2026 entry.

The applicant and the portfolio

The video above runs through a portfolio made by a student applying for 2026 entry to master’s programs in the US, including UVA (the University of Virginia) and Cornell AAP, for their MArch 1 programs. She got into both, and many more.

MArch 1 programs are the professional programs that accept students coming from a non-architecture background. That means anyone can apply. You don’t need an undergraduate degree in architecture. This student had an undergrad in studio art, along with some other minors that I can’t quite remember now, and it was that interest in studio art that began her interest in architecture. She was in the final year of college when she applied, and she came to us for six months of tutoring.

I think this portfolio is really admirable for its level of sophistication, specifically with drawing. I’ve only extracted a few projects from it. The actual portfolio is longer; what you see here is about two-thirds of it at most, and I’ve just taken the pages I feel I can talk about in more detail. The other projects hit more standard architectural requirements: physically making things, model making, some Arduino circuitry and installation design. That was more 3D work, more what you’d imagine as classically architectural. What’s here is more artistic and based in drawing, but there’s a lot in it, and that’s why I want to go into it.

The cover page

The cover page gives a description of what’s going on: “My work primarily communicates how architectural space transforms through light and marks.” That’s the key part. There’s a lot to talk about within that one quick sentence, and it is a quick sentence. It isn’t a big elaboration, because the work itself is the elaboration. That’s the sweet spot when it comes to explaining work in a visual portfolio: you don’t want to elaborate with too much text.

Then there’s a little practical information about where the projects have mainly come from, so we can root ourselves and get a sense of why this work exists. It comes from the last four years of college, developing a studio practice. That’s nice to read, because you could be an art student at college and never have a studio practice, never define what your interests are. Your practice is going to change over time. That’s just basic growth, and there’s no reason it should be stuck. You make a portfolio that sums up the last four years, submit it, go on to the next program and change your practice. But it’s good to communicate a sense of intention for a practice at that point, because it gives you something to defend. “Defend” isn’t quite the right word. It gives you something to consolidate yourself within, so that a reader can actually assess you.

The cover image matters too. When I first started working with this student, she showed me work like this without any images showing the drawings in a room, so I didn’t know how big they were. I remember thinking, these photographs are cool. And she said yes, they are, these drawings. They weren’t photographs at all. They were massive drawings.

So this is a really helpful photo, because before we even go into the work we get a sense of its scale. The image isn’t informative as such. It sets you up for what’s to come. She hasn’t covered it in text explaining how big everything is and exactly what she’s doing. It just lets us go into the work and think, I see how this lands in a physical space. I can imagine her working in this room, and I know the sizes of drawing she’s dealing with.

Project 1: translating between two and three dimensions

The first project comes directly from a course at college and is about translating between three-dimensional space and two-dimensional space. It’s a very simple idea, introducing some relationships between mark making, photography and modelling. Simple enough. All the practical information you need sits at the top: the title of the portfolio, the title of the project, the context it was made in (the actual name of the drawing studio at her college) and when it was made. The date tells us this wasn’t happening fifteen years ago, in which case it would be irrelevant.

The next page is the same project. We know that because we’ve still got “01 Black and White” at the top. It’s a development, with a little elaboration on that development, and it gets more specific: from pure ideas moving between 2D and 3D to introducing human presence at scale. Not so much program, more injecting a sense of human scale into space. Implied occupancy is a nice term for it: the implied occupancy of people within speculative environments that she was essentially designing through studies between 2D, 3D and shadow.

That’s about as architectural as you’d want to get if you’re applying to MArch 1 programs. If you’re applying to MArch 1, you probably haven’t had much experience of architecture school. You might have done architectural studies at a school with a graduate architecture program, and you might have a bunch of building-designy projects that look like something you’d sell to a developer. But those students are few and far between, and you don’t have to be like that. In my opinion it’s actually better to be like this: introduce ideas that are architectural without committing to preconceived notions of architectural design, because that’s what you’re going to learn at architecture school itself.

The uncanny

I really love this drawing, and I think she hit the nail on the head with how she described it. The project explores the phenomenon of the uncanny, with the key words evocative, curiosity, unease, investigation, marks and communication. She was making models, lighting them, photographing them, and then drawing them and exploring them further in drawings, and the drawings ended up very close to the photographs. That’s part of what’s uncanny about them: the uncanniness of representation itself, of how you represent a 3D project in 2D. But there’s also an uncanniness in the spaces themselves and what they evoke, a kind of solitude, a moonlit space.

Another thing that speaks to the uncanny across this work is the black paper. She uses black paper to make the models she photographs, and she uses the same black paper to draw over directly to make new drawings. So the black paper in the drawings is identical to the black paper in the models. I don’t just mean it’s the same type of paper, though it is. I mean the drawing is essentially a model, because the drawings and the models use exactly the same materials. There’s an uneasiness in that too, and her text sums it up very succinctly.

You can see that in much more detail here, and I think this drawing is really strong. It’s a drawing, not a photograph of a model, but again the tight relationship between models and drawings is very clear. The perspective is so immersive. Our eyes hover at what we take to be ground level, and we read it as ground because we can imagine it as the surface of the earth: there are shadows and marks across it, a column coming up, maybe a ramp in the background. These are elements of physical space, without it being the design of a hospital or whatever it might be. The architectural ideas are elemental, but the drawing is so strong.

You can have the most elaborate idea for a project and the most terrible drawings, or a very clean, simple idea and really convincing drawings. Always go for the latter. If you want to develop an elaborate idea, it’s better to write a book or an essay, and you’ll have the opportunity to do that. Instead, take the time to make your portfolio speak directly to tangible ideas about drawing, modelling and making, the physical aspects of the built world and the environment we live in. This is about mark making. It’s literally about charcoal and pastel, and about surface, light and shadow. Those are physical things, and they’re incredibly immersive and convincing in this drawing.

Project 3: colour and shadow

The third project opens with: “I challenged myself to move beyond black and white to investigate how colour and shadow redefine an environment.” So now we’re moving on. She’s got the form of her projects down (form is normally defined outside of colour, through outline, line, shape and mass) and now she’s going into colour. I think that was something she was less confident about, but she did it very well.

When we talked about this project, what was clear to me was that there was no analysis of the procedure. You can make a model, get some coloured paper, shine some light through it and take a photo, but that won’t necessarily convince anyone there was a process behind it, or analysis, or experimentation. What were the rules, and how were they being tested? So I asked her to think about making some diagrams. They didn’t have to be particularly scientific, just something to show vantage points, how colour maps across the spaces, what the colours were and where the apertures were. She made more of them, and you can see them here.

I remember suggesting some fairly architectural types of drawing to do this. We talked about axonometric drawing, and about James Stirling’s worm’s eye views. If you look those up, you’re looking up through the bottom of his buildings and getting a very experiential sense of the orthographic space inside them, something that can’t be described in plan or elevation or section alone. They have to be described together, as a worm’s eye axonometric. That was probably a bit too much. “Advanced” isn’t the right word, but it was more about worm’s eye drawing than about what this particular student was interested in doing, and that’s what matters for admissions. Admissions want to know what a student is good at and where their mind naturally gravitates.

So the diagrams she ended up making are more like little artworks in their own right. They’re not very analytical. They’re illustrative of some basic ideas, and that’s enough. That’s all you need, and it’s just what was needed here. She didn’t enjoy this part as much, and you can see that. The enjoyment is much more in these photographs, the outcomes of the models, shown nice and large, two next to each other.

Here we completely transcend the model and we’re dealing with the photograph. The model isn’t clear any more, and it isn’t important any more. The point of these scrappy, fairly ugly little models is to make these very beautiful photographs. Model as a tool: something you use to do something, to find something out, to help you investigate. There’s that word again, investigation. It’s not in this text box, but it was in an earlier one, and it’s a very important word. It speaks to the idea of development work, showing all the developments you’ve made in a project.

Complex forms and monotype

Next there’s another large image, something to rest our eyes on and remind us how big these things are and how they’re being developed. It’s interesting, because unlike the cover image, which was a tone setter, this page is part of the projects themselves, showing how light can refract and be colourful in the spaces she’s making. Then she started drawing them again, going from A to B and back to A, except A is a little different this time. It’s a way of never being settled with the end result. There’s no point in finishing a project, because you need to leave your projects open for admissions. And not only for admissions. Even after architecture school, you want an openness in your projects that lets others come in and say, let’s extend this idea, and you want the willingness to go back and change parts. That has to be apparent in an admissions portfolio, because it’s just good practice as an artist or an architect.

Then similar themes, with a different subject. This was about getting more complex with the forms she was making. Instead of making determined forms that would then be studied, these are more indeterminate forms, persuaded by the materials themselves, with shadow and light introduced as part of the whole system and not something applied afterwards. That made some complex shadows and forms, which are interesting in their own right, I suppose. But they’re really more interesting when those patterns are taken into a new medium, in this case monotype with watercolour on paper, and used as a point of departure for new two-dimensional work. It’s all very generative. It would be hard to stop any of these projects, because each one could very easily become something else. This one did sort of stop here, but that’s fine. There’s only so much space in a portfolio.

Lumen prints

This is the last project I’ve got here. Because I’ve shortened the portfolio, it looks like it ends abruptly, but in the real thing this is about two-thirds of the way through. Similar themes again, but now the medium changes to lumen prints. I’d say this one genuinely is experimental, because she didn’t know what was going to happen after setting up each print. That’s what makes it experimental.

You get a lot of students saying “this is an experimental project” when it isn’t. A lot of the time it just means “I didn’t define the project well enough, so I’m calling it experimental.” It’s a kind of cop-out, a real pitfall and a bit of a red flag. Here, the outcome really was unknown.

This is the most difficult project to argue is related to architectural ideas. The image on the right is incredibly beautiful, which is why the word beauty comes up in her text, but it isn’t necessarily something an architect would look at and think, I know where to take this next. An artist like Moyra Davey probably would. She might do a short performance piece around four of these prints, and I think a performance piece based on work like this would be wonderful. But they’re hard to see as architectural. If there were a little mini thesis somewhere about using them as points of departure for new design briefs, maybe. But it’s okay. Not all the work in a portfolio needs to be completely, obviously related to architecture.

That’s the work. I think it’s really strong, and the relationship between drawing and spatial ideas is incredibly clear, which is fundamentally architectural. The grouping is tight, too. The work is open and experimental, but it’s clearly within the student’s wheelhouse. She clearly likes working a certain way, and that’s commendable. Doubling down on your interests is a good thing to do for admissions. If someone tells you to step too far outside your comfort zone, you’ll end up making a lot of bad work that isn’t comfortable for you or anyone else.

Some of this work does step just outside her comfort zone, the colour project and definitely the lumen prints, but not in a way that says “I really didn’t know what I was doing.” It still says “I knew what I was doing, and I was testing my boundaries a bit.” She wasn’t testing them that far. This isn’t fashion design. She wasn’t making garments from her work just for the sake of stepping outside what she’s comfortable with, because that would be doing it for the sake of doing it. Everything is grouped around very clear interests, and you can see that in the quality of the visual work itself.