Disregarding Mike Brady, the one area where sitcoms and architecture graduates crossover is in the talk of going to Grad School. It is one of the accepted rules that every sitcom dad has to spend or lose his children’s college fund at least once a season. Likewise, it is mandatory that every graduate of architecture must yearn to further their education at an Ivy League school.
It is like some kind of shared wet dream - not my wet dream mind you; I was educated by the Jesuits thank you very much. But others, those types that think only of hot-dipped-galvanised-screw-bits, go to bed thinking of Masters Degrees In Chilly Climates and wake up with a smile on their face with only the faintest memory of a grinning Preston Scott Cohen as a clue as to why.
Unfortunately it is a wet dream that very few Australian architects seem to be able to drag out of the bedroom and into the cold hard light of reality. Perhaps it is that generally Australian parents have not been amassing gargantuan wheelbarrows full of the greenback to send their children to North America so that they can make large scale balsa models of improbable buildings. We tend not to want to pay too much for education in Australia and as seem to prefer property mortgages to Moneo lectures.
I suspect though that it has less to do with cost and more to do with the fact that these courses are very difficult to get into in the first place. And once accepted into the course, funding becomes entirely different challenge. As Matt found out there may be a lot of people prepared to hand out money for further study but when you are competing against doctors who only want to be sans frontieres and economists who want to take on the World Bank, it can be difficult to convince these cashcows that mapping paintings onto topographic maps for purposes undisclosed is worthy of their patronage.
Matt seemed to get it right though - the clever bugger has been awarded the Frank Knox Scholarship to Harvard. Gosh. I wonder if he mentioned squealing like a bush pig in the petal pool at Vals on his application form? Do Harvard understand the commitment they have made? I sure hope they have thought this through…
So gravestmor sends its congratulations and hopes that in two years time when he walks - waltzes - straight into a job in Miss Hadid’s Office, as Director-In-Charge of Purple Wraps, that he remembers the little folk back home and gives us all business class tickets to come visit him every so often.
