When I started architecture school at Pratt a professor introduced me to the YouTube channel, frank howarth, an Architect turned woodworker. Since then I’ve enjoyed watching his hobbyist career grow into that of a highly-skilled artisan. His early videos feel like exercises to develop a vocabulary for his current work -almost like he followed some divine syllabus.

Building a “kit-of-parts” is a design approach that gets tossed around a lot in architecture school, but I don’t think I really understood it until seeing Frank Howarth pull it off on such a timeline. In a way, he is still following this very traditional architecture school practice, but he’s documenting it all online. Feedback from the YouTube community creates a feedback loop. The interaction drives the energy and the energy drives the creativity.

I hope that education follows this trend. I believe that platforms like YouTube enable everyone to have access to an infinite classroom and an unlimited amount of education.