It’s a lot more than pretty drawings!
Studio
The foundation of an Architect’s education is the Studio. Everyday, we would sit at our own desks (a large table with a drafting board mounted on part of it) for several hours per day (and usually return at night, too). Rolls of paper and tracing paper, ink pens and graphite pencils, straight edges and triangles are now mostly replaced by laptops. The desks are still littered with cardboard for physical model-making, as well as colored pencils, watercolors, various pieces of different types of metals, and sketchbooks of all kinds. By day, the Professors would wander amongst the desks, visiting each of us, asking us to explain our design, our thoughts, our process. By night, the Studio became an intimate place, with only the glow of the individual desk lights, and most of us glued to our seats, headphones on, silently drawing out the ideas that lay in our heads.
As my Mom used to say, we should have skipped the dorm rooms and just hung hammocks above our desks in Studio.
But what, really, were we doing there? I’m sure many of my roommates and friends wondered the same thing.
Design is a form of art, so we were learning the basic ideas regarding lines and patterns, shading and composition, rhythm and forms, simple and complex systems. But design also needs to be built, hold people, and keep out rain and wind. So we were learning art but applying it to (as they call it when you get a license) Health, Safety and Welfare. We were not learning that lines could be thin and thick, dotted or continuous. Instead, we were applying those ideas to buildings: a thick line is a wall that holds up the building, while a thin line is a window to let light through. Or, a thin line was the hallway connecting different spaces, and a thick line was a series of rooms.
And while many designers can get lost in the graphic design, an Architect must remember that those lines are just placeholders for the real thing. A thin line between 2 thick lines may look good graphically, but a hallway must be a certain size between a series of rooms. Too many thin lines interspersed along a thick line may be too many windows in a solid wall.
One of my Professors would say, Remember that your Clients are alive. (That is, these aren’t just pretty lines or pretty floorplans. They are just graphic representations of a building that someone will live in for years and years to come.)
So, what we were learning was how to express the wonderment of a cathedral-space, or the quietude of a library, in lines on a page. What does privacy feel like and how do you design that? What does safety feel like?
Beyond walls, roofs, and floors, we were also schooled in the spaces between. How high a ceiling should be to feel right, where the light comes from (window or fixture), if the wall should be patterned (brick, perhaps), and other things that give you feelings of enjoying (or not) the space you are in.
Similar to art, we were desperately trying to pin down those ephemeral feelings (what does “home” feel like to you?) into built objects or buildings. And, at the same time, they had to hold up the roof, keep out the rain, etc.
Although the first year of Studio was more theoretical, as the years progressed, we delved into designing buildings, including a house, a day care, a bookstore, a sailing center, and an entire art school. The Professors would choose real places nearby, often empty parking lots, so that we could sit there and draw, take photos, and actually measure things that might affect our ideal building. Then we had to prove our designs during presentations as we tried to explain what we showed them. I still have many of the drawings that I made of these wonderful, never-to-be-built ideas.
In total hours, we spent upwards of 100 hours per week in Studio, day and night. But according to my Transcript, my Studio classes were only 43% of all my college classes.
Structures
When we weren’t in Studio, we took other classes, some required, and some elective. Structural Engineering was definitely required, and it was just as hard as it sounds. The first year was more of applied math, where they broke everything down into small pieces. Moment, shear, deflection. The second year introduced 3 materials: wood, steel, and concrete. They each act slightly differently under different stresses. We learned how to hold things up with walls, beams, columns and footings, and how to keep buildings from falling over due to wind or earthquakes.
Architectural History
Imagine getting up early in the morning (after being at Studio until the wee hours of the morning) and attending a class that was in the dark, literally. We learned the entire history of architecture (since about 5,000 BC) via slide shows in a darkened auditorium. I cannot say that I remember everything, but I can recognize the key buildings or designs from every continent and almost every age or historic period. Although there was a lot of memorization required for the tests, what we were learning were how to find the basic foundations of art or design in each building. Those thick and thin lines. Gable roofs that indicate the entrance. Grandiose stairs in front of important buildings. Why one building has decoration and another doesn’t, and what that tells us about the people living there. Similar to traveling, this class was meant to expose us to new or different ideas as much as it could.
Environmental Building Systems
The science of buildings, and how to keep rain out but shower water in, allow steam to rise from a pot on the stove, but keep out summer’s humidity, and other things. Buildings get complicated when you want them to be warm in the winter, but cool in the summer. A far cry from a camping tent or a cave. It’s all about the building envelope system, that is, the layers that make up your outside walls, roof, and floors over crawl spaces or garages.
In addition to building science, we also learned mechanical engineering (air conditioning systems, etc), electricity, and plumbing. Today’s classes probably have an even greater emphasis on energy efficiency systems, too.
Urban Planning
There were a lot of electives we could take, and Urban Planning was one that I took. This is design on a grand scale – an entire city, or larger. We learned about how settlements naturally arranged themselves in different places, and also learned about the invention of Zoning Ordinances after factories started popping up all over. We looked at the grand boulevards that were built while pondering the neighborhoods that were razed to allow for them. In the end, I enjoyed the design aspects of these classes, but got bored when they turned to the regulatory, legal and political aspects.
Thesis
No Architecture student could complete their degree without a Thesis, and what better way than to design a project of your choice. My project was a single family house, designed for a vacant piece of property just off campus, which showed different ideas of privacy. My dotted, dashed, and thick lines became hallways, rows of closets, windows up high or down low, even a row of evergreen trees outside. I turned in not only drawings and a physical model built with cardboard, but 3D images and a video that let you walk through the house from front to back (that was state of the art technology at the time). And afterwards, I was happy to graduate and get out in the real world.
To Sum Up…
Architecture is more than pretty lines on paper. We are taught how a building goes together, and have to imagine it in our heads then put it down on paper. We are also taught to look for the ideas or feelings that a building should mean to people, and figure out a way to express those in built form, too. And it has to keep out the rain, and look good, too.
I hope this helps you when you are looking for an Architect, wondering what you should or shouldn’t tell them about your project, or how much of the project you think that they might be interested in.
Go, Hokies!
Design Lines 