The expression “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”

suggests that the essence of an art form, whether music, dance, or indeed architecture, can only be communicated in the specific language of that art. You can only critique a painting, for example, by making another painting. But that doesn’t keep people from talking about Rice’s School of Architecture, which is rated among the nation’s best.

“We’re fourth in one publication, and sixth in another,” says Lars Lerup, dean of the School of Architecture and William Ward Watkin Professor. “And yes, the ratings are important,” he laughs. “Everyone pays attention to them.” The ratings have been going up since Lerup arrived eight years ago, after teaching for 20 years in the University of California at Berkeley School of Architecture.

The Rice School of Architecture was founded in 1912 by William Ward Watkin, who came to Rice to supervise the construction of the earliest buildings on campus and stayed to become one of Texas’s premier architects. “The school has always had prestige,” Lerup says. “And the students learned to do what architects do—sit in an office and design buildings.”

For the dynamic Lerup, that wasn’t enough. Under his leadership, the school’s approach to teaching architecture changed, becoming both more and less pragmatic. The students still learn to build very well, and Rice graduates are welcome in architecture firms across the country. But now the school also produces a certain amount of “dancing about architecture,” that is, new ways of thinking and talking about the subject. The Rice School of Architecture now seeks to produce graduates as noted for their expansive qualities of mind as for their drafting skills and knowledge of building engineering.

As associate professor Carlos Jimenez says, “Every architecture school has its own agenda. Our agenda at Rice is to probe, to search, to think about how architecture is shifting and changing.”

This sounds like a lofty approach to take in the teaching of a particular skill, no matter how sophisticated that skill might be. Lerup himself describes the program as avant-garde. The School of Architecture is able to operate in such a rarefied atmosphere because it attracts a faculty and a student body that are unusually versatile and creative.
“Almost everybody on the faculty writes,” Lerup points out. “If you’re going to teach architecture, you need to write, to reflect on your practice.” Jimenez is a prime example of this combination of building, writing, and teaching. His Central Administration and Junior Art School Building for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, was rated one of the 150 most important 20th-century buildings in a recent world survey, and his aesthetic is demonstrated in a number of other important buildings in Houston and elsewhere.

But Jimenez is also a fine writer who is as comfortable discussing the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca as he is in explaining the thinking behind the placement of a particular window. In fact, in his essay, “Memory, a City and the Need for Poetry,” which appeared in an issue of 2G International Architecture Review that was dedicated to his work, Jimenez wrote, “Poetry is as forceful in its immateriality as architecture is in its materiality. The two are linked and interchangeable.” Jimenez’s almost spiritual approach to teaching architecture is perhaps best expressed by the title of his favorite class—The Joy of Materials.

In a Rice School of Architecture catalog statement that manages to combine writing about music and dancing about architecture, assistant professor David Brown compares the practice of architecture to the “temporal manipulations” of Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane. “Improvised music [characterizes] an understanding of the world quite distinct from the world typically privileged and described by architecture. . . . My work strives for architectural articulations resonant with this understanding.”

To the casual observer, this avant-garde approach might seem dangerously close to coming untethered from the bricks-and-mortar work of making buildings. But the contradictions and tensions that exist between writing poetically about architecture and actually building something have been neatly resolved by Lerup’s approach to making the School of Architecture pragmatic as well as meaningful.

First, Lerup encourages his faculty and students to approach building in terms of total context rather than in the abstract. He says, “Before, teachers gave assignments to design a housing project without thinking about where it was going to be built. It would be just any public housing complex, built anywhere. Now we look at demographics, pollution, and many other factors.”

In perhaps his most significant decision, he oriented the program toward the city of Houston itself and took on the sprawling, misshapen metropolis as the school’s workshop. “Houston is a great laboratory because it has such glaring needs,” he explains. The program requires students to study both the history of architecture in Houston and the history of the city itself. The design challenges that students confront in their various classes frequently deal with problems that actually exist in the city. For example, where Houston’s soon-to-come light rail passes under Highway 59, the line takes a jog from Main Street over to Fannin, leaving a vacant tract. Jimenez had his students design a library that would fit in that space.

And at the same time that the school focuses on the city, it also pays acute attention to the individual student. According to Jimenez, many architecture schools tend to emphasize particular stylistic tendencies or mannerisms—graduates of Columbia’s architecture school tend to produce a Columbia signature style of building, for example. At Rice, however, professors focus on educating students to think critically rather than to pursue a recognizable Rice style.

“The student’s agenda becomes the school’s agenda,” says Lerup. A teacher will spend one or two hours a week with each student, Lerup notes, and he or she doesn’t spend those hours trying to make the students into clones. Comments from former students bear him out. Onezieme Mouton ’01 says that “the faculty enforced what I already thought. They gave me the confidence to explore my own ideas.”
Learning what the students’ ideas and agendas are is a fundamental part of teaching a Rice architecture class. “I’m amazed by the initial questions the freshmen ask,” Jimenez says. Lerup agrees. “They are highly sophisticated,” he says. “The teachers simply help pull out the students’ creativity. On campus, probably only the science labs have that kind of intimacy.”

But this approach wouldn’t be very productive if the students didn’t have some unique ideas or qualities already inside them that needed “pulling out.” And in fact, a key component to the School of Architecture’s success is its ability to choose the right students. “Looking at prospective students very carefully is the keystone,” Lerup says. “Everyone is awed by our students. They get better every year. It’s hard for the faculty to keep up the pace.”