The making of an architect (chapter 3)

The "Project" is the core of architecture studies. A process that slowly turns you into an architect. Why did it sometimes feel as climbing a mountain in the dark or dying at the shores of Normandy?

The highlight, the jewel in the crown of our dense and impossible schedule, was the project class. It had its own pace, its own rules, and was a world unto itself. Most other subjects took between an hour and a half to four hours of study per week. The project class took 6-8 hours ‘officially’ but in reality: it consumed entire lives. To pass the project class, you had to dedicate dozens of hours beyond the 40 hours of weekly frontal lessons (throughout the studies for the first degree).

The “project” was your life. The project was your obsession. You would dream about it (literally), after falling asleep on the thin parchment papers “I’ll just rest my head here for a few minutes, I swear, just a few minutes”. It would haunt you for days and you’d find yourself frantically grasping for a piece of paper and a pencil - eager to scribble something down—some solution, some idea—before you forgot it, even in the middle of the night, in the middle of a meal, or in the middle of a party.

Working on the project was always a race against the clock where you tried to grasp some intangible, unarticulated concept, stumbling and falling in the darkness of your inexperience and lack of understanding, drawing time and again then erasing again hesitant pencil or Rotring lines on the crackling transparent paper. striving to grasp what the hell you were actually doing and how you could possibly “design space,” what defines it, and why nothing fits with anything else. Every achievement you thought you’d made and every victory you thought you’d won turned out to be nothing more than a mirage—a vision, a fata morgana. Every workshop inhabitant a year above you would snort in disdain at your hesitant lines and wonder aloud, “What the hell are you doing?” Sometimes, they’d lean over and shadow your drawings under the merciless glow of the architect’s lamp, which shone like a relentless sun all night. Then they would utter words and etch their own lines that would destroy everything, questioning it all, making you despair so much so, that very often you would find yourself throwing hours of “work” into the trash or just onto the workshop floor, already covered in scraps of plans of every kind and colour as well as the mandatory cigarette butts and the occasional broken pieces of utility knives.

When you finally had some concept, some idea you decided to run with to the end, you’d immediately take a gray poster board, press the metal ruler against it, and start cutting it (sometimes with bits of your fingers along the way…) trying to be as precise and “clean” as possible. You’d glue piece to piece roughly, trying to understand how this monstrosity you conceived would look in three dimensions. If you were lucky, this model, which the French called "maquette d’étude" (study model), was built the day before the project class. Often, the model was built two or three hours before the class. Building a model more than a day before class would earn you looks of admiration and disbelief. It couldn’t be that this idiot “had it all figured out” so quickly that he allowed himself to transfer his half-baked ideas into tangible, reflective 3D form.

Then, on the project day, with fear and trembling, you’d ascend to one of those small classrooms above the workshop, almost always feeling like you were rising from the dark dungeons of the Colosseum to the arena where you and your pathetic models would be torn to pieces.

And that’s really how it was. In the classroom sat the project teacher, dressed in black, sometimes with a tweed jacket. In his left hand, a cold beer from the "cafette" (the school bound strange hybrid of a cafeteria and pub with particularly disgusting food), and in his right hand, a lit cigarette or cigar. In front of him, a dirty ashtray, and