2026 entry.

This portfolio was made by one of our students applying to USC and WashU for their undergraduate architecture programs, and he was accepted to both for 2026 entry. He applied to a mix of five-year BArch programs and four-year BA and BS programs. Five-year BArch programs are professionally accredited, so they take the portfolio very seriously. Four-year programs usually take it a bit less seriously, because there’s less studio time, but WashU is a very good four-year program, and this version of the portfolio was put together with WashU in mind.

It’s 18 pages and covers about five or six projects, which is about average. The portfolio is titled Organic Instrumentality, and the cover page says it explores the natural world and humanity’s place within it. Then it gets more specific: objects and processes have agency of their own. In other words, the materials and processes he works with pull against his intentions, and he lets them. That’s quite an advanced idea for an undergrad applicant. If you want to read up on it, look at object-oriented ontology and Timothy Morton’s writing. The idea came partly out of his IB Environmental Systems and Society course, and it runs through every project and through his personal statement too, so the whole application hangs together.

I want to be clear about themes, though, because students ask about them a lot. You don’t get into architecture school because you had a theme. You get in because you can organise your thoughts and put them across clearly in a PDF. A theme is just one way of doing that. It doesn’t have to cover the whole portfolio, and it doesn’t have to be linear. Admissions will flick through this in a few minutes and probably pick up about 20% of the ideas, and that’s okay. 20% of a sophisticated portfolio is still a lot more than 20% of a thin one.

Inventing media

In Ink Flows, he made his own “feral” inks from naturally found things: copper oxide from scavenged copper scraps, and ink from foraged oak galls. Then he let them move across the paper however they wanted to and watched what happened, like how the ink is pulled along the paper fibres and how the oxidised metal spreads across a wet surface. Honestly, this one is quite hard to relate to architecture, and that’s fine. Not every project has to be architectural. You could write a whole thesis on object-oriented ontology and how ink behaves on a page, or you could just flick through and think, what a beautiful set of work. Both are valid. The page is also well organised, with a nine-square grid of ink trails, and the copper and oak gall inks labelled on the left. If you’re ever confused by a page, the medium label should tell you what’s going on, and here it does.

The seashore cyanotypes work in a similar way. He weighted light-sensitive paper down with rocks on the beach and let the seawater wash over it and develop it, so the landscape does the work. His description talks about the landscape as an agent, imprinting the work instead of being represented by it, and that’s the best kind of mindset to bring to a portfolio. Constable, Turner and Georgia O’Keeffe all painted beautiful landscapes, but it’s 2026, and we know we can paint landscapes. Leaving cyanotype paper on a beach to see what happens might be a more relevant landscape painting now. He also photographed the paper in place, weighted down and waiting, which shows us the process as clearly as the final print does.

So how is that architectural? Architects make drawings and renders all day, and the tools they use (a CAD program, an AI visualisation, a pencil on paper) affect what gets built and how. Those media have their own agency in architecture. An architect looking at this page is going to be interested, and there isn’t a building in sight. That’s the sweet spot.

Space and materials

The copper sculpture, Portal, is very straightforward. There are no infographics or complicated diagrams. He was just trying to make a hole in a sculpture. But that’s a fundamentally architectural idea: at what point does a hole become a hole, or space become space, or an object become an object? Is a sculpture something you look at, or something you move around and experience with your body? As you walk around this one, the opening and the light through it change. You could take those questions to PhD level, or you can do what he does here, which is make a really good sculpture, photograph it well, and hint at the ideas lightly. He comes to metalworking through family tradition, so the material choice has a reason behind it, and words like aperture, mass and malleability in his description show he was already thinking spatially before any architectural training.

The development work is crucial. He made a long series of models in paper and card first, testing what happens when you cut through a solid form, and then made the final piece in copper. That’s basically what garment makers do with pattern cutting, testing in a cheap material before cutting the final fabric, and he could have taken the project down that route if he’d wanted to.

Recordings

Machine Dreams is a quick one-page digital project, and it’s useful because it shows admissions he can work digitally as well as by hand. He took video of himself mountain biking and datamoshed it, a technique where the frames bleed into each other, to try to capture the feeling of moving through a trail instead of its geometry. It’s really a project about media. Can a still from a video feel as dynamic as actually riding through a forest? How much of that is the artist, and how much is the software? Asking those questions in the description box is exactly the right thing to do. The stills are printed on metallic Hahnemühle paper, which keeps some of the glow of a screen, so the material choice backs up the idea.

Then there’s a charcoal drawing of a boat tacking, made during a regatta. This one isn’t trying to prove anything. It’s more like, I’m interested in boats, I noticed how they move, here’s a drawing of that, which is totally fine. The whole arc of the sail across the water is compressed into one continuous gesture, and charcoal suits that because it smudges and moves easily. When we talked about it, we looked at Dan Flavin, the American artist best known for his light sculptures, who also made some boat drawings with a similar sense of motion. If he wanted to take it further, he could look at Eadweard Muybridge, who studied space and time through photography, and ask how you could do the same thing just through drawing.

Design and speculation

Passive Solar Pollinator is a strange and really quite wonderful project. He imagined a device that runs on passive environmental stimuli, solar heat and air currents, to help with declining pollinator populations. It uses a passive solar balloon for lift and fabric surfaces to catch the breeze, so it can float over fields and pollinate them. The form comes from the Portuguese Man O’ War, a sea creature whose body works as a sail. It was never built, and that doesn’t matter. What matters is the creative interest to speculate about something that doesn’t exist yet and to draw it. It’s more advanced than a doodle, but it has a doodle’s playfulness.

The development sketches test proportions and how the form might move. Notice there’s no scientific enquiry here. There could have been, and that would have been fine too, but his strength is drawing, so the project is carried by drawings instead of infographics. If his strength had been in quantitative, analytical work and his drawing was weaker, I’d have wanted to see simulation diagrams or some software he’d written to work out how the device might function. Play to where you’re strong. It’s architectural without being a building: it’s about how a form sits in its environment and occupies space.

Thinking by doing

The clay sculpture came from his IB Studio Art class. He built it using only his hands, no tools, so the material carries a direct imprint of the making, and the pencil and pen-and-ink sketches alongside it show him moving between drawing and making. It’s not one of the stronger projects, and that’s fine. This student did his best work on independent projects, where he had free rein to follow his own interests and talk them through with us. A class project with a set brief and lots of other students is less personal, so you end up with something interesting that doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel. It’s still worth including, because it gives the portfolio a range between class work and independent work.

Attention

The watercolours from a program in Normandy are observational paintings of weathered barns and boats. They show his observational skill, which is very important for architecture school. The barn is particularly good in terms of materiality, meaning how textured and heavy the materials feel. He also makes choices about where to push the contrast or exaggerate the light, so he’s interpreting what he sees as well as recording it. Crucially, these were painted from life. Painting from a photograph doesn’t prove much, because the translation from 3D to 2D has already been done by the camera.

The figure painting that ends the portfolio reminds me of Henry Moore, and actually more of Moore’s own drawings and paintings than his sculptures. I’m biased, because I like Henry Moore, but it’s a great page to end on. The end page is on screen longest, and this one ties back to the relationship between people and the natural world that the whole portfolio is about.

The responsibilities of an architect

The solar project, made for his IB Community, Activity and Service (CAS) requirement, is complex but very rewarding. He put masking tape on a solar panel, which obviously makes the panel less efficient. That’s known from the start, and it doesn’t matter, because this isn’t a project about solar panel efficiency. It’s an arts project that uses a solar panel, and the description explains that the taped pattern maps pulsars, the way they’re charted across the sky, onto the panel. It’s about as scientific as Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, which is a very architectural piece: concrete tunnels in the desert lined up with the sun, with sight lines you look through and spaces you walk through. This feels like a 2026 version of that.

What I like is that he isn’t claiming to save the world. A high school student isn’t going to fix the energy crisis, and solving energy problems is best left to scientists and energy consultants. What he can do is connect energy to wider ideas, and that starts to break the cycle of treating every environmental issue as a quantitative problem with a neat solution, which can easily slide into greenwashing. This project is a commentary on the relationship between energy production and art, and that’s a much more interesting place for an applicant to be.

Convincing and natural development

He also made a drawing tool, and this one resonates with me, because when I was an undergrad at the Bartlett they were obsessed with students making drawing tools and using them to design architecture. The point is that the tools you use to design buildings will always have their own agency in what you end up building, so why not design a drawing tool now and see what difference it makes? Here he lets the tool do what it wants and then has the sensitivity to enjoy what it made. His part in it is small, and he’s happy with that. It’s almost a project about teamwork, except his teammate isn’t a person. That’s very advanced for an undergraduate applicant.

Across the whole portfolio, the presentation is restrained and consistent. The description boxes give the medium, size and process, and then let the work speak. There’s development work next to the finished pieces throughout, and he includes experiments that didn’t work, which is often where you can see the thinking most clearly. It reads like a record of how he works instead of a selection of polished outcomes. And because the same interest in agency shows up across inks, copper, video, clay and solar panels, the whole thing is convincing.