Architecture: Collaborative Practice postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most Saturdays at the timber merchant where I work, someone arrives with a drawing on the back of an envelope. Recently it was a retired bus driver with a plan for a lean-to against his garage: three dimensions, an arrow marked "rain goes here", and a note that his wife wanted to see the bird feeder from the kitchen. Cutting his rafters, I realised his sketch held more about how the space would be used than many of the polished boards I had produced at university. That gap between what people know about their own lives and what architects are trained to draw is the reason I want to study collaborative practice at postgraduate level.

My undergraduate degree gave me a sound grounding in design, construction and history, and I graduated with a 2:1. The project that shaped me most was my final-year proposal for a small laundrette and repair hub on a terraced street in Stoke-on-Trent. Rather than working only from census data and site photographs, I spent four afternoons on the street with a folding table, printed plans and coloured stickers. Around thirty residents stopped to talk. Several pointed out that the only existing launderette had closed and that older neighbours were carrying washing on two buses. One man explained that he fixed bikes in his back yard because he had nowhere else to do it. These conversations changed the brief: the repair area moved to the street frontage, the folding counter became a shared table, and I kept the building's footprint small enough to leave the corner open for parked prams. My tutors thought the scheme was modest, which was fair, but I was proud that residents recognised their own suggestions when I returned with the final drawings.

The project also showed me what I did not yet know how to do. I had no method for reaching people who did not stop at my table, such as younger parents working weekday shifts, and no clear way of recording who had shaped which decision. Reading Jeremy Till's Architecture Depends helped me name the problem. His argument that architecture is always contingent on circumstances and people outside the architect's control made me see participation not as consultation added at the end but as part of the design process itself. I would like to develop structured, accountable ways of working with communities, and to understand how practices sustain this approach financially and professionally.

Since graduating I have worked in the cutting shop of a timber merchant. The job has improved my practical knowledge considerably: I now understand sheet sizes, moisture movement and why a builder asks for a different joist depth than the one specified. It has also taught me to explain technical constraints to customers clearly and without condescension, whether they are tradespeople or first-time DIYers. I keep a small notebook of the questions people ask most often, partly because it makes me better at the job and partly because it reveals what ordinary clients worry about.

Outside work I coach a junior badminton session at my local leisure centre on Tuesday evenings. It is unrelated to architecture, but organising twenty children of mixed ability on four courts has made me patient, attentive to the quieter players, and practised at adapting a plan when half the group arrives late.

I am applying for postgraduate study because I want my architectural training to grow alongside the habits I have begun to build: listening carefully, testing ideas with the people who will use them, and remaining practical about materials and money. I hope to bring my construction knowledge, my experience of street-level engagement and a willingness to work as one member of a team rather than its only author. I would value the chance to learn from tutors and peers who take collaboration as seriously as form.