Architectural Education vs Architectural Reality

By: Aimee Lawson

In the field, our team is made up of architects and architectural designers, but to make a building work, we need to coordinate with other trades such as general contractors, structural, civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers, among many others. In school, we learned that Architects need to be a jack-of-all-trades because they work with so many different types of buildings and people every single day; this made sense to me at the time, but I did not realize how true this statement was until I started working in the field.

When I was at the University of Florida earning my Bachelor’s degree, there were many unknowns about how different working in the field would be compared to studying architecture as a student. I have since learned that coordination skills are in high demand. In school, we had plenty of group projects, but our teams were all architecture students receiving a similar education in developing strong individual design skills to use as a base for coordinating with other trades in the future. Looking back, I would have loved doing more projects with some of the other colleges within the university towards the latter half of my education when my own design skills were developed enough to manage a balance between my design and making it work with the other trades.

Now, after three and a half years in the field, I understand the true need to coordinate across trades. We, as Architects and Designers, gather information from all types of trades, almost like another language, and overlay, transpose and mend them together with our own knowledge and ideas to create a beautiful, functional, and cohesive building. It is much like a puzzle: you can open the box and have all the pieces, but only patience, time, and dedication will make them fit together to create a masterpiece.