What is architecture? This will be the first question on the first day of your architecture school. Every layman including first-year architecture students confuses architecture with the profession of making buildings. The reality check hits in, post the five-year hustle.
Architecture is the art of how to waste space. – Philip Johnson
The duration to inculcate this skill is infinite, and architecture school only sets the foundation of the building. The stronger and deeper the foundation is, the higher and stronger you will rise in the field. This article gives crucial insights into architecture school which will help you to be one step ahead in setting a stronger foundation for yourself as an architect.
Do’s – Customs to be persistent with.
Explore – Explore – Explore
As the title suggests, architecture is an umbrella. It houses numerous fields and subjects. Each field and subject is a contributor to architecture in its unique format. Five years at any architecture school is sufficient time for you to explore various dynamics of the field. Every semester in the curriculum offers to explore different typologies to design, enhance creativity with subjects catering to art and crafts and construction techniques. After every year during breaks, students should take up any sort of internship or freelancing jobs catering to their interests to help them get a vision of the ways architecture is practiced in the real world. Workshops, architecture college fests, and research assistance are also prominent ways to explore the field.
Exploring dynamics in architecture will only help to widen your vision and simultaneously streamline it. It will help you to understand, which string you wish to hold, of the architecture umbrella once you graduate.
Reach out
Architecture is not a profession to be practiced individually. It is all about managing teams responsible for making a built form habitable. Therefore, architecture students must endure as team players.
Unlike most professions, in architecture, not everything is available on the internet. To access certain tangents of information and career guidance, you will need your professors, since they sit on the line of academics and professional practice. Tight deadlines of crucial submissions is an unending struggle in architecture. Hence extra hands, and quick hacks to complete tasks come to the rescue. Therefore, associations with juniors and seniors in architecture school will always be of significant help. If none of them help, the library is your best friend. Housing legends and their works, current affairs, and endless archives will always rescue you in your creative blocks.
Hence, to become exceptional team players, mastering the art of reaching out to people in the hour of need is pivotal for architecture students and by extension, practicing architects.
Observe – Listen – Master
Observation of details in surroundings is an architect’s bread and butter. It helps to endure the skill of uplifting the space with an unusual experience. These details not only involve construction details of a built form but also livability of inhabitants, contextual impacts, services and it’s adaptability. It helps the architect to communicate and deliver better in any existing palette. Therefore, inculcating the ability of observation should begin on the very first day of architecture education.
Listening is an important aspect that needs to be touched upon in the beginning years of any architect. Therefore as students, we must try to listen every day. Legends talking about their projects, their approaches, challenges, and ways to tackle them is an astounding way to enhance vision and improve your design capabilities. Terminologies used on-site and exchanged amongst laborers are crucial to be able to communicate and get work done on-site.
Mastering skills and not lectures are key in architecture school. As a fresher, the opportunity to choose and master as many skills as possible is the ultimate utilization of being in an architecture school. Because practicing in architecture limits the opportunities to experiment and explore, therefore architecture schools provide the perfect platform to experiment and master skills required in the field and help to up the game significantly.
Don’ts – Customs to steer clear from.
Backlogs
The curriculum of architecture school aims to make you try nearly every dish on the plate. Therefore, your time needs to be distributed among all disciplines fairly. Delivering and approvals are the never-ending processes in architecture. And receiving approvals is the only key for you to move forward.
Putting things on hold for later will not be of any help. Instead, it will end up piling up until the last day. The next thing will be you compromising the quality of your inputs in each discipline. Furthermore, any backlogs for any subjects will end up charging your time with major deliveries at the end of sessions. Hence, keeping a check on the time, planning, and assigning your hours adequately among all subjects will upskill your time management skills immensely.
Flowing with the river
Consistently surrounded by creative, passionate, and competitive peers in architecture school can be overwhelming. Often things tend to get rigorous during the five-year process and end up diverting you from your arena. Time and again you will come across situations where the river is flowing in a certain direction. The choice to flow with or against the river to outshine your peers will be up to you. The prime idea is to be able to give your deliverables a spine. If your idea/proposal stands out of the box, your aim should be to back it up with strong references and arguments, making it inevitable.
Being under the architecture umbrella, it is crucial to explore niches and track down your niche eventually. It will drop light on you and help to streamline your vision.
Attempting to over-deliver
In any creative field, the maximum quantity of delivery is undefined. Quantity and quality go hand in hand. Sometimes the quality of work will push your scales up and sometimes quantity. Compromising one for the other might influence your delivery negatively. Under – delivering is not encouraged in architecture. Hence, potential to maintain a balance between the two is vital.
Therefore, meeting delivery requirements is crucial. Since final juries can be profuse, you might end up planning to exceed the delivery requirements. Exerting pressure to overdeliver will not only affect your time management skills but will end up exhausting you to present your piece on the final day eventually. Hence, balancing work and keeping in check your sleeping patterns before the final days is highly beneficial.
Architecture schools are meant to be exhausting. They train you to deal with pressure, extensive working hours, and presenting proposals on your worst days. It helps you to overcome all the obstacles that might come in the way of you delivering your best. If you are willing to take the leap and conquer to the best of your ability, architecture school will manage to lay the best foundation for you as a professional architect.
