"You have asked a very big question, If i answer it there will be no time for any others."
[Buckminster Fuller]
Archicad is a great tool for architects, but it is far from the industry standard because most people in our profession can't manage such complex software and rely on mere computer generated line work instead. [Stupid drafting instead of intelligent models.] Archicad actually presumes that you know something about assembling a building when you begin a model while stupid drafting can imply that you know more than you actually do until problems on site begin. [You want to be at a new firm in another country when this happens.]
Architects primarily communicate with each other through diagrammatic sketches. Throw away your ballpoint and buy a box of these:
Iconic Architect's drawing marker: the Pilot Fineliner
You might develop a taste for ideogrammatic thinking, combining drawing skill with icons:
Design Drawing Ching
see also the list "customers also bought" for other elegantly executed Ching books. My hero.
You can come to the study of architecture from one of two directions depending on your personality: primarily the artistic and qualitative or primarily the mechanical and quantitative. The first kind build visionary structures that attract rich clientele. They leak, but the rich people don't care because they go down to Cabo during rainy season.
The second group build rational boxes that don't leak for the rest of us who have to stay.
Architects love spatial quality, whether plazas, parks or interiors. If you don't marvel at volumetric space, become an engineer. If you don't care about how spaces are lit with natural light, how they sound, how they warm or cool you, stick with engineering because it pays better - the benefits of an architectural career are sensual and qualitative. I remember hardly being able to stand while gazing up into the multi-colored stone arches of Barcelona's Sagrada Familia after waiting twenty years to make the trip.
sagrada familia
Your best bet in studying architecture qualitatively is to travel, experiencing and sketching marvellous spaces and objects. Architects should bring new qualities to their clientele, informed by other cultures. To be effective, you really should have a grasp of Western cultural history. Wearing a cape and waving your arms meaningfully [like i do in my animated avatar] helps.
Don't be offended, but I would start right here:
Architecture for Dummies
I wish this book had existed when I was in high school.
The best way to learn construction is to labor for a summer just to understand the sad reality of assembly tolerances and tool clearances. [I did my time in a steel fabrication plant, learning eight new cuss words, and experienced the humiliation of being sent for a
"rubber file"
to ream out gasketted drill holes. A joke on the FNG - no such tool.] Then you might take a technical course. The most competent architects I know took their technical training first, were lucky enough to not have their creativity mashed by the constraints of reality, and then completed architectural study.
You are right to experience architecture through images since photographers and their fluffers do a lot to maintain the mystique of spatial quality, creating the memory, but not the reality of space. For the excess of interiors, study:
The Michael Jackson issue, guaranteed
I notice that UCLA has recently joined ArtStor - you may be able to access this since you are a student.
UCLA Library Blog
And right on your campus:
UCLA Architecture public events
There will be people there to talk to, i am sure.
And as for talking about design and getting books, go see these guys for guidance:
hennessey+ingalls
Is this a start?
Dwight Atkinson
