“…an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.” (Calvino, Italo. Six Memos For the New Millenium, page 56.)

Italo Calvino was specifically writing about “a plague that is afflicting language”, and reveals itself as “a loss of cognition and immediacy, bureaucratic uniformity, the monotony of the mass media, or the way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre.” However, Calvino does not search for the “sources of this epidemic” but rather reveals the embers of substance still smoldering within the poetics of language.

What does this have to do with an architectural internship?

Well. NCARB, in cooperation with AIA, ACSA, and NAAB have developed an internship regime consisting of seventeen core learning areas, broken down into training units that translate into hours all of which an intern who has earned a Master’s degree must earn and track by the hour for at least three years while earning less than (in most cases) an experienced office manager while committing around 40-70 hours a week with no paid overtime only after paying $285.00 ($400 if you’re late) for the maintenance of this work record which qualifies the intern for additional fees to study and register for the exam which consists of nine exams the intern can take over one year all while slowly paying off anywhere from $40,000 – $90,000 of student loan debt. If I might have missed a step in the sequence – please disregard the inaccuracy, as I am a seven-month old intern and have earned a spot on the beginner’s podium. So. The question is not “why” this rant could be written by the majority of interns or even to suggest the system should change, but how, in spite of the “bureaucratic uniformity” imposed by the dysfunctional and unfriendly system, can an intern maximize the experience so as to not loose the poetic passion and freshness she or he has for architecture burning just beneath the khaki pant and light blue button down oxford façade. Architectural internship should be the beginning of an expanded and prolonged passionate love affair with architecture, a dynamic intellectual relationship full of spontaneous creative outbursts that no standardized system could ever quantify or track. Interns: Give the system your 3,000 hours it wants, but give the profession of architecture what it needs: burning embers of substance to counter the culture of the mediocrity.