Young Architect Guide: One Skill (and Item) Every Aspiring Architect Needs

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Enter the One Drawing Competition

What’s the most important skill to cultivate if you’re interested in becoming an architect? Learning to sketch. According to  Eric Reinholdt, the Founder of 30X40 Design Workshop and new One Drawing Challenge Juror, sketching is an important part of the design process; a daily sketching habit will teach you to see the world as it is, to divine why buildings look the way they do and to understand proportion and scale. Sketching is invaluable for communicating your ideas in meetings to clients, to your colleagues and to tradespeople in the field during construction. For most designers, the sketch is where ideas are born.

Digital tools have their place in the design process too, but they serve a different purpose. The analog sketchbook is a place to think and to move more slowly. It’s in digital space that we transform the thoughts and ideas into the documents we’ll use to construct our architecture and to make them real. There’s room for both in the design process and each informs the other.

In this video, Eric opens up his BLANK sketchbook so you can see how he uses it in practice, demonstrating that ideation and exploration doesn’t require perfect technique or polished renderings. In fact, the imperfect nature of an open-ended sketch leads to novel ideas and better design resolutions. Follow along as Eric develops a few less than perfect sketches, shares his thought process, a few drawing conventions and personal musings about the importance of building a sketching habit.

Want to get your architectural drawings in front of Eric and other leaders in the field? Consider entering architecture’s biggest drawing competition.

Eric Reinholdt is an architect, founder of the residential architecture practice, 30X40 Design Workshop, author of Architect + Entrepreneur, innovator of progressive practice models, and the creator of the eponymous YouTube channel, 30X40 Design Workshop. From his remote island studio, Eric makes videos about architecture, designs simple, modern homes, and shares his process online.