2026 Entry, MEng ARB/RIBA Part 1.

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

Across ten pages and a cover page, this portfolio traces a consistent way of working: beginning with something personally felt or observed, and following it carefully into spatial, material, and technical territory. The projects range from wire sculptures derived from a drum kit to notational diagrams of basketball plays, from fingerboard-inspired street furniture to solar oven experiments documented through graphs and cross-sections, and what connects them is less a unified style than a shared curiosity and rigour. The applicant moves comfortably between drawing, making, measuring, and representing, and seems equally at ease with open-ended exploration and precise technical thinking. There is an underlying sense that each project was pursued because it genuinely mattered to the person making it, which gives the work as a whole an authenticity that is difficult to manufacture.

Overview

The cover page of this portfolio works because it finds a natural balance between professional clarity and creative openness. Listing five self-driven projects feels less like a calculated move and more like an honest reflection of genuine curiosity and self-motivation, qualities that resonate with institutions like the Bartlett precisely because they can’t be faked. The background sketch is a particularly considered choice because it avoids the trap of presenting Architecture with a capital A (meaning finished professional building designs) and offers instead an abstract spatial document that hints at how the student actually sees and processes the world. This sits naturally with the idea that a portfolio’s real purpose is to make original work legible to admissions panels without letting graphic design overwhelm what the work is actually saying.

Music’s relevance

Rhythmic Processes on pages one and two works because it begins somewhere genuinely personal (drumming) and follows that interest honestly into architectural territory, without forcing the connection. The movement from a three-dimensional object (the drum kit) through two-dimensional line abstractions and back into three-dimensional wire sculptures feels exploratory rather than predetermined, more like thinking through making than demonstrating a technique. Experimenting with light, shadow, and materiality through wire and tracing paper suggests a real willingness to sit with the fundamental elements of space before deciding what they might mean. The hybrid drawings that bring different iterations together show an ability to hold complexity without needing to resolve it too quickly.

Similar to architectural models

On pages three and four, Skatepark Prototype finds something compelling in niche, embodied knowledge (the free movement of fingerboarding) and uses it to quietly question how space is usually organised. Referencing the sculptural language of landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx feels less like name-dropping and more like evidence of someone genuinely absorbing a wide range of visual and intellectual material. The move from elevation drawings to scaled paper models sits in productive uncertainty, where initial ideas are allowed to shift and become something less fixed, something that might one day exist in the world as street furniture, or might not. There is a real openness to not knowing running through the project, which is part of its success.

Inventing drawn notation

Basketball Analysis on pages five and six shows a capacity to invent systems of notation for things that resist easy documentation, namely the fluid, tactical movement of bodies through space. Mapping plays from an Olympic final into two-dimensional diagrams treats the basketball court as a kind of abstracted spatial environment, not unlike the way construction drawings give spatial instructions without being the thing itself. That the project then moves from dense diagrams into an acrylic painting and eventually a mobile sculpture reflects an intellectual restlessness and an interest in dynamic equilibrium that doesn’t settle easily into one medium or one answer. The visual organisation of these pages, with large central images supported by smaller developmental studies, also helps communicate layered ideas without demanding too much of the reader.

Inventing tools

Perspective Study on page seven reveals something about the applicant’s character: a tendency to build their own tools when the right ones don’t exist, in this case a large compass made from wood scraps. The engagement with KPF’s 18 Robinson tower doesn’t try to imitate professional architecture but instead approaches it through inventive drawn representation, which is a more searching and honest type of enquiry. Highlighting work completed during the Bartlett summer school also quietly signals that the student has already spent time inside that studio environment and has some sense of what it asks of you. The focus on distorting views and lenses speaks to a genuine interest in optics as a way of understanding how architects perceive and engage with the world.

Actual experiments

Pages eight and nine, featuring Solar Oven Experiments, address the technical and scientific dimensions of the discipline, including building science and environmental design, without treating them as separate from the more exploratory work elsewhere. Testing two different ovens (one made of cardboard, one of wood) and documenting their heat-retention performance through graphs shows someone who can use research-led design to understand how materials quantitatively perform. Clear cross-sections and combination icons make this experimental data legible even in the kind of rapid review typical of admissions processes. The project suggests a student genuinely interested in resolving building details and technical performance.

Observational drawing

The final page, Various Works and Processes, closes the portfolio quietly but with substance. It includes the observational drawings (teapots, fountains) that admissions panels often look for as evidence of a student’s ability to see and represent the world directly, without mediation through photographs. The blind drawings and raw sketches from the drum project offer a kind of transparency into how this person actually works and thinks, and their willingness to set their own rules and follow them. This page doesn’t try to make a final argument so much as it lets the underlying skills and instincts behind the more complex projects simply become visible.

Across eleven pages, this portfolio traces a consistent way of working: beginning with something personally felt or observed, and following it carefully into spatial, material, and technical territory. The projects range from wire sculptures derived from a drum kit to notational diagrams of basketball plays, from fingerboard-inspired street furniture to solar oven experiments documented through graphs and cross-sections, and what connects them is less a unified style than a shared curiosity and rigour. The applicant moves comfortably between drawing, making, measuring, and representing, and seems equally at ease with open-ended exploration and precise technical thinking. There is an underlying sense that each project was pursued because it genuinely mattered to the person making it, which gives the work as a whole an authenticity that is difficult to manufacture.