This particular student came to us with just a few pieces of work. He was looking to go to Manchester School of Architecture, and over a few months we gave feedback on his portfolio development and UCAS personal statement.
As a student at a languages high school, his interests were firmly within the audible world, especially since he is also a gifted musician. This formed a very interesting brief for the application, and we spent a great deal of time coming up with innovative ways of translating between music, language, drawing and painting. A very personal brief – just as it should be.
Full transcript
This review looks at a portfolio created by an applicant from Italy who was accepted to the Manchester School of Architecture. He came to us with very little existing work, only a few drawings, and a background in languages and music rather than art or design. He had attended a languages-focused high school, but architecture had always been an underlying interest. This created an unusual starting point for developing a portfolio and led to a particularly interesting brief.
Since his background was rooted in sound and language, the challenge was to transform those interests into a set of visual works suitable for an architecture application. Over about six months he developed a body of work that explored the connections between sound, language, and visual representation. He also mentioned that he experiences a mild form of synesthesia, which allows him to translate between sound and vision with unusual ease. This became the central idea for his portfolio.
For 2023 entry, The Manchester School of Architecture requires applicants to upload their portfolios in the form of a blog. The work shown here is the formatted portfolio version of that submission. I will focus on the first two projects, as they demonstrate the main ideas and methods that defined his application. The first project was exploratory, while the second was more of an architectural proposal. It was not a building design but an investigation into architectural elements and spatial thinking. Undergraduate architecture portfolios should not include fully designed buildings. Instead, they should demonstrate curiosity, material awareness, and an understanding of space.
Project One: Drawing as Sound
The first project explored the relationship between sound and drawing. It began with the idea that drawing itself produces sound. The scratch of pencil on paper, the noise of erasing, the break of graphite, or even the accidental tap of an object on the desk all contribute to an auditory experience. Each of these sounds could be catalogued and compared to everyday sounds found in domestic routines.
In this project he focused on the sounds of breakfast. He recorded and observed the noises associated with preparing and eating breakfast, then translated them into a series of drawings. The left-hand drawing in the portfolio was a catalog of these sound marks. It contained different lines, tones, and gestures that represented distinct noises. The right-hand drawing was a first-person perspective of sitting at the breakfast table. Together the two drawings mirrored one another, one analytical and one experiential.
This pairing introduced an important architectural idea. Architecture relies on multiple types of representation such as plan, section, elevation, and perspective, all showing the same space in different ways.
Although the project was small in scale, it was a strong opening for the portfolio. It immediately established the applicant’s focus on sound and his ability to translate sensory experience into visual form.
Project Two: Translating Music into Visual Work
The second project was more developed and aimed to produce a set of outcomes. It extended the earlier theme of sound, focusing this time on translating pieces of music into visual compositions. The applicant began with a few sketches he had made before starting the course, which depicted his interpretation of music in figurative terms. These early works were useful starting points but not the direction we wanted to pursue. Instead, we moved toward a more abstract and expressionistic approach that aligned more closely with architectural thought.
He selected “Won’t Get Fooled Again” by The Who as the musical basis for the work. The process involved listening to the music repeatedly and responding to it through automatic drawing and painting. The aim was to capture rhythm, tone, and structure rather than literal imagery. The resulting three paintings were abstract compositions with strong gestural energy and layered spatial qualities.
As the series progressed, it became clear that these paintings contained architectural potential. Their forms could be interpreted as three-dimensional elements such as walls, planes, voids, and spatial sequences. The applicant began to draw over the paintings, reinterpreting them as speculative spatial structures. These were not architectural designs in the conventional sense but rather studies of space, material, and composition. They were intentionally scaleless, existing somewhere between painting and architectural drawing.
This project demonstrated a key ability to work between disciplines and to use one medium to inform another. The movement from sound to image to spatial speculation showed a coherent creative process and a depth of thinking.
Coherence
The most important point illustrated by this portfolio is that every project relates to the next. Architecture portfolios should not be collections of unrelated works. Instead, they should show a continuous train of thought where each piece connects to and builds upon the others. This is partly what distinguishes an architecture portfolio from an art portfolio.
In architectural practice, drawings and models are never isolated objects. They form a coordinated set of materials that collectively describe a building proposal. Developing a portfolio with that same mindset, treating each work as part of a larger system, shows a deep understanding of how architects think and work.
This applicant succeeded precisely because of that relational structure. Even though his background was in languages and music, his portfolio demonstrated clear visual coherence. Each project developed naturally from his personal interests while also meeting the expectations of architectural education, which include curiosity, interpretation, and spatial understanding.