Master of Advanced Studies in Architecture (MASA) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The cellar of the Victorian terrace was colder than the street outside, and my laser measure kept losing its reading against the wet brick. I was there as an architectural assistant, surveying for a kitchen extension, but most of that afternoon went on understanding why the back wall was damp. The owners wanted to tank it. My director suggested we first look at the blocked airbricks and the concrete path someone had poured against the external wall. That small investigation, done with a torch and a moisture meter, captures what I want to study further: how existing buildings actually behave, and how design decisions can work with them rather than over them.

My undergraduate degree in architecture gave me a solid grounding in studio design, construction and history, and my final-year project pointed me towards the questions I now want to research. I took a 1960s branch library in my home town, closed for several years, and proposed its reuse as a community workshop and lending space for tools. The building had a shallow concrete frame, single glazing and a flat roof that had been patched repeatedly. Rather than treating it as a shell, I spent the first weeks of the project drawing what was there: the column grid, the clerestory that gave the reading room its even light, and the timber shelving built into the walls. My scheme kept the frame and clerestory, added internal insulation where the structure allowed it, and reused the shelving as workbench frames. My tutors pushed me hard on the thermal bridging at the slab edges, which I could only address qualitatively at the time. I would like to have the methods to answer that kind of question properly.

For the past two years I have worked at a five-person practice that mostly handles domestic extensions, loft conversions and occasional small commercial fit-outs. My work includes measured surveys, drawing existing and proposed plans, preparing planning drawings and coordinating with structural engineers on steel sizes. It is ordinary, careful work, and I value it. I have learned to read old buildings from their details: where a lintel has been replaced, how a chimney breast has been removed above but not below, why a floor slopes. I have also noticed how often retrofit decisions on modest houses are made on habit rather than evidence, simply because small practices lack time to test alternatives. A period of advanced study would let me look at those decisions with more rigour, particularly around moisture, insulation and the embodied carbon of what we remove versus what we keep.

Alongside this I have read more widely than my degree required. Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn changed how I think about buildings as things altered over decades by their users, and I have been working through introductory material on hygrothermal behaviour of solid walls to make sense of what I see on site.

Not everything I do is architectural. I work occasional Saturday shifts at a bicycle repair shop, which began as a way to pay for my own bike and became something I enjoy. Fixing a gear system teaches patience with how parts interact, and customers often arrive describing a symptom rather than a cause, not unlike clients with damp walls. I also keep a sketchbook of bus shelters in the towns I visit, partly as drawing practice and partly because they are an overlooked, heavily used piece of public architecture.

I am applying for postgraduate study because I want to move from noticing problems in existing buildings to investigating them systematically. I hope to develop research on low-cost, evidence-based retrofit for mid-twentieth-century and older ordinary buildings, and to bring that understanding back to the kind of everyday practice where most of our building stock is actually altered.