Unlike most architecture schools, you wouldn't have to submit GRE scores or good grades or letters of recommendation. You wouldn't have to put the rest of your life on hold for 3 to 5 years. You wouldn't have to accrue HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars, or even tens of thousands of dollars -- in debt.

At my architecture school, anyone could come for a few weeks and learn how to build a house with their own two hands. Classes would be held year-round to make it easy to fit into your schedule. I would have a number of different campuses around the country that would teach building designs appropriate to the local climate.

And I need your help. Can you donate land for a campus? Can you donate books for a library? Can you teach a workshop? Can you provide start-up capital? Let me know.

I was very lucky (meaning that I worked very, very hard) to get into one of the top graduate architecture programs. When I got accepted, I thought I was all set for the the most mind-blowing educational experience ever! But talk about a rude awakening!

We didn’t get to choose what classes we took or who our professors were. And, thanks to the tenure system, we unfortunately had professors who had no business teaching.

With the 20 required credits per semester, the schedule was insane. Nobody had time to sleep. People considered themselves lucky if they got maybe 40 minutes of sleep a night. No wonder our school was nicknamed the “Graduate School of Divorce. Once while I was there, for fun (irony? cruelty?) they hosted a sleep expert to come in and tell us how important, how vitally, critically important it was for us to get regular, adequate sleep. He told us all about how unhealthy and psychologically damaging it was to be habitually sleep-deprived. Further, we learned how having enough sleep each night was critical to creativity, which is something you might want to have if you are paying about $50,000 a year to attend a design school. But, no matter, we still had twenty credit’s worth of required classes each semester.

Before I go on, I want to point out that I know that this type of schedule is the norm at architecture programs at universities across the nation. I don't want to pretend that I worked harder or longer than anyone else in any other architecture program. I know we've all been suffering, no matter which school we attend.

In my program, it was commonly understood that we were given more work that we could have possibly done well, thereby forcing us to choose what was important to us and how we would spend our time. They preferred to overwork and overstress us as a way to render from us a decision about where our interest lie rather than give us the choice of which classes and how large a course load to take in the first place.

There was rarely a day that went by when I didn't ask myself, "Why does becoming an architect mean staring at my computer all day? Why does becoming an architect mean that we're kept so busy that we hardly have time for regular, healthy sleep, despite all of the scientific evidence supporting a correlation between sleep and creativity? Why is it that we never visit construction sites so that we can see how buildings actually fit together?"

It really bothered me that we didn't seem to be spending any time on what was important to me, for example, designing buildings that could actually be built, and observing buildings being built. My studio critic was once really upset with me because I had taken the day off to go photograph actual buildings in order to see how builders of the past solved a design problem with which I was struggling.

I also couldn't shake the terrifying idea that, despite the time and expense of attending this program, I didn't feel like I was actually learning anything. And then I remembered the Pyramid of Learning.

You've seen this before. It's the Pyramid of Learning. It's a graphic representation of how much we remember of what we learn based on how we learned it.

What I would love to see for most if not all occupations is a return to a hands-on pedagogy such as what our recent ancestors enjoyed under an apprenticeship-based model. Somehow we got away from that, and instead of giving students an education via proven and effective teaching methods, most universities sell education as lecture-based classes (of which students can expect to remember 20%), requiring the reading of texts outside of the classroom (of which students can expect to remember 10%).

In other words, universities deliver its products to its customers in most most useless manner possible.

Compounding this problem is the great expense of a university education. The availability of Federal loans creates a false conception of the actual cost of such an education; the idea is conveyed that the expense of schooling is largely "taken care of" thanks to the loans. However, in four or five (undergraduate) or three or four (graduate) years when the university customer is finally released, bearing the university's seal of approval signifying that they've completed the requisite 128 (my undergraduate program) or 140 (my graduate program) credit hours (which means, according to the Pyramid of Learning and considering a mix of "Reading" and "Hearing Words", that they graduate about 20 remembered hours of classroom instruction), he or she has a six month's grace period before monthly loan payments' become due, payments that can last for ten years or more. In an economy like this where jobs are few and far between, universities create a class of indentured servants.

I knew there had to be another way. A better way.

Whether participating in a field trip or a workshop, the majority of the time is spent outside, where buildings live, experiencing buildings (noun) and engaging in building (verb). In some, but not all workshops, time is also spent designing the building that you will actually build. This differs from most university classes, which seem to prefer designing theoretical buildings divorced from the realities of Climate, Code, Cost, and Client.

VERB School does not yet exist, except in the hearts and minds of a few advisers. We need your help to bring VERB to fruition. Can you donate land for a campus? Can you dotate books for a library? Can you teach a workshop? Can you provide start-up capital Can you help us market the school to potential students? Can you secure funding? Can you advise us? Let me know.

You can also help us by answering this short survey to let us know what YOU want in an architectural education: