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