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The Importance of Manual Sketching in Practice - Part 1

2026-09-2027:09

Send us Fan Mail Part 1 - Continuing the conversation on manual sketching in practice. Whatever you do in architecture school, you are preparing for a fast-paced industry where deadlines serve financial goals — and where sketching has quietly become an undervalued skill. What gets lost with it is the architect: the intuition, the authorship, the sense of a building made by someone rather than generated by software. Grant Harris of HB Architecture puts it well across two recent pieces. Drawing...

The Importance of Manual Sketching in Practice - Introduction

2026-09-1920:02

Send us Fan Mail Principals aren't encouraging young architects to sketch any more. What firms hire for is Revit proficiency; sketching has been demoted to a personal plus, useful to the graduate but not asked for by the organisation. So I put the question to a former student of mine, Aminuddin Zakaria — a design architect and BIM lead working on civic and institutional projects at Arkiskape Sdn Bhd — and his answer was blunt. He sees very few graduates sketching in practice, and even experie...

Building Your Own View Point: Reflective Summary on the Use of Precedents

2026-09-0724:19

Send us Fan Mail Remember the second-year student whose lecturers kept saying "I don't like your plan, change it"? They said: in second year we studied the masters, understood the philosophy of their buildings, and applied it to our projects — borrowing viewpoints. But we can't always borrow other people's viewpoints. Copy and paste design. So how do we build a strong foundation of our own viewpoint, and our own critical thinking, through the design studio years? The student also asked about ...

Navigating Destructive Critiques in Architecture Studio

2026-09-0413:55

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, host Naziaty addresses a second-year student’s setback after receiving harsh, unguided feedback—“I don’t like your plan. Please change”—that left him doubting the entire design process. The advice is clear: don’t take it personally, and instead turn the moment into dialogue by calmly asking the critic exactly what needs changing (circulation, entrance, overall scheme). Building your own viewpoint starts with trusting the site visits, interviews, and earlier p...

Expert Overnight: Why Design in School Should Work Like Design in Practice

2026-08-3016:17

Send us Fan Mail I used to think designing in school and designing in practice were two different worlds. In this episode I argue the opposite: schools of architecture need to teach the same design process students will use when things actually get built. The test case? The dreaded overnight scheme — your boss tells you at 5pm that a design goes to the client tomorrow morning. No time for precedent studies, no lecturer feedback. So how do you become an expert overnight? The case study is the ...

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