Architecture and Adaptive Reuse MA postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The gallery of the Methodist chapel I surveyed for my final-year project was eleven centimetres lower at its north end than at its south. I found this out with a borrowed laser measure and a friend holding the other end of a tape. It was the first sign that the building had been altered at least once before I arrived with my own ideas. The chapel, built in the 1870s in the town where I grew up, had been empty for nine years. My brief was to turn it into a community food store with a small teaching kitchen. The most useful thing I learned was that a building in use for a century and a half has already been adapted by people who left few records.

I spent more time reading the fabric than drawing proposals. Nail patterns in the boarding and a change in brick bond behind the organ recess showed where a schoolroom had been added and later partly removed. The low end of the gallery turned out to be the result of an inexpertly replaced beam. Instead of levelling it, I kept the slope and used it to step the seating in a small demonstration area. My tutors questioned whether that was sentiment or design. Defending it made me state a principle I still hold. An intervention should be legible as new, but it should not erase the evidence of earlier decisions. I drew on Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn, particularly his argument that buildings are shaped over time by their users rather than finished at completion. I also read the SPAB Manifesto, whose preference for repair over restoration helped me decide what to leave alone. The project received a good mark. What pleased me more was that a volunteer from the local food bank asked for a copy of the drawings.

Since graduating I have worked as a CAD technician for a small firm that designs and fits kitchens, mostly in older terraced houses. This is not glamorous architecture. Still, I measure perhaps three houses a week, and almost none have square walls, level floors or the services shown on the estate agent's plan. I have become quick at producing accurate surveys and practical at explaining to customers why a cupboard has to stop short of a chimney breast. Fitters need drawings they can actually use on site. Working beside them has taught me how much construction knowledge sits with tradespeople rather than with designers.

Outside work I volunteer once a month at a repair café in a church hall, mostly mending lamps and reattaching chair legs. It is not architecture either. I enjoy it, though, and it has given me a habit of asking what an object was designed to tolerate before deciding how to fix it. I also swim several mornings a week, which is where I tend to think through problems from the day.

I want to study adaptive reuse at postgraduate level because my undergraduate project raised questions I could only partly answer. I would like to understand how to assess the significance of ordinary buildings that will never be listed but matter to the people around them. I am also interested in how embodied carbon arguments can be made rigorously rather than as a general appeal to keep old buildings. And I want to know how designers can work with incomplete histories without inventing false ones. I would particularly value studying alongside people from conservation, planning and practice backgrounds, because my experience so far has been narrow and hands-on.

I bring careful survey skills, patience with awkward existing structures and an undergraduate project that I have continued to think about since submitting it. I am ready to develop that practical grounding into a stronger theoretical and historical understanding of how buildings change, and I hope to spend my career working with buildings that already exist.