LESSONS THAT OUTLAST STUDIO

Architecture school ends long before architecture leaves you.

Degrees are framed, studios are cleared out, and life moves on — into offices, job sites, solo practices, or parallel creative paths. But long after the final jury, there are things we carry forward quietly. Not resumes or portfolios, but habits of mind, ways of seeing, and deeply ingrained rituals that continue to shape how we work and how we live.

I earned my Bachelor of Architecture at MSRIT, Bangalore, and later my Master of Architecture at IIT Chicago. Two different continents, cultures, climates, and pedagogies — yet remarkably similar studio truths. What I carry forward from architecture school has less to do with buildings, and everything to do with practice.

1. The Discipline of Showing Up

Architecture school teaches you to show up — even when you’re tired, uncertain, or uninspired. Studio doesn’t wait for perfect conditions. Deadlines arrive whether the idea is ready or not.

That discipline stays with you.

It becomes the quiet ability to sit down and begin. To open the sketchbook. To draft the first imperfect line. To return to the work again and again, trusting that clarity emerges through engagement, not avoidance.

2. Seeing Before Solving

Before architecture school, I thought design was about answers. School taught me it’s about questions.

At MSRIT, site visits trained my eye to context — climate, material, scale, human movement. At IIT Chicago, studying within the rigor of Crown Hall sharpened my understanding of structure, logic, and spatial discipline. Together, they instilled a habit of looking deeply before responding.

This way of seeing extends beyond architecture. You start noticing how light enters a room, how people occupy space, how cities reveal their histories in fragments. Observation becomes instinct.

3. Comfort with Critique

Few experiences shape you like a studio critique.

Standing beside your work while others dissect it teaches resilience, humility, and discernment. You learn that critique is not rejection — it’s conversation. You learn how to listen without collapsing, how to defend ideas without ego, and how to extract value even from difficult feedback.

That ability to separate yourself from your work becomes invaluable — in practice, collaboration, and life.

4. The Power of Process Over Perfection

Architecture school rewards thinking out loud. Sketches, diagrams, trace overlays, models — all evidence of a mind at work.

What stays with you is the understanding that the process matters as much as the final outcome. That unfinished drawings can be more revealing than polished renders. That iteration is not failure, but fluency.

This belief becomes grounding in a world obsessed with finished images. You learn to value the work-in-progress.

5. Time Pressure as a Creative Tool

Studio deadlines are unforgiving — and oddly transformative.

Under time pressure, you learn to prioritize. To let go of unnecessary complexity. To trust intuition. Those late nights train you to make decisions with incomplete information — a skill essential to real-world practice.

Even today, I often return to timed sketching and constrained exercises. Not as nostalgia, but as a way to reconnect with creative clarity.

6. Community as Catalyst

Architecture school is never a solitary experience.

From all-nighters to site visits, shared meals to shared panic before juries — studio creates a unique form of collective learning. You grow not just from your own work, but from watching others struggle, experiment, and succeed.

That sense of creative community is something I consciously seek to recreate today — through initiatives like Studio Saturdays and Thursday Throw Downs. Architecture thrives in circles, not silos.

7. A Lifelong Relationship with Learning

Perhaps the most enduring thing architecture school teaches you is that you will never finish learning.

Every project introduces new constraints, materials, regulations, and human needs. School doesn’t prepare you with all the answers — it prepares you to keep asking better questions.

That mindset stays with you whether you remain in traditional practice or forge your own path.

Carrying It Forward

What we carry forward from architecture school isn’t just technique — it’s temperament.

The patience to observe.

The courage to iterate.

The discipline to show up.

The humility to listen.

The belief that design is a form of service.

These are the invisible tools that continue to shape my work through Architecture Speaks Volumes and The ASV Atelier — long after graduation ceremonies have faded into memory.

Architecture school may end, but studio never really does.

Birthing a Design Practice with Many Voices

It didn’t begin with a business plan.

It began with a feeling.

A quiet realization that the work I wanted to do — the architecture I wanted to practice — wouldn’t quite fit into the molds that already existed. I wasn’t just trying to start a firm. I was trying to build something that could carry more than drawings and deadlines. I wanted to create a design practice that could speak in multiple voices — through space, through story, through objects — and still feel like one clear, resonant truth.

This is how Architecture Speaks Volumes was born.

Listening for a New Kind of Practice

As a trained architect, I’ve spent years learning how to think spatially — how to listen to a site, a material, a brief. But what school never quite teaches you is how to listen to yourself, or how to design a life that feels as intentional as the buildings you create.

I began to sense that I wanted more than project cycles and client calls. I wanted a practice that could carry personal memory, cultural complexity, and emotional resonance. I wanted space to write, to reflect, to share. I wanted a studio where slow design, sensory experience, and story were just as central as structure and form.

That’s where the weaving began — between design thinking, entrepreneurship, and personal storytelling.

Scaling with Intention

Too often, the idea of “scaling” a business is reduced to growth for growth’s sake — more clients, bigger teams, higher fees. But for me, scaling meant deepening, not just expanding.

That’s why I structured Architecture Speaks Volumes as a practice with multiple distinct but connected voices:

• The ASV Atelier: My design studio — where I work on design projects grounded in slowness, care, and material storytelling.

• The ASV Edit: A boutique for designed objects, scarves, and photographs — each item an archive of memory and meaning.

• ASV blogs & Podcasts: A space for memoir, design writing, and reflections — where I can explore the edges of architecture, culture, and emotion.

Each branch is its own channel, but together, they speak to a shared belief: that architecture is not just built — it is felt, remembered, experienced and expressed.

The Need for Multiple Streams — Not Just for Profit

In today’s world, many of us are waking up to the fact that a single stream of income is no longer sustainable — especially for creatives. But I didn’t create The ASV Edit just to diversify revenue. I created it to give form to ideas that couldn’t live inside floor plans.

Sometimes a scarf carries more meaning than a structure. Sometimes a photograph captures more memory than a model. The boutique allows me to share fragments of my design language in tactile, intimate ways. It also invites those who may never commission a building to still be part of this story — to wear, hold, or gift a piece of the practice.

In this way, income and impact become intertwined. Not in a transactional sense, but in a meaningful exchange of value and vision.

Building a Community that Listens

The real reason I built ASV in this way — across multiple modes — is because I didn’t want to simply launch a brand. I wanted to build a community.

A community of thinkers, feelers, makers, and quiet rebels. People who believe that the built environment is never neutral. People who notice the curve of a stair, the softness of a wall, the stillness in a courtyard. People who understand that architecture is never just structure — it is memory, language, and care.

I write for them. I design for them. I edit for them.

And I share my stories — including the difficult ones — because I believe that vulnerability is part of architecture too. We build from who we are.

In Closing: Architecture Speaks Volumes

What does it mean to birth a design practice in this moment?

For me, it means resisting narrow definitions. It means allowing architecture to speak through drawings, yes — but also through short film, curated objects, essays, poems, materiality, vision and small moments of shared wonder. It means embracing the many voices that live inside me — the architect, the writer, the daughter, the wife,the witness — and letting them all have a place in the room.

Because I still believe that architecture speaks.

And if we listen carefully enough,

it speaks volumes.