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11 pages from an accepted portfolio to the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL.

2026 Entry, MEng ARB/RIBA Part 1.

The cover page of an accepted portfolio to the Bartlett School of Architecture for their MEng program. The cover page shows a drawing, the student's name, summary, and contents list.

This portfolio was made by one of our students applying to the Bartlett UCL for 2026 entry.

It’s ten pages plus a cover page, and the projects cover a lot of ground: wire sculptures that started with a drum kit, street furniture based on fingerboarding, diagrams of basketball plays, a perspective study, and two solar ovens tested and plotted on graphs. On paper those projects don’t have much to do with each other, and that’s fine. What ties them together is the way the student works. Each project starts with something they actually care about, and then they follow it through drawings, models and measurements until it becomes something spatial.

Overview

The cover page gets the practical information across quickly: the student’s name, a short summary and a contents list. That matters, because schools skim these things incredibly fast, and a clear cover page sets the reader up for everything that follows. All five projects listed are self-driven, which tells admissions straight away that this student makes work off their own back, not just when a class asks them to. That kind of self-initiative is hard to fake, and it’s exactly what schools like the Bartlett are looking for. The background sketch is a good choice too. It isn’t a building design (Architecture with a capital A), it’s an abstract spatial drawing, which gives us a much better sense of how the student sees things. And the graphic design stays out of the way, so the work comes right to the front.

A page of an accepted portfolio to the Bartlett School of Architecture for their MEng program. The page shows three large images of models, and three photographs.
A page of an accepted portfolio to the Bartlett School of Architecture for their MEng program. The page shows a large drawing on the right, and smaller development work on the left.

Music’s relevance

Rhythmic Processes, on pages one and two, starts with drumming, which is something personal to the student, and moves into architectural ideas without forcing it. The drum kit is a three-dimensional object, it gets abstracted into two-dimensional line drawings, and those lines get turned back into three-dimensional wire sculptures. Going from 3D to 2D and back again is a very architectural thing to do, because that’s basically what architects do all day: translate between the world around them and the page. The project doesn’t feel planned out from the start; it feels like the student was working things out by making them. Wire and tracing paper bring in light, shadow and material, which are some of the most fundamental parts of space. Then the hybrid drawings put the different iterations together on one sheet without trying to tidy them into a final answer, which is a good instinct. The photography is worth mentioning too. It’s of the student’s own sculptures, which is exactly how photography should be used in an architecture portfolio.

A page of an accepted portfolio to the Bartlett School of Architecture for their MEng program. The page shows a large painting on the right, and three sets of drawings on the left, with some small models.
A page of an accepted portfolio to the Bartlett School of Architecture for their MEng program. The page shows a series of model photographs.

Similar to architectural models

Skatepark Prototype, on pages three and four, takes fingerboarding (skateboarding with your fingers on a miniature board) as its starting point. It’s niche, but that’s what makes it interesting. It’s a type of movement most people wouldn’t think to design for, and the project uses it to ask how street space could be organised differently. The student references the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, and it doesn’t read as name-dropping, because you can see his sculptural forms working their way into the drawings. From there, elevation drawings become scaled paper models, and the ideas change as they go. The project might end up as a piece of street furniture, or it might not, and the student doesn’t pretend to know. That openness is a good thing. In a ten-page portfolio, a project like this is really a conversation starter: something a tutor would want to ask you about at interview.

A page of an accepted portfolio to the Bartlett School of Architecture for their MEng program. The page shows a large set of notational drawings and some source imagery.
A page of an accepted portfolio to the Bartlett School of Architecture for their MEng program. The page shows a large painting, two small models and two small drawings.

Inventing drawn notation

Basketball Analysis, on pages five and six, invents a way of drawing something that’s hard to draw: players moving around a court. The student took plays from an Olympic final and mapped them as two-dimensional diagrams, treating the court as an abstract spatial environment. That’s not far off what architectural drawings do. A construction drawing tells someone how to build a space without being the space itself, and these diagrams do something similar for movement. The project then moves into an acrylic painting and finally a mobile sculpture, which brings in ideas about balance and dynamic equilibrium. Each medium tells us something different about the same plays. The page hierarchy is clear as well, meaning a large main image on each page with smaller development studies supporting it, so we know where to look and can take in a lot of information quickly.

A page of an accepted portfolio to the Bartlett School of Architecture for their MEng program. The page shows a range of drawings.

Inventing tools

Perspective Study makes it clear that this was done at the Bartlett summer school, which is important practical information. It shows admissions that the student has already spent time in that studio environment and knows what it asks of you, and it gives the portfolio a good balance between independent work and work done in a class.

A page of an accepted portfolio to the Bartlett School of Architecture for their MEng program. The page shows a physics experiment.
A page of an accepted portfolio to the Bartlett School of Architecture for their MEng program. The page shows detailed drawings of a physics experiment.

Actual experiments

Solar Oven Experiments, on pages eight and nine, brings in the technical side of architecture: building science and environmental design. The student built two ovens, one from cardboard and one from wood, measured how well each one held heat, and plotted the results on graphs. This is one of the few times the word experimental really applies, because something was clearly being tested, there was a hypothesis, and there were measurable outcomes. The cross-sections and icons make the data easy to read at a glance, which matters when admissions are skimming. The project also doesn’t feel cut off from the rest of the portfolio. The same curiosity is there; it’s just pointed at how materials perform instead of how they look. It suggests a student who would be as interested in resolving a building detail as in making a sketch.

A page of an accepted portfolio to the Bartlett School of Architecture for their MEng program. The page shows a range of observational pencil drawings.

Observational drawing

The final page, Various Works and Processes, includes observational drawings of teapots and fountains. Observational drawing is very high value to architecture schools, and it’s often the first thing they look for, because it shows that you can translate the three-dimensional world onto a page. These are drawn from life, not from photographs, which makes all the difference. There are also blind drawings and raw sketches from the drum project, which show how the student actually works: setting their own rules and then sticking to them. It’s a looser page than the rest, and that’s okay. It lets us see the basic skills behind the more complex projects earlier in the portfolio.

What makes this portfolio work is that none of the projects started out as architecture. They started with drumming, fingerboarding, basketball and a question about how materials hold heat, and the student followed each one through drawing, making and measuring until it became spatial. There’s a good range, from loose exploratory work to precise technical testing, and a good mix of independent and class-based projects. Most importantly, it’s clear the student made this work because they wanted to, and admissions can tell.