\o7 Practical Applications of Architecture 101: Class focuses on the comfort and concerns of people who actually live\f7 ,\o7 play or work in various buildings.
\f7 Students at Burbank's Woodbury University won't find Practical Applications of Architecture 101 listed in the course catalogue, but Don Conway says the curriculum was designed with human and social needs in mind.
"Most design schools that teach architecture treat it either as a fine art or a sort of quasi-engineering," said Conway, director of the five-year program at Woodbury leading to a bachelor of architecture degree.
"In the typical approach to teaching design, the users of architecture are all too often the forgotten ones."
Woodbury, Conway said, concentrates on architecture as an applied social science. According to the school catalogue, "Self-expression, while encouraged, is viewed as subordinate to the larger human issues with which architecture deals."
The curriculum combines applied social science with a strong base in business practice and computer-aided design (CAD) technology. The university's well-equipped computer labs, which, according to Conway, are the most up-to-date in the United States on an undergraduate level, familiarize students from the first year on with the powerful new tool of three-dimensional software design programs.
Computer-Illiterate Architects
"Most architecture schools give a perfunctory course in CAD technology at the end of their course," Conway said. "In addition, few schools teach architects how to run their own offices as an efficient business proposition. The result is that many architects are not only computer-illiterate, they also fail to make a decent living."
Conway admitted that his 4-year-old architecture program, with 170 students, is "still feeling its way." Woodbury University as a whole has had to overcome a longstanding reputation as a glorified secretarial school.
The school was founded in 1884 by F.C. Woodbury as a college of business administration. The private nonprofit institution added a division of "professional arts" in 1931, a few years before the college moved into the Wilshire Boulevard building it occupied for 50 years, before relocating to Burbank last year.
Now occupying the 22.4-acre former campus of the Cabrini School for Girls on Glenoaks Boulevard, Woodbury University includes the San Fernando Valley's first and only fully accredited architecture school.
