Nobody really knows what to expect from college when you decide to become an Architect. The incoming students fall into two categories. There’s the starry-eyed freshmen, with the little knowledge that they have about architecture, who think college is having passionate discussions about Neoclassical architecture, and traveling to foreign lands like the Greats before them to discover various Architectural marvels, all whilst drinking coffee, and wearing clothes darker than said coffee. Then there’s freshmen whose knowledge of architecture is limited to the fact that architects design buildings. I fell into the latter category – my architectural knowledge before joining college was limited to a ‘Technical Drawing’ class I took in High School, and the only architect I had heard of was Ted Mosby in How I Met Your Mother. Both categories of students are painfully clueless about what awaits them.
It’s hard to accurately describe the experience of studying at an Architecture School, even after graduating and having been through it all. It’s an amalgamation of discovering yourself, learning to be inherently curious about everything around you, and questioning every single day if you’re willing to put yourself through what it takes to call yourself an Architect, mixed in with extra helpings of insomnia, coffee, and energy drink addictions. There are also the cliches – the late nights in the studio, the questionable eating, and sleeping patterns, spending way more money than you should on drawing supplies, your Cad/ Revit files deciding to give up on you, and crushing on dreamy, intellectual studio professors.
Ask any architect, and they will tell you that the hardest year in college was their first, and that was definitely the case for me. Our professors told us that if we got through the first year, we may just succeed in graduating with an Architecture degree after all.“Sink or swim” is how they very eloquently put it. Encouraging, right? Architects are nothing if not honest. The first year was then filled with them throwing new challenges at us every other day, while we scrambled to get the job done just in time. All that chaos did have one very big benefit – it brought our studio class closer, and fostered friendships that may not have happened otherwise. Of course, everyone wanted to put out the best and most creative project for every assignment, so there wasn’t a lack of competition. But there was always a very strong sense of camaraderie within our class.
The week before a project jury is always filled with stress and anxiety, as everyone is trying to get their project together, and the last night before the presentation is the culmination of all that collective tension. The night before my very first presentation in college was all that amplified manifold. The entire class was present in the studio (yes, even the all-rounders). We all were fighting valiantly to stay awake with our tar-black coffee and chips, but failing miserably. So, at 2 am, we decided that in order to stay awake for the rest of the night, urgent and extreme action must be taken immediately. What followed was an intense brainstorming session which led to a simple and innovative solution – a snowball fight. The plan of action was to form two teams, and have a competitive snowball fight for at least 20 minutes, while it was snowing outside in -1 °C weather. We then proceeded to run around the quad, flinging snow at each other, and laughing at the absurdity of it all. We barely lasted ten minutes in the snow before retreating to the warmth of our studio. The plan was genius – while we barely survived getting hypothermia, we were wide awake for the remainder of the night. We managed to complete all our submissions and gave pretty good presentations, which probably wouldn’t have been possible without the last-minute push we got from the insanity of the previous night.
The rest of my journey through architecture college was equally bizarre and wonderful as that night. There were a lot more late nights, and even more, coffee involved. While the assignments were demanding, and the course was beyond rigorous, studying architecture was immensely rewarding.
