Given the ancient character of the craft, architecture school is a comparatively recent cultural phenomenon. Emerging from a soup of pupillage, guild-based apprenticeships and enthusiastic amateurship, the idea that you could train architects away from the building site only really took form in 17th-century France, when the Académie Royale d’Architecture (later the École des Beaux-Arts) offered the first properly academic training for would-be Ictinuses. Since its founding, architectural pedagogy has been constantly wracked by a simple yet galling question: should schools focus on the complex pragmatics of building, or should the studio be used as a space of cultural and artistic experiment before hard commerce takes over?