Undergraduate application portfolios require artwork. Some artwork can be very architectural in nature.

These portfolio extracts come from one of our students for 2025 entry. Catinca applied for undergraduate architecture programs at WashU, Carnegie Mellon, UVA, Tulane, and Syracuse, and she was accepted to all schools. Tulane and Syracuse offered her a full cost of attendance scholarship, and Tulane also added on a portfolio award. 

This article aims to cover the idea that painting and drawing can be considered architectural work, for various different reasons. While it may be easy to label work like Catinca’s as purely artistic, there is much more going on under the surface.

Architecture schools are looking for students who do a few different things, and show it in their artwork.

Firstly, the student must want to go to architecture school. This may seem obvious, but many students apply to colleges year after year without any firm desire to actually study their intended majors. Schools find motivated students from the application pool by understanding how a student’s personal background, interests and artwork marry up with what the student perceives architecture school to be all about. How can a student find out what architecture school is all about? Summer schools. Summer schools in architecture are helpful, because the subsequent application schools would be convinced that the student knows what they’re getting into. These insights from the student can also come through in the essays and personal statements. The goal is for the student to see how their perceptions of architecture school align with the artwork they make. At that point it is clear that a student wants to go to architecture school.

Secondly, the student must be authentic in their visual work / portfolio. In other words, the student must know what their skills and motivations are, and make work accordingly. Work made in this way is strong by default. Authentic work shows how a student thinks, which is what schools want to know above all else. You cannot be penalised for making authentic, honest work that speaks to your interests. Ideally this all aligns with the essays and personal statements. When authentic work aligns with the kind of work that’s taught in an architecture school, then the student is accepted. The win-win of making authentic work is that if a student makes authentic work and is then rejected from architecture school, it will truly be for the best. The school would effectively be saying that they think the student’s talents would be best directed elsewhere. This could save a lot of time and money. 

Thirdly, the student must come across as a contributing factor to the educational environment of the school. Meaning, will this student continue to make great work under our guidance, and contribute said great work to our summer shows? After all, schools are businesses, and they want to show off their marketing material. The best marketing material is good student work.

So, what is authentic work that speaks to architectural themes? Two examples of the most architectural themes in visual work would be the following.

Spatial themes. Does the work speak to the third dimension? This is one of the most basic topics of architecture, and one of the most crucial. In what way does the work deal with space? Physical, imagined, or otherwise. 

Representation. How is an idea being communicated? Also very architectural. What visual language is being used to communicate something, and does the language align with the something. I.e., if your sculpture primarily deals with lighting conditions, the representation would ideally be a set of photos that test lighting. As opposed to line drawings of the sculpture. 

With the example of Catinca’s work, all these areas were hit on the head.

Example 1.

This is a painting that Catinca made in school (art class). This painting deals directly with the above idea of representation. Architects often use a particular kind of drawing called orthographic drawing to communicate the space of design proposals. Orthographic drawing is a type of non-perspective drawing that allows an architect to draw plans and sections of design proposals. Imagine a floor plan of a building. The floor plan appears as an outline with no perspective depth into the page. The same goes for elevational drawings of the outside of buildings. Elevational drawings only depict heights and scales, and sometimes they can be worked up to also show materials. Between orthographic drawings, the space of a design proposal can become very clear and highly precise. But two drawings are needed to enable this clarity. The drawings relate to each other, and comprise a single set of work. 

Catinca has done something very similar. Two elevations of a head have been weaved together. It’s the relationship of the front and side elevation which unlocks the space of the head. Meaning that a model of a head can be created in the mind of the viewer, in the third dimension, that extends beyond a two dimensional depiction of an object. What’s more, the grid strengthens the relationship between the two elevations. We’re able as viewers to align various geometries across the space of the entire canvas through the grid. It’s a good painting, and it’s a great one if you’re interested in architecture, as admissions panelists are, at architecture schools. 

Example 2.

This is another painting Catina made, though this one was made outside of school. It’s good to have a range of work made in and out of class. It shows self initiative, but really it shows that the student is interested in making work by default. 

This painting is less to do with representation, though it’s a high quality representational figurative painting. Instead, the work is to do with personal identity (highly authentic) and the space of the physical world. The fact that it’s a representational figurative painting simply allows these themes, as opposed to the previous painting which lives and dies by the type of orthographic representation studied. 

With this painting, the physical world comes through in terms of time, space, gravity and movement. Basic phenomena that allow the existence of architecture. This is how subtly an artwork can relate to architecture. These phenomena are the basis of architecture; there’s no need to draw or design buildings in an architecture school application portfolio. That comes later, at architecture school itself. 

There is no formula when it comes to making artwork that authentically relates to a student’s skills and interests. The only things that can help the making of work like this is time and guidance. Making an architecture school application portfolio is a very introspective process. Sometimes, at the end of the process, a student might make an exceptional set of work but then realise that architecture might only be a small part of their interests. Or that there’s only an interest in a small part of architecture. But that’s a good way to enter into architecture school, since it’s such a broad academic environment, it can be good to enter with a sense of your core interests. It can make a student’s time at architecture school much more specific and directed.

If you’d like to learn about how to develop these skills further through our tutoring program, we can set up a call here.