alless Posted July 22, 2009 Share Posted July 22, 2009 Hey dudes , well I recently passed a University Entrance Exam , And I wanna Choose Architecture .... But I Need to Know more About this Profession , I Like it but I don't Have Some Skills which are maybe important for an Architect . well I'm Good in Theories Like Math, Physics , Chemistry and etc ... And Also I am 3D Designer (Modeling in Rhinoceros+Rendering in Max-Vray) so these are my Abilities for now ... But I've Heard Sketching is one of the Most Important Things needed for an architect ... and Honestly I really Donnow Anything about Sketching and hand works ... Besides , I sometimes Worry about my Lack of Ideas ... as Architecture is All about new Ideas ... I think I May not be able to Sketch and Design my Ideas .... As a Question .... What do You suggest to a person like me , about how can I make myself Ready for this Profession ?! thanx in advice , Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted July 22, 2009 Share Posted July 22, 2009 Most architects don't spend their time doing renderings, most don't even spend that much time designing, what monopolizes most of their time is the process of creating the mountain of details that goes into a drawing package. Most architecture schools spend 95% of their time focusing on design when in reality design is only a small part of what an architect does. In the US a licensed architects responsibilities would include design development, presentations, drawing details, site visits, client meetings, consultant meetings, team meetings, phone meetings, and on and on. I suggest you find a job working for an architect in a real office so you can see what kind of work goes on there. I think most people who get into this field have a distorted understanding of what an Architect is, it's not a glamorous job or a highley paied one but if you love buildings and the details that come with it you will find the field rewording. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mbowers Posted July 22, 2009 Share Posted July 22, 2009 Sounds like you'd be a better candidate for Industrial or Product Design. Everything Maxer stated is spot on. Architects are meticulous for technical details that make beautiful buildings happen, the design|theory|rationale for them is most often left to the senior principals (which reaching that level takes a lot of money and decades of experience). I for one love my job as an architect where i get to do a wide variety of things, but i rarely have time for 'free form' design. Clients have real world budgets, constricting time commitments, and high expectations that the universities and colleges can't/won't teach because it limits design, but that's exactly what you'll find in the real world. My $.02 Good Luck. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted July 22, 2009 Share Posted July 22, 2009 Take classes in debate, verbal communication, etc... Not only do you need to have ideas, but to be a successful architect you will need to be able to communicate those ideas clearly and with confidence. You also need to be able to influence people to believe in you. This could be one of the most important areas that is not covered at most architectural/design schools. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Noise Posted July 22, 2009 Share Posted July 22, 2009 Work in an architects for minimum 6 months, 12 if possible and get a feeling for it. There after, if you like it and its for you - then go for it, its not for the faint hearted or the half arsed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peter M. Gruhn Posted July 23, 2009 Share Posted July 23, 2009 Architecture isn't something like doctor or footballer that people really have a sense of coming out of secondary school. Heck, your guidance councellor probably doesn't really know what architects do, what architcture school is like and just how broad the gap between the two is. Architecture schools (may well be not all of them) in my experience do not expect incoming frosh to know what they are doing. I work with incoming frosh at student orientation. One of the things we do is take them sketching. A, to me, scary number of them are scared to put pencil to paper. But first semester they get beaten into shape. It's good to be able to draw a bit, as it is how most of us design. Drawing is the conversation you have with yourself to figure out what you are designing, to test ideas. And then it is the way you communicate to your peers so they can tell you everything that is wrong with your design. Math isn't that important. Not irrelevant, but not that important. Especially early on, you may encounter teacher who will not let you use a computer for design studio work. My last studio I ended up not being able to realize my design w/o using a computer (back and forth between max and acad and it actually came to gether, tbtg). Same studio like 80% of my peers were all over SketchUp (and boy do I have complaints about that). Previous studios? Much more pencil work for presentation and design. Why? Short answer - it's better for design. What do I suggest? Buy and do what your teachers tell you to; be prepared for the unexpected. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted July 23, 2009 Share Posted July 23, 2009 Architecture isn't something like doctor or footballer that people really have a sense of coming out of secondary school. Heck, your guidance councellor probably doesn't really know what architects do, what architcture school is like and just how broad the gap between the two is. Architecture schools (may well be not all of them) in my experience do not expect incoming frosh to know what they are doing. I work with incoming frosh at student orientation. One of the things we do is take them sketching. A, to me, scary number of them are scared to put pencil to paper. But first semester they get beaten into shape. It's good to be able to draw a bit, as it is how most of us design. Drawing is the conversation you have with yourself to figure out what you are designing, to test ideas. And then it is the way you communicate to your peers so they can tell you everything that is wrong with your design. Math isn't that important. Not irrelevant, but not that important. Especially early on, you may encounter teacher who will not let you use a computer for design studio work. My last studio I ended up not being able to realize my design w/o using a computer (back and forth between max and acad and it actually came to gether, tbtg). Same studio like 80% of my peers were all over SketchUp (and boy do I have complaints about that). Previous studios? Much more pencil work for presentation and design. Why? Short answer - it's better for design. What do I suggest? Buy and do what your teachers tell you to; be prepared for the unexpected. Good points all around. In some sense, the fewer preconceived notions about what architecture is when entering school, the better off you will do. You will be easier to teach, and get through to. I would also say it is beneficial to have a passion for another art form, be it music, dance, painting, etc... these will help you think abstractly about space, which is vital to learning how to design space. I believe that students shouldn't be allowed to touch a computer until half way through their second year. You need to see with your brain, and hands. You need to build physical models, and sketch like Peter has suggested. The computer can inhibit design as much as it can enhance it. I think this is largely due to the computer lacking a sense of scale. When you draw, you may draw at A3 size, and explore details at different sizes. When you build physical models, you can work with small hand size sketch models, or larger models to some scale. Taking away the ability to work at 1:1 scale is useful because it allows the mind to function in a different way. Nothing is worse than having a young architecture student get caught up in door details when they need to be learning how to focus on the overall broad concept. I don't like SketchUp, but at the same time, it is more intuitive to the way people work with sketch models, so that it can be good. However, I still think students need to learn with their hands. Physical models simply allow us to experience the design in ways that can't be matched on the computer. At least not yet. People can disagree with that all they want, but I strongly believe that to be true. One of our first exercises in first year studio required us to find a black and white photograph from any source we wanted. Then we had to start overlaying lines on top of the photo. We were trying to learn how the eye moved through the picture, how the picture was organized spatially, and any correlations that existed in the photo graph. We then broke this down to secondary and tertiary relationships. The next step was figuring out how to translate those line into a physical model. Not a model of a building, but just a physical model that represented space. I can't remember what the next step was, but I know it was another exploration and interpretation of the space that we created from the original photo. Not once did any of this have a scale, and not once did we talk about any of this in terms of architecture. The point I am trying to make is, expect to learn and see space differently than you do now. It is the job of the school to teach you how to do this. When selecting a school, it is good to look at the type of work the professors and TA's are creating themselves, because they are going to teach how to think about design in the way that they do. Slowly you will begin to form your own ideas and concepts, but this probably won't happen until you have learned to think abstractly about space. Which is not always easy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
illegalalieninbeijing Posted July 23, 2009 Share Posted July 23, 2009 (edited) Here's a little encouragement in the form of a discouragement. I remember my very first day in University wherein the Dean for Architecture made a short welcome speech. He told us that being an Architect is never a glamorous job. The misconceptions how Architects are portrayed in films and in television are all false. We were warned that there will be countless of sleepless nights and frustrations from thereon and it won't be any different in our careers. Half of us are not expected to survive the semester. Most of us who are not cut to be in Architecture should immediately shift courses immediately or arrange for university transfer rather than wasting his or our time - not to mention the tuition our parents put in to get us an education. True to his words, that semester alone our class was reduced in half. In the end only 1/4 of that whole class made it and only about half of that are actually practicing or are in Architecture. So far, I love what I am doing. Edited July 24, 2009 by illegalalieninbeijing Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alless Posted July 24, 2009 Author Share Posted July 24, 2009 Thanx Dudes , I really Keep these Advises in Mind ... Well I Think as Peter M. Gruhn Said I should Prepare for Unexpected ... anyway , My Uncle always Tell me that "If you Wanna be a great guy in your Profession , Try to Learn everything that doesn't Related to your Profession .... Like the Other Guy Said Music , Maybe these are not related but it helps us in the Way we think ... (+I play Tar for 2 years ... fortunately I know music well) thanx again Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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