How difficult is studying architecture?

There seems to be this stigma around architecture being really difficult to study – but why?

If we break it down, there are a few things that come into play.

Firstly being – that it’s time consuming.

Architecture is perceived as being hard because of how time intensive it is – this heavy requirement of a student’s time and lack of experience managing their own time creates sleepless nights, long days in the studio and a horrific amount of homework. Because there is no end to the work you do – as in – an architect’s work is never finished. There’s always something you can add, subtract, implement or change to your design. The only thing that puts an official stop to your work is the deadline, or due date.

The second reason architecture is so hard is that it requires deep thinking and understanding. Architecture is very design heavy and problem-solving based. These things require deep thinking and critical thought. In a world filled with distractions it’s becoming harder and harder to put your head down and just work on deep-thinking tasks.

Lastly, it’s that architecture school is like going to a semester of construction school, a semester of art school, a semester of theory school, a semester of business school, a semester of history school and a semester of design school all at the same time. It’s this jack of all trades which requires you to learn a little bit about a lot. There’s so much involved in the world of architecture that it can become overwhelming – and that makes architecture difficult.

However – I want to say that it doesn’t have to be hard.

We make things difficult when they don’t have to be. We make studying architecture difficult when it doesn’t have to be.

As you can see, there’s a theme at play here. Firstly – architecture is time consuming. Secondly, it requires deep thinking. Thirdly, it requires having a balance of knowledge in different fields – being a jack of all trades. If you look at what all 3 of these things have in common – it’s about have balance, time management and the removal of procrastination. These are all skills you can practice and get better at.

That first point of architecture being time consuming – the way around this is to make a list of high important tasks, removing procrastination – ya know, don’t open up Netflix when you know you have work to do. Manage your time and practice the skill of managing your time to make architecture easier.

Secondly, deep thinking is another skill you can practice. It’s a really valuable skill to have and is becoming less and less common in people, architecture students specifically. Again, practice removing distractions, procrastination. Set timers when working on a project to help you stay focussed. Practice saying no to procrastination – I highly recommend checking out my video on how to stop procrastinating – it’ll help you out a lot if this is something you deal with often.

Lastly, it’s about balancing between different classes and trying to learn different topics and focusses all at once. You can practice this skill of balancing and managing your time to work on different things at once to get better at doing it.

So, yes, architecture can be really, really, really hard. But you can make it easier with the decisions you make, and you can control how hard architecture is going to be for you.

In life, the more time you spend on something, typically, the better you’re going to be at it. As long as you are consciously practicing and putting in the effort to get better, architecture will be easy for you.

Don’t let other people’s opinions and experiences about architecture discourage you from getting started – if you have a passion for it, you’ll do really well, and it’ll be easy for you.

On that note, I want to say thank you for making it all the way through. If you have any questions – chuck them down below, if you have a spare second, I’d appreciate you leaving a like on the video and subscribing. Until next time, have a great day.