As a first year student the challenges of learning how to do architecture can be daunting. Though not prescribing a particular way (there are as many ways to do architecture as there are architects), this Notebook outlines what you should do to cultivate your own distinctive capacity for architectural design.

Architecture is a rich and varied subject, a multifaceted and multidimensional skill. Learning to do it is not easy. It has many subtleties. Becoming fluent can take many years. Informed by decades of discussing architecture and its challenges with students, this Notebook will help you lay foundations for a rewarding career as a creative architect.

All Simon Unwin’s books explore architecture not just as a matter of form and space but in terms of its primal driving force, the universal need and desire to make places for life.

Each of these Analysing Architecture Notebooks is devoted to a particular theme in understanding the rich and varied workings of architecture. They can be thought of as addenda to the foundation volume Analysing Architecture: the Universal Language of Place-Making, which first appeared in 1997 and has subsequently been enlarged in four further editions. Examining these extra themes as a series of Notebooks, rather than as additional chapters in future editions, allows greater space for more detailed exploration of a wider variety of examples, whilst avoiding the risk of the original book becoming unwieldy.