So you want to only focus on the 5% of architectural practice?

Do you have any idea how many current architects would kill for the chance to work exclusively as you describe?  Most, if not all, successful architects excel in both the creative and the technical.  There is also no shortage of dreamer M.Arch grads available for grunt design concept work.

If school and proper intern training is not for you, best marry rich and use that wealth to treat architectural design as a (expensive) hobby. 

There are some marketing firms that only do the aesthetic portion of the architectural and interior design and work with an architect to get the technical and legal stuff done. 

So what you're saying is you want to be an artist?

People have been doing art for a long time now ... I don't see what would be stopping you aside from your personal financial situation. If that is the case, see Non Sequitur's advice about marrying rich. Failing that, try to convince clients to commission your art, or buy it once you've created it. Of course, that starts to bring in those pesky constraints like budget into the purely aesthetic equation.

You also might find it easier to stick to 2 dimensional space or virtual space. Doing art in 3 dimensional space starts to bring in pesky constraints like gravity.

Good luck!

there are firms that do a lot of conceptual work and competitions, so if you found the right role in one of those then it could be a decent fit. you would still have to be detail oriented and get a degree though.

alot of bigger firms have in house visualization and digital practice groups that work on renderings and other 3d stuff to support the architects.

I really depends on how good you are and if you are willing to adapt to the rest like the technical, social, cultural, geographical, climate, altitude, ...

I myself I'm not happy with the profession and I'm finding ways to adapt and discover emerging and unknown trends within the practice of architecture.

I will stress that research is crucial for what you are trying to do. Best of luck don't be dragged by negativity as I have in the past.

Why not try video game design - lots of designed architecture in games that doesn't require physical constraints!

or set design

Thanks all for the great advice. I guess to cut it short then, there isn't really ever a dedicated position in what I described unless you have already been there and done that on the traditional Arch path..

yea, you will never be able to really do arch. design until you get a degree. getting a degree would not be hard for you i think, there is a minimal amount of technical knowledge required, it's mostly creative exercises. but ultimately you will be expected to work on technical documentation in practice which is very detailed oriented and probably goes against your grain.

alot of people do visualization, visual effects for movies or games, stuff like that and seem to like it a lot.

Thanks for the reply

"Do you seriously think they license architects if all they did was pretty sketches?"

"If the role of Architect was purely aesthetics, then you are providing nothing that anyone is willing to pay a big amount of money for."

My point is that I am not looking at becoming an architect so in answer no i do not think this is the role of an architect otherwise I would not be asking the question. There are other industries (one of which you outlined) where a creative is put in place to work with those with more technical knowledge, in order to help develop a more innovative product.Those involved don't create sketches that a child could draw, I think your idea of professional concept design is some what distorted.

I take on your points though, its seems there is no way around the deep knowledge one must obtain in order to have any place in the arch design process.

Some large-ish (50 people and up) architecture firms organize themselves with separate "design" and "production" or "technical" departments.  In those the designers come close to having the role you're looking for - though they're still constrained by client's program, the technical department's and engineer's structural partis, etc. 

There are also some big-name design firms that, for the most part, do not do their own CD sets in-house, so their staff are nearly all designers and managers, and the former usually only stick with the project through DD. 

Having had design roles in both of those types of firms I can say that it is possible to find a job in architecture where you spend nearly all your time on the tasks you're describing.  What it takes to get those jobs are usually an artsy portfolio, some skill at hand sketching, and usually a degree from a name-brand design-oriented school (not always an architecture school though - I've known some of these designers to have other art and design backgrounds) and some connections with the firm.  In the firms that separate designers and production/technical staff the ratio is about 2 designers per 30 others, so if that's the role you want you can pretty much target only the 600 or so largest firms in the US, if that's where you want to work.  You can be an artist in an architecture firm, but you should expect  that you'll work under tight deadlines, experience frequent requests for total re-designs, and regularly be expected to develop as many as 20+ schemes for the same project at once, only to have them glanced at for seconds each before most are dismissed.  This is not to say it can't be a rewarding path.

There are also firms (again usually large) who hire non-architect artists to produce materials for their proposals and marketing.  In most of those roles the person also has responsibility for putting together the graphic components of the proposals, which is not all that glamorous - it's more of a desktop publishing kind of job, in the time between creating the beautiful models and renderings.