Architecture as a Career

by Gayathri Vasu
Architects in Chennai

All over the country. board exams have been concluded and it’ll soon be the time where students and parents line up outside colleges and universities for applications, counselling, and admissions. While in our country engineering and medicine are the most sought after fields, here’s why architecture is one of the most promising and build able courses that ever existed.

Architecture schools don’t just teach their students about how buildings are built. While that is an essential part of it, it’s not the only part – we’ll leave that to the civil engineers. An architecture student is taught how to think, not what to think. Even then, the “how” part is interpreted differently by every student in the studio, which shows that there is no right or wrong way of thinking. It’s just a matter of personal preference. Architecture students have the freedom of forming their own opinions. This is the reason why a majority of architects you’ll meet are people with headstrong personalities.

Honestly speaking, architecture cannot be learnt. We are taught to perceive abstract concepts that exist all around us like shapes, proportion, colours, symmetry, space perception and translate that into architecture. Through these concepts we evolve design. So when we look at it as a whole, in conjunction with its surroundings, it forms an integral yet seamless part of the environmental fabric.

Another important thing we learn in architecture schools is to perceive the user’s needs. It gets easier when you have a client and they tell you exactly what they need. But what would an architect do if there is no client? Or if the design is for a public domain and no one person can tell you what they need? The architect has to have the ability to step in to the client/ end user’s shoes and find out what they would need, even before they realize it themselves. A sort of farsightedness that has the ability to predict user patterns and change is essential for an architect. Architecture schools aim to make its students into these seer-like designers that can envisage the future and come up with infrastructure that is a literal and tangible rendition of the user’s needs.
If all that sounds like it’s not your cup of tea but you’ve already picked architecture and think that you have no other career options, you are sorely mistaken. Like I mentioned before, architecture is a buildable course. It can be a stepping stone towards other careers like product designing, textile designing, landscaping, photography, film making, graphic designing; almost anything that has something to with design, because the cup may be different but the tea is essentially the same.

On the whole, architecture is a versatile career option that doesn’t have just one stream. You can change fields as soon as you graduate or when you’re in your 50s, it won’t matter. Architecture as a course gives you the tools to make good design – be it in a space, a piece of paper or with a camera.