An Architecture School Applicant’s Guide to Portfolio Design
by Evangelos P. Limpantoudis
by Evangelos P. Limpantoudis
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Evangelos Limpantoudis is an architect, entrepreneur and educator. He is an expert in Architecture School admissions, the founder of Architecture School Review, as well as Corvus.Community, a venture development studio. He has taught at multiple colleges, including MIT, CCNY and NYIT, where he was an adjunct professor. He holds an M.Arch. from MIT, where he was a Presidential Fellow, and a M.S. in Construction Management and Social entrepreneurship from NYU Tandon, where he was a Reynolds Fellow.
When developing a portfolio for architecture school admissions, you have to make sure that what you present to the admissions reviewers is the absolute best possible book. In order to do so, you need to evaluate and then keep re-evaluating your work, taking into consideration four factors: Strategy, Content, Presentation, and Personality. The following report analyzes these factors, and discusses ways in which you can improve the quality of your overall architecture school portfolio.
We often hear the stories of students interested in applying for admission to architecture schools. Many of the stories come with a variety of excuses as to why they have not started working on their portfolio yet. An example of an excuse is that they will begin working on their portfolio as soon as school is over. Then, school is over, and they say that they intend to start working on the portfolio, only they feel exhausted by the finals, so they really need to take a vacation, and they will begin working on the portfolio immediately after that. Then, they come back from vacation, and two weeks later they will say something along the lines of: “my friend is getting married in Boston, so I absolutely HAVE to go, but no worries, I will begin working on the portfolio as soon as I am back from my trip. After all, architecture school deadlines are in 5 months”. Then they return from their friend’s wedding, and a week later there is another excuse. In the meantime, the summer flies by, the five months become three, and the stress is now amplified. On top of everything, they realize that they now have to get some kind of a job, which will consume a minimum of 40 hours of their week. Then, panic sets in, and whoever has tried to work creatively while panicing, knows that it simply can’t happen.
The fact of the matter is that applying to architecture school is such a competitive process, that it requires a lot of the applicant’s time. It requires so much time in fact, that most succesful applicants tend to take a hiatus from most of their social activities for a few months, just to keep up with the prep work. For some people, this level of commitment is a deal-breaker, so they give up pretty much immediately upon realizing what is required. On the other hand, there are those architecture school applicants who understand that no excuse will ever reverse a rejection letter from Harvard GSD or Columbia GSAPP, and this realization is enough for them to make a choice to transform into “design-monks” for a while.
This is the necessary level of commitment for applying and getting into architecture school. If you have not reached it yet, then there is probably no constructive reason for you to keep reading this report. If on the other hand you feel committed enough to go through the hundreds of hours of work required to be a successful architecture school applicant, then let’s start by talking about how to manage your time and make the most of it.
Before you begin drawing, building, sketching, and even thinking about developing the content of your portfolio, you should sit in front of your computer, or get pen and some paper, and write. Write your mission statement first, before you even have a chance to waste time. Try to express and then understand what makes you special, different from everyone else, and what it is that you want to generate as a person and as a designer. The process of writing your mission statement is not about writing your personal statement for your architecture school application. Its purpose is similar to that of a script’s function in the development of a play. Just like a script, the mission statement defines a structure for your application, but it is not necessary to be 100% faithful to this structure all the time. As long as it provides a good starting point, you are all set to begin developing your portfolio.
In developing your mission, try looking at your overall background and life, and try to encapsulate them in a few simple ideas that are easy to grasp.
Example of portfolio spread, by Sean Ostro, a former ASR student. Sean applied to and was accepted by several top M.Arch. programs, including Yale, Cornell, Upenn, and UC Berkeley. He chose to attend UC Berkeley’s school of environmental design, which offered him a full fellowship and teaching assistantship.
Architecture School Portfolio
Begin by asking the question: how do I approach design problems, and what is my process for addressing them? An example is, do you have the tendency to observe patterns of behavior and form in communities and individuals? Do you tend to over-emphasize poetics? Do you rationalize as much as you should, or do you underplay the importance of the rational aspects of a design problem? Do you celebrate form? If you celebrate form, do you fetishize form (in short, are you a formalist)? Are you passionate about strong, complex concepts, and why? Are you a combination of all these ideas? And if yes, how do they come together to form a cohesive whole? Follow up this first set of questions with questions like: do you tend to analyze behavior in the people who are supposed to use your architectural design? Do you use this approach is your life as well? And if yes, then how has this guided you throughout life? How do you approach it? How do you use your strategic approach on a day-to-day basis? And how are you planning to use this strategy as a student of the program that you are applying to?
All this has to be done methodically, and in a way that does not seem forced. You have to do your absolute best to integrate ideas about what makes you as an architecture school applicant special, in everything that you submit, from architectural sketches, to architectural models.
Example of portfolio spread, by Emily McGowan, a former ASR student. Emily applied to and was accepted by Columbia GSAPP, Cornell, Upenn, UC Berkeley and Clemson School of Architecture. She decided to choose to attend Clemson School of Architecture’s dual degree program in Architecture and Healthcare Administration, which offered her a full fellowship, as well as a generous stipend and teaching assistantship. Since completing her studies at Clemson, Emily has worked in the healthcare architecture division of HOK. She is currently considered one of HOK’s rising stars in healthcare architecture. (Click here to learn more about Emily >>>)
Most architecture schools reserve significant financial aid (50% or more) for less than 5% of their accepted students. This means that a tiny fraction of the initial applicants’ pool receives any financial aid (less than 1%). It therefore is essential to stand out if you need a merit-based scholarship or fellowship to attend your favorite school. Unfortunately, scholarships and fellowships like MIT’s Presidential Fellowship are extremely tough to get.
When it comes to top architecture schools, for every one acceptance spot, there are on average three applicants who are equally qualified to get it. Therefore, to get that spot, and to get the financial aid that you need to study at your favorite architecture school, you need to differentiate yourself from the crowd.
The first step, is the development of your mission. The second step, is the development of your architecture school admissions strategy. After you have made sure that both are very strong, you need to start trying to see whether you could find a way to differentiate yourself from the crowd, without making you irrelevant. You have to make sure that you focus your description on areas that are covered by the architecture programs you are applying to, but try to find a niche that other candidates are not likely to be occupying.
Do your best to analyze your projects, and you will notice some defining motifs beginning to emerge. You could then use these motifs throughout your entire portfolio. This is a good way to create a sense of cohesion in the narrative, and clarify your vision and several points of differentiation.
In this video, Sebastian Almeida, a former ASR student, describes how he managed to develop an entire 30 spread architecture school portfolio from scratch. Sebastian applied and got into Cornell AAP’s M.Arch. program, and was offered a generous financial aid package.
Anita Sellers, a former Architecture School Review student, working on an architectural model in design studio, at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Architecture students like Anita need a well-defined mission as early in their career as possible, to make sure that they can develop the foundation for a fitting career.
Architecture School Portfolio
Make the basic ideas that you want the admissions committee to absorb as easy to understand as possible. This is the only way to make sure that a good project is fully appreciated.
By defining the identity of your architecture school portfolio, you are able to transfer the load from the individual project, onto your entire profile. The identity is what brings all projects together to lift your portfolio. Even if someone does not understand or appreciate your individual projects, they will appreciate your identity as a candidate.
A portfolio example by former ASR student, Yina Luo, who managed to get into several top architecture schools as an M.Arch.I student,including Cornell AAP, Harvard GSD, MIT SAP and UPenn. When she started working with ASR, Yina was a financial analyst at a major investment bank in New York and had very limited experience in design. She developed an identity that had to do with her narrating her story as the story of two worlds. The entire portfolio became an opportunity to narrate this story through projects that dealt with nostalgia, transplanting of memories into new environments. Yina chose to attend Harvard GSD, where she excelled as a student and got the chance to work as an intern at the Office of Metropolitan Architecture.
Poetics is a big and important part of portfolio development. Begin by asking yourself: how your projects deal with poetics of space, How is this poetry perceived, and what is the process of poetic composition. Developing a demonstration that is purely illustrative and not related to experience is simply the wrong way to approach developing your projects. An architecture school portfolio is supposed to encapsulate the essence of your thinking. Make poetics of space appear to be the core/ the essence of your thinking process.
You may want to read the book Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. It is a great read, and will allow you to begin thinking or architecture and design as disciplines with humanistic cores, where human behavior and psychology play a primary role.
One of our former students, Jordan Miodownik, developed a project that attempted to redefine the jewish temple, while critiquing the idea of ‘Sacred’ spaces. Jordan’s approach emphasized poetics, and tried to get to the root of human emotion, by building sequences of spatial experience that took his portfolio reviewers through intriguing emotional transitions. Jordan’s emphasis on poetics resonated with his architecture school reviewers, so he gained admission to several M.Arch. programs. His top two favorite programs were Cornell and UC Berkeley. Both universities offered Jordan full fellowships. He finally decided to go to Berkeley, where he had an excellent experience.
The point of the architecture school portfolio is to help you prove that you are a perfect fit, but also very different from everyone else. If you manage to strike this balance, your portfolio will be very successful.
Do your best to develop a slightly different portfolio for each school of architecture that you have decided to apply to. Some portfolios, for example, may be good for a polytechnic institute like MIT or Virginia Tech, but may be thrown out by a school of architecture that is part of an art school, like Pratt, or Parsons, or RISD. There are also schools that are in a category of their own, somewhere between a polytechnic institute and an Art school, like Columbia GSAPP, or Sci-Arch, or the AA in the UK. The portfolios that are ideal for a school like MIT, especially for M.S. applicants, may not be as ideal for a school like the AA.
Begin by studying the programs you are applying to. Understand the philosophical foundation of the program, their mission and ways in which they are different from others, and try to adjust your approach to them. Obviously, if you decide to apply to ten schools, you cannot produce ten different portfolios, however, it is recommended that you make some minor adjustments, or that you vary one project or so according to the school. The main body of your portfolio should remain the same for all schools, which will allow you to refine and perfect it. For some schools, some of your projects will be interpreted as somewhat “unusual”, which is good, because it contributes towards differentiating yourself from their usual pool of applicants.
Overall, reflecting the mission of the architecture schools you are applying to in your portfolio is a good idea. However, always make sure to remind them of your differences from the rest of the crowd.
The best way to tie several seemingly disconnected ideas together is by developing a umbrella portfolio theme, and carrying it throughout presentation of all your projects. So, what does a theme for an architecture school admissions portfolio look like?
An architecture school portfolio theme is not a strategy, is not a mission, but is an extension of both. It defines a set of ideas and graphics, a system of personal branding and aesthetics, and a set of tools and processes, that appear and reappear throughout the portfolio, in an attempt to help integrate multiple ideas, while constantly repeating other ideas that characterize the applicant. Therefore, in developing a theme, it is essential that you first develop your mission and strategy. You need to go in depth into the specifics of your background, and engage your portfolio reviewers in some sort of an indirect dialogue, in an attempt to help them grasp the complexity of the material that you are presenting to them in your architecture school portfolio. It is therefore highly recommended that you be as analytical as possible in the pages of your architecture school portfolio, using all sorts of sketches and diagrams related to the project, trying to take the viewer through the important parts of the process of creating the work that is in your architecture school portfolio. Through doing this, you can define what the essence of the project is and try to explain it through your sketches and diagramatic sequences, as quickly as possible and as early on in the portfolio narrative, as possible. Keep the main point of the theme is in line with your mission and strategy., and then use the rest of the space to analyze the projects and get into their various interesting details. This will allow you to create exciting in-between sections, which introduce the examiner to the upcoming projects as parts of preceding ones.
In terms of understanding the portfolio, your theme must be a reflection of your strategy and mission, and should allow the reviewer to instantly grasp what your book is about by simply looking at the main umbrella theme. This is when you will know you have a clear organization. Then, begin working on the development of potency in the presentation of your process. After you have described the design problem, continue with a seed of an idea, a concept, and develop it as you go. Use primarily sketches and diagrams in the beginning to explain your idea development, and eventually begin placing in the more finished drawings and renderings, until by the final spread you have narrated the whole process and the only thing left is an image or two of the final product.
Your Design-thinking Process is by far at the most important element of a portfolio. The reason is that architects live and die by the processes that they use when working on architectural design projects. It therefore makes sense that the process of creating a project is actually more important in an architecture school portfolio than the product itself.
As you are narrating your story, you have to take your reviewers through the entire process of project development, starting at the pre-schematic level. The reasons are two: First of all, it allows you to engage them more easily. They begin by wondering what you are trying to do, and eventually they see it. This process sticks your project and you in their mind. The second reason is that through your “seeds” of concepts you have an opportunity to use references from your own life. Ideas that make you special can all be potential influences that you could filter into your concept. By using your own influences in your portfolio you are able to tell them about you and what makes you different. By seamlessly weaving your own life into the project you communicate crucial information to the examiner, who will be making his/her decision based on your personality as well as your work.
When we are talking about process we mean a) process of development of the project, and b) process of taking the viewer through the presentation. Do not forget that architecture is itself based on individual sequences of spaces that an individual stitches together and forms perceptions and memories of moments in time and space. In the same way, a sequence like the one of taking someone through the process of development of your own project is like a miniature architectural project. Do not make your presentation static. Take us on a ceremonial walk through the memory of how you generated and developed your ideas.
When you show your work, it is ok to show the finished final pieces, but it is more important to show the conceptual models that led you to them. If at this point you do not have any conceptual models left (perhaps you are missing photos or threw them out), simply remake them as if you were in the process of developing your project. Build up your conceptual analysis through post-rationalizing.
Post-rationalizing is an essential technique in making a portfolio work perfectly with a strategy. You can go as far as adjusting the program of your projects and even the story behind some of your them, to present them as if you are trying to solve some serious social problem. Adjust their location to be in a type of neighborhood that you would want to serve, addressing urban issues as well as the life and culture of a particular place that you feel you can identify with and represents what you care about in this world. Finally,develop diagrams and conceptual sketches. Use pencil and ink to create new ones. Develop a more complete presentation of the issues related to the environment and the world we live in.
The rule of thumb is that at least half the concepts in an architecture school portfolio should stem from some kind of a social cause and be spread relatively evenly throughout the portfolio. If you are able to develop more than that, even better, but if not, then half is fine.
Try to use a variety of media, specifically for conceptual drawing and sketches in order to capture your involvement in the study and development of concepts stemming from different social arenas, so that you can demonstrate your own passion for using architecture to create positive change.
The ability to communicate ideas quickly with a stroke of a pencil will be essential throughout your career, from team-meetings at firms where you will work, to meetings with clients or general contractors. Diagramming is particularly significant when putting together a portfolio for architecture school admissions, because (simply put) no one will read your text. Effective diagramming of ideas and processes can make the difference between an acceptance and a rejection letter from your favorite architecture schools. Architecture school admissions reviewers will take a quick look at some of your pages, and unless they capture their attention immediately, your lofty dreams will not materialize. The projects in your architecture school portfolio exist nowhere but in the imagination of the reviewer, and therefore mastering the art of diagramming is essential because diagrams and sketches help you establish that rhythm to your analysis, which is important for telling the story of each project in your architecture school portfolio. This rhythm is important because it allows reviewers to quickly grasp various patterns in your work. A great diagram captures the essence of your ideas and designs, and presents it in a way that captivates and often inspires the reviewer, without necessarily fully resolving the project. By allowing your projects to remain unresolved, you give the reviewer a chance to picture the final result in their own way, which helps them remember you.
How you visually synthesize your portfolio can mean the difference between a successful and a failed portfolio. Your presentation demonstrates your understanding of your ability to express things graphically. Good graphic representation of your projects allows you to mask the weaknesses of any project, while unsuccessful graphic representation can ruin the impression of an otherwise great project. There are a few rules of thumb that one needs to follow in order to avoid unpleasant and unexpected surprises, and one of the most fundamental ones is that you cannot have substance without absence.
By absence, we mean offering the reviewer’s eye space to understand the arrangement of images, synthesize some kind of perception, and react. It is important to allow your pages ‘the benefit of the pause’. This means that the various images on each of your architecture school portfolio pages should have enough space to breathe, and allow the reviewer’s eye to understand the narrative of the page without getting overwhelmed. It is recommended that you avoid overstuffing your architecture school portfolio with too much information just so it seems like it contains more work.
Your ability to synthesize your book is a reflection of your ability to synthesize spatial sequences as well. You would not want to create overstuffed spaces, would you? Think the same way about your portfolio, and your projects will shine!
The integrity of your presentation is based on a combination of four factors:
How easy is it for you to get all your points across as efficiently, effectively, clearly and accurately as possible.
Clarity is essential because it establishes trust in the mind of the reviewers, but most importantly communicates the exact ideas that your portfolio is supposed to represent, based on your architecture school admissions strategy. By making sure that the portfolio is clear enough and accurate enough, you ensure order, which is essential in the first few moments of one reviewing your portfolio. These first few moments are when the architecture school admissions reviewer’s first impressions on your portfolio will be established, so it is important to communicate that you are trustworthy and you have something important to say.
Then, as the architecture school reviewer progresses through the pages of your portfolio, clarity and accuracy will allow her to understand why and how you are approaching your designs, and how these ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ connect to the overall strategy of your architecture school portfolio. This is a very important foundation for establishing trust, but also for creating positive labels that will help you stand out from the crowd.
Being able to pull together all the ideas in your architecture school portfolio under the umbrella of a unifying theme that itself has lots to communicate about you and your personal brand.
Integrity is also established when you do your best to pull the many layers of ideas associated with you, under a unifying umbrella, that will help the architecture school portfolio reviewer to understand how to relate all these ideas to you. You have to remember that the portfolio is nothing but a branding tool, and its sole purpose in this architecture school admissions game is to help you win by persuading the architecture school admissions reviewers to pick you over someone else. Therefore, the more you are able to explain to the reviewers how all the ideas that appear in your architecture school portfolio relate to your own mission and strategy, the more successful you will be in establishing your message and persuading the architecture school portfolio reviewers.
Establishing graphic harmony is all about getting a general sense of cohesion in your portfolio. The best way to achieve this, is by looking at all the different graphic approaches that you have used (literally print stuff out and put them on your wall and then look at them), and build a strategy for bringing them together. Sometimes all it takes are minor changes, as well as adjustments to the placement of projects and images and perhaps some adjustments in the story-telling aspect of your graphics.
Create a set of very simple rules for your whole book and follow them throughout it. A simple and commonly used solution is to use diagrams, sketches and other analytical and conceptual sketches. You will notice how easier it becomes to flip through your portfolio when things are ordered. >>>
Allowing space for the mind of the architecture school portfolio reviewer to breathe, think, imagine, envision and absorb.
This is a tricky one! On the one hand, you are supposed to be accurate, that’s true, and on the other hand you have to make sure that the reviewers are engaged enough to appreciate your work and remember it until the last round of the admissions process. It is a tricky factor, because the best way of allowing open-endedness, is by choosing to let the design of your projects stay unresolved. By doing so, you invite the reviewer to participate in this game of piecing ideas together, trying to figure out what the final result should / could be. Your reviewers, in most architecture school admissions committees, will be either architecture school faculty, or architecture students, which means that their brains are calibrated for this exact process of seeing something that is unresolved, and immediately envisioning ways to fix it. By engaging them in this game, they feel more fulfilled by the process of reviewing your portfolio, and in most cases they do not know why, or they think that it is because of your brilliance.
This simple set of ideas will make a very significant difference to your portfolio almost immediately, and will allow you to think creatively and widely, while maintaining order in the development of your portfolio, preserving the integrity of your presentation.
Now, wherever there are rules, there are occasions when it is good to break them. In the case of architecture school portfolios, these moments are many, and offer the designer multiple opportunities for creative design thinking. However, breaking the rules and creating moments of excitement while still preserving the graphical integrity of the architecture school portfolio presentation, is not possible unless a context of order has been established. The aforementioned three rules will help you establish that context.
One of the issues that an architecture school applicant has to deal with is that they cannot be present when their portfolio is being reviewed. This means that a project may end up being misinterpreted, and under-appreciated, simply due to the lack of a proper presentation and story.
Presenting a project that is part of a portfolio for architecture school admissions is different from presenting a project in a portfolio at an interview, or presenting a project at a studio critique. The reason is that the creator of the project is present at the interview and the critique, and is able to make a proper presentation of all ideas, taking the reviewer through the different images on a wall or on a page, without having to invest too much time into the story-telling aspect of the portfolio. When the creator is present, she can also respond to any questions that the reviewer might have, which means that she does not even need to cover everything during her basic presentation, because if something remains unanswered, the reviewer will ask about it.
On the other hand, in the case of a portfolio for architecture school admissions, the applicant cannot be present at the review of the portfolio, and therefore the only way for the applicant to communicate the details and complexities of her thinking process is by using the design and development process of each project, in a way that will cover all bases of the project, and answer all anticipated questions of the reviewer. This is the primary reason, why an architecture school applicant has to see his or her architecture school portfolio as a project in itself, and possibly the most important project of all, because it can amplify the message of the projects it contains, celebrating the strengths of each project, or it can mute this message, to the extent that a set of well-executed projects come across as dull and unsophisticated.
The primary way in which successful architecture school applicants are able to optimize their use their architecture school admissions portfolios, is by using them as story-telling devices. Telling stories is essential, because they tend to stick in the minds of the reviewers much more efficiently than dry facts about technical and programmatic aspects of the project. The best way to narrate a story about an architectural project is by narrating the story of the development of the ideas related to the project. One can do it by emphasizing their process-related fundamental work, which through sketches, diagrams and text is narrated at a slow pace of one idea at a time, eventually leading to the subtleties of the design and development of the central concept of the project into a construct of some sort (a building, a product, a vision or a strategy).
The real issue of course is trying to bring all the projects in the architecture school portfolio together in a way that they produce a cohesive story. The quality of the story that the portfolio tells, has to do with narrative, strategy, mission, graphics, layout and the overall organization of the entire book. If you manage to work and develop those, you will improve your portfolio’s overall sense of cohesion as well.
By making sure that each project that is included in the architecture school portfolio has its own character, and also by making sure that the characters of all segments are clearly communicating between themselves and place themselves under an overall “umbrella theme” (which was discussed earlier), the creator of the portfolio is able to cover a wide array of various issues, each discussed in a different project, yet manages to actually communicate the most essential pieces of information to the reviewer thanks to the overall story of the architecture school portfolio.
Every discipline has its own means of communicating ideas. Architecture has the portfolio.
It is important to grasp the game you are playing. Using a portfolio is an opportunity to show that you are able to communicate your ideas through images of a variety of different media, which is an essential skill to have. Even if you are not that great at it, you will at least let the reviewers know that you are placing a lot of effort into communicating your ideas.
Text is almost never read in portfolios. It is unlikely that admissions reviewers will go over the written text in your portfolio. Part of the reason for that is that designers often tend to use text just to fill in gaps, to add a level of prestige to a project. In rare occasions, and when the reviewer is truly engaged by the graphic narrative of a project, she may read parts of the text in order to learn a bit more about the project. Do not forget that the examiners will not spend more than a few minutes on your portfolio (at least in the first and toughest phase of the selection process). Replace the extensive text with short references to the design and graphic material that clearly describes the concept. Work on a few quick napkin sketches (so-called “Corbusian” sketches) and try to locate them in key places and in a sequence that tells the story of what your project is about and how it developed as a design.
If you are invited to go to an interview at an architecture school, keep in mind that architecture school interviews take about 30 minutes. These 30 minutes, are usually spent going through the visual material of your architecture school portfolio, and discussing it with the interviewer. During these interviews, interviewers will most likely not read any of your text. The reason for this is that interviewers probably go through hundreds of different portfolios per season, so over time they try to understand someone’s work as quickly and efficiently as possible.
One thing to do is control the length of the descriptions and also the way that they are displayed on the page. Do not necessarily place the text of a page in a single block. As mentioned earlier, text is also a good way to graphically fill up space on your pages where there does not seem to be anything else that could fit. However, if there is graphic material that could say what the text says, use it and remove the text from your architecture school portfolio.
We have already mentioned about a dozen times that you should begin with the development of an excellent strategy and mission in order to avoid wasting time by designing work that does not serve its purpose. After that, try selecting a project, preferably your favorite one of the projects you have already developed, and try to discover how to tell its story. Following your decision on the various aspects of the project, define the kind of story that you would like to tell about it. After you define the story and become aware of how your project fits in it and how the story fits in the overall synthesis of the portfolio, you need to begin redeveloping the project. Create the missing pieces according to earlier instructions, and insert them into the story in a way that allows the project to be presented cogently and in a fun, exciting way.
After you are done developing the drawings and models, take some beautiful pictures of them. Do not worry about the quality of the photos, and you certainly do not need a professional photo camera. You can just use your cell-phone to take the photos and then try to bring out your own point of view as a designer. In fact, if necessary, adjust the pictures on Photoshop.
To develop appealing projects, you have to do your best to communicate your process through your design work. Anything you are bringing to the table has to be present in your process, otherwise the examiners will not buy it. It is through the intriguing subtleties of this process that you will win the hearts of the examiners.
Just like a city’s character can be defined by the organization of it’s urban blocks (see difference between NY and Paris for example), an architecture school portfolio can be defined by the organization of its images on pages. I am not suggesting that a square format or a grid format will define you as a good architecture school applicant, versus someone else who will be defined as a “bad” architecture school applicant. What I am saying is that the format will create a rhythm, and will have some rules that may/ may not be appropriate for some projects or some target audiences. It is a very important factor to consider and try to determine early on.
Many people wonder why there is a Resume page in the portfolio. The answer is that you need to remind the architecture school admissions reviewers of your strengths any chance you get, and the purpose of a well-composed resume is to do exactly that. Obviously it is not as important as your graphic work, but it helps establish a background and a context so that you can be judged fairly.
Developing an exciting resume is therefore important, and there are many ways to do it. For starters, do not limit yourself to your education, experience and activities, but expand a bit, by including categories like ‘languages’, software, and others. Do not hesitate to see your resume as a a tiny piece of graphics – a pamphlet – which is supposed to encapsulate the essence of you, your background and your capabilities.
Architecture School Portfolio
Do your best to express your inner child, through humor and excitement. Architects have the reputation of taking things way too seriously. Use images that make your architecture school portfolio reviewers smirk. Don’t go telling jokes or anything like that, but bring a little bit of childishness into your book to balance the seriousness of your projects. Do not forget that you are trying to sell yourself, not your projects, through this portfolio, to the reviewers of the architecture school admissions committees.
One of the best ways to grasp the attention of the architecture school portfolio admissions reviewers is through demonstrating passion and involvement, and the most reliable way for doing so is by demonstrating a process that takes the examiner through a step-by-step tracing of your battle to resolve the design problem. The best way to do this is through sketches. In your sketches you can show all your inner thoughts. In the strokes of each individual sketch you can capture your involvement in the process. It is obviously impossible to have any effect if you simply write “I am passionate”. The only way to communicate how passionate you are is indirect. People will understand this about you through the imperfections of a beautiful, intense, hand-drawn sketch and its variations, or the multiple versions of a cardboard model that has been used and reused so much that it seems to be ready to fall apart. Passion is a factor that can really inspire people and turn things around, so I recommend you pay close attention to this comment.
Hand draw as much as possible. Any person can draft with computer assistance, but drafting by hand shows true craftsmanship and allows you to expand your mind to laying out structures with shapes and curves that simply cannot be captured on a computer.
Some of your projects have to direct the conversation to issues that you are passionate about, not so much for the sake of the issues themselves, but to lead to what you have done in your life to address these issues as a leader and as a member of a group. Begin by digging deep into your biography and find these issues, and then define ways in which you have dealt with them. Then, use your essay to describe your leadership ability, and also use your portfolio to bring the conversation back to those experiences.
The examiners have no way of knowing how complex your ideas are, unless you present and analyze your concepts and process of development. If you do, and then manage to pull all processes together in a poetic and clear way that tells a story about each project, and then manage to pull all the individual stories together to form a whole (the portfolio), you will definitely come across as a very smart person. Do not fool yourself! Unfortunately, pictures of the final product do not demonstrate how smart you are and whether you can handle the development of complex concepts. Even simple sketches can do it, as long as you show a serious and well developed process of thinking. Remember, they want to understand how you think!
You need to demonstrate to the examiners that you are as curious as a 5 year-old child. Once again, this childish curiosity can be communicated through your process of thinking and resolving complex problems. Showcase multiple versions of a concept, discuss your personal influences, bring in references that helped you in developing a better final product, and most importantly: ASK QUESTIONS!!! Great researchers are great at asking questions. In fact, most successful people out there tend to ask more questions than provide answers. By asking questions and using a Socratic approach in building the story of your projects, you indirectly ask the architecture school portfolio reviewer to participate. This engages the reviewer and allows her to identify more with the work. Reviewers are themselves architects. They would love nothing more than to come up with their own possibilities for what the best final product could be. Allow this open-ended approach!
When you embark on your journey to architecture school, there are many issues to consider, and the most important one is time management. Your time is extremely valuable, and should be spent on the item of your architecture school application that carries the most value, and that is your architecture school portfolio.
The average architecture school applicant budgets less than 6 months for the full development of their application, and this usually includes GRE prep, and everything else required, so initially the applicant feels like she has plenty of time, until she does not, which is when she begins to panic. This is usually at about 3 to 2 months from the deadlines.
If your portfolio is not completed by December 1, you might as well not even think about beginning, unless you are planning to fail. On December 1, your portfolio should be ready, and you should only be adding final touches. These final touches usually take at least a month, and they often make the difference between a good portfolio and a great portfolio that can get you into top architecture schools.
The best way to make sure that you do not waste your time is by calculating exactly how much time you have that you are willing and able to commit towards the development of your application.
Let’s say for example that you have 3 months until December 1. This gives you about 12 weeks. Each week has 7 days, and each day has 24 hours, out of which you sleep for 8 hours. So, you have about 16×7 hours per week. This gives you a total of 112 hours per week, and then you start deducting hours that you are can’t commit to developing your portfolio – for example:
10 hours per week, for 12 weeks, is a staggering total of 120 hours. All of a sudden it looks like you have plenty of time to develop the portfolio for your architecture school application. All you have to do at that point, is focus on making sure that you put in these 10 hours weekly, and try to occasionally steal an hour or two from your other endeavors, starting with the endeavor of ‘doing nothing’.
Following your decision to commit to building your architecture school portfolio for 10 hours a week, you need to figure out how to allocate your available time.
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Time allocation is not easy to tackle, primarily because of what is required to properly allocate time.
It is virtually impossible to create a time allocation plan for the design of your architecture school portfolio or the development of your architecture school application if you do not understand the details of your work in relation to their impact on the overall picture of your application. For example, on the surface I may look at my work and assume that one of my biggest problems as an applicant is that I cannot draw as well as some other applicants that I know, so naturally, I set out to learn how to draw better. I spend a minimum of 10 hours a week, for 3 months, trying to learn how to draw well, while producing some interesting drawings. However, had I known that demonstrating an ability to draw well is by far not a great value-generator, I would have at least limited my allocation, and would have instead used a more targeted learning approach that would minimize time spent and maximize my ability to draw well enough so I can put together a great set of projects for my architecture school portfolio.
This example discusses just one of the many areas that matter when someone is applying to architecture school. It is essential for the applicant to understand these areas, weigh different options, and develop a plan that is based on what would bring the most value to the portfolio.
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Architecture School Portfolio
Architecture School Portfolio
Based on over 100 interviews that we have conducted over the years with members of admissions committees, competition for admission to the top architecture schools has increased dramatically since 2010, but has fluctuated quite a bit since 2016. This fluctuation is relatively random. There are years when the work of the competitive pool is at a very high level, and other years when it is not. This fluctiation is also true when it comes to the competitive pools of some of the top architecture schools, like Harvard GSD, MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Cornell School of Architecture, Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Yale School of Architecture and others.
Less popular schools of architecture are likely to also notice spikes in the competitive level of their candidates. These schools may include Washington University in Saint Louis College of Architecture, the School of Architecture and Design at the New York Institute of Technology, the Rhode Island School of Design, or Pratt School of Architecture. The reason why competitiveness often spikes in less known popular programs, may simply be that some of the most competitive applicants decide to apply to these architecture schools in an effort to secure merit-based financial aid packages that pay for their architecture school tuition and fees.
The problem is that noone no one knows when or where this spike in competitiveness will take place.
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We have already established that, whether you are applying to the best architecture programs, or some of the less popular ones, it is really hard to predict the level of competitiveness of architecture school candidates. In our experience, there have been years when an applicant from an obscure high-school of college, with a low GPA (even as low as 2.8/4.0) makes it into an architecture school that is as good and competitive as Columbia GSAPP, or UC Berkeley . These are the types of situations that make you wonder “how on earth is this possible”?
It is usually possible because these students worked their tails off for several months, to build portfolios that somehow made up for the lack of academic achievement. This type of sacrifice usually pays off when the student’s application year coincides with a cycle of lower competitiveness. It is also possble because these students decided not to allow themselves to be intimidated by the name of the school, or the perception of their peers, or even their perception of their own work, and took a chance by applying to several of the top programs. This combination of dedication and luck defined their lives and architectural careers.
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Even if you decide to get into an architecture college or graduate school that is not very competitive, it is still not a sure thing. Top 20 and top 30 architecture schools are in most cases as competitive, and sometimes (depending on the school and the market they are serving or their reputation as schools that offer a lot of financial aid) they are even more competitive than some top-5 schools of architecture. This happens for a few reasons, including the fact that some colleges of architecture and graduate schools of architecture are very affordable compared to others. Architectural education in the US is normally very expensive – an architecture school may end up costing its architecture students over $60K per year, and that amount keeps climbing at a rate of about 7% per year. Therefore, some schools, like public schools for example, with great reputation, or private architecture colleges and graduate schools which are known to offer generous financial aid packages, often are as competitive or even more competitive than top-5 programs.
A good example, is UC Berkeley School of Environmental Design , which used to be ranked at 11, 13 and so on for a number of years, and yet has consistently been more competitive than some top five schools like Cornell School of Architecture, Art and Planning.
The reason why a school like UC Berkeley’s school of architecture can be more competitive than Cornell’s school of architecture, is that it combines several important factors:
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UC Berkeley has a great reputation as an architecture graduate school, partly because of its stellar reputation as a university, and partly because its architecture program is excellent and encompasses various excellent departments, like the school of city and regional planning, which is considered the 2nd best graduate program in urban planning, right behind MIT.
UC Berkeley is much more affordable than most other graduate schools of architecture in the United States, and this list includes every single one of the top 10 schools in 2020. To be more specific, the Design Intelligence graduate architecture school rankings for 2019-2020, place UC Berkeley’s architecture school in the tenth place, behind Harvard GSD, Columbia GSAPP, MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Yale school of architecture, Cornell AAP, Princeton, Rice, RISD and UPenn school of architecture. Tuition per year at Berkeley for a California residents is $11,422. For non-californians tuition is $23,686. Tuition at the rest of the top-ten architecture schools is as follows (click on the links to these schools’ “cost-of-attendance pages” for more details): 1. Harvard GSD: $53,420 / 2.Columbia GSAPP: $50,880 / 3. MIT SAP: $55,450 / 4. Yale: $52,500 / 5. Cornell AAP: $56,550 / 6.Princeton: $51,870 / 7.Rice: $32,360 / 8.RISD: $52,860 / 9.UPenn: $55,566 . These amounts represent tuition ONLY, and do not include personal and living expenses for any of these schools. However, just to offer some perspective, as an example Columbia GSAPP’s total cost of attendance for a nine-month academic year is $83,703, which over the three years of the M.Arch program amounts to a total of a little over $250K. On the other hand, UC Berkeley’s total cost of attendance for a year is $39,052 (less than half). Obviously Berkeley is a “value” program.
Looking at the map of the United States, one realizes that 8 out of 10 top-10 graduate architecture schools are located in the Northeast: New York, Boston, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Philadelphia. This means that most of their graduates tend to want to stay in these areas following graduation, which makes these job-markets ultra-competitive for new architecture school graduates. On the other hand, UC Berkelely is the top school of the vast market of California, where it is considered the #1 graduate program (there are of course architecture programs like USC School of Architecture, UCLA and SCI-Arch, but none is as prestigious as the Masters of Architecture program at UCBerkeley.
All these factors, financial, geographic and academic, make UC Berkeley a very popular school, with an admissions process that is as competitive as those of Harvard and MIT.
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