Lavin. The book is a collaborative effort, culling work from students in Cal Poly’s L.A. Metro Program in Architecture and Urban Design, Wim de Wit and Christopher Alexander of the Getty Research Institute, and Phillips himself. As an initiative that pits students alongside practicing professionals, combining oral history with journalistic investigation, L.A. [TEN] is both the artifact of an educational performance and a signpost in the continuing attempt to historicize L.A.’s messy architectural identity.

Lavin and Betsky kicked off the launch with miniature lectures, riffing on L.A.’s environmental and cultural context during the book’s era. Lacking the institutional validation of a strong publishing culture, archite...

A Gathering of Student Work: My Studio at the University of Cincinnati

2011-12-08T19:26:48-05:00

This fall, I co-taught such a studio (with Eli Meiners) at the University of Cincinnati. The project was a real one: the conversion of a former Kroger supermarket building into an open storage facility for the Cincinnati Art Museum, a Montessori school, and studios and display space for artists. The rules of the studio were a bit different: you could do anything you wanted, as long as it was begged, borrowed or stolen; your design did not have to be efficient or buildable...

Postage Stamp Architecture

2011-05-11T11:23:00-04:00

I know I have been on a Dutch rag as of late, but where else can you buy postage stamps that honor not just architects, but architecture, and not just timeworn monuments, but experimental work that has not even been built? As a kicker, the stamps are designed so that, if you hold them up to a Web cam, they turn into 3D models floating in front of your screen.