You are an intellectual bigot. We all are. Remember, in the lovable but prejudiced Disney classic, Pocahontas, when Pocahontas calls out John Smith on his racism? She sings, “You think the only people who are people are the people who look and think like you.” Take out the words “look and,” and imagine her serenading the architecture school. As usual, the Disney heroine is right. Before I came to college, I thought the rumors of the architecture school’s isolation must have been exaggerated. Unfortunately, the infamous disjointure between architecture students and the rest of the school proved real. We conducted interviews with 58 non-architecture majors and 46 architecture majors and the results were shocking. Out of ten, the friendship of an architecture student most frequently rates between one and three: barely an acquaintance, and even worse, as the interviewees get older, the
rating decreases even more. To everyone else, as one international relations major said, an architecture major is “someone who will always be too busy to hang out.” But really, it's not that we stop having time for our friends; it's that we stop making time for them.
I can already sense that I’ll be losing my connection with my own group of non-arch friends next year, when we’re no longer living together. Why is it inevitable that we should become disconnected? And why is it that my only non-architecture friends are the ones I live with? I must not be involved enough in the rest of the university to make friends on my own. God, that’s sad. I mean, if we could balance four or five extracurricular activities with six or seven classes when we were less mature (and, as our research shows, 45% of us could) why can’t we balance two or three organizations with four or five classes now? This lack of involvement is a plight we all suffer from. The average architecture student is only involved in one (typically architecture-related) organization. This is comparable to having a diet in which you eat only one food. Consider that you start eating yams – and only yams. Give it a few days, and you may make yourself sick. In a few months, a potentially lethal dose of vitamin A will build up, causing you to have itchy orange skin and schizophrenia. That's right, you’ll go crazy.
But the truth is that you don't want to go crazy, and you don't want to turn orange and most of us would love to have a normal life. All I want to know is this: why is having a balanced life such a low priority? Why is it that we can't take the parts of our lives that are normal, the GE's, the extracurriculars, the free time, and simply make them important? Ultimately, it comes down to value. If a class can be relevant to architecture, it should have value to us. If we can get something new and unique out of it, it should have value to us. If it inspires new ideas and new philosophies, it should have value to us. Anything relating to the human condition, world affairs, and political science can be applied to our projects. Anything that would help develop our skills in time management or public speaking improves how we execute and present our projects. And frankly, any new thought you apply to your project gives you an advantage over your peers simply because it makes you different. We all do architecture but it is what you do outside of architecture that sets you apart. You have the choice of blending into the background, or standing out and being evocative and, chances are, enjoying yourself at the same time.
Which will you choose?
