Preparing for crits

Preparing for crits sends shivers down the spine of even the most confident student. Here, legendary architects and teachers Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein of Gillespie Kidd & Coia fame – along with some current students – give their advice on how to prepare.

Crits, otherwise known as review or jury, are for many students one of the most daunting parts of architectural education.

Though the format varies depending on the school and the personalities involved, all involve students presenting their work to tutors, other students, and sometimes visiting academics or laypeople. In many cases students receive marks for their performance in the crit.

But aside from standard interview advice – to prepare properly and consider in advance obvious questions and criticisms – what else should students consider?

Andy MacMillan

Preparing for a life in architecture – that is the underlying idea behind the crit.

There are two main aspects to it. What the tutor expects to get out of it and what opportunity the student has to demonstrate a number of things.

Above all, it is the clarity of the student’s own intentions in response to the programme which counts.

When I was at the Mac [Mackintosh School of Architecture], the primary thing was looking at what the student wanted to do.

Did they have a concept? Could they develop it and could they present it visually and using the right vocabulary?

You develop the students’ ability over a five-year period, so there are levels of expectation from staff depending on whether you’re in the first year or the final year.

I also think that students sometimes don’t understand that a project which fails can be better experience than a project which succeeds.

The crit is meant to be helpful, so you shouldn’t be terrified.

Isi Metzstein

A crit is a device for teaching a class of students, a device for telling staff whether they are doing their teaching correctly.

You are not examining the student but the project as a whole and the crit should not be seen as a direct response to a student’s scheme.

My view is an ideal view but I’m a great believer in the traditional crit and I believe this is being eroded. They have become too much like Maths crits.

If the student prepares to defend their project then they are setting themselves up for a confrontation.

A crit is a teaching device, not something to punish students if they have not been working hard enough.

Cristina Monteiro, part II architectural assistant at Muf and teacher at Kingston University

Like any form of presentation, there is an element of performance to a crit – taking the critics and audience on a journey through your project that is engaging and rigorous.

Students are often quite good at pinning up their work, but also quite bad at verbally communicating their projects.

We have all done all-nighters and felt dreadful when it comes to the big moment, but it’s really important to dedicate time to looking and thinking critically about the work, and then organising that into a fluent verbal presentation.

Really, a crit is an opportunity for a conversation, for opening up the project to dialogue, and shouldn’t be treated as oppositional.

The ideal scenario, perhaps, would be pinning up the work the day before, taking a good long look at it, and spending the final night refining what is important to say about the work, and how to say it.

Oliver Wainwright, fifth year student at the Royal College of Art

Crits can be seen as quite a negative thing but it shouldn’t be like that.

Rather than seeing this panel of jurors who need to be duped into seeing your project as amazing, you should see it as a chance to get feedback and ideas which can improve your work.

People can also control the direction of the discussion and kind of curate the crit – the students have more power than they realise.

Clarity is very important, so the presentation should be pared down as if you were presenting to the man in the street. You could present initially to your housemate, for example.

Presenting the project as an inevitability so the discussion becomes about what it is and what it is like also helps.

Finally, using models or some kind of object can often engage the audience more quickly. That is better than images or Powerpoint, which is the worst.