Architecture, Master of (ARB/RIBA Part 2) MArch ARB Pt 2 postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last winter I spent two mornings measuring a timber stair in a 1960s primary school that my practice was refurbishing. The existing drawings showed a straight flight; in reality it had a quarter landing, a handrail fixed at three different heights and treads worn into shallow dips outside the classroom doors. Recording those dips seemed unimportant at the time, but they told us which routes the children actually used, and that shaped where we placed new cloakroom storage. The job taught me something I want to pursue at Part 2: existing buildings carry evidence of how they are lived in, and reading that evidence carefully is a design skill rather than a preliminary chore.

I graduated with a BSc in Architecture and have worked for eighteen months as a Part 1 assistant at a practice of around twenty people in Glasgow, mainly on education and community refurbishment. My role is supporting rather than leading. I prepare survey drawings, build and maintain Revit models, draft door and window schedules and mark up consultants' comments. I have attended site visits with the project architect and taken minutes at design team meetings. Being in that room has made me more aware of how decisions get made: a fire engineer's comment about travel distances, or a contractor's lead time for steel, can reshape a plan more quickly than any concept sketch. I have learned to check drawings against those constraints before they leave my desk, and the project architect now trusts me to issue minor revisions without line-by-line checking.

My final undergraduate project proposed reusing a disused bus depot in a Lanarkshire town as a covered market and workshop space. The depot had a long-span steel roof in decent condition and a concrete floor stained with decades of oil. Rather than clearing the site, I kept the roof structure and inspection pits, turning the pits into sunken seating and storage for traders. I tested daylight with a physical model under a lamp rig in the studio, then cut new rooflights where the model showed the deepest shadow. Tutors felt the structural strategy was convincing, but pointed out that my ground-floor plan was weaker at the street edge, where the depot presented a blank wall. I have thought about that criticism since, and noticed how often refurbishment schemes succeed inside while neglecting the threshold. I would like to work on that problem more deliberately.

My reading has followed the same interest. Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn gave me a vocabulary for thinking about buildings changing over time in layers, from structure that lasts to services and fittings that are replaced often. I found it useful at work, where a school's heating and partitions had changed several times while the frame stayed put. I have also been reading about embodied carbon, and want to understand reuse not only as a heritage question but as an environmental one I can argue for with evidence.

Outside the office I volunteer on Sunday afternoons at a bike repair co-op, where people bring in neglected bicycles and we help them fix brakes or true wheels themselves. It has nothing to do with architecture directly, though explaining a repair to someone holding the spanner has made me better at explaining drawings to clients who do not read plans. I also keep a sketchbook of tenement stairwells across the city, which started as a habit on my walk to work and has become a record of light, ironwork and wear.

At Part 2 I want to develop a stronger design voice in adaptive reuse, improve my understanding of environmental performance and push my drawing beyond the efficient but cautious style that office work encourages. I bring practical experience of how projects are delivered, a habit of careful observation and enough self-awareness to know where my design thinking still needs to grow.