Difference between Architecture and Interior Design

so in the summer of 2020 after 10 years of excruciating pain i finally got my architecture license but that same year i decided to take a job at an interior design firm you want to know why watch the rest of this video [Music] hey guys welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is dani and i'm a licensed architect in beautiful vancouver bc on this channel we talk about architecture and design and also some tools and strategies that can help us have more meaningful and fulfilling careers in architecture so in this video i'm going to talk about the difference between interior design and architecture from the type of projects to liability and licensure the design process education career and as i go through this you'll probably kind of get a sense of what type of skills and personality type would be an ideal fit for each but i'll also give you my personal thoughts on this so in a very general sense architects design buildings including the envelope the foundation the roofs and interior designers they design the spaces within that shell and this difference in scale actually has a huge impact on the work itself and your day-to-day i would say the biggest difference is actually the speed the timeline for an interiors project is much much much shorter than an architecture project like within the time span of a few months or like just a few years you go from concept to construction to completing a project in an architecture project the process of going from concept to construction it could take years and a lot of times you might decide after doing a feasibility study that you know the project is not even worth continuing so if you are someone who's in this design field to see the thing that you designed get built which is you know totally valid interior should definitely be a consideration for you but as an architect you can also work on interior fit outs or renovations which is where it gets a little bit confusing but this is actually very very common i did interior fit outs for a big part of my career and those are actually the only projects that i saw from start to finish i would say that the biggest distinction it actually really comes down to the liability and the licensure and the ability to stamp and seal drawings and pull permits so in most north american jurisdictions even if you're doing very minor work you still need to apply for a permit and when your interiors project involves things that could compromise the health and safety of the occupants of a building you need someone who can sign and seal the drawings and take liability for their work aka someone who can get sued if something goes wrong and that person in most cases is a registered professional like an architect or an engineer so it's very common for interior designers to work with either of these people either as a consultant or as a in-house architect but there are some jurisdictions like alberta that also allow registered interior designers to sign off on code related items and pull permits for minor interior retrofits personally i think interior designers should be able to sign off on these interior renovations because building code is a very big part of their education and the process of becoming a registered interior designer teaches you things on like life safety and health of the occupants but i think because interior design is a relatively new profession compared to architecture or engineering most jurisdictions don't allow them to sign and seal the drawings yet the design process is actually where it gets really interesting so in my opinion the biggest difference between an architect and an interior designer is that architects work in the realm of function and interior designers work in the realm of new [Music] obviously there is overlap but i'd say that's the biggest distinction that impacts the design process so when an architect starts the design process we meet with the client and we talk about the site the landscape and we talk about all the code and zoning requirements like how much can you build how high can you build and we'll talk about the functional and physical constraints to understand you know if the project is feasible because there's so much money involved and once we have a good understanding of those parameters we start diagramming programming and massing and before we even get into the design or like the look of the building we'll have at least a couple of meetings where we're just talking about the massing and how it works with the site and the feasibility of the project and once we have a direction then we actually start the actual design of the building when interior designers start the design process it's very much connected to the feeling and the mood of the space as well as the functional parameters by the way i've only worked at one interior design firm so if you are an interior designer and you have other ways of operating please let me know drop it down in the comments so that we can all learn so at my firm we would meet with the client and we would talk about their ideas for the space like what kind of impression or like mood they want to create and if they have any inspirational images they bring that and we gather all of the descriptive words or imagery or any kind of branding guidelines from the client and from that we create a mood board the mood board is not made up of building elements but any images that illustrate the feeling that you're trying to capture in the space at my firm we had a grid of images and text on the side that we could present to the client and the text would work with the images to create a poetic description of the mood that we're trying to create when i first started at the sperm it was actually really hard for me to wrap my head around this like new approach but um oh man like clients loved it like i'd never seen that kind of involvement from a client before and it was a really really cool process but you have to be really good at describing this mood and also in building rapport with the client because you are selling something that's a lot more elusive and i learned so much during my time there and i feel like architects could learn so much from working with interior designers so both architects and interior designers have to get through the formal education process professional work experience under a supervisor and after that we have the exam i actually have a video on the step-by-step process of becoming an architect i'll leave it right here so i just did a quick search in the cidq website and it seems like there's a similar amount of requirements in terms of work experience hours in interior design it's 3520 hours and in architecture it's 3750 hours the biggest difference between architecture and interior design is at the cidq which is like the council for interior design qualifications in north america they allow you to count up to 1760 hours before you graduate so this actually makes a pretty big difference because a lot of people work between school over the summers and if you use those hours you can take off like almost half of your work experience i'm not entirely sure what the interior design exam is like all i know is that it's a three-part exam but if you have any experience with this please let me know so i did spend some time thinking about how i want to cover the section because obviously there's a million different routes you could take in your career depending on what you're interested in you could work for a firm and you can move up in that firm or you could specialize in one aspect of the job or you could go and start your own practice and because there's so many things i could talk about i'm just gonna try to focus on the aspects that i was personally interested in in terms of my career ambitions and professional growth so for me there's one principle that's kind of guided my career and i've spent a lot of my energy on trying to achieve this and it's kind of formed the basis for deciding which skills i want to focus on and it's this idea of the linchpin i first learned about this idea from seth godin and a linchpin is basically a person who is indispensable it's someone who is vital to an organization i think about this a lot not because i'm like hyper competitive or anything like that but because i think being a linchpin means you can have more freedom and you start to have options in where to work and how to work and being indispensable means that your time is worth more to that organization so when your time is worth more you can either increase your salary or you can reduce your hours of course every organization has their unique needs but after working for a few firms and just like trying to pay attention to how the business side of it works i eventually realized that the fastest way to make yourself indispensable and valuable is if you can attract work or money or clients so how do you do that so first of all obviously you have to have the foundational skills to be an architect but on top of that it's great if you have a unique skill like marketing or branding or videography or it could be with connections like if you can actually bring in interesting work that's probably the top tier of moving up fast in a firm or it can be with a qualification for example if you are lead or passive house or rick hansen certified the firm could put you down on a project that requires those certifications ideally it's a skill or qualification that the firm can charge more money for and unfortunately in most cases the firm's not going to be able to charge more money for having these uh certifications but like having more qualified people will help the firm win more work what they can definitely charge more for is like the difference between a registered architect and an intern is pretty big for example and the difference between being a registered architect in an architecture firm and a non-architecture firm is also pretty big let me explain so for example if you're a licensed architect and work for an interior design firm which is what i did you can advise on things like zoning regulations like building code and you can stamp the drawings right so typically an interior design firm will get an architecture consultant and pay them to stamp the drawings so by having your license you're saving them thousands of dollars and you can tell your clients that we have a registered architect on the team who can oversee all that and that brings a level of credibility and trust if you can bring this on top of having the basic skills to function in this role you will become very valuable and you will be able to move up very quickly in that firm and you will be able to make more money in this case your role as an architect is much more valuable than being an architect in an architecture firm with 10 other architects who have the exact same skill sets and qualifications as you especially if you go just outside of architecture let's say you work for a developer or for the city lots of development firms or city positions they only hire licensed architects in this case it's not because they can stamp drawings but because they have the full range of experience required to run a project so i think there is a lot of different ways you can provide a unique value proposition to areas just outside of an architecture firm with your architectural license but of course the most effective way of becoming a linchpin is of course starting your own firm i'm actually curious how many of you are thinking of going this path i'm actually thinking of interviewing some people who have done this so let me know in the comments if you're interested in this i think having the goal of running your own business is awesome and inspiring you have autonomy you don't have a cap on how much money you can make but it's risky and it's a lot of work and it's just not for everyone but if that is what you want to do and you want to do that fairly early on i think the barrier to entry is somewhat lower in interior design compared to architecture like when you look around you'll see a lot more younger entrepreneurial interior designers starting their own firms than young architects first reason i think is because while interior projects are faster you're gonna be able to get more experience and build up a portfolio earlier in your career and second reason i think it's the amount of time it takes to become an expert in interior design is shorter in architecture i think the growth is much slower because buildings they are really complex and i think because your career growth is kind of parallel to how many projects you work on and how many projects you lead so by the nature of architecture projects being bigger and taking a lot longer i think it just takes more time it takes more years to be ready to run your own firm another thing is i think a lot of architects don't get the project management or entrepreneurial experience when they're working at a firm but i got the sense that in interior design firms you are the one who's dealing with the client you are the one whose project managing and you have well at least the firm that i was at we all had access to the budget of each project so you knew exactly how much time you had to spend and you knew exactly how much money was left on the project so i think the business side is more of an integral part of being an interior designer compared to architects so i think that's probably another reason why the learning gap is a little bit shorter for interior designers when they want to start their own firms also there's the clients you can get right because interior designers are smaller and they're less expensive and therefore they're less risky so you will be able to get more clients compared to architecture work for example let's say a client wants a six-story 26 million dollar building they're gonna want someone they can trust someone with experience in that building type and for an architect to see these projects through they will have to have worked in the field for at least 10 years working on that same typology as opposed to a client who wants to spend one million dollars on an interiors project because they're relatively smaller and a smaller amount of money it's less risky and yeah like the client can hire someone based on experience but i think they'd be more willing to take a chance on like new and up-and-coming designers it's also easier to meet these types of clients in your day-to-day like when i was doing freelance work as an intern i was connected to quite a few clients for interiors work and you know i did work for them even though i didn't have that much experience i think this also means that you have to be more of a people person in interior design but i'll talk about that later just to wrap up this section i think at a certain point in your career you will have to make the choice of whether to stay in your firm or start your own business and for some people like you'll get to a point where it makes more sense for you to start your own business i personally i'm very interested in starting my own business but i just want to make sure that i have all the necessary experience before taking the leap so in interior design you're selling a mood which i think is harder than selling something with rational hard constraints behind it like the building code or zoning regulations like when you're an architect you can very easily tell the client okay like this is what the code says and so you know this are the limits of what we can work with but in interior design you're really working in the realm of like feelings and moods and atmosphere so as an interior designer i think you have to be a great communicator you have to be great at selling your ideas you have to be more personable you have to be amazing at dealing with clients and managing relationships not just with clients but like everyone you work with like i remember when i was at the interiors firm like we would go for beers with clients and like product reps and whenever they came in they like actually liked coming to our office and like they knew all of us by name and that rarely happened in the architecture firms that i work for also because there's less risk and liability i think it makes more sense for interior designers to go out on their own and so if that's the case you know having an entrepreneurial mindset and you know being able to inspire others that's an important skill but even if you're working for a firm most of the times you are going to be managing your own project and handling your own clients so i think these skills are really important if you are an interior designer in architecture i think there's a wider variety of roles you can play which will also determine the skills you need but in general if you want to start your own firm or move up into a senior position i think you need to have all the skills that i just mentioned like selling your ideas like relationship building and just like being a likable person um this might sound kind of strange but you'd be amazed at how many people um architects who are just not a people person and i think that's totally fine but to be totally frank i think you will have a hard time opening your firm if that is what you're interested in i think being in any senior position in architecture you need to be good at working with people and you need to be a good conductor of people with different skill sets but you know moving up into a senior or managerial position isn't the only way to have a successful career in architecture like if you specialize and become really good at one thing in a large firm you can also make pretty good money but you know whichever direction you choose every architect has to start at the bottom as an intern architect or a junior architect and in general i think one of the most important skills for an architect is the ability to digest lots of complex often technical information and communicate it in a simple way by using both graphic and verbal communication all right so i hope that was helpful in understanding the difference between architecture and interior design i think there is a lot more i could go into especially in the career and skills sections but i'm also trying to navigate this profession myself so my summary is actually really based on my personal experience and my personal interest something i kind of want to mention is i i talked about the linchpin principle but i you know i've tried to follow the framework throughout my career but i've also made a lot of decisions that don't perfectly align with that philosophy for example when i got the position as an architect at the interior design firm it was fantastic like i was ecstatic and i was set up to move up in that firm but to my surprise and to everyone's surprise i realized after a while that you know i wasn't really ready to niche down and i just wanted to try working on different types of projects and focus more on learning new things i think this linchpin mentality is something you should always have no matter what firm or what field you're in but you need to balance it with your interests and your passions once you find something that you really like then you can put all your heart and soul into it but you know it's okay to take more time in the exploration and learning phase as long as you're constantly growing design is a really fun profession and in a lot of ways it's a forever profession which means that you never really stop learning but it is very easy to burn out or get jaded if you don't put yourself in a position to get properly rewarded for your work which is why i try to urge people to get licensed early and you know whether you're in an architecture firm or an interior design firm pay attention to what brings value to that firm and also try to constantly be thinking about what you enjoy doing and what you want to get better at and how you can contribute to the field in your own unique way i think if you do that no matter which path you decide to go into you will do well anyways if you have any questions or things you want to add feel free to drop it down in the comments if you're interested in learning how i got my architecture license in less than four years i'll leave the video right here if you're interested in learning more about the value of becoming licensed i'll also leave the video right here and if you're not interested at all in this technical information and just want to watch some videos on architectural concepts i have a video on one of my projects and i'll leave it right here all right thanks for watching guys as always i'll see you in the next video bye [Music]

Channel: DamiLee

Views: 605,036

Keywords: architecture, architecture student, architect, female architect, life of an architect, architecture life, architecture school, archinect, career, career in architecture, interior designer, interior architecture, how to become an interior designer, ncidq test, linchpin, seth godin

Id: x5YlogsATeg

Length: 24min 59sec (1499 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 26 2022