ive wanted to be an architect since i was in the 6th grade...but i up until college i never did anything about it. i guess now that im done with college, its been 4 years since i was 17.

Age five. No kidding.

I am still a student....I started at 30

Will graduate at 34, and then focus on IDP

early thirties... and as of friday, i am not doing what others tell me to do anymore.

Freshman in high school, so I think I was 14 years old, I stopped by the architecture college when visiting my older sister at university because I had always been curious about architecture and was taking drafting classes at school. Was immediately hooked and have never looked back.

I started the journey 2 years ago, applying for M.Arch @ the age of 26.
I just started my first year @ the age of 28.

17. I was stopped at a red light.

But I do know many who started their journey much later -- you would by no means be alone!

13.

When I was 5, my grandmother bought me a set of wood blocks.

It was very FLLW-ish.

I think the first time I heard the word "architect" in conjunction with a career path was probably seventh grade or so.

16, entered undergrad, currently in my first job, but i feel realllly young,, so, no worries

I'm sure we've had this discussion already but I'll bite. Whilst I would love to woo you with a story that I am a late scholar or that I knew from I was a tadpole, it instead happened just about now in a season when the leaves begin to thin and fall back in the 1980s. Halloween wasn't actively practiced where I grew up, but one year in prep school we were invited to guise ourselves in the garb of our future careers. It was the first time I can consciously remember wanting to be an architect, and also the first time the profession actively disappointed me, because at that age I never knew how architects dressed.

So instead I went dressed as a pilot.

perhaps I should use this story when asked why architects wear black. where is that why do architects wear black thread?

Well I started straight out of high school, there's a guy in my class who started as 27 year old, he's really cool, and one the youngest in attitude in the place...

but i saw one guy who was 50, and owns his own engineering firm, which i think he daughter is currently managing, and he was sick of architects telling him what to do, so he's doing a bachelor of architecture...

8, when i started drawing floor plans of 'dream' houses. also would do observation drawings - pencil and pastel mostly - of buildings around my small historic va town and, in some cases, sell them.

my best friend and i were constantly drawing car designs, so that was my fallback.

I'm like Steven, and started drawing houses when I was little.

But my first architectural memory was finding the brochure for our new subdivision in Northern Cal when I was five. It had a floor plan, which my mom told me showed the layout of rooms in our house. I looked at the plan, then looked up at the living room, family room, bedrooms, and instantly got it. When I was seven or eight, I started drawing house plans. When I was eleven, my parents gave me a brand-new drafting table with T-square and triangles. Woo hoo!

I will be 31 in a couple of weeks. I'm currently taking general education classes at a community college with the hopes of transferrering into my first year of a 4+2 arch. degree program in the fall of 2009. I'm doing all of this while carrying on with my 10-year Information Technology career, at least for the first 2 years of school.

I grew up in a small town in Indiana. I guarantee at the time that there was not a single architect living there...I had no idea that the profession even existed. Since then, I've lived in Oak Park IL, former home of FLW and taken up an interest in midcentury design.

As I got burned out on technology, it seemed natural to gravitate towards something that I enjoy rather than something I'm doing just for the paycheck.

Thought about as a kid while building tree houses and confirmed the desire in first year collage after finding a book about FLW/Fallingwater in the library, I found that regionally I had a tough time to get into the local University
(needed an under grad degree) so I applied to Landscape Architecture, after that I realized I still wanted to be an Architect and did my master's.

5th grade. i have some dope "dream house" plans that a friend of mine and I sketched out. but i never REALLY got deep into it (meaning, it runs my life) until graduate school

i was around 4 or 5, my parents still have the first drawings i did, i was obsessed with half circle transom windows, dont know where i picked it up, obviously didnt know what they were called, i just drew them everywhere, by age 7 i was ALL about interior floor plans...

was going to be a welder or an electrician... but received some money for college so went to arch. school

i'm 32... no IDP and somehow i'm doing something.....

For what it is worth, Philip Johnson did not become an architect until age 39. He practiced well into his 90s when he passed away.

As an educator, I have seen plenty of students of all ages ranging from 16 to mid 50s who were in the journey to become an architect.

Best

Dr. Architecture

I was 14 when i first started thinking about Architecture as a career, 31, when I decided against it.

architecture is in my blood as granpaTK, AIA was Pei's right-hand man for many years.

I was a sophomore in hs when I seriously started down this path some 23 or so years ago. Still not registered and my idp is stalled with my current job.

The first inkling came while playing D&D at the age of 10. I was put in charge of mapping out the dungeons.

Later it showed up as my being the only student actually interested in the difference between doric, ionian and corinthian columns in art history class my first year in college.

I didn't actually know architecture was what is what and that I had to be part of it until the age of 22.

Despite all this knowing, I am still a late starter. I expect to start grad school (and my first professional degree) at the age of 30.

Let me rephrase that.

I didn't know about what architects did and that I wanted to do that until the age of 22.

i realized when i was a junior in high school, i was 16

took some drawing classes there and i got hooked right in, haven't stopped since!

i started when i was about 2 months old, my mom used to take me to her architecture school lectures, when i was about a year old i was already marking up her drawings with my crayons, so by the time i was 2 years old i had already been in architecture school for 2 years (y de ahi pal real)....

i guess i didnt got exposed too much to other professions...well yes, law, but no thanks.

at least your mom didn't use you as child labor

did you get a roll of trace for your first birthday??

"live out of your parents until you can live out of your sons"

CMU nah i guess i got a soccer ball or a toy fireman truck from my dad, i was never growing up with books about little architects or anything, more with stuff which enhanced my creativity in certain ways.... i do remember i started to get lego and such kind of building toys soon enough...but im sure as soon as people who at the end are doctors or lawyers or pilots, so, lets not take it out of proportion

i do loved to blow up my LEGO houses with fireworks when i was a kid.... still i didnt went into demolitions ;)


:P i hope i dont give my kids a roll of trace for any b.day :P

haha i hear ya, i was just joking a little

i loved the legos too, didnt realize how they were shaping my mind at the time

though i didn't really get into the demolition so much, at least not with fireworks lol

destroy to create right?

OK, heres mine...

I loved legos, so I wanted to be a "lego engineer." I even wrote to their corperate head quarters in 5th grade. By Jr. High, I had decided that that was a pipe dream, and Architect was a more realistic path.

And I think Trace would be a fine gift, assuming crayons and such were given right along.

speaking of LEGOs anybody can make them now, a eu court decided.

http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/11/eu-court-says-l.html

talking about generics...