Architecture is a multidisciplinary subject where you learn about the connections between humans, nature, and space. Being an architecture student, it takes a lot of energy to study and skills to portray what has been processed in mind. A bewildering and vicious beast, involving long hours, and often blunt teaching, is the architecture curriculum. Though the architectural lessons are engaging, they are also loaded with so many exceptions and limitations that students could easily wonder if there’s anything meaningful to understand about architecture at all.
After all, architecture is an imaginative field, and design instructors are understandably difficult to make lesson plans out of fear of putting unrealistic boundaries on the creative process. Resulting in a trip down several new paths, but always with a sense that architecture is founded on fast sand rather than on solid earth. While pursuing architecture, thought process, technical skills, and managing everything are the essential things architecture has taught.
Architecture and Thinking process | Architectural Learning
The most important thing you learn from one design studio and take with you to the next is an improved design process, not a fully realized building. Above all, design studio teachers want to build successful methods for their classes. If a teacher gives what seems to be a lousy project a good grade, it is usually because the student has shown a good method.
Additionally, you will see a marginal grade being given to an obviously successful project. But why? Because the process matters more than the outcome, architecture training focuses more on the thinking process. While training on how to think, another vital element is “Meta-thinking” The term “Meta-thinking” means that you are conscious of how you think while designing. The most effective, most innovative problem solvers participate in the process of meta-thinking or “thinking about the thinking.”
Meta-thinkers engage in regular internal debate to measure, stretch, critique, and redirect their thinking process. A good designer is not afraid to throw a good idea away. Just because you have an innovative idea does not mean that it belongs to the building you design. For another time and project, save your excellent but ill-fitting ideas, and with the understanding that they may not work then either.
Technical skills in architecture
Architects are skilled in understanding and analyzing orthographic drawings like plan, elevation, and sections. Still, in this way, a person who does not have architecture training will not grasp everything about a project. Throughout the design process, drawing detailed one- and two-point views of your design and building interiors will allow you to clear your perceptions of the building. How the building will look, function, and feel in the real environment and imagine design concepts that are not visible in two-dimensional sketches.
Other than hand drawings, software-based skills are now also very essential. Previously before the software, architects had to draw the design several times just to fix a few small changes. The drawing softwares are very much time saving, corrections can be done quickly. Different kinds of experiments can be done to check the building’s airflow and load-bearing capacity, making the architecture student life very smooth.
In jury, the juror says this building will not work; students can answer with valid data. Drawings can be printed out on any scale that students want. These software-based drawing learning and knowledge about composition helps students understand architecture and opens doors to opportunities to flourish as photographers, graphic designers, and many other professions.
Managing solutions in architecture | Architectural Learning
Until starting to sketch, don’t wait for clarification to arrive when a design dilemma is so daunting as to be almost suffocating. An illustration is not only a way to represent a proposed design; it is a way to think about the dilemma you are trying to solve. A designer must be competent in history, architecture, psychology, physics, philosophy, materiality, sociology, political process, and numerous other fields. An architect must construct a house that follows regulation codes, environmentally sounds, mechanical systems working, and fits its users’ diverse rational and psychological needs.
Never regret the constraints of a design dilemma, an awkward terrain, tiny location, an excessively long room, an unfamiliar material palate, conflicting customer requests. Limitations inspire imagination. Architecture taught that the solution to the issue lies within those restrictions! If a contour slope renders it challenging to construct a traditional structure, celebrate with a fascinating stair, ramp, and spaces’ vertical connections. If the house faces an ugly old wall, seek ways to frame thoughts to make it enjoyable and memorable. It takes time to understand and integrate many considerations into a coherent product, with lots of experimentation along the way. If you’re willing to be an architect, be in it for the long haul. And It is indeed, worthwhile.
To sum up, Architecture starts with a concept. A concept is a particular mental framework by which certain interactions and knowledge are structured, interpreted, and given meaning. Architects are merely space designers without fundamental ideas that inform their buildings. It is not architecture to design space with decoration added to “dress it up”; architecture exists in a building’s DNA, in an embedded sensibility that infuses its entirety. Reasonable design solutions are not merely visually fascinating but are guided by fundamental concepts. All the training architecture has given, the abnormality was shifting of lifestyle!
Time management, convincing people are very crucial skills that every individual needs in life. Thankfully architecture may not teach it directly, but the 5 years of training and unimaginable pressure molds a student in that manner where they can take criticism and manage everything smoothly! Group projects teach how to be tolerant and ignore to maintain peace of mind, which helps to negotiate and synthesize conflicting criteria while respecting the client’s expectations and the entire project’s dignity, an architect must know enough about each discipline. An architect is a jack of all trade and knows something about everything!