When most people think of architecture school, they view it through a narrow, vocational lens. It is seen as a specialized trade school for people who want to draw blueprints, navigate building codes, and construct physical buildings.

I want to propose a different theory: Architecture education is actually the ultimate generalist degree, a modern, multidimensional SPATIAL LIBERAL ARTS.

Just as the classical liberal arts (trivium and quadrivium) aimed to cultivate free-thinking citizens through grammar, logic, rhetoric, geometry, and astronomy, an architectural education equips people to read, reason through, and shape the complex environments we inhabit. Whether those spaces are physical, digital, organizational, or social, studio culture teaches a core method of humanistic inquiry: how to synthesize competing forces into cohesive, spatial form.

Redefining the Liberal Arts for a Spatial World

The idea that the liberal arts must evolve beyond traditional text-based subjects is not new. Robin Sloan (and others at Snarkmarket) have written extensively on the topic; likewise Jason Kottke has ruminated about updating a definition attempting to stitch together technology & the liberal arts. In his proposed Liberal Arts 2.5, Tim Carmody posed the question: "How do the liberal arts need to change to reflect new technologies, media ecologies, and social and political transformations (and crises)? If you were teaching a youth today what they needed to know to be a free person in the world, what subjects would be on your curriculum?"

These conversations around an updated "Liberal Arts" expand curriculums beyond traditional literature and philosophy to include disciplines like Mapping, Iteration, Reality Engineering, and Design Thinking, but I argue that there is already an academic discipline that does this and does this well: Architecture education. It sits at the intersection of these and other similarly modern disciplines. It is critical to understand, however, that architecture as an education and architecture as a profession are two dramatically different things. 

The Deep Roots of Architectural Synthesis

Viewing architecture as a broad, humanistic discipline is arguably a return to its oldest roots. In De Architectura, the Roman writer Vitruvius argued architecture sits among the liberal arts because it requires a synthesis of nearly every branch of knowledge. As explored in studies of Vitruvius and the Education of the Architect, he insisted that the architect must be "a man of letters, a skilled draftsman, trained in geometry, informed in history, well read in philosophy, understanding music, not ignorant of medicine, well acquainted with the law and grounded in the practice and theory of astronomy."

Today, the rise of design thinking popularized by IBM, IDEO, SYP, and peer studios has encouraged forward-thinking institutions to re-center architecture as a foundation for generalist critical thinking. The Harvard Undergraduate Architecture Studies program explicitly frames its curriculum around "teaching design thinking through making within the liberal arts context." Similarly, the liberal arts program at the SCI-Arc Liberal Arts curriculum treats spatial education as an independent cultural exploration designed to "disrupt conventional ways of thinking about architecture, space, and urbanism."

For the After Architecture: Education, Profession Tête-à-Tech on Thursday, October 16, 2025 in NYC, Nicholas de Monchaux, Professor and Head of Architecture at MIT, and I gathered with a number of architects for a discussion on the evolving nature of careers, the diversity of thinking that architecture can engage, and how the changing nature of careers for architectural graduates can help us understand the shifting role of education in our society and economy.  

Those present had studied architecture but chose to explore real estate development, technology, education, literature, industrial design, building cultural institutions, and numerous other fields. Together, we explored this idea of a broader definition of architecture: not as buildings, but as spatial, technical, designed for human experience. ​Many of us embraced architectural education, but escaped the traditional grasp of the profession to build novel, interdisciplinary careers. 

The prompts we sent ahead of the evening were deliberately personal: "How did architecture form part of your education? How do you rely on that education today? And how does it provide any of your superpowers — or your Achilles' heel?"

De Monchaux entered college to study astronomy, figured out quickly that it was not right for him, and chose architecture “because [he] knew it would let [him] do all the different things [he] wanted to do.” And decades later, running the architecture department at MIT, he more sharply expressed the same idea: “Architecture is the thing that I could have done that allows you not to figure out what you want to do.” (De Monchaux is about to move back to UC Berkeley, drawn by the unique opportunity to lead the College of Environmental Design [CED], the area’s premier institution for studio learning and critique embedded within a world-leading technological hub.)

This same desire, to leverage the malleability of the study of architecture to explore my own wide range of interests, was what brought me to the AA School of Architecture in London, which at the time exhibited an exceptionally quirky and flexible definition of what could be considered architecture (as well as having the word in the school’s name twice). And it also brought me to Kent Bloomer, the Yale Director of Undergraduate Studies, jazz musician, sculptor, and advocate for meaningful ornament whose multifaceted expertise paved the way for signing off on my time studying in the UK.

What Does "Spatial Liberal Arts" Actually Teach?

If traditional liberal arts teach us how to process language, logic, and quantitative data, what are the core habits of mind cultivated by a spatial liberal arts education?

1. Spatial Literacy

We live in a world defined by boundaries, flows, adjacency, and scale. Yet, basic spatial literacy is rarely taught in primary education. As highlighted in Kottke’s The geometric zen of solving Rubik's Cubes, the National Academies of Sciences notes that: "To think spatially entails knowing about space, representation, and reasoning. This is the kind of knowledge we tap into every day, when timing our commutes or taking detours, reading maps, and solving problems."

Architecture as a study elevates spatial literacy into a cognitive tool, teaching how spatial organization dictates human movement, social dynamics, and power structures.

2. Iterative Epistemology ("Thinking Through Making")

In studio culture, ideas are not evaluated purely as abstract text; they are tested through physical artifacts, drawings, models, and spatial simulations. Knowledge is gained through the iterative process of drafting, tearing down, and rebuilding. This requires a comfort with ambiguity and rapid prototyping that can apply equally to software design, policy making, and organizational strategy.

In our conversation, De Monchaux described this habit from the outside in. His Bay Area studio once shared space with a firm that had spun out of Google. After watching a table of architects work a problem, i.e.: “That’s not right, that needs to change, how could we reimagine this," the founder of that firm turned to him and asked, “How do you do that? How do you teach that?” What the tech founder was noticing, de Monchaux explained, was a trained reflex: “There’s a real depersonalization of problem-solving that’s taught, and a real focus on iteration. We did this, [now] how can we do it better?“

3. The Studio Critique as Rhetorical Arena

The architecture desk critique and formal review ("desk crits" and "juries") function as a modern dialectic. Students must present an idea, defend spatial decisions against multi-layered constraints, and adapt to critique in real time. It is rhetoric made spatial.

One of my most formative experiences in school was staying up all night before a presentation, building what I thought was a great model and generating pretty drawings. But when it came time to present, I muddled my way through the presentation, confusing the critics and failing to direct their attention to the parts of the design I most wanted their input on. A senior critic focused on an aspect of the design I hadn’t drawn or modeled, and our debate quickly grew heated, with my responses more defensive and aroused, culminating in them throwing up their hands and storming off to the next presentation. I was frustrated, angry, and confused, and spent the night and following day ruminating on how and why things had gone so quickly and drastically off the rails. 

I eventually grew to understand that it was my responsibility when making drawings, models, and choosing what to say to direct the attention of the critics to focus on points of my choosing. A failure to do that, or doing it too passively, resulted in confusion on everyone’s part. Initially it felt rude to assert where they should look and to what they ought to pay attention, but I learned in time that not doing so was far ruder and akin to showing up to an important presentation and just saying, “What do you think?” without any intro, guiding framework, or expression of vision and purpose.

4. Systems Thinking & Creative Synthesis

An architect cannot isolate structural integrity from environmental impact, historical context, human psychology, or material costs. Architecture is one of the remaining disciplines that forces students to practice broad synthesis rather than narrow specialization.

Why This Matters for the Future

We live in an age increasingly dominated by hyper-specialization and automated execution. Technical skills alone age rapidly, but the ability to structure messy, complex problems spatially and humanistically remains rare and valuable.

De Monchaux’s response is not to defend architecture as a profession, but to spread its pedagogy. At MIT, he is working through interdisciplinary design majors and minors to bring design education into every undergraduate major, on the conviction that it is “very useful no matter what you end up doing in the world, particularly in a world defined increasingly by other kinds of intelligence — some of them non-human — with which we also have to learn how to interact and collaborate.”

Whether or not a graduate goes on to design physical skyscrapers, an architectural education instills a way of seeing the world. It teaches that every system, be it an app interface, a transit network, a community garden, or a corporate hierarchy, have spatial design components.

Architecture education is no longer a professional training for builders. It is a foundational general education for the 21st century: a spatial liberal arts that prepares us to understand, critique, and construct the world around us.

An additional N.B. by De Monchaux: “As well as arguing that architecture provides a great vector to bring the liberal arts into technology, one could also accept a related argument made by Bruno Latour in his book Science in Action that engineering/technology and the creative arts actually involve nearly identical modes of creativity, but it is particularly in the cultural interest of engineers and scientists to not acknowledge this, and indeed to suppress it in their larger claims to technical authority. When, in our contemporary moment, the culture of science and technology is the leading driver of change, this is particularly essential to acknowledge and examine.”