The Professional Architecture Portfolio: Your First Silent Interview: When you send your portfolio to an architecture office, the interview has already begun, even though you are not in the room. Someone opens your PDF, scrolls through the first few pages and begins making decisions about you from the evidence in front of them. This is why I developed what I call the 20-second test. Imagine that a busy architect gives your portfolio only twenty seconds before deciding whether

Your portfolio has about 20 seconds to make someone want to know more. When you apply for a job in an architecture office, your portfolio is not simply a collection of university projects. It is often the first real test of how professionally you think, communicate and present yourself as a future architect. Architecture studios receive large numbers of applications. Before anyone reads every paragraph or carefully studies every drawing, they usually scan. Very quickly they a

An architectural portfolio for a job interview is not simply a collection of projects. It is a carefully designed portrait of who you are as an architect, how you think, what you can do, what you care about and what you may be capable of becoming. When an architecture office opens your portfolio, it is not only looking at buildings, plans, renderings and sketches. It is looking at you. This changes everything about how an architecture portfolio for a job interview should be c