Category: surviving the design studio

Surviving the Design Studio: 5 ways architecture students can avoid a mental health meltdown.

Surviving the Design Studio: 5 ways architecture students can avoid a mental health meltdown.

Peter Raisbeck

As an architecture student I was a miserable wretch and I was treated as such by my design tutors. At my part-time architecture job I slept at nights under the dyeline machine in the back of the office I worked in. Every week when I presented my studio work at the crits it was torture. My tutors either said nothing at all or said things like, “I am not really sure this is a 4th year (fill in the year) project”or worse still, “you cant put a fucking toilet (fill in the function room name) there or even better, (although often said with some laconic humour) “that is the worst model (drawing, axo, plan) I have ever seen in my whole life” which I think may have often been true. I was a pretty ordinary student and for the most part I was a sullen martyr who just sucked it up.

It was worse for my colleagues the female architecture students. No matter how hard they tried they couldn’t seem to get anything right. They were never going to be golden boys because the were simply not boys. At times it was an exhilarating but also brutal environment. I learnt a lot but I am not sure it did a lot to foster my confidence as a designer or even as a person. Supposedly, in the modern digital age things are better now in architecture schools and  architectural education is a fairer, kinder and less misogynist enterprise. But are things now any better? A recent survey in the UK magazine The Architects’ Journal suggests otherwise.

The Architects’ Journal surveyed 450 architecture students in the UK that just over a quarter of them  (26 per cent) of “architecture students had received medical help for mental health problems resulting from their course, and a further 26 per cent feared they would need to seek help in the future.” Most disturbing was the finding that these issues were “more acute with female respondents, of whom almost a third had sought support for mental health issues compared to 26 per cent of male respondents.”

Details of the entire survey and its results can be found here. It covers working through all-nighters, student debt, working for free, practical training, discrimination and the length of architectural education. The survey identified that for the student respondents the primary stressors are issues related to increasing debt, a culture of crazy working hours and the anxiety about acquiring effective skills in order to be employable at the end of a long course.

As Robert Mull the former Dean of The Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, noted in Dezeen  “High fees, debt, the fear of debt, low wages, poor working practices and educational models that reflect aspects of practice based on individualism and competition rather than collective action and mutual support have put intolerable pressure on those students who can still study and has excluded many more.” Mull (what a great name) is a noted critic of homogenised and commodified versions of higher education.  In response to the survey the head of the Bartlett Rob Shiel argued that new models of architectural education were needed in order to increase access to architectural education from different backgrounds and to reduce the mental health pressures on architecture students.

Mental health of the emerging generation of architects should be taken as a serious issue in architecture schools and by the profession. Larger studio sizes (recently shocked to hear of one school with 25 people in each studio; 12 to 14 is best) are one significant pressure point in the mix of fee paying higher education, poor and entrenched working cultures in the profession and the need to teach an increasing complex architectural curriculum.

For architecture students mired in the above circumstances there are probably a few things you can do to avoid a meltdown and manage your mental health through architecture school. As I am not a trained clinical psychologist I will keep my suggestions short and simple. They cover the most common things that I have seen in my experience as a architectural design educator.

1. You are not invincible 

Sometimes things happen. Health issues, family issues or even accidents. In my experience it is often not great for those who are grieve. When stuff happens its best to take the time out or at least to change your expectations or aspirations to manage it. Too often I see students think they can just work or push through the rough bit. Only to find later, usually towards the end of semester, that they just can’t do it. That is usually when it may be too late to compensate. No one is invincible.

2. Timing 

Timing is crucial. Design studios are as a much a project management exercise as anything else. Managing and organising your time is critical to your own mental health. You should not have to work all night either in the studio or in an office. This opinion piece on unpaid overtime speaks to some of the complexity of these workplace issues. Architects should not be working 60 hours a week.  Unfortunately bad working habits often start at architecture school. If you think your tutor is mismanaging your time or you are putting in all nighters and not getting much traction then you need to rethink how you are managing your time or speak out.

3. Dont procrastinate 

Don’t procrastinate. As I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog the sooner you get started designing and the more  consistently you work on a design the better. If you get stuck or need help get it from your friends or your tutor. Tackle the hard design task’s first and don’t leave things to the last minute. Dont get sucked into doing text based research and no drawing or thinking that you are working by spinning that 3D model around and around in the computer. Too often I see students putting pressure on themselves by procrastinating, week after week, and then letting it build up and up to the point where their stress levels almost prevent them from actually working.

Procrastination leading to the all nighter, or last few days, in the last few weeks of semester only reinforces this culture.

4. Get help sooner rather than later

Depression, anxiety, grief, and illness can all take its toll. All design tutors are usually extremely sympathetic to these issues and more than happy to help you adjust and get through the crap moments in life. There are lost of resources on the web to help you get through things. Its better to seek help or talk to someone rather than doing nothing at all.

5. Take a break 

Know when to take  break rather than beating your head against a wall. A break no matter how short will help improve your productivity in the long run.

Doing and considering the above will help you develop the resilience you need to survive the design studio. Of course, the best architects, and architectural teams, are kind of crazy in their own way. Some of my best and most successful students have been the ones who have worked through and come out of other side of serious mental health issues. It happens to everyone at some stage in life. As a profession we need to harness and foster the creative aspects of craziness that makes our profession unique rather than the toxic craziness of overwork and sullen martyrdom. Our profession deserves better.

 

Surviving the Design Studio: Why architects and archi-students should go non-digital cold turkey.

Surviving the Design Studio: Why architects and archi-students should go non-digital cold turkey.

Peter Raisbeck

In between moving house and writing the conference paper I was able to attend attend a few end of semester pinups at my architecture school. Afterwards of course the tutors and critics sat around in the local pub and get about the current state of play. We mused about one very prominent and recently built facade in the city and how it may, or may not have been, developed via the computer. Inevitably the discussion turned to the insidious grip that the computer and digital design has on architecture students and even architects.

We were however, or at least it seemed to me, to be in agreement that the computer’s influence on modern day architecture students was often, although not always, potentially negative. An understanding of orthographic design, iterative process, and the ability to research design issues via different media are all essential skills for the architecture student.

Too often architecture students rush into digital design and then never return. Too often as a design teacher I am faced with students who are lost to me. Lost in the computer, they seem to have no interest in learning about architecture and its relationship to the real world. They are certain that the computer itself will solve all problems.  I think the computer software vendors have a lot to answer for.

Architectural education is a continuous process. Architects learn from one project to the next and the then the next. Each time lessons are learnt and the knowledge gleaned from the encounter with one project or situation is then banked in the mind for later use. But this continuity also extends into our lives as architects. Perhaps it sounds trite, but architecture is a spatial medium, and as architects we encounter this medium in our everyday lives.

The journeys we fleetingly conduct, the places we inhabit and bodies that we encounter are all a part of our continuous education as architects. Too often the allure of the computer limits our understanding of these other encounters.

So I would suggest the best thing any architecture student or architect is to have a few free digital days, weeks or even a life between projects. Yes, I think it is a great idea to go non-digital cold turkey. At the end of it the next time you do a new project, which will inevitably mean using the computer, you will feel be more capable and have a different insight into the design process.

So next time you are between projects go non-digital cold turkey and try and see what happens. The following exercises and rituals should help. The are designed to help you get over the fever of going cold turkey.

Observation

Yes its not a bad idea to look at things. Yes, actual things in the world. This is what going non-digital is all about. Architects are constantly observing and assessing the everyday environment that  surrounds them. In a way there is really no need to go and visit the latest building or luxury product produced by your local version of the star architect. Houses, streets, details roads, objects and urban patterns. Record what you see and interests you in a note book or a sketch book. Study on particular thing: street lighting, doors, kerbs, drainage grates, or windows. You could also observe different materials like concrete, brick, steel or paint and render. Of course, you can cheat a bit and take photos with your phone and start a new Instagram account based around a particular element or issue.

If you get really desperate you can always go to a gallery and sit in front of some art. Sit in front of a Rothko; or maybe even a building buildings or a landscape.

Measure

Size is everything. Measure you house. How big is a chair or a table. How much room is need to clear a path of circulation through a space. How high are your kitchen benches? Its all too easy to pull things out of a digital library and plaster them all over your drawings. But do you really know what it is those things represent.

Going non-digital means observing things to consider how high or how big they are. Its always good to carry a tape measure in your bag to help.

Imagine how big something is. a place or a building or a door, and tray and quantify this. Then go and measure it in reality and see if you are right. This exercise or ritual will help you explain to your clients the size of things when they don’t quite understand how big thing will be.

Different scales

Going non-digital means measuring things or considering the relative size of things in the real world. This way of seeing inevitably leads to a consideration of scale. Consider juxtapositions in scale. In some senses the architectural world that we inhabit is comprised of elements thrown together at different scales. Architects, if they choose, are able to nest and embed different scales within the one project. Arguably every project is a series of nested scales.

The tiniest renovation or detail fragment can evoke the monumental.

Viewpoints 

Vist a view buildings and consider how the are viewed and how viewpoints are either controlled by the architect or taken advantage of in their urban setting.

View points and scenography have always been big in architecture. For some post Tschumi architects viewing architecture via the viewpoint, based on the architect as an individual observer, might suggest a dated and static approach to signification. Contrary to those design methods reliant on conceptual abstraction, field theory and overdetermined diagrams, I think the viewpoint is still a valid compositional consideration. Ask Brunelleschi (except he is dead). Even Zaha Hadid’s (also dead) riffs on Suprematism rely on the view and the viewpoint.

Going non-digital means asking yourself does this building reveal more as I engage with it from different viewpoints? The facade of the building (that shall remain nameless), I was talking to my fellow jurors about, looked terrible to me from its Southern perspective. Coming up in the tram, it looked like a ham fisted commercial office building with coloured glazing : yet from another more oblique viewpoint, travelling in my car, from the Easter approach it looked great. I could almost imagine that this was the viewpoint from which the architects actually designed the building.

I guess what I am suggesting is that, as architects we should practice a kind of architectural mindfulness; its great to live in the digital world but maybe its also better to understand how the real world is. Going non-digital means taking back architecture before it becomes just another gap filler amongst the virtual banner ads.

 

 

 

 

Surviving the Design Studio: Bridging the gap between architecture school and practice.

Surviving the Design Studio: Bridging the gap between architecture school and practice.

Peter Raisbeck

This is a blog for that curious class of humans known as the graduate of architecture or almost graduate. The architectural graduate is often not quite a student and not quite an actual architect. In some ways it is an unenviable position to be in especially if you are a graduate without a lot of experience in architectural offices. But, getting on the ideal job treadmill of putting together a portfolio and sending out a thousand over designed CVs via  your very own mass marketing campaign may not necessarily get you that job.

I write  as a person with considerable experience as an architecture student and graduate. I was an architecture student for so long that by the time I graduated the 70s had morphed into the 90s (by the time I registered it was the 2000s). Here are some tips, along with some hints for architectural employers, that will help you make the transition to practice regardless of where you are in the food chain.

1. Learning continues

Yes. It is wrong to think that an architecture school can teach everything a graduate should know. No-one should ever thing this.

I know this is going to sound harsh but you will not be made a design director or made an associate on the day after you graduate. There will still be a lot you will need to learn in terms of the mechanics of practice and design processes in different offices. Architecture as a discourse and as a field of knowledge is complex. What you have learnt in architecture school is an introduction to this discipline. You need to keep learning and thus I would suggest you do this by joining your local chapter of architects, networking and  getting started on any professional development courses that interest you.

Or, you could do what I did and do another degree. Architectural practice is about life long learning.

2. Get a range of experience

Following, on from the above its always a good idea to update your skills. Yes, I know you may have just spent a small fortune and made sacrifices or just partayed your way through architecture school without learning much. But if you are serious about bridging the gap you will need to upgrade your skills: constantly.

Just having  BIM skills and expertise in one bit of software and nothing else in terms of digital skills is not going to get you a job. If it does your employment mobility will be limited and you will be relegated to CAD monkey status. Learn a few programs and some coding well and you will be more versatile in what you can do in an office. Hopefully, you will have left architecture school with more than a few software programs under your belt.

But apart from software, there is also the great dilemma of the architecture student about to enter the employment market and this is what size and type of firm should you work for. Big firms have better conditions but you may get stuck documenting or worse still doing design development for the rest of your life. Small firms offer better experience but come with the hazards of less job security and practice volatility. Arguably in small firms you can learn more and be closer to the actual decision making processes in the firm.

I started in very small firms and had the dubious distinction of working for the best and the worst architects in my town.

3. Work on competitions

If you can’t get a job, or it is taking time, or it is the holidays then I suggest you work on competitions. Collaborate with your friends; do the competitions as if you might win them. You never know you might actually win something. At the least you might get published or pick up a few new design and decision making skills. You can also publish your competitions through social media.

4. Don’t work for people who treat you poorly

This is aka don’t work for a-hole’s rule. Don’t work for people, who underpay and overwork. Don’t accept someone else’s  managerial disorganisation, misogyny or fee cutting.  Make yourself aware and be aware of your rights. Support Parlour. Familiarise yourself with the Fair Work Act and the architect’s awards.

5. Be curious about the business

This is one of the most important things an architectural graduate can do. An employer is more likely to employ someone who is trying to understand, and has some insight, into how the business works. Architectural practice is one of the hardest things anyone can embark on. Competition is fierce and the lead times for getting a practice to a point of viability are long. What is your employers, or potential employers perspective? What is their strategy, what kind of practice are they, where do they get their client’s from? How do they market themselves and how do they make money?

6. Figure out the firm’s design processes

In approaching a firm or working in one ask yourself: Who does the designing and how is it actually done? Is it a collaborative effort or is it done by a single person? Is it simply driven by pragmatics, budgets and client concerns? Or does it have some kind of strategic intent? Do your employers, or potentials, actually design and if so what can you learn from them?

7. Visit the sites (virtual and real)

This is another way of doing your homework. Who has the best website and social media presence amongst the architects you like or are interested in working for? But you also get your head out of social media, or the spinning BIM model, and go and look at buildings in the flesh. Make your own assessments of them. Think about what you would have done if you designed the building.

8. Don’t send out CVS that are over designed

Don’t write your CV like a bad business plan. I have seen a lot of these. The logo is designed in 3 colours, the fonts are all over the place, there are pictures of the obligatory final thesis project. Bad renders. Pictures in the back of the portfolio of your hobby travel photos with the DSLR camera. A lot of philosophy in the covering letter about design and sustainability and how creative you are.

Most employers will base their hiring decisions on what you have previously done in the workplace rather than what you are like as an existential being.

Besides an employer, even amongst the best architects, wants is not someone to question the meaning of life, or get precious over designing the partitions, when all they want you to do is document the toilets. As the master once said to me “for god’s Raisbeck this bathroom reno is not fucking Eisenman’s House X.” When I worked for the master he was always saying stuff like that to me and it wasn’t long before I got replaced.

9. Hang out with real architects 

Yes, real architects, and I don’t mean star architects or award winners. Find your own mentors. Hang out with the meanest most experienced badass architects you can find. The ones with 100s of years of contract admin or small renovation documentation experience. Hang out with the female architects juggling small practice and family life and about to have children. Hang out with the practitioners who have been working in the back of the big office for 10 years or have been working on the one project for as many years. Hang out with the architects doing it tough in the outer suburbs where the punters think all architects are rich wankers. Hang out with the architects ekeing out a living on schools or hospitals or community centres. Hang out with the “young” practices who are still considered to be “young” after 10 or 12 years in practice. Hang out out with your grad schools alumni. Hang out with moi.

Finally, a few words to the architects who employ our recent students and graduates. 

Firstly. Thank you so much. For the profession good mentoring of architectural students and graduates is essential to it’s future.

Most firms will welcome graduates and students knocking on their doors. The better firm’s in the profession provide there young graduates with programmed and well thought out ongoing education. The competitive firms in the profession also provide and foster an inclusive workplace. The best firms mentor inclusively. Winning awards is one thing but the better firms give back to the profession through effective and inclusive mentoring.

In contrast to the better firms the old catch cry of “what do they teach at archi-school these days” always makes me want to retch and throw up. Usually the elements of the architectural profession that declaim this are those elements who think that a good architectural education is about teaching young architects technical skills and nothing else. Of course, entire architecture schools have been designed around teaching the competencies and then conveniently forget to teach the students how to design or to think. Digital techniques, construction techniques that’s all you get. To suggest that architecture grad schools are somehow too theoretical or concentrate too much on history and don’t teach students real world skills is simplistic, naive and anti-intellectual. It doesn’t really do the profession as a whole any favours.

Many students have worked hard and made enormous sacrifices to graduate. Of course for some architects having an architecture student in your practice is like your worst nightmare. For some architects it might actually mean they have to think about having management skills rather than lurching from fee cutting crisis to fee cutting crisis. Architecture students are not cheap labour or whipping posts for either misogynist views or failed careers and egos.

A few years back I want to the annual architectural chapter awards. For the usual reasons I hadn’t been for quite a few years. The usual reason’s being my own embarrassment and the desire to adopt a low profile after my previous awards night episodes;  everytime I go I unavoidably get too drunk, and then ill, or I ended up having a fight about Eisenman and House X with the master. Or shamefully avoid him because I accidently dropped and smashed the model so many years before. Then there was the awards night I staggered and knocked the waiter at the Hilton and two dozen glasses of dessert wine landed on the public works architect’s toupee. It was really sticky and I had to pay for the dry cleaning.

But on a better awards night I had an epiphany when I realised the entire room was almost entirely full of recent graduates or newly registered architects. The brightest and the best of the recent graduates were there and it gave me hope for the profession’s future.

 

Surviving the Design Studio: Getting through the last days before the submission deadline.

Surviving the Design Studio: Getting through the last days before the submission deadline.

Peter Raisbeck

Architecture is a desperate enterprise. This is because in many ways designing is a race against time. As a designer you are always time poor. Deadlines are imposed externally. The more time you send on the design the more you burn up your fees. Fees that sometimes have already been cut to the bone. Whats worse is that it takes time to design properly. It is a labour intensive exercise that involves the consideration of different options and the exploration of different design pathways.

Most architects are always designing in a blind panic and this is what you need to get good at. But: too many architects procrastinate and too many architecture students leave things to the last minute. Finally, the procrastination can inevitably give way to blind panic.  Its 5 days to go and you still need to do the layout and print ! OMG !!

As it is almost the end of semester here in my hemisphere I thought I would do a special Surviving the Design Studio blog outside of my normal weekly blogging routine. So here are a few last minute survival points to think about. Enjoy.

1.Dont Panic

Hyperventilating and multitasking and not knowing where to start can lead to conflicted priorities. Its best to sit down and to methodically  plan you way out of things. Make a list. Write down all the things you need to do. Prioritise the list. Decide what you can’t do. Yes everything is interlinked but you can only do one thing at a time.  Put the prioritised list next to you computer and every time you start to panic look at it and stay calm.

Avoid anxiety and your own inner critical negative voice. Be mindful as much as you can.

2. Work back from the end

Know what your layout is (and I don’t mean the layout of your plans). Know what drawings you are going to pin up or publish at the end and how these drawings contribute and support your argument. If you know what you are going to present at the end then you will know more accurately what you have to do. Do an actual mock up and stick it on a wall and see how it looks.  Read this previous blog of mine on layout and this one on verbal presentation.

Timing is critical and working back form the end helps. Too often architects forget to allow for the print queue. There is nothing worse than having a great design but missing the deadline set by the project manager or the studio submission.

3. Plan and resolve your way through problems

The quicker you can resolve issues around your design the better. At the end of the project it usually the medium and little things that need to be resolved.  What is the profile of the roof or volume, where should openings or windows go, what happens at the entry conditions, is the circulation pattern easily communicated. Resolve as much as you can and as quickly as you can.These are design development decisions.  If you think you are getting into a bind about anyone decision. Just make a choice. Its your design.

Know when to design and then when to just produce the images.

4. Figure out what you can and cant do

You cant do everything. Use a prioritised list and a final layout plan to figure out what you need to do.D hat way you won t get sucked into the computer finessing things that you don’t need to worry about and making design development decisions. Concentrate, and complete, the hardest and most time consuming elements of the design and presentation first. Leaving the hard and time consuming things to last is just another form of procrastination.

Your mantra at this stage should be. Resolve, Resolve and Resolve; one issue at a time.

5. Look after yourself

Staying up all night to 5 in the morning hyped up on mother or red bull or coke or amphetamines is really really bad. After 1 am your productivity will drop. It doesn’t matter if you are in your twenties. Take breaks, eat properly and know when it is time to sleep. Get some exercise.

If you are really strapped for time the best you can do is work form 9 am to around 1 am with an hour for lunch and hour for dinner. Then make sure you get 6, maybe 7 to 8 hours sleep. It will help you to make better decisions.

Know when it is not worth it. At the end of the day it is not worth sacrificing your mental health for a better than average pass or wining the selected competition. There will be other design studios and other projects. Stop and get help if you feel your mental health is suffering.

6. Get help

Get your friends in. Get them to do stuff. Get them to lend you another eye when you are not sure about things. Ask your tutor, or a team member, about design and design development decisions. A good tutor or team member will relish the questions and help you to resolve issues more quickly rather than you agonise over something for hours.

Discussing your project s concept and design process with others even at this late stage will help you to clarify and prioritise what you need to do to finish it.

7. When bad things go wrong problem solve and replan again

There will be glitches of course. Once I printed out all of my final thesis drawings and looked at them only to realise they were all wrong. The line weights combined with the particular experimental printing process I employed led to unreadable drawings. It was a total disaster. The best thing to do was to have a sleep and not to panic.

After the sleep I could think straight and look at my drawings with a more evaluative eye. I then replanned my production technique and after a few days had reprinted my drawings. I lost time, but on the second print run my drawings were much better (see 2 above).

8. Don’t sit on the computer for the sake of it

If you are sitting there looking at the screen and not getting much done it’s time to move. Efficiency is good and sometimes that means taking breaks every so often. Don’t deceive yourself by thinking that all because you are sitting in front of the computer you are getting things done. Move on to another task.

9. If it looks good it is good

The above statement is my cardinal rule for deciding when to move onto the next task or micro task. If you are running out of time you need to suspend your own inner critic and inner perfectionist. If it looks good then use that and move onto the next task. There is no point having a great and perfect render if the rest of your drawings and images are awful.

Getting the balance right between different images and representation of your design at the end of semester or project is what will count. You are producing an integrated and wholistic design vision. Making one thing superbly refined at the expense of everything else is always remarked upon by the jury critics. But you will never win the competition if you do this. Jury critics usually want to see that how well your design proposal relates to everything.

Of course it may be too late for you to get the balance right. between the design of different elements on your final images. You may have just run out of time or read this blog too late in the day. If that’s then case you may need to make sure a couple of things are so good that you cant fail. This is what I would call a salvage operation.

10. Take notes

Take notes as you work and different justifications, rationale or aspects of your project spring to mind. Use these notes to frame and articulate your own arguments if and when you have to stand in front of your project and discuss it. You can also use the notes to help you include any explanatory or annotative text that may need to go onto the drawings. These notes will also help you to take lessons and insights onto your next project.

Don’t try and constantly second guess your tutor or the critics. Consider what they might want and then craft your response to it. Use the working notes to do this.

Finally 

All of the above should help if you are in desperation mode and you have kissed your significant others goodbye. You may think you will never see them again  as you go into the vortex of the final days of a design project.  But it will soon be over and then of course there is always the next project and it is actually the next project that all architects yearn for.