The architecture track: is the path to licensure paved with good intentions, or mired in a maze?

Residential Architect, Sept-Oct, 2005 by Cheryl Weber

Stephen Kieran, FAIA, Kieran Timberlake, Philadelphia, is another architect who breezed through a three-year internship before all the reporting and monitoring became de rigueur. He offers several reasons why the IDP can be an impediment to licensure. Contrary to Cutler's analogy, he believes the generalist medical model on which it is based is less relevant to architecture. "Many architects wind up in specialties of different sorts. There's an increasing argument that the full depth and breadth of the required training isn't as relevant as it was 50 years ago," he says.

And because the success of the IDP ultimately rests on the goodwill and resources of the employer, in the wrong firms it can take more than three years to fulfill the requirements. Even if a firm is committed to the IDP, it has to make money off of employees, and architecture firms have relatively low profit margins. "I wonder if there could be some revisions made to the requirements that are more difficult to get, such as field experience," Kieran says. "I think there could be more of an averaging--'Here's the range of experience we want you to have; get 80 percent of this range.'"

Speaking as a historian, Braham also notes that a safety net exists that wasn't there 50 or so years ago when licensure began. Some of the things a license ensures have been taken up by building officials and engineering firms.

knowledge vs. practice

A second part of this debate revolves around whether interns should be able to take the ARE during their internship, which could shorten the time line. Senhauser says the AIA's position is that interns should indeed be able to sit for the test upon graduation, but be licensed only after putting in the internship hours. Russell DiNardo, AIA Associate, agrees. DiNardo, an architect at Michael Graves Associates, Princeton, N.J., graduated in 1995 and passed the ARE last February. "If the exam is set up to test minimum knowledge to enter the profession, why does it matter when you take it?" he asks.

DiNardo says the IDP didn't expose him to aspects of practice he wouldn't have gotten on his own, and that the intuitive understanding he gained during internship had little to do with what's on the exam. Two years ago he enrolled in a seminar with a well-known professor on how to pass the graphics division. When DiNardo said the information wasn't what he learned in school, the professor replied that he wasn't teaching architecture, he was teaching how to pass the exam.

Karl Wallick, an assistant architecture professor at the University of Cincinnati, echoes the opinion that because large parts of the test have little to do with actual practice, the exam shouldn't have to wait. For example, he says the pre-design section was a grab bag of elements, such as site contracts and lending issues, that were foreign to him. "A lot of my design experience had to do with trying to fold programming and environmental and mechanical factors into one holistic design," he says. "Maybe it's just tough to test that with multiple choice."