This article is dotted with conversations and interviews of various creative people. They’re included in order to show a standard for the conversational nature of architecture school interviews. This first one shows Zadie Smith working through her thoughts with the interviewer. Interviewers simply want a wide conversation, rooted in the honest interests of the interviewee.

An interview can easily feel like a test with no syllabus, a room where someone will finally see through you, or ask a question you can’t answer. But that is not the case.

Architecture school interviews are conversations. And the best thing you can do before walking into one, or opening your laptop for a video call, is to genuinely believe that.

What to expect

For applicants in the UK, interviews typically happen in winter and may involve one person or a small panel, which can include faculty, heads of department, or senior tutors. In the US, the format varies considerably: some BArch programs hold structured interviews with faculty, others are genuinely informal, sometimes in a coffee shop rather than a seminar room. If you’re applying to a four-year liberal arts college with an architecture major, the interview will likely feel closer to a standard college admissions conversation.

In either context, most interviews follow a similar shape. They open with you presenting your portfolio, which typically takes somewhere between five and ten minutes. After that, the interviewer will ask follow-up questions, sometimes about the work itself, sometimes about your broader interests, your reasons for choosing this school, or your sense of what architecture is and does. The whole thing usually closes with an invitation for you to ask questions of your own.

Knowing this arc in advance takes a lot of the mystery out of it. The interview isn’t a series of surprises. It’s a structured conversation with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and you have a role in shaping each part.

Preparing for the format

How you set up for the interview matters, and the logistics differ depending on whether you’re meeting in person or online.

For online interviews, the basics are worth getting right: a quiet space, a stable internet connection, and a background that isn’t distracting. More specifically, have your portfolio open in full-screen mode before the call begins. Even if the school already has your file, having it ready on your end means you’re not fumbling through folders in the first minute of the conversation.

For in-person interviews, bring a physical version of your portfolio. If your work is primarily digital, print it at a portable size, A3 or A4. Better still, if you have original work, a significant painting, a sketchbook, a physical model, bring it. Original objects have a quality that printed pages don’t, and they tend to open up the conversation in ways that are harder to anticipate and more interesting because of it.

The interview is an extension of your application materials

Interviewers aren’t looking to catch you off guard. They want to understand who you are, how you think, and whether the curiosity evident in your application is something they can build on over the next three to five years.

This means your personal statement and portfolio aren’t just things you submit and move past. They’re the foundation of the whole conversation. The interview is an invitation to go deeper into work you’ve already done and ideas you’ve already started forming.

So spend time revisiting your application before the interview. What parts feel most alive to you? Where in your portfolio did something unexpected happen? Those moments, where you surprised yourself, where a project shifted mid-process, where you weren’t entirely sure what you were making until you’d made it, are exactly what interviewers want to hear about.

Your portfolio is a tool, not just a presentation

One of the more freeing things to understand about the architecture school portfolio is that it doesn’t need to look like architecture. Not yet. Schools are far more interested in evidence of spatial thinking, material curiosity, and comfort with ambiguity than in polished technical drawings of buildings.

When you’re preparing to talk through your work, think of your portfolio as a tool for conversation rather than a finished object. The work on the page points to something, a set of interests, a way of seeing, a recurring preoccupation, and your job in the interview is to articulate what that something is.

A good way to prepare is to speak about your portfolio out loud before the interview, without worrying about what you sound like. Just talk about it freely, even messily. Then notice which ideas keep surfacing. Those recurring ideas are your keywords, the real substance of what you’re trying to say. The structure will follow naturally once you know what you’re actually talking about.

For each project, try moving through four simple movements: how it began, what you did, what you discovered in the process, and where your thinking went afterward. That last part, where it led you, is often the most interesting to an interviewer, because it shows that you’re someone who doesn’t just complete work, but learns from it.

Your ideas are valid

Some of the strongest applications come from students whose personal interests feel, at first glance, entirely unrelated to architecture. The student who writes about karate because she’s fascinated by the relationship between the body and space. The student who photographs his neighborhood’s drainage systems because he’s obsessed with the invisible logic of cities. The student who makes clothes because she’s been thinking for years about how fabric creates enclosure.

These students aren’t making a stretch. They’re showing something essential: that their curiosity about the world is already spatial, already material, already architectural, even if they haven’t used that word for it yet.

The difference between preparation and performance

There’s a version of interview preparation that tips into performance: polished answers to anticipated questions, a practiced patter, a persona assembled for the occasion. Architecture schools are quite good at identifying this, and it tends to work against applicants rather than for them.

The more useful kind of preparation is the kind that makes you more yourself, not less. It’s reading back through your own work (personal statements, application essays) and remembering why you made the choices you made. It’s being able to say, clearly and without jargon, what a particular project meant to you. It’s having thought enough about why you want to study architecture, and why at this school specifically, with reference to their particular approach, their faculty, the work you’ve seen their students produce, that your answer feels like a thought you’re having rather than a line you’re reciting.

Common questions like “Why architecture?” or “What is your favorite project in the portfolio?” are worth sitting with before the interview. Not scripting an answer, but actually thinking through what you believe. The same goes for questions about the role of the architect today, or which piece of work you consider the most architectural and why. These aren’t trick questions. They’re openings.

Being specific about a school when asked why you want to study there matters more than most applicants realize. Referring to work you’ve seen from current students, a particular faculty member whose practice interests you, or something specific about how the school structures its studio time, these details signal that your interest is real rather than general. The distinction between genuine enthusiasm and recycled marketing language is obvious to anyone sitting on the other side of the table.

Closing the conversation

At the end of most interviews, you’ll be invited to ask questions of your own. This invitation is not a trick question. The question to ask is the question you want the answer to. Usually, the more sincere questions are more practical. Ask about studio culture, about field trips, about what a typical week in the first year actually looks like. These questions signal that you’re thinking about what it would mean to be there, that you’re not just trying to get in, but genuinely considering what you’d do once you arrived. That’s what they’re looking for.