Peter cook: reflections on how architects are educated and cultivated in Europe and the US.

As Europeans we shouldn't crow, but it does seem that all those aspiring American cities find it exciting to commission yet another architect from these parts for a museum/theatre/park/tallest tower or whatever gives them the dreaded 'icon' factor.

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It could be explained away on various counts if it were not that the diversity of choice continues to widen. Chipper field and Calatrava have little enough in common, ditto Nouvel and Co-op Himmelblau--at least, architecturally Yet confronted with the same discipline of gridded cities, potentially heroic corners and discarded back lots, faded downtowns and shredded edges, they invariably come up with something memorable or at least identifiable.

Yet 10 or 20 years ago, a visit to an architectural bookstore anywhere in the world would elicit the pushing forward of numerous monographs of American architects, immense published support for American Post-Modern and not a few wittily argued broadsheets, fringe magazines and chitchat of all kinds from San Francisco, Chicago and Texas, as well as New York.

Seduced by such proliferation, a close inspection soon revealed where the real interest lay. Hardly in the description of buildings, but in the playing out of revelations as to the depth and significance of philosophy, insisting on the debt that architecture should pay to the written culture of France, Italy, Germany. This was about the essentiality of theory and the implication--gradually but effectively built up--that architecture-as-made was a rather lesser pursuit than culture-as-dismembered.

It worked a dream. Not just in the bastions of Princeton and Harvard but way down the line--scores of bright (and articulate in that smart-quote kind of way) young graduates scattered themselves around the USA, spreading the Word through words. In any ambitious state university Deleuze and Guattari's names would waft across the boards as readily as Le Corbusier or Mies might have done a couple of decades before. Except that--er--D and G had no actual architectural clues on offer!

Never mind, that could wait for when you went into an office. Then, up on the shelf (metaphorically as well as physically) could go the books; the smart chat was reserved for parties or for daily one-upmanship and the architecture in the majority of respected firms could continue on a path of thinly concealed pragmatism. In larger projects, particularly masterplans, the manner of composing and articulating buildings still reveals itself as emanating from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to which many key American architects were sent in the early twentieth century. A corporately acceptable emphasis was given to portals, axes, circular or semi-circular foci, straight avenues, grand steps, almost as if the elder Saarinen had never landed, never set up Cranbrook and its accompanying atelier where his son, as well as Roche, Dinkeloo, Venturi, Pelli, Lumsden or Vreeland worked round the corner from Eames and Bertoia.

Two (or was it three?) decades later, one Daniel Libeskind was running another Cranbrook class that could spawn Jesse Reiser, Ben Nicholson, Karl Chu, Raoul Bunschoten, Donald Bates and Hani Rashid--names that have lately formed and informed the more quizzical corners of the English-speaking architectural world. Not only this, but Libeskind was a walking brain--music, mathematics, drawing, philosophy, architectural ingenuity, iconography, hard sell--he has proved the master of them all. Yet for a few years, he, along with the ghosts of the Saarinens, fed a true architectural spirit into the scene.

Meanwhile, Europeans have continued to be educated through a more localised system: the prominent architects of a region become professors, grab their brightest students for their office or as teaching assistants. The latter win a competition or two and then cycle up on their own machine. Theory comes in linked to the story of building and culture. Step by step. Example by example. Those returning from a Masters' course in the States claim to find this approach provincial, but a year or two down the line, they are beavering away, catching up on how to turn a corner with the rest.

The British, Australians and Scandics were pulled in both directions. In London we were lucky. The AA never went for Po-Mo and magically overlaid the theorists (who could be brought over for the day from Paris and then sent back) with a remarkable set of drawing people. We colonised the University up the street and kept doing stuff. Our great studios became part of the 'look how it's done' process.

The inevitable came two years ago at an MIT conference on theory, when some very bright Americans revealed that they really were wanting to talk about architecture. Beatriz Colomina (no slouch on the subject) tugged the arms of two or three of us and said, 'Let's go outside and see a good building'. Which turned out to be Steven Holl's dormitory (An architect who seems to get better and better: take the trip to Kansas City and experience an essay in controlled waywardness and the theatre of light that he has brought to the task of an art museum extension. Where did that come from? I suggest it came from looking at architecture itself, and landscape itself, and light itself and then weaving it.)

Since then, one hears from all sides that theory is on the back foot in the smart schools. Ironically though, the European and English-speaking scene is mimicking the American 1990s. In Aachen, for example, professors who design interesting buildings are being replaced by career academics who don't. How many British schools are run by people who can point to something they have designed? Yet the 'points' system and the insistence upon 'academic achievement' promotes the abstraction of teaching from architecture itself. Can we imagine an English or Scandanavian school following the example of SCI-Arc, with Ray Kappe, Michael Rotondi, Neil Denari and Eric Owen Moss as its train of Heads? So curiously, the land of general architectural frustration turns out to have the most intriguing antecedents. Europe has the ball, for now, but are there hands to catch it? And where?