If you have stumbled upon this article you are either an architect or aspiring to be one or maybe one who is hung in between. If you already are one, then hats off to you, you have already crossed the phase of slave labour, filled up to the brim with caffeine, plotters, massively sleep-deprived and in debt (mostly to prints and stationery) that is (yes you guessed it right), Architecture school and for all those who are in the latter category, we salute you and send you all the world’s power (obviously you will need it).
We know the luxury of free will
We architects are plagued with stressful situations more than any other profession but we shouldn’t forget that we are so fortunate in countless ways, take for instance the fact that we never get nightmares, cause we almost never sleep and lack of sleep actually make us feel high because normal people can’t afford this luxury. When mentioning the leisure of sleeping how can we leave out the feel of the energized soul that comes with the privileged sleep of two hours before submission. Sometimes it’s hard to make out if we are doing architecture or architecture is doing us.
Often when we lament about it to our non-architect friends, however much they try, they don’t understand us, they just can’t. They are not used to the impact that moving a staircase or rotating a plan or saving the same AutoCAD file with different names because we had to make little changes have on our workload, nor can they relate to losing a favourite pen and the pure joy that we experience when we use a fresh blade for our models. But among us, we can wallow in our sufferings together as we go through just what makes our life so stressful (and rewarding)!
Scares of our life
Some very unquestionable revelations have been made about our life. To illustrate, our worst scare is forgetting the headphones and even worse — when they break. Talking about scares, we have quite an extensive list for us to dwell upon. Think about this: You’ve worked straight for 12 hours and waited 5 hours in line at the printers and possibly had to pay a small fortune, so the last thing you need is the green to come out yellow or the edges of your building to be trimmed off. Scary isn’t it? And as we all know ‘Software and us’ we have a very love-hate relationship. We all are very familiar with the scare and panic induced by software crashes and when that error message pops up on AutoCAD.
Jury scares are extremely daunting, so much so that it still gives us creeps even when we have left college behind. ‘Where is the North?’. Done with all your work and you are prepped up for your presentation and the first word that the professor utters is asking about the north without even seeing the ton of other work that you did. If we keep on continuing this list, we might just never stop.
Conflicts that can never be cleared
I am very sure we all must have wondered this at one point of time in college that what is the point of learning all about structures when whatever we will learn would still be done by an engineer anyway? Makes no sense right? Or why is it that, when we use software all our lives and excel at it we still use CAD shortcuts in Sketchup? Seems crazy? And although it happens very rarely why is it that whenever we finish something early there has to be something wrong with it? Or why is our life all about rejection? Or what to do when the professor doesn’t even know what they want from the project.
Luxuries of our life
A simple shower, free time for actually dressing up, no redos for one week straight, actually getting the line widths right in one go, not completely making up words to describe our concepts (because we actually have one), not having to listen to 5 different critics and thinking which actually should be followed…..the list will continue on, After all, we have a lot that we can ask for. I wonder what fun would it be if we could just have an all-nighter without having a submission at 7 a.m. or if we don’t have to show people the correct place to use ‘Architecture’ and ‘Architect’ yet again and again. And our professor gets our concept in one go and we can spend all our money on ourselves instead of buying the usual.
It still is the best
All through architecture school we struggle a lot but looking back nobody remembers the nights they had plenty of sleep. We remember the sweet difficulties we faced day in and day out. May it be giving juries for 7 hours on an empty stomach or when we were tired to the point of being a complete zombie because architecture abducted us from our normal lives and made us into the architecture zombies that we are today. We all have so much that makes us smile when we think about it and we can’t deny that although architecture is difficult it is still the best decision and one of the best times of our life. After all, we are the only people who possess the talent of changing the whole design on Wednesday when the final jury is on Friday.
