Architecture Student Guide: Vol 1

Open the series with the first crit. Meet the project and start interrogating the narrative, the one-line argument that drives the three or four decisions everything follows from. The student walks through a Brussels site responding to MVRDV's master plan, an aeroponic farm with an educational lead, and a brewery next door. Adam stress-tests every assumption: who is the scheme for, what problem it solves, and whether the educational angle or the production angle leads. The session sets the spine that the rest of the volume builds on.

Lock the narrative with precedents. Translate the one-liner into programme by stress-testing it against real spaces that work. The student presents farm, community kitchen, market, and a micro enterprise hub borrowed from a zero-waste shop in Greenwich, plus a flexible festival space that overflows into the courtyard or the neighbouring brewery's operable wall. Every space is pressure-tested against the narrative: is the educational aspect leading, or is the production hijacking it? The session locks the programmatic brief that becomes the adjacency diagram in lesson three.

Learn the right way to move from programme to plan: adjacency diagram before CAD. Entrance, farm, festival space, and delivery emerge as the four big wins, with everything else orbiting them. The student then develops a first floor plan in AutoCAD: a bazaar-style market structure, male/female/accessible toilets, a harvesting-to-storage-to-kitchen flow, and an operable wall onto the brewery. The plan gets read back against the diagram and the moments that don't follow through get flagged. The session ends with a working draft strong enough to take into 3D.

See why getting into 3D early matters. Adam drives the SketchUp model directly, the only session in the series where the mentor takes the wheel. He builds the massing live: 80-sided arc forms snapped to a semicircle, component-ified glazing bars with 50mm reveals, 400mm walls, and shadow gaps where elements meet so the building reads with depth from the street. The session is also about working method: getting into 3D early and frequently catches plan decisions you cannot see flat. The student takes the techniques back into their own model between sessions.

Add the spatial drama that lifts a scheme from competent to compelling. The brewery operable wall becomes the anchor for shared events with the neighbour. The student swaps the communication and market spaces so the market can spill into the brewery, and the fully glazed ground-floor entrance is positioned to frame the historic building next door, and the elevation reads as a three-part split inspired by the historic neighbour. The session reframes the move as a real planning argument: "I'm transitioning from the historic building into mine." The contextual logic carries through to the submission.

Run a thorough design crit. Walk the plan space by space and pressure-test every move. A new education room behind the farm where visitors land after a 40-minute farm tour, stacked toilets so the services align floor to floor, and dining and sofa living pushed to the front for the view to the historic building. The festival no longer needs its own room. It overflows into the lobby, the courtyard, or the historic building itself. The session pushes back on a decorative atrium dome the student is considering: "you're adding fuss for no good reason." It closes with a clear instruction: the plan is strong, the 3D model needs to catch up.

Learn how to present your project with confidence. Adam takes the project solo and picks the key 3D views that will carry the submission. The session opens with the principle that better projects are decisive about what they show: sandwich flows and double-height drama at the entrance, a symmetrical centre-of-the-barrel-vault shot, the reception positioned to read instantly without breaking the main view through. The reception that sits too far off to the side gets queried; the line of the surrounding walls suggests where it should go. The takeaway: "don't try and wake up the whole model. Really focus your attention."

Polish the final submission document with the discipline that gets people through a real planning meeting. No pixelated images. They're called an absolute sin, and Photoshop's Hue/Saturation Colorize brings a mixed-resolution sheet onto one palette. Messy arrows pointing at areas of interest get replaced with numbered circles and a clean side-key. The session closes by tying submission discipline back to professional life. Presenting in town halls, where the same themes apply: be decisive, look polished, don't waste pages.