08/09/2026
Architecture education, seen from both sides of the desk — years of practice in Bangalore, and a stint teaching at an architecture college here.
I’ve said the line every architect says: colleges don’t prepare students for the real world. Fresh graduates don’t know working drawings well enough. They haven’t been to enough sites. We have to teach them everything.
Then I taught. And I started noticing what happens before a graduate ever walks into an office — five years of a student slowly learning to understand proportion, scale, light, material, form. Learning not just what they like, but why something is balanced.
A trained eye isn’t something you’re born with. You can teach someone your office’s drawing standards in a month. Teaching someone how to see takes far longer.
That doesn’t make colleges perfect — the gap is real. But maybe the question is wrong. Architecture has become too vast for one curriculum to produce a designer, a site architect, a project manager, a researcher and a BIM specialist all at once. And the industry still expects graduates to arrive job-ready.
So: are we doing enough to continue that education after graduation?
Who taught you how to see? A professor, a jury, a first boss, a site? Tell me below.
