Sara Alexander Thinks Architecture School Should Change How You See Everything

How Architecture School Challenges All Creatives

Architecture school won't let you get away from answering the most intimidating question for a creative. You can design the most beautiful hand-crafted piece, arranged the most beautiful space, be the most considered, the most technical, and it wouldn't matter. Your professor would still look at it, and then look at you, and ask "why?" That provocation isn't to force the justification of your choices. The why is meant to help you articulate the logic and ways of thinking that brought this concept from your imagination, to our earthly plane.

What is the argument?

What does that work look to express to others about itself?

Why does this exist like this? 

Sara Alexander, founder and Creative Director of The Scale Collective, went through this at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where she earned her Master of Architecture after an undergraduate degree in urban studies and planning, and an associate's in interior architecture. Even as an interior designer who applies all of her collegiate experiences in her work, she describes the process intimately, "They always ask you why you did everything. They do this because they want to teach you process, they want to teach you to do things iteratively. If you don't show them how you designed it, the whole process, they're not going to give you a good grade. They'll rip it to shreds."

She let's the moment breathe and then says something that breaks open the entire conversation, she says "Architecture is a kind of jumping off point or ground zero for abstract creative thinkers."

How Architectural Thinking Escaped Architecture

Alexander isn't the first with this paradigm. When the late great Virgil Abloh enrolled in the Master of Architecture program at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, a curriculum designed by one of the father's of 20th-century international style, Ludwin Mies van der Rohe, he was a civil engineering graduate from Wisconsin who wanted to understand scale. When questioned about his academic past, he described his ambitions as if a matter of prophecy, "I wanted to build skyscrapers because I figured if you could build the tallest building, you could design a spoon." That belief produced some of the most important fashion brands in both Pyrex and Off-White. That belief became the language that helped him become the artistic director of Louis Vuitton Menswear, and reshape what luxury design was allowed to be. He later credits Rem Koolhass, who's work he was first exposed to at IIT, with teaching him how to "combine socio-political thinking with design."

There's also the three founding members of Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright who's creativity is girded by a foundation of Architectural study. All three met while studying architecture at what is now the University of Westminster in London. In 1969, they even released an album called "Music for Architectural Students", dedicated to that period of their life. 

You also have Tom Ford who studied interior architecture at Parsons before becoming the designer who arguably saved Gucci and defined desire commercially for an entire generation.

We can even look at Ice Cube who earned a diploma in architectural drafting. Then there's Tinker Hatfield who graduated from the University of Oregon School of Architecture and leveraged that learning into designing some of the most iconic sneaker silhouettes and Jordans of all time. Even Weird Al Yankovic holds an architecture degree from California Polytechnic State University.

No matter the creative industry, architecture school produces people who can articulate the indescribable with definitive aims thanks to the unrelenting why they were forced to confront day in and day out. 

How Studying Architecture Teaches You to Think Beneath the Surface

CCA taught Sara Alexander a building, room, or space is never a surface problem that needs to be confronted, but a medium for one to express their answers to social, economic, and ecological change. The program's curriculum begins with a four-semester core studio sequence that integrates foundational design with building technology, history, and theory simultaneously to strengthen the relationship between the practical and the abstract. As Alexander explains, this produces a fundamentally different way of experiencing a room, "untrained designers often think in terms of surfaces. Everything is a response to what they see and experience on the surface. Architects think very much about holistic space, what the whole space wants to be." The brilliance of her perspective is where she anchors the want: its not the clients, hers, or even the mood board's. This want is owned by the space and attributes to it a sense of logic, character, and set of demands that precede the introduction of the designer. 

Once again we're brought to the infamous  iceberg. "People go to the top and just pick what they see at the top instead of going deep," says Alexander. "The work that I'm most interested in and find the most excitement in working on, happens under the surface."

How Constraints Become Creative Opportunities

While working with a commercial client, Alexander recounts the time where a contractor's mistake left a shotcrete wall where a drywall was supposed to be. On the table were two choices, rip out the ceiling and fix it, or to cover it up. Instead of acquiescing to either, she called upon Detroit-based artist Ellen Rutt, who she came across while visiting a gallery in San Francisco, that did murals. She proposed turning the entire wall into one, assuming the client would be too conservative to go for it, and was surprised by their response. "We showed her mural option and everyone went nuts for it. And like this mural makes the entire project. And it was completely unplanned."

On the one hand, this is an example of the kind of problem-solving that's demanded of interior designers. On the other hand, it's a story about how architecture school trains you to see unexpected constraints as an opportunity if you are willing to think past the surface. 

Alexander talks about Simone Bodmer-Turner, the ceramics artist from Brooklyn she commissioned to design a fireplace that expresses itself across an entire surrounding wall that is as much a relief sculpture as it is architecture in its own right. She opens up about the powder room she designed to function as a portal, using mirror and color to dissolve the sense of the room's actual dimensions akin to the ways of Yayoi Kusama. Then there's the Wild Child Playspace in Oakland, a children's space built around portals and passages, with each room leading into another world as inspired in part by James Turrell's relationship with light. "When you think about corridors," says Alexander, "those types of spaces are usually left behind or seen as an aside to the overall concept. In all of my work, I always look for the opportunity to bring art and intention to its existence. Even if it's just a corridor, how you move through that space presents an opportunity to be designed with intention." 

Once again we see the architectural mind reveal itself. There's this insistence that every inch of a space is making an argument, and that you as the architect or interior designer are either making that argument consciously or letting it be made for you. 

Why Lighting Determines Whether a Room Truly Works

At Residence Supply, we're constantly questioning how light and hardware shape the experience of a room instead of just occupying space in one. Sara Alexander thinks about lighting the same way she thinks about everything else, systemically. 

"The main thing that separates a good project from a great project is lighting," she says. "It's not the furniture, the art itself, or the materials you use, it is and always will be the lighting." Alexander recommends a dedicated lighting designer on every significant project, something her clients don't always budget for but turn around and express gratitude over when they see the finished space. 

The logic here is inherently architectural; you can do everything right in a space and spend tens of thousands on a renovation, and still lose the room to bad lighting. The irony is most people think about lighting last, and yet, it's the first thing they notice when a space really works for them. It's undeniable how light activates spaces beyond basic illumination and the way it functions as an atmosphere catalyst. 

The Creative Habit of Learning How to Truly Observe

As our conversation came to an end I asked Sara what homework she would give to anyone trying to understand design better or who wanted to think like an architect, something I plan on doing more often with these interviews. 

Her answer, "Go into various spaces, whether they be a space you like or a piece of nature that you are drawn to, and really take it in. Even make a sketch of it. Challenge yourself to hone in and understand what about it are you drawn to? Why is it creating something for you?" 

For Alexander, one of those places is South Pointe Park in Miami Beach, where she used to go at the end of the day to be where the water was calm and the wind came in from a particular direction almost predictably. "I felt like I was living in another world just being there you know? Listening to music, lying in the water, not actively designing anything. Just being. Just being there," said Alexander. 

She's spent years not just designing spaces, but inhabiting them consciously and asking why a particular place pulls at something for her. There's this spirit of curiosity and exploration that's nurtured through the rigor of architecture school; a natural provocation to understand that asking the larger, more intimidating questions, in a lot of ways, should begin the work.

"Good design is meant to help you get to those answers," she says. "Or at least transport you in some way to that feeling consistently," says Alexander, with an ease in delivery as someone who went all the way under the iceberg and came back with greater revelation. 

 

Sara Alexander is the founder and Creative Director of The Scale Collective, an interdisciplinary design studio known for creating immersive residential, commercial, and hospitality environments. Photos courtesy of the Scale Collective