13 Essential Skills for Architects
Someone who enjoys cutting meat is unlikely to become an architect. When skills and abilities identified by the US Department of Labor were compared, butchery proved to be almost the opposite of architecture…
Someone who loves butchering meat might not be suited to architecture. When researchers compared the skills and abilities identified by the U.S. Department of Labor for success in different jobs, butcher emerged as the occupation most unlike architect.
The New York Times identified unusual opposites such as architect–butcher, writer–model, teacher–farm worker, and laborer–physicist. To find these pairs, journalists compared requirements in the U.S. Department of Labor's public occupations database. Using dozens of indicators, the database describes what people in each occupation actually do.
The database describes architecture through 325 characteristics, including tasks, required skills and knowledge, commonly used tools, and related professions. We selected the 13 abilities with the highest usefulness scores and compared them with the competencies described in Russian official documents.
13 abilities valuable in architecture
1. Visualization
An architect's core ability is strong spatial thinking: mentally rotating an object, breaking it into parts, or changing its form.
2. Rapid idea generation
The ability to produce many ideas on a given topic. The measure is how quickly ideas are generated, not their quality, creativity, or correctness.
3. Deductive reasoning
The ability to reason from the general to the specific, applying general rules to a particular problem to find an answer.
4. Inductive reasoning
The ability to reason from specific observations to general patterns, recognizing details and drawing broader conclusions.
5. Information organization
The ability to arrange or compare information in a required sequence or pattern, including patterns of images, letters, and words.
6. Attention to detail
The term “Near Vision” refers to the ability to see fine details at close range. According to O*NET, this skill is important for physicians across specialties as well as creative professionals.
7. Oral comprehension
The ability to listen to and understand spoken information and ideas. In this respect, architects need a skill also considered essential for therapists and psychologists.
8. Oral expression
The ability to communicate ideas clearly in conversation. The database's authors consider it even more important for urban planners and landscape architects.
9. Originality
The ability to develop unusual or clever ideas on a given topic and find creative ways to solve problems.
Architects rank among the top ten professions for the importance of this skill. Winy Maas disagrees, criticizing architects for placing too much value on originality and encouraging them to learn more from others.
10. Problem sensitivity
The ability to recognize when something is wrong or likely to be wrong. This does not include solving the problem, only identifying that it exists.
11. Reading comprehension
The ability to read and understand written information, especially documents, and identify their most important points.
12. Visual observation
The ability to notice details at a distance. This seems to mean exactly what it says: the skill is rated most important for pilots.
13. Written expression
Apart from writers and poets, architects are considered the creative professionals for whom clear written expression matters most.
The Russian perspective
At least two major documents define the architect's role in Russia. The educational standard sets out what must be taught to train an architect, while the professional standard describes what architects do and which skills they need.
Training an architect
The educational standard does not specify the skills applicants must have, but defines the competencies graduates should acquire. It lists 40 abilities: 21 general cultural competencies and 19 professional ones. The first group includes:
- think critically, summarize, and analyze information
set goals and choose ways to achieve them
communicate logically, persuasively, and clearly, both orally and in writing
use imagination, think creatively, and initiate innovative solutions
demonstrate spatial imagination, developed artistic taste, and methods for modeling and harmonizing the built environment.
The list also includes broader expectations, such as physical fitness (“independently use methods of physical education and health improvement”) and philosophical reflection (“understand and analyze philosophical questions of personal importance”).
Working as an architect
The professional standard divides architecture into 17 areas of work, covering everything from design to organizing competitions.
The standard specifies the necessary skills and knowledge for each area. Reading it might suggest that architects mostly perform analysis, but that impression is misleading. We processed the document using semantic analysis and identified the three most frequently mentioned concepts:
- method
solution
documentation
- That makes sense
- an architect first develops an approach to a problem, then finds a solution and implements it through documentation.