Talk Architecture

Design Thinking and Critical Thinking, Part 2: What Happens in a Crit

Send us Fan Mail Part 2, and this time the question is the word itself. Does “crit” come from critical thinking? The root is the same: the Greek kritikos, the ability to judge and discern — to separate, sift and decide. Criticism, critique and crit all descend from it. As a formal teaching event the crit was popularised in nineteenth-century architectural education at the École des Beaux-Arts, where students pinned up drawings and models before a jury of professors and peers. That is still wh...