ArchAdemia

Model Richard Meier’s Saltzman House from scratch in 3ds Max.

Sixteen lessons, four chapters. Taught by Neelkumar Wala, BIM Lead at Speirs Major. The same workflow he uses on real commercial schemes, taught as you build one of the canonical white-modernist houses of the late twentieth century.

Modelling in 3ds Max can be brutal. Modifier stack, edit poly, the curved corner bay that makes the Saltzman a Saltzman. The course breaks every hard move into the workflow that actually works. D5 Live Sync at lessons 15 and 16 is the finisher, not the headline.

If you’re a junior who wants to confidently model in 3ds Max, this is the course. If you’re senior, send it to the next person on your team learning it.

Five things firms are actually hiring juniors for in 2026.

Not what the curriculum teaches. Not what the portfolio competition rewards. The five capabilities every senior architect wishes their junior already had.

Real BIM fluency, not “I can draw a wall in Revit.” Drawings a builder can actually build from at 7am. Design judgement you can defend on every move. The juggle of admin and creativity in any given morning. And working with AI well. Knowing what it’s for, when to reach for it, when to leave it alone.

If you’re a Part 1 hunting placement, this is the rubric. If you’re senior, send it to the junior on your team you keep wanting to skill up.

Detailing takes (at least) twice as long as juniors expect.

Then add the labelling. Then add the sheeting up. None of it is glamorous, but every line propagates straight to site.

A flippant detail on a Friday afternoon becomes a real mistake on a Monday morning.

In our experience, contractors prefer a unique set of notes per detail. A key with entries that never appear on the drawing reads as noise, not help.

The full course is inside ArchAdemia. Twelve lessons by practice founders, on the bit of the job nobody teaches you.

A new kind of learning inside ArchAdemia.

Introducing Guides. Handbooks and audio companions on the topics every working architect now has to navigate: the Building Safety Act, the BIM Ex*****on Plan, and the frameworks shaping modern practice.

45 minutes to an hour each. Read at your desk or listened to on the commute. Same handbook, two ways in.

If you’ve not had time to sit down with the regs, these are for you. If you have, they’re the cross-check.

Annual exclusive, alongside the full download library and toolkit. More guides shipping over the coming weeks.

Eleven mistakes quietly killing your portfolio 💀

Five of them inside this carousel: open with your strongest, make every drawing legible, show the process, claim your role, make the file sendable. The full eleven are in the free Audit at ArchAdemia.

Comment ‘audit’ for a direct link to a completely free audit of your CV \& Portfolio, complete with actionable steps to get it up to speed!

Hiring panels see hundreds of portfolios a year. They notice the same fixable mistakes every time.

If you’re soon applying for your next position, run your portfolio through the audit before you send it to a firm.

Clients don’t pay you until you chase them.

Most of us would rather swallow it than ask. We’re designers, not collectors. We trained for the drawing, not the asking. But your fee is owed the moment the work lands, and quiet invoices stay quiet until they’re nudged.

Six slides on getting comfortable with the chase. The line that changed how we run the practice. The habits that move it from awkward to procedural: terms set day one, an accounts inbox doing the talking, escalation already written into the contract.

If you’re running your own studio, this is the chapter no one teaches in school. If you’re working in a firm, it’s worth knowing before you go out on your own.

How to set up your own architecture practice. Honestly.

Three directors of ThreeForm Architects sit down for a candid ten-part series. Over a decade of running a working practice in Liverpool, taught from hindsight. They share the wins, the losses, and the hard lessons they wish someone had told them earlier.

Inside: realistic startup costs (the £30k figure nobody wants to say out loud), the consultant relationships that actually win you work, the two-stage hiring process that scales without losing your studio culture, and why a 20% margin matters more than turnover.

Not a polished business course. A conversation.

If you’re a senior architect thinking about going out on your own, or a practice owner trying to make your second hire pay for itself, this is your week.

From £39/mo. Cancel anytime.