2026 entry.

The applicant and the portfolio

The above video shows work from a student applying for 2026 entry to master’s programmes in the United States, among them the University of Virginia and Cornell, both for their MArch 1 tracks. MArch 1 programmes are the professional degrees open to applicants from outside architecture, which means an undergraduate degree in the subject is not required and anyone can apply. This applicant had studied studio art as an undergraduate, along with a few minors, and it was the studio art that led her toward architecture. She was in the final year of college when she applied, and came to us for six months of tutoring.

What follows is not the whole portfolio. It is roughly two-thirds of it at most, the projects I felt able to discuss at length. The pages left out met more conventional architectural expectations: physical making, model building, Arduino circuitry, installation design, the sort of three-dimensional work most people picture when they think of architecture school. The pages kept here are the drawing-based, more artistic side of her practice, and there is enough in them to talk through in detail.

The cover page

The cover page carries a short description of the work: it communicates how architectural space transforms through light and marks. The sentence is brief, and the brevity is the point. In a visual portfolio the work does the elaborating, so the text can stay short, and overloading it with explanation tends to work against the images. Below the description is a note on where the projects came from, which places them in the last four years of college and frames them as a studio practice developed over that time. An art student can pass through college without arriving at a defined studio practice, so naming one gives the reader something to assess. A practice is expected to change afterward, and there is no reason it should be fixed; the portfolio records what the practice was at the point of application, which then gives the applicant something to consolidate herself within when a reader looks at the work.

The cover image shows the drawings at scale. When the student first showed me this work I took the images for photographs. They are in fact large drawings, and the cover photo establishes that before the work itself appears. It is not doing much informational work so much as conveying physical size, so that the drawings that follow can be read as things made in a real space, at a scale you can picture her working across, rather than as pictures on a screen.

Project 1: translating between two and three dimensions

The first project comes directly from a college course and concerns translation between three-dimensional and two-dimensional space, setting up relationships between mark making and photography or modelling. It is a simple idea, and the practical information sits at the top of each image: the portfolio title, the project title, the context in which it was made, which is the drawing studio at the college, and the date. The date matters because it tells the reader the work is recent rather than something from many years earlier that would no longer be relevant.

The next page belongs to the same project and develops it. It moves from ideas held purely between two and three dimensions toward the representation of people at scale, an implied occupancy, putting a sense of human scale into otherwise speculative environments built from studies between two dimensions, three dimensions, and shadow. That is about as architectural as an MArch 1 applicant needs to be. Applicants to these programmes usually have little architecture-school experience. Some may have done architectural studies at a school with a graduate architecture programme and can show building-design projects that resemble something a developer might buy, but those students are few, and there is no need to be one of them. In my view it is better to work as she does here, introducing architectural ideas without committing to fixed notions of architectural design, since that design is what architecture school itself will teach.

The uncanny

The drawing on the following page addresses the uncanny, with the keywords evocative, curiosity, unease, investigation, marks, and communication. The method was to build models, light them, photograph them, and then draw them, and the drawings came to resemble the uncanny quality of the models themselves. Part of that is the ordinary strangeness of representing a three-dimensional thing in two dimensions, and part is the quality of the spaces, a kind of solitary, moonlit stillness. The black paper reinforces it. The same type of black paper is used to construct the models that are photographed and to draw over directly for new drawings, so model and drawing share a material. A drawing built from the same paper as the model it depicts is close to being a model itself, and the unease sits partly there.

One image here is a drawing rather than a photograph of a model, though the closeness between the two is again clear. The perspective is immersive, and the eye settles at what reads as ground level, the surface of the earth, established by shadows and marks across the surface, a column rising, and what may be a ramp behind it. These are elements of physical space arrived at without designing any particular building, a hospital or anything else. The ideas stay elemental while the drawing itself, worked in charcoal and pastel, holds attention through surface, light, and shadow. A simple idea carried by convincing drawings does more in a portfolio than an elaborate idea carried by weak ones. An elaborate idea is better served by an essay or a book, which is a separate opportunity; the portfolio should speak directly to tangible things, to drawing, modelling, and making, the physical aspects of a built world.

The models are scrappy, and their purpose is to produce the photographs. The model is used as a tool; a means of investigating something and finding something out, which connects back to the recurring word investigation and to the visible development of work across the projects.

Project 3: colour and shadow

The third project moves beyond black and white to ask how colour and shadow redefine an environment. Form tends to be settled first, since form is usually defined by outline, line, shape, and mass rather than colour, and here colour comes afterward. Colour was the part the student was less sure of, though the results hold up. When we discussed it, what stood out was the absence of any account of procedure. A model lit through coloured paper and photographed does not, on its own, show that a process was tested or that rules were being followed. I suggested some diagrams to record vantage points, how colour maps across the spaces, which colours were used, and where the apertures sat. We talked about fairly architectural options, axonometric drawing and James Stirling’s worm’s eye views, in which you look up through the underside of a building and read its orthographic space experientially rather than through separate plan, elevation, and section. That turned out to be more about worm’s eye drawing than about what this student was drawn to, and admissions want to see where a student is strong and where their mind naturally goes. The diagrams she made are illustrative rather than analytical, small artworks describing basic ideas, and that is enough for what the project needed. Her attention is clearly in the photographs that come out of the models.

Complex forms and monotype

The forms then become more complex. Rather than fixing a determined form and studying it, she works with indeterminate forms shaped in part by the material, with light and shadow treated as part of the whole system from the start rather than applied later. The resulting shadows and forms are of some interest on their own, but more so once the patterns are carried into a new medium, in this case monotype with watercolour on paper. The process is generative, and any of these projects could continue into something else; this one stops here mainly because the portfolio has limited space.

Lumen prints

The last project shown here changes medium again to lumen prints. It is experimental in a real sense, because the outcome of setting up a lumen print was genuinely unknown beforehand. Students often call a project experimental when they mean only that they did not define it well enough, which is a bit of a red flag; here the term is accurate. This is also the project hardest to tie to architectural ideas. The print on the right is striking, which is where the word beauty enters, but it is not obvious what an architect would do with it next. An artist such as Moyra Davey could build a short performance piece around several of these prints, which would suit the work. But it is harder to read them as architectural. A short argument on using them as points of departure for new design briefs might bridge that gap. But not every piece in a portfolio has to be plainly and obviously architectural.