Sixteen years of education and what do you get? University students who have never heard of William Shakespeare or Yasunari Kawabata or Mohammed

It's been an interesting couple of years. I consider myself fortunate to have landed a teaching position in the architectural design department of a respected private university located in a scenic old city on the Sea of Japan side of the country. (Yes, I am circumlocuting, because I'm about to bite the hand that feeds me.) Good salary, excellent facilities, light workload, congenial peers; yet the passage of months has deepened my distress about how architecture is taught in Japan.
It began, I suppose, when after lectures on architectural concepts, illustrated heavily with slides of important buildings from all over the world, fourth-year students would repeatedly complain that they didn't understand what I was talking about. "Maybe it's a language problem," I thought, or "Maybe the concepts I'm presenting are too unfamiliar." But when I still encountered uncomprehending looks after months of working on my vocabulary and breaking down difficult concepts into more manageable hunks, I began to question my students' educational foundation.

Once, prior to showing a video of Peter Greenaway's The Tempest in order to discuss how he uses references to Renaissance architecture and art, I learned that none of my graduate students knew who Shakespeare was. Several admitted knowledge of the story of Romeo and Juliet, but not from having read the play; they knew it as an old movie. Recounting this later to a foreign professor of English on the staff, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said, "I assume these students have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of the humanities. If I talk about a book or an author, I assume it's the first time they've ever heard of them."

Maybe I was being a little unfair, expecting such knowledge about my culture--not theirs. But in fact, I learned, none of these students could tell me when Sei Shonagon lived, nor could name a single novel by Yasunari Kawabata. My students had tremendous difficulty with my reading assignments, which were mainly 100 or so page tracts in Japanese. Many of them could not read short passages aloud; they quite simply did not know the kanji characters. And when I asked them to summarize what they had read outside of class, to tell me the main theses of a book like From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe--which they read in an excellent translation--none could.

"But they are architecture students," you may be thinking, "not literature students." Which, fair enough, is what I thought. So, after a year and a half of blank stares, I decided to conduct a systematic probe of their general architectural knowledge. In brief, I devised a test.

Before I tell you the results--which I doubt will surprise, considering the build up--I want to stress that I realize the students at my university may not be representative. It is a middle-rank engineering university with a good reputation and is somewhat, but not excessively difficult to enter. It is a fallback school for many students who might prefer to enter a more prestigious college. But having spent a number of years as a graduate student at the "top" university architecture department in Japan, I feel that my teaching experiences merely confirm what I had sensed but had been unable to test previously.

The test. Quite simple, really: pictures of 24 buildings, with columns labeled "What," "Where," "When" and "Who." I called it "Architectural Common Knowledge," a group of buildings from various eras, both Western and Japanese, with which any fourth-year architecture student anywhere in the world should be familiar. Things like the Colosseum, the Toshogu Shrine in Nikko, Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum. A few slightly trickier ones, including the pagodas of both Horyuji and Yakushiji in Nara, along with the question of which was which (difficult for many people, I know, but these are two of the most architecturally significant temples in Japan, and their differences are crucial). Buildings like Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

Twenty-four buildings, four points each. I gave four free points to begin with, and said I didn't expect the designers' names of anything earlier than the 18th century. I gave them an hour. I believed that an average fourth-year architecture student should get about 80 points on the quiz, and very good students should know even the tough ones.

The results. Dismal, as a matter of fact. The top score was 24 points. No one got the Guggenheim right. Many knew it was by Wright, but no one could date it within 50 years, and no one placed it in New York. No one knew what century the Byodo-in was built. No one could name or date any of three major projects by Le Corbusier, who along with Wright and Mies Van Der Rohe is a member of the holy trinity of modern architecture. No one knew Toyo Ito's award-winning "Silver Hut" house, which is not even a decade old.

But it got worse. After the quiz, while giving the correct answers, during the discussion of the Guggenheim (one of Wright's last works, completed in 1956), I asked if anyone could guess which half of the century it was built. Getting no offers, I decided to make it easier, "Was it built before or after World War I?" Unfortunately, only one student knew when that was.

Discussing the Hagia Sophia--one of the most famous and architecturally striking mosques in the world--with a graduate student was even more eye-opening.

"What building is this, Yamada-kun?"

"Gee . . . Uhmmmmm."

"Okay, where do you think it is?"

"Uh . . . near Rome?"

"Close, Yamada-kun." (Close because it is in Istanbul, the former capital of the eastern Roman Empire, and was built during the sixth century as a Christian church). "It's in Istanbul. What kind of building is it?"

" . . . Is it a church?"

"Close again, Yamada-kun."

Then, pointing to the prominent minarets, I asked, "What religion always puts these towers next to their houses of worship? I'll give you a hint. Someone climbs up there and calls the people to prayer."

" . . . It's not Christianity, right?"

"No, Yamada."

"Do Jewish people build churches?"

"Yes, they do, they're called synagogues. But this isn't one. So I'll tell you: this is a mosque. What religion builds mosques?"

"Uh . . . ."

"The religion of Islam. Do you know who founded Islam?" "Uh . . . ."

"Have you heard of Mohammed, Yamada-kun? Do you know when he lived?"

". . . ."

"I'll make it easier: when did Christianity start?" "Hmmmm . . . about 600?"

"Is that B.C., Yamada, or A.D.?"

"Uh . . . A.D.?"

"You think Christianity started in 600 A.D., Yamada? What year is it now?"

"1995?"

"Right. And since it's based on the Christian calendar, that means it's 1,995 years after the birth of Christ."

" . . . Really?"

"Yes, Yamada. Really."

Now, to be fair, my students do very well at math and physics. And despite the fact that they're allowed to bring textbooks and notes into their final exams in these subjects, I believe that they have a solid foundation in these areas. While it is difficult to extrapolate from this one university to the architectural profession in Japan in general, I do believe I understand better what sort of things are considered common knowledge among architects here, and what constitutes extraordinary knowledge. I showed the test and the results to my department chairman, and he grimaced a bit and replied, "They should get at least a 50 on this."

I understand that Japanese architects are not expected to know history, even the rudiments of it (one student thought the Colosseum was built in the 18th century). And if the prevailing culture is one of architectural aporia, then architects capable of witty historical reference--such as Arata Isozaki in his Tsukuba buildings which refer to Mannerism, and Fumihiko Maki in the details he borrows from Mies or Le Corbusier--are considered phenomenally erudite. The better-educated architects nudge each other in the ribs, "Get it? Get it?" and article after article explaining the references appear in the architectural press.

But for most of my students, anything more than 10 years old is irrelevant. All of their architectural information comes from TV and a handful of occasionally read magazines. They fail to see the magazines for what they are: showcases for the work of the construction companies who advertise in them; nor do they grasp the workings of fashion and PR image building in the field. They do not see that ideas are connected to earlier ideas, coexist with them and are nourished by them. In short, they lack the means to differentiate novelty from originality, to evaluate the significance and worth of older buildings, to design buildings which connect to their built surroundings instead of standing like isolated arrivals from nowhere. These are precisely the ills and shortcomings of both Japanese architecture and our cities in general.

It is worth acknowledging, of course, that maybe a new culture is being born, one for which the history of buildings and other matter are less important than the associative meanings to be gleaned from the endless parade of images. Maybe these associative resonances are really deeper, truer somehow, more revealing of how we think and live than the network of speculative links and lineages which our historians have constructed for us over the centuries. Maybe I should stop trying to stress history, as my department chairman suggested, "and just teach design"--though I have to admit that I haven't the first clue about how to teach design without constantly referring to historical examples. Maybe I should accept my own education as ammonite baggage, chuck it out, and just go with the flow.

The temptation is great; the possibility of helping to build a new kind of purely visual, ahistorical architectural culture occasionally gives me goosebumps. "Tokyo is not all wrong, a litany of tragic shortsightedness and missed opportunities; it represents a new standard of beauty," I tell myself, just to see how it feels to blaspheme. After all, I can call up thousands of pictures of historical buildings, analyses of Diocletian's palace at Spalato, a guide to the samurai district of Kanazawa and news of design exhibitions at Columbia University over the Internet, and cut and paste them together into a thousand shimmering collages of chance. And enjoy it.

But it feels like the Dark Ages.

And my students? Well, most of them never really wanted to be architects anyway. They entered the department because they had a good statistical probability of getting in. And the university makes extraordinary efforts to find them jobs before they graduate.

Yes, all 16 of my fourth-year seminar students already have jobs lined up for when they graduate next spring. But the sad thing is they entered the university uneducated, and, my best efforts notwithstanding, they will leave that way too. Caught between hensachi on one side and shushoku on the other, very few find any room for serious study and experimentation. It's sad, really. And the institution which employs me, sorry to say, only cares about producing graduates with jobs. It's their business.

It is my business, as well, since I've linked my present livelihood to theirs. And though it is very easy to be cynical, I am convinced that my efforts to improve the educational process still have meaning--both for myself and my students. And that relationship is the reason why I became a teacher in the first place.

callout

Maybe I should stop trying to stress history, as my department chairman suggested, "and just teach design"--though I haven't the first clue how to teach design without constantly referring to historical examples.