Buildings for schools of architecture should be the best structures on college campuses. The architects are working for clients and occupants who understand the process of designing buildings — its possibilities, limitations, and pitfalls.

Alas, that’s not the case. Think of a really ugly, really problematic building on the campus, and you just might be thinking of the one that houses the architecture department. Various architecture buildings get a thorough evaluation in a new book, Designing for Designers: Lessons Learned From Schools of Architecture (Fairchild Books), written and edited by Jack L. Nasar, a professor of city and regional planning at Ohio State University; Wolfgang F.E. Preiser, a professor of architecture at the University of Cincinnati; and Thomas Fisher, a professor and dean of design at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

Philip Langdon, an architecture critic, lays out the case in the book’s foreword. After he started writing about architecture, he writes, “I noticed how strangely, how radically, the quality of architecture schools varied. It wasn’t the differences among professors, students, or curricula that caught my attention. It was the buildings in which the schools were housed; they were so disparate in character and not infrequently disappointing.”

The buildings were evaluated by occupants for their appearance, the usefulness of their spaces, their accessibility and layout, and the quality of construction materials and their application, among other criteria. The book’s essays were written by faculty members from the respective colleges.

The book finds flaws with every one of the buildings that were evaluated — more with some than others. In the chapter about the pink-and-pastel-blue architecture building at the University of Cincinnati, for example, the designer, Peter Eisenman, is described as shooting for “a rock concert in concrete.”

“Eisenman stated that he does not care about the users of his buildings, meaning that he does not care about such fundamental concerns as function, human comfort, and ease of access,” writes Mr. Preiser, the author of the essay. The architect seems to have achieved just what he wanted. The building might have won attention for the university (see this Chronicle article about “star-chitecture”), but the design has serious leakage and maintenance problems, lighting and acoustical flaws, a confusing layout, and is regarded as ugly by many on the campus.

The architecture building at Ohio State, designed by Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, was deemed “fairly flawed.” It does not have much useable space, the book says, and most people think it is not a good fit on the campus. The interior performs poorly and lacks basic energy-efficient elements. The essay notes that people who met with the architects during the design process found them “closed to user input.” The director of the architecture school at the time said he didn’t want to “design by committee,” the book says.

The most important finding of the various studies is “simple” and “intuitive,” the authors write: “The better designs tended to have a well-managed process.”

Really, the point of the book is not to trash prominent architecture buildings and the famous architects who designed them. It is to show that buildings should not be only artistic statements or only utilitarian. “When people buy a product, they expect it to look good and work well, such as the universally designed line of kitchen utensils by OXO,” the authors write. “The same philosophy should be applied in architecture.”