Being in the midst of my own thesis and curious if not skeptical about the very nature of an architectural thesis, I walked to SCI-Arc this weekend to see their graduate thesis exhibition. I’ve gone a few times before and enjoyed the work. Student work, at its best, provokes and inspires, and few schools have the reputation for innovative work that SCI-Arc has earned. This year, however, instead of giving out one award for the best thesis, the school gave four. It’s easy to see why: as a group, the projects weren’t merely unimpressive–they were boring. Scandalously boring, really. The eight or so projects on display were uniformly mediocre; there were a few good renderings, as usual, but many graphics were ugly, illegible, and some were badly pixelated. Precedent studies were sloppy and predictable. And not to get all William Safire on you, but the presentation texts were poorly written and full of grammar and spelling errors (and questionable Deleuze references, but that’s a separate issue). I’m sorry, but if this is your graduate thesis presentation, how have you (and your instructor!) not read over your abstract a hundred times? I suppose there aren’t any red squiggly lines in Illustrator.

Most offensive of all was the overwhelming lack of urgency in the projects. Careless presentation is one thing; poverty of critical thought is another. There was all the Maya and V-ray and Rhinoscripting you’d expect to see, but nothing else, nothing beyond the blob. One project explored the geometric possibilities of “banal figures” such as the rubber ducky. Another fearlessly tackled the perennial issue of cuteness. One of the winners of the best M.Arch thesis award affixed huge baroque arabesques and curlicues to a generic building and twisted them into a gothic-looking tower straight out of some DeviantArt dystopia.

This makes me sound more curmudgeonly than I mean to be. It’s not like this kind of form-making is particularly wrong or morally reprehensible, nor is it uninteresting. Yet there seems to a failure to harness the technology and use it as a means to an end beyond itself. They may be interesting as isolated exercises, but I lose patience when they’re posed as architectural theses and I’m left asking that most frustrating of questions: so what? What then is a thesis? How does one argue through architecture, and, more importantly, what do we argue for? The SCI-Arc projects I saw were dull because, after form, there was nothing. I’m not sure whether to chalk it up to myopia or nihilism–could they not see past the final rendering or did they just not care?

Today I organized a meeting with a few other fifth-year students to discuss our own thesis degree projects. People talked about coastal settlements and rising sea levels, politicized war memorials, militant agriculture in Palestine, border crossings, homeless shelters on Skid Row, and a chancery. There are two things happening here that I didn’t see at SCI-Arc: architectural ideas born out of social awareness and diversity of direction. Hopefully we’ll all come out with very different projects that are not only innovative and beautiful but thoughtful and relevant.