Everyone carries around their box of the moments that bring them joy, peace, and a sense of belonging. Be it the laughter that follows through every turn and step in the school corridors, the tears whose only audience is the bedroom walls, the shouts of your friends at your local park while the sun-lit trees act as a perfect background, the whispers of hide and seek while everybody zigzags in and around the streets and lampposts, the nervous thrum of your first day of work sitting at your cubicle, or the peace of your first home.
And isn’t this how architecture impacts lives? That the schools, parks, streets, and offices are home to memories that people will carry around for the rest of their lives.
But creating a place for memories isn’t an easy task. There are multitudes that need to be understood to make this happen. Various disciplines need to be worked out so that architecture as a whole discipline can come together.
A subject like this then needs to have training that makes architects ready for their job. And architecture colleges step up brilliantly.
Any college, for that matter, opens a new world for students. Stories are written about this epoch, movies are made, freedom is handed to them at the tea stall in front of their college, and, to quote a cliche, they are the kings and queens of the world. It is a time to learn how things work, the whys and the whats.
Architecture colleges, though, are a whole different world. They teach students to hold a pencil, set a scale, draft sheets, and, by association, their future.
Practical knowledge
A design isn’t finished until someone is using it—Brenda Laurel
The first and foremost school of thought students learn in architecture school is ‘Form follows function or function follows form.’
Functionality is, pun intended, the foundation of architecture. Spaces designed can be the most aesthetic ever, but they won’t fulfill their purpose if they aren’t functional. Practical application is ingrained into the very core of architecture schools. Right from their first year, students are taught practical knowledge that they can apply in the field.
Adapting to change
When designs from paper are put into motion, changes are bound to happen. The variables can be far and many. Architecture colleges teach students to adapt to changes; and welcome them even. Be it through the many redo remarks the professors give or oftentimes extreme criticism towards their design.
This process makes sure that when students step into the field as architects, sudden client demands or on-site issues do not faze them. Instead, they can deal with it.
Diverse subjects
Architecture contains multitudes within itself and is a manifestation of different disciplines working together to design and create a space.
Architecture schools therefore teach a diverse range of subjects that help students gain perspective and knowledge through different fields. Be it teaching the construction process, material study, landscaping, various types of flora and fauna, history, economics of building, or climatology and how to design spaces around it.
This also helps form a holistic view of spaces and how they can function to their maximum potential.
Learning style/technique
In schools, we mostly relied on textbooks and teachers to learn our coursework. Architecture, though, requires a different approach. Being primarily a design discipline, it is expected of students to be creative, and engaging, and look for solutions outside the conventional.
Architecture schools bridge the gap between classrooms and the outside world through the way they teach.
Studio classes, specifically, urge students to interact and engage with each other to explore ideas, analyze, and critique their work not just in the classroom but outside of it as well. They also encourage students to learn independently, outside the coursework, and develop a design language of their own.
Work management
Architecture schools are notoriously known for their intense deadlines and workload. Design disciplines in general tend to have intense deadlines and ask that the students give their 100% on every assignment and design problem.
You are sure to find architecture students at ungodly hours, racing against time and their design professors to complete their deadlines.
And while all this might seem daunting, students come out on the other side of this with time management skills that would rival the biggest CEOs.
Peers and competitions
While design is said to be subjective, colleges do still work on the grading system. Competition, in healthy amounts, can help a student push themselves to think outside of the box and come up with designs that push their creative boundaries.
But architecture colleges also make sure that students view one another more than a competition. Students are urged to interact with each other, bounce ideas off, and come up with creative ideas and solutions.
Misery also loves company, and there is no one else who can understand architecture students like one another and the stress they go through, which gives way to friendships that stand the test of storms and design juries.
Software skills
Software applications not only help students present their ideas; they also help them visualize those ideas and give them a scale and proportion.
Add to that, the software learned during this time is used in a variety of different fields and gives architecture students an edge over their peers.
Analog skills
While software is necessary when working in the field, architecture students don’t necessarily start with that.
The first couple of years of architecture school are filled with hand-drafted sheets for students. While this stage might seem a little tedious for students, it teaches them to pay attention to detail, precision, and most importantly, patience.
Time is a fickle thing. Half a decade will feel like 5 seconds on some days, and 50 years on others, depending on the design jury you’ve had. Students start architecture school when they’re 18, fresh out of school when the world’s their oyster when everything seems achievable and everyone seems to tell them the same. Architecture school teaches us it is not.
Architecture teaches us reality. It teaches us about bad days and their importance. It teaches us to trust ourselves and have patience in the process. The 3D model won’t look as good as imagined in SketchUp, but give it some, or a lot, time in rendering software and you have the structure you dreamt of.
It teaches us to pay attention to the smallest of things because that’s how the big picture will be flawless. Students go to architecture school thinking they know how to sharpen a pencil and hold a scale. They are robbed of that notion the very first day. If that doesn’t tell you everything about architecture school, I don’t know what will. But then they teach students how to do just that and more.
Architecture teaches us that we design our future, no pun intended. It also teaches us how to pick ourselves up if things don’t go our way. While we continue to drift from one goal to another, one failure to the next throughout life, architecture gives us the tools to make a raft that will eventually help us reach the shore. We might need a few redos, but it has us prepared for that as well.
