The architectural profession is unique due to an architect’s ability to mediate between the instrumental construction of space and the transcendental quality space has on our perception. Currently, the canonical instruction for architecture derives from the apprenticeship model, rendering the profession as a pragmatic trade while, conversely, it is also a cultivated profession derived from a universal academic education. This dichotomy becomes moot through modern pragmatism, which emphasizes the trade with little acknowledgment to scholarship. Indeed, most graduating students feel they can erase the past five years to begin the true education of the architect. Many licensed professionals also see the internship program this way. The aim of the internship program should not be a transitional phase from academia to profession, but the continuation of the education of an architect to become a cultivated, scholarly individual.

The accreditation achieved by passing the licensing exam is conceived as the qualifier to become a proper architect, and the didactic formula of the internship program teaches this exam. This does not mean the intern knows architecture, but proficiently understands pragmatic building. Since most practicing architects reduce their expectations for recent graduates based on the hours accomplished through IDP, the resulting effect is that emerging practitioners will design practical buildings. The theoretical discoveries of understanding a world of design become latent since they have no direct application towards the accreditation canon.

Another architecture canon merges theory and practice harmoniously via the Renaissance and its magic. Renaissance magic, such as numerology and alchemy, sought for a hidden essence as part of a physical presence. In this way, the Renaissance architect’s lineaments of architecture are not simply measurements of physical construction but also imaginative measurements of our nurtured minds. Renaissance architects decipher their design problems, both in theory and construction, by analyzing Roman ruins. The Roman utilitarian approach to architecture, as explained by Vitruvius, is influenced by intuitively unrelated outside fields linked to an instrumental discussion on materials or assembly. The distinction between the Vitruvian model and modern pragmatism is that Vitruvius typically introduces a short myth before narrating very practical means of building. Even in the utilitarian Roman or Renaissance art of building, there is a quintessence transcending the instructions for assembly.

The internship program should be about constructing the theoretical lineaments of architecture into physical presence. The internship should not undermine the theoretical cultivation of architectural understanding but support academic architectural philosophies. An architect’s design means should not be to solve a pragmatic problem but invoke a magical experience through cognition and construction. By teaching this belief as part of the instrumental, technological aspect of architecture to interns as they progress through their development as emerging professionals, the program will not only satisfy legitimate building but contribute architecture with poetic resonance. It will transform the profession from being a transition into “how things are really done” by bringing forth a quality similar to Renaissance magic and metamorphose architecture into the realm of imagination.