Architecture School Vs Practice
Welcome to my newsletter, where you'll find my latest takes on the architecture industry.
Today's read is ~ 4 minutes
Let me catch you up with the latest...
So, for the past 3 weeks, I've been working as an architectural designer in practice and have been adapting to a new routine with new challenges and have absolutely loved every day! I'm learning so much from the directors, architects and fellow designers at the practice and I'm extremely grateful for this incredible new journey.
But one thing I have noticed is that life in practice is very different from life in architecture school.
Now, I know there are many similarities:
etc, etc...
The fast-paced yet patient game of architecture brings both instant and delayed gratification.
领英推荐
But here are some of the differences:
- Being a student is hard. Being an architecture student is 2x more challenging. From my experience at undergraduate and masters and also from the conversations I've had from peers, I can say that the pressure we put on ourselves is far more than the expectations of our tutors and others. Everything depends on us. There is no such thing as a 9-5. You're always thinking about your work even when you leave uni or finish working for the day. It's mentally exhausting if you don't manage your time and set yourself 'boundaries', whatever that means. But since I've started working in practice, although it's taken some time, it's refreshing to be able to switch off and rest without those pressures after the working day is over.
- Now, you may be familiar with the university schedule of architecture projects. Roughly: September / October - Brief and Site Research, November / December - Exploring and Testing Design Ideas and creating Preliminary Concepts, January / March - Developing Proposal, April / May Finalising Design and Submission. What we have here is a structure that is used, repeated and what I call, the imperfect perfect model. I say this because although the structure of the academic year is predictive and each aim is outlined, there are still areas within the curriculum that can be and should be improved (but more on that in another edition to come). In practice, projects take years at the least and more often than not, it can take a considerable amount of time before any construction work reaches site.
- We take university for granted. The time spent working on creative and experimental projects that we know won't get built by the time we finish the year or architecture school completely. During the design phase, there's things we either don't spend as much time on as we should or details that we don't fully explore to the extent required in practice. At the end of the day, in practice, we design buildings for the real world. This means that there's a HUGE amount of responsibility placed on architects and designers to design structures correctly and work in conjunction with engineers, contractors, developers and many more in order to get the job done. At architecture school, we aren't given a budget, the clients are the people we say they are and there truly is no limit to what can be designed and constructed. Everyday it becomes clearer - there's a bigger divide between life in practice and life in architecture school than I once thought. And it's vital that we continue educating the current and future generations of aspiring architects to not only provide support, but more importantly, work on equipping students with information, tools and skills that will make them exceptional as they transition from school to practice.
There is so much information that isn't available to students in architecture school.
It's time to double down on efforts to merge the two worlds together to provide an optimal working and learning environment for the designers of the future.
Let's start working together now to make it happen.