2026 Entry.

This portfolio was made by one of our students applying to USC and WashU for their undergraduate architecture programs, and was accepted to both for 2026 entry.

The portfolio, titled Organic Instrumentality, takes as its subject the natural world and humanity’s place within it, specifically the idea that the environment is composed of agentive actors, forces and materials that push back, that have their own intentions. This is not a theme applied from the outside; it is consistent across every project and present equally in the personal statement, making the whole application read as a single document rather than a collection of parts. The conceptual framework draws from the student’s IB Environmental Systems and Society curriculum, and what is impressive is how fully it has been developed.

Inventing media

The most immediate evidence of this is the investigation into what the student calls “feral” inks, homemade pigments drawn from scavenged copper scraps and foraged oak galls. Control of these inks is relinquished, they are let to move unpredictably across paper, and the results observed. The work that results is less about mark-making than about attending to how matter behaves when pressure is removed: the capillary pull of fiber, the spread of oxidized metal across a wet surface.

A similar logic governs the seashore cyanotypes, where light-sensitive paper is weighted down with rocks on the sand and seawater is let to wash over and develop it. The environmental conditions do the formal work. The paper is photographed in situ, weighted and waiting, and the image communicates the sincerity of the process as clearly as the finished cyanotype does.

Space and materials

The copper sculpture extends this inquiry into three dimensions. The piece began with a long series of models in paper and cardboard, studies in aperture and mass, in what happens when you cut a hole through a solid thing. The final object is both ocular and kinesthetic: it asks the viewer to move around it, to find the light changing through its opening. The student comes to metalworking through family tradition, which grounds the material choice in something other than novelty. The vocabulary used to describe the work, aperture, mass, malleable properties, shows that the conceptual language of spatial thinking was already being built before any formal architectural training.

Recordings

The studies of motion show the same attentiveness. A series of digitally manipulated video stills from mountain biking, a technique called datamoshing in which frames bleed into each other, attempts to hold the feeling of moving through space rather than its geometry. These are printed on metallic Hahnemühle paper, which retains something of a screen’s luminosity, and the choice is purposeful: the work is about the experience of flow, and the surface reinforces that.

Elsewhere, a gestural charcoal sketch made during a boat regatta compresses movement into a single mark, the whole arc of a sail across water rendered as one continuous gesture. Charcoal is chosen for its malleability, a material decision that mirrors the fluid nature of the subject, and the result is notation for motion rather than a record of a fixed thing.

Design and speculation

The speculative pollinator device is perhaps the portfolio’s most formally ambitious piece. The student proposes a structure that responds to passive environmental stimuli, solar heat and air currents, to support declining pollinator populations. The formal inspiration comes from the Portuguese Man O’ War, a colonial organism whose body functions as a sail. The iterative sketches show how the idea was worked through: testing proportions, thinking about how the form might move, how it might invite insects rather than simply accommodate them. The project synthesizes inputs from climate science, insect biology, and atmospheric physics into a coherent design proposal. It is architectural in the sense that matters most here, a proposal about how a form interacts with its environment and occupies space, without defaulting to building design.

Thinking by doing

The IB Studio Art clay sculpture works from a different set of constraints. It is built using only the hands, refusing tools in order to leave a direct physical imprint in the material. The fluidity of clay under hand pressure becomes the subject as much as any final form. The pencil and pen-and-ink sketches made alongside the sculpture are included, and together they show how the student moves between formats, using drawing to think through what making is doing, and making to test what drawing proposes.

Attention

The observational watercolor sketches from a program in Normandy round out the portfolio’s range. Studies of weathered barns and boats demonstrate careful looking and accurate rendering, while choices about where to heighten contrast or exaggerate light show that observation and interpretation are happening simultaneously. These are not documentary records but considered responses to what is found worth attending to.

The responsibilities of an architect

A solar installation made as a Community, Activity, and Service project extends the portfolio’s environmental concerns into the civic realm, proposing alternative energy infrastructure as a form of collective agency. It demonstrates that thinking about natural and built systems carries a sense of social responsibility alongside the formal curiosity.

Convincing and natural development

Across all of this, the presentation is restrained and consistent. Descriptions note medium, size, and process, and let the work carry the argument. Development work sits alongside finished pieces throughout, and failed experiments are present too, which is where the thinking is most visible. The portfolio reads as a record of a process rather than a curated selection of outcomes, and the consistency of concern across such different materials and scales is what makes it convincing.