Building the Future

Sarah Whiting’s fascination with people led her to pursue a career in architecture.

“I am interested in the city and how people interact in the world,” said Whiting, the William Ward Watkin Professor of Architecture and dean of the School of Architecture at Rice. “Architecture, in the end, necessarily brings people together in specific spaces. It affects how people and things function at the scale of a room, the scale of a building and the scale of the city. In short, one could say that my nosiness about people is what got me interested in architecture.”

Whiting is also a principal at WW Architecture, which she co-founded with Ron Witte (also a professor of architecture at Rice) in 1999. Her roles in academia and her firm keep her busy today, but she originally wanted to be an architecture critic for the former International Herald Tribune, originally based in Paris. While the discipline of architectural criticism doesn’t exist much anymore as the role is being phased out of most newspapers, her interest in architecture’s public discourse remains. “I’m passionately interested in how the public understands architecture,” she said. “Architecture is a public discipline — it’s a public art. We all experience architecture, whether we pay attention to it or not.”

Technological Advances

In the past 20 years or so, technology has allowed smaller architecture offices to compete with larger firms, leveling out the playing field. “With advances in technology, architecture is made more quickly or let’s say design is done more quickly,” Whiting said. “However, architecture remains a slow profession that requires a lot of money and a lot of convincing to make any changes.” While certain aspects of architecture have changed in terms of how it is created, the pace of architecture and the public support of architecture haven’t changed much.

Whiting believes the field of architecture is not for the faint of heart and tells students who are considering it as a profession that they need to be very passionate about it and have a level of self-confidence in order to advocate to potential clients for something that doesn’t yet exist. “It’s hard to be an architect,” she said. “This field opens you to tons of different worlds — it’s a really open, incredibly diverse field, but you have to be passionate about it. You have to be able to express yourself verbally and visually. You have to be able to deal with all sorts of different kinds of people.”

Coming to Rice

Whiting came to Rice in 2010 for the opportunity to run a school of architecture at a small university where students and faculty can have a collective conversation. Rice Architecture is the smallest professional degree program situated within a top research university, allowing the school to draw extensively from other disciplines and forge new territories of speculative practice. “I think I have the most exciting job for a dean of architecture in the U.S.,” she said. “I have strong beliefs about architectural education. You have to put your money where your mouth is and take a job like this if you feel that strongly.” Whiting saw the opportunity as a chance to help shape an already robust program. “We have incredibly strong students, fantastic faculty and good resources,” she said. “I’m very aware that I have a very plum job.”

Advice for Students

Rice Architecture’s preceptorship program places every undergraduate student in a top-ranked architecture firm for a year, between their fourth and fifth year of study. “As a result, all of our students get jobs, because they’ve worked for a year in these fantastic offices all over the world,” she said. While experience and education are essential foundations to an architect’s career, Whiting also urges students to pay more attention to buildings beyond the walls of a classroom or firm. “I regret not paying more attention to buildings under construction when I was a student in architecture school, because I think that you learn an incredible amount from looking carefully at buildings,” she said. “I think we spend a lot of time as students looking at architecture through a computer screen or at a book, and I think taking the time to look at architecture by experiencing it and by looking at it very closely is probably the most important thing for understanding how it is built and what impacts it has.”

Shaping the Future of Architecture

Innately, architecture is future-centric. Architecture seeks to construct things that accommodate new possible uses. “As an architect, you’re constantly building worlds yet to come,” she said. “Architecture is a balance of understanding present needs and anticipating future ones. And that’s the most exciting thing about this field, because you never get bored — you’re always thinking about different options, different ways of living, different futures. And architectural education is exactly the same: it’s always evolving in consideration of those potential futures.”

Published at Unconventional.rice.edu: https://unconventional.rice.edu/sarah-whiting.