Architecture Personal Statementfor Oxford & Cambridge

I want to study architecture because I am interested in how buildings organise behaviour. When the Elizabeth Line won the 2024 RIBA Stirling Prize, I recognised something from my commute: its stations stay calm when crowded. The architecture manages flows of people without making them feel processed. I began sketching bottlenecks, escalator landings and sightlines, trying to work out how width, ceiling height and the timing of turns could reduce stress. I stopped treating architecture as a set of façades and started thinking about it as choreography. That shift made me suspicious of photographs. Juhani Pallasmaa's The Eyes of the Skin helped me name why: buildings are understood through the body as much as through the eye. Peter Zumthor's Thinking Architecture pushed that further through its focus on atmosphere as a relation between materials, light and use. On a Barbican architecture tour I noticed how Chamberlin, Powell and Bon guide movement through compression and release: low walkways opening onto terraces, rough concrete interrupted by water and planting, long views appearing only after turns. I had thought good architecture was mainly visual coherence; I began to care more about sequence, threshold and bodily orientation. Once I started paying attention to threshold and movement in transport spaces, I began to see the same questions in housing. Goldsmith Street in Norwich, designed by Mikhail Riches with Cathy Hawley, interested me because energy performance there is not separate from dignity. A social housing scheme can meet Passivhaus standards and still produce streets that feel ordered rather than mean. That unsettled my assumption that sustainability usually arrives as a technical add-on. I became interested in the point where choices such as spacing, window depth, orientation and entrances start shaping fuel bills, privacy and whether home feels generous or defensive.

My qualifications have helped by giving me ways to test those questions. In Art I became drawn to section drawing because it makes you design for occupation rather than image. For a portfolio project, I redesigned a garage court beside my estate as an evening study space with a shared workshop and sheltered outdoor seating. I started with photographs, hand-measured dimensions and circulation diagrams showing the routes residents already used across the site. My first scheme was over-glazed and too symmetrical: tidy in plan, but exposed and temporary. Reworking it through card models and SketchUp, I lowered the roof over the entrance, thickened the wall facing the road, and used a narrow courtyard with high windows to pull light deeper into the building without putting desks on display. Drawing the section at 1:50 was the point at which the project became believable, because I could see where ceiling height, bench placement and sill level either invited people to stay or signalled that the room was only for passing through. That taught me more than any finished render could about how atmosphere, use and construction have to support one another.

Outside education, I have tried to test those ideas. Through Open House Festival I have visited buildings whose plans I had first seen online, and the gap between image and experience has been the most useful part. Spaces I expected to feel severe turned out to be generous once I moved through them; others that photographed well became confusing at eye level. Working part-time in a café has sharpened that attention in a more ordinary way. People hesitate at exposed tables, bunch near bottlenecks and drift towards corners that feel protected. Watching that has made me think carefully about circulation, pause points and what makes a public space feel usable rather than merely efficient. These experiences keep bringing me back to the question I want to pursue at university: how section, material and movement can make dense urban environments feel legible, low-energy and humane without becoming over-managed.