Portfolio Exam 201

Photographs don’t really do justice to the portfolios so this is going to be a text based blog post but I wanted to use the opportunity to make some general comments about the portfolio exam. We saw some really high quality work and portfolios that really improved upon the project work in terms of presentation and design development. We also saw a few which we felt let down the work and examples of portfolios which were less than the sum of their parts. There were a few things I wanted to highlight, particularly as I believe that the portfolio examination is likely to become an increasingly important part of the way in which design is assessed. The portfolio is also your key to employment!

SELF REFLECTION

We saw various ways of tackling the self reflection part of the portfolio – including very narrative descriptions of the projects to skills audits. Many of you picked up on the need to develop specific skills like CAD, or drawing and presentation etc. Whilst these were valid comments the best self reflections we saw discussed in much more depth your design method. Do you make enough models? Are you the sort of person who tries to entirely formulate the design in their heads before committing to paper or card? Do you feel like you can visualise 3D space? Do you have a library of great architects and buildings in your head? How do you want to develop your design method? These are the sorts of questions you need to ask yourself. Being better at AutoCAD helps – but it won’t make you a great architect. A number of you also contacted me because you had mislaid your feedback sheets. As I explained this didn’t affect our assessment of your work but it did indicate to me that you had discarded the comments that were made in your reviews and the nature of the mark you were given in terms of the assessment criteria. With every assessment you do you should be thinking about why you got the mark you got and what you might do to improve for next time.

PROCESS

The best portfolios were those which were full of development work and where each project told a story about the methods used to develop the design. Good portfolios tended to be full of photographs of models and accompanied with sketchbooks (often 1 per project bulging) with ideas clippings, sketches…etc. Weaker portfolios tended just to have the final projects – with little evidence of development work. For me there are two messages here. One is that the best projects emerge from the most active minds – those people who just create – even if some of that creation leads to dead ends. Second is that it is really important to demonstrate your process. There are no absolutes in architecture and when we look at your design work we are measuring your work against your own expectations and what you were looking to achieve. I was shown around some of the third year work recently where even when the work on the wall didn’t quite match up to the high standard of the students thinking I was shown extensive development work which made up for what I couldn’t see in the final presentation. Its very important therefore that 1) You have a clear design method and 2) You find ways of communicating it as part of your portfolio.

PRESENTATION

We tended to look through the presentation at the quality of the work but there were many and varied ways of presenting the portfolio ranging the professional to the…well…less than professional. Something we observed was that it was much easier to look at the portfolios of those who didn’t use plastic wallets. This will be rather galling for those who spend hundreds of pounds on plastic wallets but it was perfectly reasonable to mount the work on card and stack the sheets loosely in the portfolio file. Some things that you might want to avoid when you put future portfolios together:

Artschoolishness

A tendency, particularly for students who have an art school background, is to pack every page full of graphics and to have, for example a page with 6-10 charcoal drawings with no labels or explanation. There is also a fine line between self expression (using the portfolio as a way of expressing your personality and style or work) and messiness and lack of clarity. Don’t be afraid to let drawings breath – its not unusual to mount an A3 sheet on an A1 board to highlight work that you are prod of and deserves a bit more space. And remember to label things – as tutors we were familiar with your projects but this is not the same for everyone who looks at your portfolio (particularly the external examiner and potential employers).

Fiddleism

We discussed this at the beginning of the year and it crept back on some of the work we looked at in the portfolios. By Fiddleism I mean the tendency to over elaborate the peripheral parts of your presentation – to add many different types of font, to add frames and swirls on the sides of the image or labels. The most impressive portfolios presented the content with clarity and simplicity – keeping single fonts and styles for labeling and not competing for attention with the images.

AND FINALLY…

This marks the end of this blog post and the end of your 1^st year of Architecture School. On behalf of all the teaching staff who have had contact with you this year let me congratulate you on a great year and say that it has been a great pleasure teaching you. We may have contact with you again in later stages of the degree but we will follow your career with interest.

Fragments of Invisible Cities 2011

This year’s work has been, as usual, of a high standard, however, I think that there are some good news stories and some bad news stories.

Overall the quality of the AutoCAD work was much better than I have seen before. A large number of you scored in the 60s with many getting 1sts for this component. The clear message that I got from the AutoCAD work was that if you knew how to draw you know how to create CAD drawings. Common mistakes were not using line weights or using line weights badly (i.e. making the walls a fine line and the toilets a heavy line) and exporting the drawings at low resolutions so they appeared pixilated. In fact poor resolution was a common problem across all the exercises with both Sketchup work and Photoshop work sometimes printed at 50 dpi or less (bearing in mind that we suggested that you print at 200-300 dpi).

SketchUp work was generally good and it was fun to explore your imaginings of your invisible cities. My only concern was that a number of you seemed to rely very heavily on models imported from Warehouse and although its wasn’t always possible to verify which were you own models and which weren’t (I gave extra credit to those people who listed the models they had used from elsewhere). There were a number of commonly used building types which gave the game away.

I think that the weakest aspect of this year’s submission was the Photoshop work. I think a few people had taken the brief to demonstrate their technical skills to the extreme without thought to the output of what they were doing and I was often greeted by muddy, confused, low resolution, filter heavy work. In some cases the printed output probably surprised people when it appeared darker and much less clear than on the screen but in other cases I felt that the Photoshop part of the work was rushed and underdeveloped.

I think the general rule for all these exercises when you get your mark back is that if you are getting a 2:1 or above (60%>) then you are of a good standard for next year but less that 60% you should spend some time over the summer developing your skills.
In previous years I have given prizes (all be it with no actual prizes ) to the best work and I wanted to celebrate some of the hybrid graphics here and explain why I liked them.

BEST OF THE YEAR – Rumen Dimov
My Favourite image of the year was Rumens Cover graphic (which was also used on the cover of his portfolio). While the image seems very simple it is composed of 8 different layers with subtle changes to lighting and contrast and light and the best use of filters I’ve seen. The result is seamless and beautifully framed.

MOST DISNEY LIKE – Michael Pybus

One of the thinks that surprised me about many of your interpretations of Invisible Cities was how conservative they were. But, just occasionally I was something that really explored the full fantasy potential of the project. This image by Michael Pypus could have come straight out of a Disney animation. It consists of more than 24 layers with some very subtle effects using highly transparent layers added on top of another to achieve images like fog for example. This sort of image is really not easy to do and you can’t get this kind of output from a 3D renderer.

MOST LIKELY TO BE FOUND IN PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 4

This is the kind of thing that you would never get away with in the design module but without the constraints of style or, indeed, gravity Muyan has created something which could either be a computer game level or the set of a movie. The work was also supported with some really nice preparatory drawings.

MOST SOPHISTICATED MODELLING: Ruta Austrina

While this model looks deceptively simple its worth noting that each of the bricks in the arch is a separate element and the model is precisely organised to allow all the cables to be properly joined up. I like the Lawrence of Arabia theme in the hybrid graphic as well!

MOST ACCOMPLISHED TEXTURING AND LAYERING – Rachel Leatherbarrow
Rachel worked with a combination of textures and drawing directly on to the models to create these ruins and this was accompanied by some simple but very affective Photoshop work to add some depth to the shadows and hint at the ghostly presence of people.

MOST…CYBERSPACEY: Matthew Pratt
With digital graphics and rendering there is, what we might call, a digital vernacular. Computers are very good a producing complex surface geometries and highly fluid/metallic textures. For this exercise Matthew really played with these techniques and the results are exciting. A word of caution though, unless you can work out a way of building out of pure mercury real buildings tend to be made of material stuff with seams and joints and it’s important not to get seduced by the purity of shapes and surfaces you can achieve in a computer.

Campus 2021: Feedback for 2011

I’ve finally got through tallying the marks and finalising the grades which should be ready to pick up when you get back (wait for an email form Carolyn to tell you when). I’m afraid that this blog post is also imageless at the moment because the photographs I took on the day have been corrupted in my camera so will have to wait until I receive the A3s and update later.

Overall we were very impressed with this years work – particularly since this is the first master planning type exercise you have ever done and the first time you have been asked to do serious site analysis. Most people treated the exercise with huge enthusiasm and professionalism and the results showed. The marks, in keeping with the tradition of group projects where generally not middling with no one really excelling into the high 70s or 80s but very few dropping significantly below 50. As usual though, as long as you have passed and learned something that’s good enough for us!

This is not the best medium for extensive feedback but just a few notes made by the reviewers which refer more generally to the overall assessment. I also encourage you to go back over the comments I made to last year’s work which could also refer to much of the stuff we saw:

Selection Selection Selection!

By far the biggest challenge we saw was in the selection of the images used in the A1 presentation. There were a number of instances where we saw A1 presentations which we judged to be of 2.2 or even 3rd standard where the supplementary work submitted was easily of a 1st standard. The instruction to reviewers was to mark ‘what is on the wall’ and while the supplementary information was referred to we took the decision to stick to that rule. Remember that you wall presentation is there to both show your design but also to argue for why it is the way it is. In this instance (given the competition context) you really needed to edit your site analysis in such a way to persuade the audience that your design decisions have been made for the right reasons.

Understanding 3D

A common problem was mistaking the idea of a masterplan as only a plan. The key to getting this exercise right was to understand that you are planning for 3-dimensional volumes on a 3 –dimensional site. The best proposals were those that used section and/or 3 dimensional studies to give their building proposition weight and volume and to tackle issues of access on multiple levels.

Oral Presentations

It was noted by one of the reviewers that in many cases those for whom English is a second language did better in the oral presentation that native English speakers. We put this down to the fact that often overseas students tended to prepare better taking notes and structuring their presentations where as often native English speakers relied on their own improvisation so the story they told tended to be much less clear, disordered and also untimed. The oral presentation is very important and you should structure your story logically and make sure that you practice what you intend to say before time and make notes of the main points you want to discuss and their order.

Group working

Inevitably group working is challenging and I think it would be accurate to say that most students don’t enjoy group work projects. Despite this working in groups is a reality of virtually all professions and a key skill we must develop to give you professional accreditation with the RIBA. This means that you will do at least one group work project (or project with a significant group work component) every year. The groups that seemed to work best were those where roles were clearly assigned with each member given specific responsibly but with an overall sense of direction. Groups which worked less well tended not to collaborate but each take a section of the design each or where there was a lack of leadership. There were a couple of instances where I felt that group members were passengers in the process and did very little. We have decided to give everyone in all groups the same mark but I think there are a number of people who need to ask themselves whether they deserve a grade earned by other people in the team.

So now to the good stuff – the winning entries. This year I decided to give three prizes which reflect the way we characterise different projects and shows that quality is not necessarily done on a single dimension. So the prizes are:

COMPETITION WINNER

This goes to Group 33! It’s interesting to note that this was not the highest scoring design (in fact it got a high 2:1) but a combination of a very high level of presentation (elements of which we felt where clear to a non-professional) and a thorough 3D knowledge of the site meant that this was a clear competition win. We also felt that this was the convincing attempt we saw to join up the museum to the rest of the Campus and created a really exciting new public space.

BEST MARK

The best mark went to Group 31. The overall design was, by far, the most accomplished we saw with extensive background work and a very well worked out master plan – presented beautifully and with clarity.

TUTORS FAVORITE

You might think that the tutors favourite would get the best mark but not in this case. I think for its sheer audaciousness in creating an entirely new civic core for the city and the extraordinary level of research that went into coming up with the design we wanted to give a special mention to Group 32 for making us excited about the master planning exercise and really understanding what it could do for the campus.