Friday, 30 March 2012

450 word Personal Statement to MSA


I want to study architecture because I have always been creative and drawing has been my passion since I was very young – I usually carry a sketchpad and pencil. I also enjoy logic, maths, business and understanding things and how they work. I looked for a balance between the two and chatted to friends’ parents who are successful architects. Later I took Design as a subject in school, which helped develop my drawing and software skills and gain greater understanding of architectural principles, elements and history and gain inspiration from great historical designers. I am keen to attend MSA after visiting the university in February. I like your approach of close links with working architects, including in teaching. I believe the course structure will work well for me, with emphasis on studio and practical skills as the foundation for improving thinking and processes and eventually my own design solutions.
I was excited to see the textbooks come to life at the Design Museum, including the Lounge Chair by Charles and Ray Eames, the Valentine typewriter by Ettore Sottsass and Corradino D’Ascanio’s Vespa. The building is well laid out, leading the visitor into a spiralling progress through the exhibits. The lighting is bright and the format exciting, showcasing talented designers wide range of output. I visited the Terence Conran exhibition, from hand-tools for woodcarving and photographs of his vegetable gardens, to restaurant furniture, crockery, Habitat graphics and modern furniture for sale. It will be interesting to see how the Museum will use its new space.

If I have to choose one out of hundreds of favourite architectural works, it is Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier, the basis of almost all contemporary housing systems, designed by the father of modernist design. The house displays all seven characteristics of modernist architecture, contains no added ornamentation or décor and was not designed to be aesthetic but to maintain its functional purpose as a “machine for living”, as Le Corbusier described buildings or, as Louis Sullivan put it: “form ever follows function”. Regardless of its intentional lack of added ornamentation the building still has a very elegant and humble quality making it aesthetic which is how I believe true design should be: Simple yet beautiful. 

I would love to visit the building “Falling Waters” by Frank Lloyd Wright, also built using modernist principles. What makes this building unique is its breath-taking unity between technology and nature and the way it truly integrates its surrounding environment.

Architecture is a career I am certain I will excel at, partly because of my natural drawing skill but also because I aim to push limits and break boundaries in the way to which we approach these “machines for living”.

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