Find the 8 Different Types of Architecture - Architectural Foundation (2024)

“Visual Art is necessarily defined by Architecture.”

Ever wondered what’s the most important to an architect? It’s the form, styles, or you can say different types. Every architectural type is not a cup of tea for an individual architect. They are experts in their respective fields. And, those respective fields are what we are going to discuss in the article.

Architecture is a vast array of career alternatives where you can explore a variety of design skills, understanding, and artistic feel. What makes each architecture type different are merchandise layout, graphic layout, and game design.

This is how a day looks like in the life of an architect! Let’s see this video to know more:

What Are the 8 Different Types of Architectural Specific Roles?

Get to know 8 different branches of architecture and their specifications in the section given below. Apart from different job roles in architecture, you will find further various branches as follows.

Residential Architect

The name itself indicates the job roles of such architects. These architects are sort of private architects dealing with clients on a personal basis. It generally means they are besides commercial architects who are more involved in the negotiation, or you know time shortage.

They usually start a project with a client’s meeting in which the client discusses their requirements of budget, taste, and vision. After that, a kind of blueprint of the proposed design is prepared by an architect. For a residential architect, it becomes pretty obvious to take into account specific regulations like environmental factors, zoning laws, and structural stability.

Aesthetic appeal for designing homes or other similar structures is essential for those architects. That’s why they would love to approach electrical systems, ventilating, heating, and air conditioning differently than other architects. Generally, you have to go for three years training period to become eligible for the licensing exam.

Check out this residential architect video to get more ideas!

Green Design Architect

Green or sustainable design architects are specialized in consulting and delivering eco-friendly building methods and design. They tend to have an in-depth knowledge of sustainable products with powerful green design aesthetics. It’s a human as well environment-friendly approach that reduces the harmful effects of construction projects.

In most communities, building a greener or eco-friendly home is more of choice. Unlike code requirements for typical buildings, a green design architect has to go beyond such needs to improve overall building efficiency and minimize the impact and cost of life-cycle environmental structure.

Green designs are mainly focused on increasing sustainability. They have different features such as water-saving plumbing fixtures, energy-efficient appliances and lighting, renewable energy power sources, use of non-toxic and non-synthetic materials, responsibly harvested woods, efficient space usage, greywater reuse, rainwater harvesting, and so on.

Look at these greener structures when trees meet buildings!

Landscape Architect

Landscape architects or landscape designers are related to designing outside surrounding buildings. It’s more of a common title for a licensed architect who works in a professional sense for outside spaces such as gardens, parks, campuses, and other public zones. They are engaged in structuring high compatible and effective surroundings.

However, the profession of landscape architecture is misunderstood as gardening by many. But it’s not the case here! The profession is much more than they think, and it should be celebrated by people of every city, town, and country. Well, it’s such an encompassing and broad profession with varying options.

Different spaces are structured that enables a kind of high life between buildings. They are often involved in regulating the place laws where they are working. The various places where you can check over their involvement are shared paths, streets, roads, apartment compounds, housing estates, squares, shopping malls, pocket parks, cemeteries, museums, universities, national parks, forests, and so on.

What do landscape architects do? Watch this video to know more:

Interior Designer

An interior architect is another licensed architect who is specialized in interior procurement and designing of interior projects. They are predominantly found in large firms because of their specialist nature—they kind of stitch the inside apartment. Before you get into the lucrative career of an interior designer, you must know the difference between a decorator and designer.

Interior decorators are involved in playing with fabrics, colors, and textiles. Their educational background is equally important to get into the business. On the other hand, interior designers with accredited educational certification have an innate flair for spatial arrangement, color, textiles, and architecture.

The first step to such a successful career is passion. Apart from the interest in fabrics, color, and furniture, an interior designer have to be educated in the structural integrity of buildings, design’s history, building codes, spatial concepts, ergonomics, computer-aided design (CAD), psychology, and much more.

Check out this visual on interior architecture design!

Commercial/Actual Architect

The expert in building non-residential buildings is a commercial architect. They are also called as ‘A’ style architects. This architecture is more concerned with specialized commercial places, typically office buildings or office fit-outs, malls, retail stores, strip malls, and so on.

The commercial project stands apart from other projects by having a focus on the client’s business needs. They have to engineer design based upon the client’s business requirements so that they can run the designated type of business within the facility. Also, they have to meet high challenges as compared to residential work.

Almost every business hires commercial architects for such projects. The architects have to complete almost 5-year bachelor’s degree with an internship program. This architecture requires a great set of skills, as creativity is merged with engineering and analytical skills.

Watch this video to know more:

Urban Designer

Urban Designers are the architects highly involved in city and town planning. As the name indicates, the urban context is kept in mind while designing such urban buildings. It implies a citizenship notion with the realm in public life. Urban design is concerned with organizing, analyzing, and shaping urban form to elaborate richly and coherently as much as possible.

It involves designing a group of buildings, landscapes, and spaces, and establishing the process that makes the development successfully possible. The urban design structure is the newest profession. The profession is a little more than 25 years old. The urban design is about making relations between places and people, nature and built fabric, and movement and urban form.

The design further draws together many strands of environmental stewardship, place-making, economic viability, and social equity into making of places with distinct identity and beauty. The design is developed from and transcends transportation and planning policy, development economics, architectural design, landscape, and engineering.

Watch this video to know more:

Industrial Architect

Industrial Architecture consists of impressive work arts of train stations, banks, retail stores, factories, and so on. They are focused on kind of commercial products but with enriching architectural landscape. The industrial design is very crucial to its performance. The subject of Industrial Architecture is broad in itself.

After designing an industrial facility, the direction in which the industry goes is the most considered subject. In any vast industrial design, the synergy between engineering and architecture is very critical. With the industrial revolution heralding mass production and machines, industrial and commercial establishments began to depend more on such processes.

That’s why an industrial architect is required very necessarily in industrial firms. They would better know how to shape, organize, and plan such structure keeping in mind the requirements of raw materials and other production processes. So, these architects apply their knowledge to create and design such places.

This is how the Industrial Revolution Architecture took place! Watch this video to know more:

Restoration Architect

The work of restoration architect is aimed at maintaining, repairing, extending, and restoring historic and protected properties. You will be required both relative legislative and planning knowledge for negotiation of the planning system and understanding historical architect merits and their constructions.

For becoming a restoration architect, you must have an interest in architecture, history, and conservation. There should be a good understanding of structural engineering. You would be having a master’s degree in historic preservation, conservation architecture, or any subject related to building restoration, renovation, and rehabilitation.

They generally meet with project managers or clients to discuss the requirements and objectives of a particular project. You have to provide practical advice regarding the project that further includes computer-aided software to make renderings. Just with relevant work experience, it may be challenging to enter the field.

Here’s a video at office restoration! Watch this video to know more:

5 Design Hacks to Design Like a Professional Architect

Any aspiring architect would definitely like to know these design hacks to design your architecture project just like a professional architect. Let’s get started and break down elements of alignment, concept, proportions, scale, and details.

• Designing a concept is first thing you would learn architecture design school. It can be either abstract or liberal.
• Then, you have to consider proper alignment. A good alignment is required to create intentional and symmetrical design.
• Most of the times, scale of design is overlooked. And, the essential factor to keep in mind while using appropriate scale is space.
• You have to look at proportions also which successfully leads to unification of alignment.
• Beautiful details should be kept in mind while designing architecture. For instance, you can use contrast between darkness and light to showcase the cross-detailed information.

Some Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some frequently asked questions on different architectural types and their implications. Make sure to give them a read so that you would be able to know the real essence of architecture.

Conclusion

So, these are 8 different branches of architecture specifically engineered in different areas as designated. As you have observed, a professional degree with an internship is usually required in every architect’s portfolio. Understanding how different each architect also works lets, you know their job responsibilities and contribution to society.