There were no libraries at universities in the past apparently or preferred styles or methods of representation...odd.

"And how can an individual develop their own way of representing architecture at uni nowadays"

Why bother?  Careers are long, you aren't Bjarke and won't be famous before 50.  Copy what you like, master it, then branch out.  Form the parts before attempting to form the whole. Even the 'famous institutions' are copycat houses.  PSC just made students drop 2k to imitate an artists interpretation of the Superman universe (seriously); pretty soon everyone will be flooding their studio with colorful resin models.  Its a world of mimics and dupes, and you can't be a taste maker without building the skills to do so.  

As Tom Lehrer said: "Plagiarize.  Let no one else's work evade your eyes. Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, so don't shade your eyes, but plagiarize.  plagiarize."

Kids were copying Rem back when I was in school 15 years ago. They were probably copying Libeskind 30 years ago. And Archigram 50 years ago. And Corbu 100 years ago. I don't think things have changed so much, just technology.

own way of representation? tell that to ncarb, aia, and the myriad of contractors that can't even read a floor plan. "it's my own way of representation, you should understand it, the detail here is exploded in an isometric watercolor with enhanced perspective to look like a zaha painting, post it in the job site and everything will be fine"

so my take would be no, it's not worth it. At the end you want your drawings to be clear and concise, not to be hung on a gallery.

Next questions: Why are people on archinect some what so cynical? Can architects live positively? 

i'm one of those who you are talking about ,i like to copy and add to the project until it satisfy me 

and i'm working on my independent style but even if you want to copy a famous style you will learn a lot and it will be hard ,and even copying not all people can do it and adding features to the original it's harder

that's what i've learned :)

There is nothing new. In architecture, film, fashion and so on. You can't design in a bubble and even if you did you'll still end up making something that's similar to something already done. There's just too much out there that already exists and especially for architecture, wherein parameters such as inside-outside, structural integrity, program etc must exist, there's no way for something to be wholly 'unique'. The individuality comes in with taking all of those inputs and creating a 'new' amalgamation or interpretation of those existing and available parts. By this logic everyone is a copy cat yet no two buildings by separate architect are truly identical, however similar they may appear. If they were we wouldn't have jobs...

Meh. I'm bored with you now. Arguing with you is like arguing with a 10 year old. It becomes a bit boring and predictable after a while. All they can do is throwing shit at people. If your logic involves personal attack, assumption and speculation with phrases like 'I don't think you are this and you are that', 'you only come here to do this and that' blah blah blah, then it is not valid. Can we stop? Or are you going to talk about my appearance, my grades, and my penis size now?

That was meant for @randomised. Sorry everyone. 

^ You cast the first stone and didn't expect recoil?

you funny!

@randomised: Fuck mate, let me breath. The thread was opened 4 days ago. I still don’t really understand why you think I trick people into giving me their insight. Now I am tricked into having to do what you want me to do. Just chill, mate. I was busy socializing with my friends.   

To @archinine: in saying about how “The individuality comes in with taking all of those inputs and creating a 'new' amalgamation or interpretation of those existing and available parts.”, I had some luck reading and learning (superficially) a bit about working memory, long-term memory and the process of remembering - encoding and retrieving information from the brain before I came to architecture school. Apparently, memory is stored in the brain in nodes, semantic associative nodes, and when you are trying to remember something, you don’t remember a whole scene/ images, you remember fragments, chunks and bits.  And when you try to bring your memory back into a specific time in your life, you don’t retrieve perfectly the scenes, you retrieve fragments, chunks, and bits. Remembering, then, basically becomes a process of gathering fragments to form a consistent whole rather than perfectly reproducing an exact replica. But the problem of that is that those fragments dwell deeply within your subconsciousness. You don’t really know specifically where they come from. You bring every single piece of associative bits together to create what is entirely yours.

It sounds similar to creative/ thinking process to me. You let all those influences into your head. You forget them. You remember them again, entirely by your will. But in saying that, the process is involuntary. You don’t know what you accidently get out is a resemblance of something you’ve seen seven years ago. Your hands move in a particular way, the way that you forget your mother taught you how to hold a pencil to draw a circle when you was five. And the circle has that particular look, the look that you forget that you saw it in a comic book three days ago while eating an ice-cream. But maybe the beige colour of the ice-cream has something to do with the circle. You think. You say to yourself.

To me, that’s different to copying. Copying means you voluntarily tracing images. A whole image. Particular images. Those bits and chunks are transferred from a drawing in front of you to the drawing that you are doing. You might argue and say that, yeah, by doing that, you involuntarily having those influences coming out as well. But when your desire is to mimic an image, you can only end up with, at-best, the image that you are copying.

To @randomised: The reason why I opened this thread was because I’m in a transitional state of my life: from having studied for three years at architecture school, being young, ‘creative’ to working in practice, having responsibilities, trying to adapt to being practical, thoughtful, logical and efficient. It means I’m in a luckier position than most members here (sorry for the assumption) - having worked for a long time. I’m in a position where I can reflect and think about the way I am designing at university and the way I am designing and solving problems at work and how to adapt and to progress my thinking and my skill set further.

The first two weeks of my practice life, I got to spend the entire time to use pencil and butter paper to plan a house. That was the first piece of real architecture that I ‘drawn’. And I think through that design by drawing plans. At uni, I thought: well, plans are easy. It’s all about making the final geometry and images looks good. Make your geometry interesting. Don’t draw a square. Try to divide the square into several bits of golden triangles. Draw a square, then project the square into an axonometric but tell your tutor that it is still a planar square. It’s all about generating cool geometry and connection (for me, anyway). In practice, using a pencil and butter paper, I thought: well, it’s all about the circulation connecting all those little bits and pieces of programs together. It was, evidently, painful thinking about human scale doing it.

And then further into my time in practice, I started using sections to solve detailing problems. I hate sections, never used them at university. I thought section was never ‘abstract’ enough. And then sometimes I spent too much time dealing with the plan and ignoring the sections. And then last week, I started using axo (my favorite) to deal with some structure problems. And then I started wondering what people think when they read/ design in a flat plan, do they always protect those simple geometry into an axo and start trying to link random lines and bits and pieces together like I do? And it worked for me trying to figure out the structure of the whole design linking bits and pieces together (And then I asked my boss if it was right or not, of course). But then I thought, of course they do, how silly of you to think that.

I remember when I was 16 and was taught on drawing still life (it was a compulsory entrance exam to get into architecture school in my country). Everything starts with a flat image, proportion, some lines, particular geometry, and then you shade them. ‘Use your 4B, you idiot!’ ‘How can you become an architect if you draw like this?’ And being 17, I thought ‘Fuck this. I am going to be an architect by drawing the exact opposite of what you taught me to draw.’ But, how naïve I was, they are the same methodology. I just ignored the last bit, the shading bit, the bit that turns those lines into an actual apple, a vase, a football, or a nude female body.

That’s when I thought about representation. And the whole idea of remembering as a creative process bit above. And then I suddenly realised there’s a tiny correlation between the way I represent (in an ignorant, arrogant and naïve manner) my ‘creative’ projects at uni and the way I think in a practical way at work. I remember a friend of mine, who always has particular images of how his final design is going to look like, and his whole design process is just to finalise it. But isn’t representation about how to actually process your ideas to an outcome, rather than bringing your outcome to an image. Practicing representation is not about creating a unique image, a style, a beautiful line drawing, wonderful geometry but about forming a mental structural network of how to think, how to draw, how to deal with problems, and how to design architecture. I realised that. And I am taking two steps back to think about design process. I guess I got lucky to end up practicing to design something (with plenty of helps) that is going to be built in my first job.

Sorry if this whole story seems messy, naive, fragmented and irrelevant at times: I was very happy this morning when I heard about ArchiCad version 21 enhancing their Stair Tool that I started jumping up and down in a whimsical way (I learned that from where? – I don’t remember) at the real stair at work and I fell three steps. That’s alright. I thought. They probably drawn and calculated this stair using AutoCad. AutoCad is just lines, right?   

PS: I am currently having some mice problem at home so everything I draw at work now involves triangles and circles in red pen. I saw them in my dreams, bloody hell!

Thought about this more.

To your initial post - sure there will be some 'copy cats' who don't think. That's anywhere any time. But for millennia students have learned by copying masters. In terms of things looking similar from the leading schools, I'll name a few since you didn't, Columbia, penn, sci-arc, Pratt and others are doing this scifi zaha thing. We don't know the name now because we're currently in the movement. (I reject schumachers term parametricism as all architecture has since existence relied on paratmers and also he's obnoxious). Just as when the arts n crafts or the modernists or the futurists or deconstructionists or the bauhaus' were in the midst of their movements - they didn't have a name at the time, and a lot of stuff looked very similar. A lot of it was junk and has long been forgotten as will happen now. But some projects were truly excellent and are studied to this day. That's what being in an era is - lots of people trying different things with the latest available technologies and experimenting; not necessarily knowing where it's going or even really trying to be unique for the sake of uniqueness.

To your follow up - how can you admit to drawing golden ratios and then point the finger at a 'copy cat'? Surely an individual came up with or found in nature that ratio which you now use. And countless others have as well. You're using axos and sections? Those conventions of representation have existed for hundreds of years. Centuries of designers have honed these modes so that you and others of today may build upon that representation and pass them down the next iteration. That's progress. Can't say if it's good or bad but it's certainly movement. Which is probably why eras or artistic periods are commonly referred to as movements.

Side note there's a complex '3D plan' buried in the 12th planet which I've still yet to comprehend but I think could be utterly fantastic for representation, and it's over three thousand years old. If I crack it and find it useful for my purposes, I won't be the least bit upset about 'copying' the format.

Glad to hear others work in axo. I've always thought that way - I assume due to being of the computer generation where navigating 3D space on a 2D screen is more natural than lines in paper/space. I'm quite unalone in this. For those who have the innate capacity to visualize 3D space (because let's be honest some people just don't and won't get it no matter how much training) we are very much inherently going to be the shapers of this particular as of yet unnamed movement in which we currently operate. For the record this whole thing started at the end of desconstructionosm, arguably in the maya studio at Columbia run by Greg Lynn. I don't even like the guy particularly - his work isn't very interesting but he is an academic, a great teacher, and his students and their's have gone on to influence and create all that interesting (and some not so interesting) grasshopper twisty curvy stuff that just wasn't possible with say Neiymeyer's age of trigonometry/calc 101 based structural integrity.

You seem interested in this topic. I encourage you to read more recent history about the subject. Postmodernism beginning in the 60-70s was all about recognizing, calling out and celebrating meta, redundancy, rehashing, copy catting etc. Start there and work your way through to robotization and the current hype - automation and AI.

Always a pleasure to discuss current theory with a fellow designer.

TLDR,
Do whatever you want in school.
In a practice, the super-uber-cool  drawings will cost money to produce but they are also great marketing tool as well. It's a balancing act.