0010 Your First Architecture Assignment
The Brief
Welcome back Ladies and Gentlemen to the Architecture Student Diaries where it is my mission to help you kill it in Architecture school whilst making you, the best you in the process. Today we're going to discuss how to tackle your first assignment in Architecture School to get you the best result possible with minimal tears. In architecture school the first year is a test, the staff will throw you in the deep end with perceivably impossible assignments; this is to eliminate those from the course who are not serious about architecture. This is where you need to dig deep and be resilient. When you get presented with your first assignment, you will most likely look at it and its size and think you are way in over your head, but trust me, you’ve got this. Below, I am going to provide you with the essential tips to succeed in your first assignment and in doing so, provide you with the foundations to tackle every assignment for the rest of your time at university.
Below is a breakdown of what we will discuss in today's lesson:
Read the Brief
Go to Class
Ask for Help
Follow the Rubric
Explore the Studio
Put the Hours In
Don’t Be Scared to Be Different
Find Inspiration but Don’t Copy
DO NOT PLAGIARISE
Now, let’s get into it. Class is now in session.
Read the Brief
Architecture assignments are similar in concept to that of a real-world design job that you will be exposed to in practice. A simple way to look at it is to think of yourself as the architect, the lead professor or unit chair as the client and your studio group tutor as your boss in the firm. The unit chair (client) will present to you the brief of what needs to be completed in the assignment. An architectural brief is in simple terms, a list that outlines the wants and needs of the client, the assignment brief represents the same thing but typically with stricter guidelines. The earlier in your degree, the stricter the guidelines will be as unpractised students may go in the wrong direction if not clearly explained in the brief.
It is integral that you read and understand the brief for your assignment, because if you don’t, your product will not be what the assignment is meant to be. The brief will explain things like what type of structure you may be designing, whether your end product should be a physical model or a computer render, what material you should make your model out of, if you need to write text and if there is a specific location you are designing for. Know the brief inside and out and you are on the right track to a solid finished product.
Go to Class
University in the age of technology, its easy right? Every lecture is recorded and uploaded to the cloud along with the Keynote Slides, all required information is online, if you get confused you can just slide into one of the smart kids DMs to ask for help and submissions are online! You don’t even need to go to Uni anymore, do you?! Welllll... Sorry to tell you, but if you want to pass Architecture School, you’re going to need to go to class, especially Studio!
Architecture is a difficult degree, no matter what university you study at, no matter what country you live in, architecture is hard, and I guarantee you are going to get confused and lost at some point in an assignment. When this happens, you are going to need to seek help from a tutor, and yes, you can email them and hope for a response, and you might be lucky enough to get a highly digitally literate and kind tutor who can genuinely help over email, but the likelihood of this is very low.
You have heard of teachers pets in High School, right? They were the ones who always got made fun of. Yeah, well they are also the ones who got good marks because they had strong relationships with the teachers and therefore got extra help. In university you are going to want to swallow your pride and become a teacher's pet of sorts. The easiest way to produce the best assignments, is to produce the exact thing that your tutor wants, and how are you going to know what your tutor wants? Be in class and talk to them! Show them what you have so far, get feedback, change what they think you should and repeat these steps until the assignment is completed. Do this and you are basically guaranteed a good mark.
A terrific reason to go to each class other than getting good marks is as stated above, creating strong relationships with staff. The more you are at class, the more the tutors know you and therefore the more likely they are to help you. If a tutor hasn’t seen a student for the entire semester, and then all of a sudden the day before submission this girl shows up, says that she is in this tutors group and asks for help, the tutor will likely not be interested in helping as the student has not shown commitment to the course. However, if this girl went to every class from the very start of the semester, maybe missing one class for an important reason and still contacting the tutor that week, the tutor is almost certain to give up time for this girl because she has been consistent.
If you haven’t picked up on this, the difference here is not simply attendance, but respect. By attending classes and conversing with your tutor each week, asking for help and genuinely taking their comments on board, you are showing that you respect the tutor and their wealth of knowledge. Respect is a two way street, if you show respect to the staff, they will show respect to you and I guarantee, this mutual respect between you and staff will make your time at university perpetually better and open future possibilities to you that you didn’t think possible. This includes possibilities such as study abroad opportunities, leadership opportunities, scholarship opportunities and employment opportunities. It pays to be respectful in life.
Ask for Help
Expanding on going to class and building relationships with the staff discussed above, asking for help is one of the easiest ways to boost your grades. You will find a point in your assignment when you get stuck, lacking inspiration or simply hating the design you have so far, this is where asking for help comes in. Every designer has a bit of an arrogant side where they always think that their design is the best design and that they can do better than everyone else. It’s okay, that is actually an important quality to have in architecture, because sometimes you genuinely are right, and you need to be able to stand up for yourself. However, in first year of architecture school you probably aren’t right... But that is what school is for, it is for learning and getting better and they are two of the most valuable things in the world.
If you get stuck, ask the staff for help. Don’t be scared because it is literally what they get paid for, they are teachers and they are there to help you on your journey to becoming the best architect as possible. You will come across one every now and then who is simply just there for the money and who doesn’t want to help, but that is very rare, and you simply need to move on to the next staff member. Asking for help is something important to learn how to do, some people have too much pride to ask for help and these are the people who get left behind. It is integral that you learn from an early stage that gaining help and tips from other people is guaranteed to make you a better architect; and in life outside of architecture, a better person. You’re here, reading The Architecture Student Diaries so you already understand that finding resources to help you become a better student is beneficial and I commend you for that. Sometimes in life you will get tips that are bad and that shouldn’t be followed, but don’t overlook these tips as they have also taught you something; what not to do. Mistakes can sometimes be more valuable than doing something right the first time around because of what those mistakes have taught you, remember that.
Follow the Rubric
With each assignment you will get a brief as discussed above, however, along with each brief comes the rubric. The rubric is the breakdown of how your assignment will be marked, it explains each area that marks are awarded to and typically how many marks are awarded to the respected areas. Think of the rubric as your marking bible, to be followed on your path to a successful assignment mark.
Explore the Studio
Something that I wish I had done more in my first year of architecture school was to take the time to walk around the studio space, look at other students work and discuss it with them. Walking through the studio whilst others work is something that can be incredibly helpful for inspiration, understanding of the assignment and simply seeing the great work that others are capable of. It also gives you a chance to see who appears to be as dedicated as you are and therefore might be a good person to team up with in group assignments.
Getting to know other students by walking around also gives you a larger group of people who you can ask for help from or discuss ideas with. Remember, this is just like High school, this will be your cohort for a minimum of three years, so try to get along with them and make some friends, it will make your life easier. One saying that I live by is ‘you are the sum of the five people that you spend the most time with’; basically, this means that the person you are is combination of the five people who you spend the most time with. So yes, it is good to make friends in university, but it is also important that you choose wisely and don’t waste one of your five spots on someone who will hold you back. Choose people who push you to be better and that will help you succeed.
Put the Hours In
If you want to do well in Architecture School, you cannot simply breeze your way through it. I have said this on The Architecture Student Diaries a hundred times, and I will probably say it two thousand times more, but architecture is hard, and it takes time and commitment to succeed. Being someone who is able to be committed is a difficult but important personality trait. If you are not a committed type person you will either need to learn how to be one or you have most likely chosen, the wrong career path, I apologise for being so blunt but it is better that you find that out sooner rather than later. Your first assignment in architecture school will typically be quite large and that means it will take a lot of time to do. You can’t just leave it until the last minute and cram everything in in a few days. Okay, you can, and lots of people do, but these assignments are always horrible quality, and these are the people who either fail or only pass by the smallest of margins.
Typically, in architecture school, hours wise you will be wanting to put in 10-12 hours per week for each subject that you are doing. If you put in these hours and they are good quality working hours you should be able to put together a strong assignment. Depending on the assignment you may be able to do it in slightly less hours or it may be a big assignment that requires more; but the bottom line is that you need to put in the hours to be successful. A trap that a lot of people fall into in architecture school is messing around in Studio classes and not getting work done; to be successful and to free up as much personal time outside of university work as possible, you need to utilise these studio hours to do your assignment. This is not only a great time to put your head down and focus on your assignment, but your tutors and peers are there by your side to give you tips or to bounce ideas off; the atmosphere will be filled with creative and talented juices.
Don’t Be Scared to Be Different
Architecture is a passion fuelled profession where you are able to be creative and you will throughout your years typically find your personal design ‘style’. The best thing to do is to find designs, architects and eras of design that really speak to you and that you find beautiful. This is a great place to start to get inspired at the beginning of your course as you will go in with ideas and be ready to start designing. Instagram and Pinterest are incredible resources for finding inspiration and new work that you may not be familiar with. Use these resources, find a few architects who's work you really love and try drawing some of their past work or finding buildings that are similar to find even more inspiration. If you are feeling particularly excited by the work you find, try to design something yourself using those styles and see what you can come up with. You may surprise yourself.
Find Inspiration but Don’t Copy
One of the great things about studying in the digital age is that is has never been easier to get inspired. With social sites such as Pinterest and Instagram as well as a simple Google search, you are able to see the best architecture from all around the globe. Another old school method is simply going outside (I know, scary right?) and going for a walk to have a look at some of the local architecture, or even to your closest major city and admiring the skyline. Something that I always enjoy, and I am lucky with living close to Melbourne, Australia, is looking at modern structures right next to old structures and dissecting the differences and similarities between the two. Finding inspiration is a simple way to kick start your design for your assignment however, you cannot, and I repeat, cannot, simply use the design that you saw. You need to use this design as inspiration only, take the design and try to adopt some of its elements that you like and change them until you have made them your own. That is what architecture is anyway, being inspired by something and generating something new and beautiful from it. You can be inspired by a wave in the ocean or a lighthouse on the cliff overlooking it, but what you create from this inspiration is your own choice and should be your own creation.
DO NOT PLAGIARISE
Plagiarism and University, two words that should never go together yet unfortunately, so often do. The simplest way to describe plagiarism is taking someone else's work and pretending that it is yours. This is a big no no in University and can bear serious consequences to the point of expulsion from your course; this can also go onto your transcript and follow you to another university if you attempt to enter another course. So, please listen to me when I say this: DO NOT PLAGIARISE. You can borrow other people’s work and change it up to make it your own as described in finding inspiration above, but it all depends on the assignment and the brief you are given. It is far simpler to use others work as inspiration on a design assignment without running into issues than it is in written assignments.
In written assignments, if you utilise someone else's work you are required to reference this work, referencing is recognising that it is not your work and giving the owner of the work credit for what they have done. Depending on where you are in the world and what university you attend the required referencing will differ, referencing can even differ from assignment to assignment in a single course. Your university will provide referencing guides on how to reference correctly and typically there are dedicated writing staff members who can assist you in learning how to reference correctly. Something that I do at the start of each assignment is to talk to my tutor and ensure that I know which referencing style I should be using; the style will typically also be stated on the assignment brief.
Final Notes
So, it’s time to start your very first assignment in Architecture School, you are probably excited and a little bit scared (or a lot), but you have read all of my tips above which means you’ve got this. As long as you follow these simple steps you will be able to create a terrific assignment, create a good relationship with staff members and peers and know exactly where to find inspiration. I wish you all of the best with your first architecture assignment and all of the assignments to follow. And remember, don’t plagiarise, it’s not worth it.
Ladies and Gentlemen, class dismissed.
Iain Colliver, SONA, YBA, GKIHS
