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7 Lessons From Architecture School To Apply When Writing

adevarias
4 min readJan 6, 2022

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You’ll be surprised!

Image by Abstract Memento

After nearly a decade I will be done with my final year of my Master’s Degree in Architecture. I’ve extended my education to include things like virtual environments, museum curation, business practices, and science fiction literature (to name a few, and hell yeah I’m bragging a little!) Beyond these idiosyncratic, self imposed moments of “branching out”, an architectural education provides a lot of insight that can be applied to nearly all industries.

Make Your Own Tools

In Architecture School, it doesn’t matter if what you need to fulfill your vision exists or not because if the tool doesn’t exist, you make it. It’s that simple. Doing so often gets you a better grade, too, in my own personal experience. I think this applies to writing because writing is a creative field that is begging to be in constant innovation. Poetry has always been bit more complacent to this concept. If the word doesn’t exist ? You make it up. Sentence structure? Who cares. Did you get your point across in an artistically unique way? Now you’re in the annals of history! That’s the general attitude.

Research Everything Around the Problem

Architecture is really the art of problem solving for the built environment. When given a prompt, a task, a concept, a client — you are presented with a series of problems, but often times there is a huge elephant in the room-esque chunk of a problem. It is very logical fixate in the problem and prioritize in solving that, but in reality the answer is within the factors around the problem. When writing sometimes you want to talk about this one particular topic or event, but readers are often more interested in all the circumstances that led it to be so. There is often a lot of amazing stories within the larger story. When writing fiction you don’t want to just say the problem and then present the conclusion. You want to insinuate and build up to it. Show the constraints and nuance so the reader appreciates what it took to really get to the final conclusion.

Simplify

As the first tip clumsily implied, architecture school can beg for complication. The reality is that the complication is only useful when…

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adevarias
adevarias

Written by adevarias

Architectural designer monthly crafting well-researched articles envisioning the future (and sometimes the past) of the built environment.

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