BSc ARB/RIBA Part 1.
Every year, the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL gets thousands of applications for its BSc Architecture (RIBA/ARB Part 1). Roughly 2,000 students are competing for about 120 offers, so it’s tough, and good grades on their own won’t get you through. What the admissions panel really wants to know is who you are as a thinker and a maker. You can’t fake that, and you can’t borrow it from someone else’s portfolio.
In this guide I’m going through six pages from the accepted portfolio of “Joe,” who applied for 2025 entry, to show how drawing skill, ideas and a well-organised document come together in a successful Bartlett application. The portfolio was made for 2025, but everything here applies just as well to 2026 and beyond, and to plenty of similar applications. Just check the school’s website for its latest requirements, because they do change.
What do these schools want to see?
Something worth understanding early on is that the Bartlett (and most of the other top architecture schools) isn’t all that interested in Buildings with a capital B. It’s much more interested in architecture as a speculative practice. The panel wants to see how you look at the world, how you think, and how you translate three-dimensional experience into things that sit on a page. That translation is basically what architects do all day. The portfolio and the interview are set up to bring those qualities out, not to reward technical polish for its own sake.
Admissions panels value what you might call projective thinking: imagining worlds that don’t exist yet, and following a hunch all the way through to a drawn conclusion. You can’t really do that unless you’re interested in the thing you’re drawing. The applicants who get remembered are the ones whose curiosity is obviously their own, rather than something put on for the panel.
Page limits
For 2025 (and 2026) entry, the Bartlett BSc Architecture portfolio is limited to ten pages. That limit isn’t incidental; it’s part of the test. Your portfolio is a vehicle for your ideas, and it has to make your creative voice clear to a panel that might only spend a few moments on each submission. Remember these people are looking at thousands of portfolios and they’re going to be tired, so have some empathy and make it easy for them. Anything redundant has to go. Every page that’s left needs to pull its weight and say something about who you are and how you see things.
If you try to include everything, you end up saying nothing. Cutting work that’s technically fine but doesn’t fit with the rest is one of the most important editorial decisions you’ll make, and honestly one of the hardest.
Project 1: Drawing skills (Nature in Concrete Jungles)
Joe’s first project, Nature in Concrete Jungles, opens the portfolio with really good drawing, and it’s confident and precise from the first glance. That’s exactly how you want to start. Observational drawing is one of the first things admissions panels look for: drawing the world as you see it, in person, not from photographs. When you draw from a photo you’re not really translating anything; you’re copying something that’s already been flattened for you. Drawing from life shows you can perceive volume, light and material, and that’s fundamental to thinking architecturally.
The page has a clear hierarchy, which just means there’s one big drawing as the main event, with smaller sketches supporting it and showing how he was thinking. That matters more than you might expect, because architects make sets of drawings for other people (consultants, contractors, planning departments), so having a natural sense of how to organise a page is a big part of the job. Across the top there’s a header bar with the practical information: project titles, dates, and whether each piece was done at school or independently. That last one is important, because independent work shows self-initiative, not just that you finished the assignment. What makes this project strong isn’t a complicated concept. It’s the clean line work, and how clearly it shows the relationship between the built and natural environment. A simple idea with convincing drawings will beat an elaborate idea with weak drawings every time.
Project 2: Material exploration and the value of documentation (The Plaster City)
Joe’s second project started at the Bartlett Summer School, which gives you a direct taste of the school’s studio culture. Going to a Bartlett summer school or open day counts for something in an application, because it shows you know what you’re signing up for and you want more of it. That’s a very different thing from being generally enthusiastic about architecture as an idea.
What made Joe’s project stand out was what he did after the summer school finished. He took his plaster casts home and kept going with them, through photography and projection. That shift, from completing an exercise to following your own line of inquiry, is exactly what admissions panels are looking for.
The admissions panel will never see the physical models, so the photographs are the work. 3D work is basically half the model and half the photography. Joe used stark lighting and deep shadow to bring out the tactile, spatial qualities of the casts, so the empty voids inside them start to read like inhabited architectural spaces. Paying attention to the photography (lens compression, colour balance in post-processing) can turn a material exercise into a really sophisticated study of mass and space. This is also the right way to use photography in an architecture portfolio: as a tool for bringing out the qualities in your own work. A standalone photography project would have to be world class to earn its place, because you’re not applying for a photography degree.
Project 3: Speculative thinking and architectural imagination (Radio Metamorphosis)
The third project, Radio Metamorphosis, is where Joe’s speculative side really comes through. He took apart an old radio and reimagined its insides as large-scale urban spaces, including concert venues and nightclubs. It shows he can move easily between two and three dimensions, and explore architectural ideas without designing a conventional building. Honestly, that’s a much better use of an undergraduate portfolio than designing buildings, which is what you go to architecture school to learn in the first place.
The project deals with occupancy, scale and mechanisation. Short text boxes of around 100 words give just enough context to find your way in, without over-explaining anything, so the drawings get to do the heavy lifting. The Bartlett wants students who are comfortable with ambiguity and happy to see where a project takes them. Speculative work like this invites you into a conversation instead of handing over a neat, resolved conclusion, and that makes it a perfect starting point for an interview. A ten-page portfolio is really just a conversation starter anyway.
The interview: what to expect
If your portfolio shows promise, you’ll be invited to an interview of 20 to 30 minutes. It’s a structured conversation, and the point of it is to understand how your visual work connects to your interests (architectural and otherwise), and whether you’d be someone a tutor could easily work with in the studio.
You’ll usually be asked to present your portfolio, or part of it, for five to ten minutes, and you should assume the interviewer knows nothing about the work. The best tone is open and energised, as if you’re talking to someone who’s curious, not performing for a panel. Tell the story of how each project came about, including the failed experiments, the unexpected discoveries and the things that went wrong. Being open about that stuff shows how you actually think, and it’s what makes a tutor look at you and think, great, I can have a conversation with this person.
In the end, the Bartlett is looking for students who have creative ability, plus the discipline and organisation to keep that creative work going across three demanding years. Strong drawing and making, a willingness to speculate beyond the obvious, and a clear personal thread running through the portfolio: put those together and you’re showing them you’re ready for one of the most rigorous architecture schools in the world.