Hey guys, welcome back to the channel.
My name is Dami and I'm an architect in Vancouver. So today we're gonna talk about five skills that
you can start developing now, to prepare for architecture school.
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You can start practicing these now
and they're gonna help build the foundation for your journey, not just in architecture
school, but on your path to becoming an architect. So when you start architecture
school, there's gonna be so much information thrown at you, that having these basic tools
under your belt will help you absorb more of that information, help you get a leg up
on your peers, and they might also help you avoid those all-nighters. These are things you
can practice little by little every day until you start school. Also, by the end of the
video, I will also teach you a little bonus trick that you can do with a q tip that has
saved me a lot of time for me when I was in school.
The first couple items I will cover all has to do with your communication skills, which
is kind of essential to your success in architecture. Your education is gonna be composed of: architectural
history, theory, building science, structures, sustainability, urban planning, and finally,
your design studio. So the design studio is where you take the culmination of all the things
that you've learned, and create your own design out of it. This project is gonna be your baby, a very
needy baby. It's gonna need feeding and nurturing, it's gonna be constantly on your mind when
you're in the shower or when you go to bed, and you
will be responsible for turning it into something amazing, and when it sucks, everyone is gonna
judge you and you will fail.
But it's also the best and most fun part of architecture school.
Anyways, as you go through the design process, you're constantly presenting to your peers,
your instructors, whether it's during desk crits or during your final presentation.
The most important thing to remember is: show, don't tell. You don't want to just
talk about your ideas, you actually want to show them, with sketches, drawings, or renders.
So the first skill i want you to practice every single day, is sketching.
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We now use digital
modelling and computer renderings but sketching is still so important for you to get your
ideas out quickly and effectively.
If you're not good at sketching, that's totally fine. That's what practice is for. This is
something i learned in life drawing classes, it's that when you're just trying to learn,
don't go and try drawing the entire body. just try focusing on a small portion of it,
like the feet. so when you're at home, find an object that you find interesting and
try to draw a very small portion of it.
You really don't need to be a perfect drawer or get all the perfect
little details. I think what's most important is just being able to express your ideas with
your sketches, quickly.
So personally, I like to figure out the spatial relationships and the basic massing on paper,
and then I move into 3d modelling fairly quickly, because it's, for me, the fastest way to iterate
through a bunch of different massing options.
A crucial thing to always keep in mind is, you think by doing. A lot
of students miss this. You'll get a project brief, and they spend way too much time trying
to figure out the initial concept, or come up with the initial parti. and when it's time
for the desk crit, they only have a few scribbles. The concept is something you develop
over the span of your project, and it evolves as you go through the design process.
So when you're thinking or designing, just sketch out a bunch of different iterations, try to overlay
them on trace, by the process
of creating those things, you'll be able to see what works and what doesn't work and you can eliminate from there.
The modmin Youtube channel has some really great sketching tips, he also has a tutorial on rapid sketching,
so you can check that out.
Also, try to practice drawing some plans. You can start off my copying or tracing the
plans of some of the masters and just try to think about why they shaped the building a certain way,
what that does to the spaces and the movement or light conditions in those spaces, and what
that means to the overall concept of the building.
I would love to see your progress, so if you're drawing or sketching, follow me on Instagram
and tag me.
If you're struggling in the beginning in the beginning of school, don't even worry. I was a late
bloomer. I was terrible in school until second year. And if you're like me, you will have that one
project that will just ignite that fire in you. For me, it was a hydrotherapy pool. That project
really made me fall in love with architecture and the whole process
behind it. So yeah, just be patient, you will find that project too.
The second thing you can start working on right now, is all the digital tools.
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when i was in school, we didn't have a dedicated course for learning all the programs, and
you were supposed to learn them on your own, so knowing how to use them right into
school will give you a huge advantage.
The most common ones are AutoCAD, SketchUp, Rhino, and Revit. I would say Sketchup is
probably the easiest for you to learn, and you can probably learn it in just
a week or two. with sketchup you can create whatever you want. Simple to more complex
geometries, and you can render them afterwards. I'll put together a playlist of Sketchup tutorials
that you can watch.
Then I would say try to learn AutoCAD, that's the software where you draw your floorplans,
elevations and sections. it's an industry standard, so if you're looking to get a summer
job, this and Revit will be very helpful to have. It's a bit more complicated, but learning
all the functions and shortcuts, they're gonna will help you further down the line.
The third program is Rhino. Rhino is kind of like Sketchup but you can do more things
with it. If you only have time to learn one of them, I would say
Rhino. You can just create more complex geometries, and I know that some architects say that the
software is just an extension of your pencil, but i really think that the infinite amount
of 3d modelling possibilities in rhino has really helped me in the creative process, and it's helped
me design geometries that probably would have taken me a very long time to figure out by hand
or on AutoCAD. For example, this project,
I wanted to create a torquing motion throughout the building, and I just started with a few
sketch models, sketched out a few plans, and just moved straight into Rhino, because I
could quickly iterate through a bunch of options and geometries, and I knew it was gonna take me
forever to figure it out on paper.
There's actually tons of really great rhino tutorials on youtube, you can just search Rhino
Tutorials, and their channel will take you from step 1.
And then there's Revit. Revit is an industry standard. it's
what you call a BIM software. So basically to create a building you would draw an actual
wall in the category of a wall, rather than drawing in two lines or a geometry that represents
a wall, as you would do in AutoCAD or Rhino. Then you would put in a roof, in the category
of a roof. For example if you were to model these two exact same things in Rhino, Rhino would just treat
this as a geometry, but Revit understands that this is a wall, and that this is a roof, a window. Revit's
an industry standard so it's a really great skill to have if you want to work at an arch firm over
the summer.
But there's some pros and cons.
The pro, is that once you create the walls or roofs, the 3d model is basically just created for you,
or visa versa. So once you create the 3d model, then you already have the 2d drawings, like the plans, sections, and elevations
so this obviously feels like a no brainer. Why would you go through Rhino, then Autocad
to prepare the drawings when you can just do it in Revit? Right?
So here's the con. Revit is a great tool to know when you start working in the industry and
definitely it creates a lot of efficiencies in the process but I think the danger of using Revit
in school is that, it can kind of limit your creativity. So for example, the default
wall in revit is a 2 by 4 stud wall going straight up. In architecture school, you want
to challenge the conventional idea of what a wall is, what a building looks like. so you
have to go through extra steps to design something that has a slightly more complex geometry.
I think when the default wall or roof looks like the industry standard, then your inclination
is to design boxy, very standard looking buildings. And I have seen projects change throughout
the years, once Revit was introduced in schools. So it's definitely something to think about.
The workflow that I have used when I was doing my Masters, is I would do
all my designs and modelling in Rhino, and I recreated the model in Revit to create the
floorplans. Coz I still like the way Revit creates the orthographic drawings
So Udemy has really good affordable Revit course for beginners, I took it and I have a couple
friends took it. So I'll put the link below. If you use my link, you won't pay a penny
more but I will get a little tip from the course.
Also, if you can teach yourself all the Adobe suites, like InDesign, Photoshop Illustrator, that's
also a bonus, because you will definitely be using all of them in school. There's tons of tutorials
you can find on Youtube or other online learning platforms.
And skill number three
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Understanding the basics of perspectives and composition helps a lot when you're doing
renderings, which you will be producing a lot of
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or for photographing your models.
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There's some general rules that you can follow, like keeping all your lines perfectly horizontal
or perfectly vertical. I do post-processing on all of my images, and it can also be a
fun way for you to learn programs like Photoshop or Lightroom.
I mentioned briefly earlier, your courses will contain your core architectural courses,
and your design course.
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One of those architectural courses is architectural history, where you
learn about the different architectural styles, and the culture, religion, or politics that
shaped that architecture.
Learning about the architectural past it will teach you how to think about architecture
and talk about architecture in a more meaningful
and intelligible way.
This stuff is really interesting when you actually spend the time to learn about it,
but when you're in school, and you have all these other things that you have to do,
learning about the medieval churches might not be the first thing on your mind. Like I remember
having a kind of hard time focusing on this particular course.
So i think this is something that you could try to learn when you have a little
bit more time now.
So I've created a playlist for you on my channel where you can learn about these different styles
in architecture. Some of these videos can be a little bit drab, so if you find any of them are kind of boring
just skip through them.
This is a book that you will probably be a required reading for school, so you might
as well just get it now, it covers all the different styles in a kind of chronological
order. It talks about cultural influences that shaped the architecture. But it is kind of
dense, maybe reading one section a day could help you get a little bit more into it.
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So in the first year of architecture school, I was so invested in my studio project that
i spent all my time into it, and a lot of my other core courses, they kinda suffered.
and I did lot of all nighters.
I mean, I can't stop you from doing them. If you gotta do it, you
gotta do it.
It can be kinda tricky to avoid those all nighters because you might have a new idea like
five days before your deadline, or your prof tells you to change something, and you're
like Agh F#$% I have to do it all over again.
And so what I would say about this, is that. Try to do a lot of work in the front end. Don't wait til a couple
weeks in to the deadline to make some big decisions in your design. Do as many iterations
as possible. And just throw out all your bad ideas. The more developed your idea is, it will be
easier to sell it to your professors during your crits, and you're gonna be more convinced
of your idea as well. I think a lot of students fall into the trap of trying to find the best idea,
but what's more interesting is the process and the story behind the idea.
During my thesis, we would have the hand in deadline for your work, where you submit all
your materials, and between that time and the presentation, that was about a week, and during that time, you
could figure out your presentation, and how to tell the story behind your project. I really
liked that approach, because everyone had very polished presentations.
ultimately, it doesn't matter how amazing your project is
if you can't convince your clients that it's an amazing idea.
So all that is to say. Start learning time management. Learn how to manage yourself.
Keep this constantly in the back of your mind as you're going through your daily life and
as you go through architecture school.
This is also connected to mental health.
mental health is the core of everything. School is just a stepping stone for you to get to the end
goal, which is to become a professional who is going to contribute to the betterment of
society. You can't have a positive influence on other people or become a mentor to them if you're
not healthy here. Mental health is just like physical health. It's something you have to
practice every day. Otherwise, you will get burnt out. I have seen so many architects
quit and complain about their work
So start getting in the habit of taking a
little bit of time to yourself, preferably doing something that's off the screen. Maybe
it's a little bit of meditation, quick cardio, or yoga. Take some time to think about what you're doing,
instead of just going through the motions.
This reflection can actually help you with your workflow as well. I think stepping back
to think about your struggles and inefficiencies can be a really good thing to incorporate into your
daily lifestyle.
So with all that being said, I promised would show one last trick that has helped me in school.
And it's a simple trick that you can do with a q tip.
cut the q-tip about in half
just try to take the cotton part out of it
and you do that with the other one as well
just cut it up
and you do this
and so now you have two of these
now what you can do is
I think you have a problem
you have to do a course about learning how to be funny
it's also creepy
ok you don't have to do it for real I think we got it
we got it
thank you
well I can't do it with my eyes my eyes are too
asian
alright alright thanks
you don't think that's funny
yeah it's super funny
we got the idea thank you
thank you very entertaining
well that was a fail
ok can we just see the real thing now?
so this is a real trick
it's something that you can do while you're making your model
you know, when you're putting together your model, usually you're pretty
tight on time
and you want to try to make it as fast as possible
and sometimes if you're doing sketch models you want to do that even faster
and
a lot of times when you're waiting for the glue to dry
it can take quite a bit of time
so I like to use a q tip
and put it on the model
and that instantly
makes the glue a little bit dry
on the cardboard or on that material
so when you stick it on, it kind of
it kind of just stays on automatically
and you don't really have to wait for it to dry
yeah, so that's it, that's the little trick
hope you guys found that helpful