Teach what our society needs

While Hank Dittmar is right that “architecture is no longer taught as a craft”, the problems of architectural education go deeper than the obsession with originality at all costs.

As noted in Amanda Baillieu’s leader (Farrell must help students out of their ivory towers), current teaching lavishes attention on standalone icons, experimental designs or whimsical fantasies. On planet earth, meanwhile, volume housebuilders will soon be designing the 500,000 or more new dwellings projected to be built in England over the next decade.

They will be doing this with little helpful input from young architects, whose training never gave any sustained attention to affordable mass housing of a kind that will appeal to buyers.

And if these new streets and neighbourhoods turn out to be mediocre or worse, the blame will be placed on everyone except the true culprits — the heads of our schools of architecture.

Maritz Vandenberg
London SW15