The explosive growth of courses and classes in traditional design

For decades, all architectural education in Europe was monocultural. If you did not present your work as radical invention, you had a hard time. Traditional and classical design were the direct opposite of what was taught. If you tried to do this, you were often told to change – or fail.

When the Prince of Wales’s Institute opened in 1992 there was a summer school and a course teaching traditional architecture, but the course closed after a few years. What is now the King’s Foundation continues with some educational programmes.

In the new millennium more courses appeared. In 2008 a summer course was launched in Romania, partly directed towards traditional building technology. From 2011 the Part II course in Kingston has offered a classical module. 

In 2014, a summer school began in Spain and Portugal with a bias to the vernacular. In 2016, I started a month-long summer school in classical architecture in Sweden.

In the past five years, there has been an explosion of courses on traditional and classical design throughout Europe. Summer schools have opened in Belgium with an emphasis on crafts, in the Netherlands on traditional urban design, in Italy concentrating on Palladio, in Finland looking at national traditional architecture, in Norway combining local traditions and urban design, in Austria based on the methodology of Christopher Alexander. My course at the University of Oxford is on classical composition and symbolism.

Outside Europe there are also courses in Qatar, Mexico and Brazil. These come under the umbrella of the International Network for Traditional Building Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU).

Additionally, the University of Cambridge Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture runs a five-week course. There are also the Create Streets Summer School, with a prominence given to urban design, the Classic Planning Institute has a Salon for Classical Architecture, and my other course at the University of Oxford is evening classes introducing classical architecture.

Coming up this year are a new architecture and building crafts school in Alsace, a summer school in Budapest, and a new part-time Masters course at Cambridge supported by the King’s Foundation launched this month.

In the United States, the pattern is similar but more established. The first major change was at the top private university of Notre Dame in Indiana. In 1989 they appointed Thomas Gordon-Smith, who turned the architecture school around to teach classical architecture.

In 1992 the Institute of Classical Architecture was set up and has run summer schools and courses around the US ever since. From 1999 to 2016, Robert Stern was dean at the Yale architecture school and added classical architecture into a diverse and stellar faculty.

From the 1990s, the University of Miami, Georgia Tech, the University of Colorado and, from 2020, the Catholic University of America in Washington DC, offered a similarly mixed curriculum. Coming out of the success of Notre Dame, the Utah Valley University and the Benedictine College in Kansas have started courses framed around classic architecture.

A notable part of this dramatic shift has been the demands by students unsupported by the established staff. At the University of Queensland in Brisbane and Trondheim University in Norway, students have insisted on classical programmes. At the University of Virginia a group of students have set up an independent Classical Architecture Society.

To find students deliberately breaking away from tried-and-tested conditioning, propped up by the threat of failure, has significance beyond its numbers

The numbers may not be large in comparison with the conventional schools and the courses do not just include student architects. Nonetheless, a large proportion of architecture students and architects attend.

Most architecture students enter schools for a career and profession with little idea about what they are letting themselves in for. At college, they are taught to join an elite group with a different set of aesthetic standards to the wider public. So, to find students deliberately breaking away from tried-and-tested conditioning, propped up by the threat of failure, has significance beyond its numbers.

Sympathise with this or not, it is a phenomenon of significance in architectural education. What lies behind it? One can only speculate.

How about a loss of interest in a design philosophy, which is not only dogmatic but is now historic? Although presented as radical and inventive, it is in its own way conventional.

Not allowing something that contradicts it, on principle, is demonstration enough of its rigidity. This creates a different kind of radicalism: the traditional is a challenge to the conventions of the profession and education.

It is now realised that traditional design is intrinsically sustainable. The use of local materials, longevity of construction, flexibility of function and the natural brake on the more extraordinary and untested, are now recognised as factors in the limitation of energy consumption in buildings.

Finally and perhaps most controversially, the social and political landscape is moving away from the diktat of elites. This may move architecture students away from just satisfying fellow professionals to addressing the likes and dislikes of the wider public. Research consistently indicates that the public have a marked preference for the traditional.

Whatever the motives, a new and flourishing interest in traditional architecture and urban design is clearly taking place. It may be that, as literacy in classical and traditional design increases, we will see an interesting evolution in traditions, as always occurred when traditional design prevailed.