Design Studio Was Awesome

All architects spent a lot of time in "studio." Just ask them. They'll tell you. Studio was a magical place in architecture school. A place where young architects in training gathered for hours on end to refine their designs. A place where the coffeepot was always on and the ideas flowed like ... coffee. (Sorry, I'm on my third straight day without sleep, and I have a presentation first thing in the morning, so I really don't have time for analogies.)

Studio was hard, and it was designed to be hard. Studio was like boot camp for design. It was the central course in our architecture education, and for most of us, it became a home away from home, mainly because we spent more time in studio than we did at home, so it became more like our home than our actual home. (Again, it's my third day straight without sleep. I'm not interested in run-on sentences right now.)

All our work in studio would culminate in a design review, which we called a "crit." (We were too tired to use the complete word.) On the morning of the crit, we would pin up our drawings, stand in front of them and present the design to our fellow classmates and a selection of bored professors. This was meant to prepare us for the rigors of presenting to clients in the "real world."

Which it totally did, because the real world is hard, and you seldom get enough sleep to properly deal with it. Studio was awesome.