The making of an architect (Chapter 1)

How I managed to sneak in to one of Europe's most prestigious Architecture schools and what a complete shock treatment it was for me.

Until after my military service, I didn’t really know what an architect was. I had no idea. I could barely distinguish one from a contractor. I loved biology in high school and was a combat medic, so when I thought about higher education, it was more along the lines of molecular biology or genetics. But my mother (how embarrassing…) told me I should consider architecture instead, and since she knew me better than I was willing to admit, she didn’t just suggest it; she acted on it. One day, she showed up at my shared apartment in Tel Aviv and dropped off a box of no less than 15 books on architecture that she borrowed (as was her privilege being a Ph.D. student at the time) from TA University.

Now, books are my weakness. I absolutely love reading, and from a young age, I was always taught that "everything is in books," so I couldn’t refuse. I vaguely remember what was in the pile, it included a very good translation of "De Architectura" by Vitruvius (which I read first) and "Towards a New Architecture" by Le Corbusier (which I read last). I devoured every book from cover to cover and eventually fell completely in love with the crazy idea that there are people who walk among us with ideas and forms in their heads, which they then translate onto drafting paper, sign, and it becomes reality. At that time, I was convinced the whole world was made of buildings; I didn’t yet know it was made of money.

Given my not-so-great high school diploma and an embarrassing psychometric score of 606/800, I didn’t have much chance (as I understood back in 1998) of getting into one of the three architecture faculties in Israel that existed at the time. To be honest, after a brief tour of each, I didn’t really want to study at any of them either. So, instead of improving my high-school diploma externally and retaking the psychometric exam repeatedly, I decided to take advantage of the fact that I had French citizenship and try to get into one of the French Grand Écoles for architecture. After all, if you're going to study architecture, what better city than Paris? It has everything, from the Roman ruins of Cluny to the exaggerated post-modernism of Ricardo Bofill. So what if I hardly spoke the language and knew no one there besides my grandparents, who happened to live in one of Paris’s tougher suburbs?

Anyone familiar with the French education system knows the difference between a Grand École and a standard faculty at, say - the Sorbonne - is enormous. Grand Écoles are both much harder to get into and much more demanding in terms of their standards and requirements. In 1999, the method at the École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Versailles was still the old one, where they would test about 1500 candidates, accept around 130, and by the end of the first year, about half were supposed to drop out. By the third year, maybe 40 would remain. Ultimately, each year, Versailles barely produces 20 architects. Everyone wanted Versailles. Either Versailles or Belleville. These are still considered the most prestigious Grand Écoles for architecture in France. Their graduates find jobs within seconds, even during their studies, and their teaching staff (many of whom taught at both schools) were considered top-notch, including some famous and important architects. But both Versailles and Belleville were very selective, and their candidate selection process (then) was quite simple. They would upload all the candidates' high school grades to an Excel sheet, choose the top 130 with the highest grades, and then move on to the second parameter – the “motivation letter,” which is a handwritten letter that each candidate is supposed to write; No more than two folio pages, explaining why the hell you want to be an architect. Out of the 130, even those with good grades would be eliminated en masse after analyzing their motivation letters, simply “pulling” the next in line from the waiting list until the final candidates were left.

So, as i’ve mentioned, my high school grades weren’t great. All between 65 and 90/100 max (in math, which I improved by retaking the exam after my military service, and in biology, which I loved dearly). But luck played a bit in my favor here because the Israeli grading system (0-100) is completely different from the French grading system (0-20). In France, a grade of 12 out of 20 (equivalent to a 60 in Israel) is not that bad. A grade of 14 (70) is already a wow. And if you get 16 (80/100 in Israel), you’re a real prodigy. No one can get a 20 (unless it’s in exact sciences), so it turned out that my very sub-par high school diploma, translated by the French Institute in Tel Aviv, was considered that of a rare prodigy. My lowest grade was 13, and my average was 16 and a bit. Additionally, there was only one high school unit where I got a round 100 score – Hebrew expression. So, incidentally, I knew very well how to write motivation letters. Only problem - I only know how to do so in Hebrew. I sat my ass down and I wrote a quite decent one, where I rambled mostly nonsense about growing up in a development town like Karmiel, being impressed as a child by buildings springing up from nothing in a new city, and so on. I painstakingly translated all this (with lots of help and terrible disputes with my grandparents over every comma) into polished French, copied it by hand as if it were a punishment, and sent it to Versailles.

I copied the same letter eight times to all the top architecture schools in Paris and got accepted by all except for the damned Belleville, who summoned me for an exam with five open questions on architectural concepts (for which I had all the answers thanks to the books my mum chose for me…) Unfortunately, in March 1999, my French was far from adequate to express myself properly, and I spectacularly failed the exam.

By the way, today, the entrance exams to these two schools are really horrifying: Two intense exam days, each 8 hours long, and it’s almost impossible to get in without a special prep course.

I had until October 4, 1999, to learn proper French. Just under half a year. It was a crazy and intense period. I worked as a security guard in a mall in one of the suburbs (a horrifying story in itself) during the day, and in the evenings, I sat and learned French. I read "The Stranger" by Albert Camus (because the whole book is in passé composé and imparfait which are the easiest of all pasts tenses in French grammar) and page after page, wrote down words I didn’t know in a small notebook and looked them up in a dictionary. By the end of the process, I could understand what was being said to me, read an in-depth article in Le Monde, and even summarize in classes.

Happy and content, I arrived at the school on the 4th of October and realized, to my embarrassment that I was a complete idiot of the ridiculous kind - who knew pretty good literary French, but every time someone spoke to me, I understood half of what was said. I didn’t know a single slang word, and the “cool” architecture students all spoke in verlan (A unique kind of slang where syllables are reversed. So I didn’t arrive at “Versailles” but “Seillavre,” and wasn’t a jew (– “juif”) but a proud “feuj,” and so on).

To my shock, I realized that the first two weeks wouldn’t be pleasantly spent among the radiators of the impressive school building but outside in the freezing cold in a series of 8-hour tours of Paris, during which we also had to sit and draw what the professors had explained to us. It appears, so i’ve learned back then, that architecture is learned “through the eye and fingers,” not through the ears. They took us to the Louvre, to a metro station of the elevated line 6 under renovation, to Les Invalides, the Supreme Court, the Pont des Arts, the Palais de Chaillot, Le Corbusier’s Villa La Roche, Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre, and so on and so forth. All these places my frozen fingers had to transfer onto a large sketch pad to be submitted at the end of those two weeks. The only problem was, I didn’t, for the life of me, know how to draw.

The anxiety was immense. Really. There were no YouTube tutorials on “how to draw buildings” back then because no one thought to invent YouTube until 2005. So at the end of the first day, which was an absolute nightmare for me, I ran to buy a book at the huge bookstore in Place Saint-Michel called "How to Draw," but I didn’t understand much from it. It seemed utterly hopeless. On the third day, one of the lecturers caught on that while everyone else were fervently sketching and drawing, I was sitting there trying to scribble something that had nothing to do with drawing or any of the rules of perspective. He grabbed my sketch pad, sat down next to me, and said, “Look, hold the pencil like this,” – and he held it with the tip up. “Now look through the pencil, you see? I’m *placing it on this line of the façade of the Louvre – from the roof to the floor, it’s a third of a pencil, right?” – he held my new pencil in front of my eyes, and I looked through it at the northernmost line of the Louvre and saw that the tip was stuck under the roof, and about a third of the way down, where he placed his thumb, the floor started. “See?” he asked. “Oui, oui,” I muttered. So he lowered the pencil and drew a vertical line on a new sheet from my sketch pad, exactly a third of the pencil’s length. “Now I’m measuring the other vertical edge of the façade,” he said, raising the pencil again, placing its tip on the roof exactly under the line of the southernmost edge. I looked “through the pencil” and saw it was significantly less than a third of the pencil. “It’s less than a third!” I exclaimed.

He smiled to himself, probably realizing how dumb I truly was. “Correct,” he whispered and drew that façade line on the paper as well. “But how can that be??” I asked out of deep and genuine stupidity. “It’s called perspective,” he replied dryly. Then he showed me how he copied more outlines using the pencil, and he quickly sketched the entire façade, including the decorations, the pediments, everything. And it was beautiful as the sun, I swear. It was an amazing sketch. “All you need is a pencil, an eye, and not entirely frozen fingers,” he said. Understand?

I finally understood.

I returned at night to all the places we had been in the first three days and filled in all the gaps – still drawing like a complete pantoufle. But by the end of those two weeks, I knew how to draw quite well and even started to impress my very own self with shading and special effects. Then I also realized that when you draw something from reality, you really do acquire it. Meaning you have to pay attention to every small detail, every distance between windows, every proportion, every shadow projection, every play of sunlight. Then, slowly, something opens up in you. You no longer see buildings and windows; you see full and empty, light and dark, reflective and disappearing, huge and tiny, and you start to read facades, scales, proportions, and distances suddenly become clear, and so do the dimensions of things. That was the basic training of an architectural rookie. At the end of it, one of the lecturers told us, “A good architect is someone whose gaze is stuck in the roofs of buildings, his pockets full of sketches, and his shoes full of dog poo because he doesn’t watch where he steps at all.” Then he added, “And because Paris is disgusting,” and a few girls giggled a most exquisite french giggle.

In the next chapter – the essence of things and the reign of terror in the workshops.