When you tell someone you’re an architect, the often say, “wow, you must be good at math.” The truth is that architects don’t do much math.
There’s a bit of confusion between the difference between an architect and an engineer. Many people don’t realize the difference or may even think the words “architect” and “engineer” are synonyms. In reality, architects conceive the idea for a building - the big picture. This means coming up with a solution for the most creative balance between aesthetics, code compliance, safety, energy efficiency, comfort, privacy, lighting, integrating with the environment, and coordinating with engineers who are experts in structure, soil, drainage, and mechanical systems. In doing this work, there is very little math for the architect. The math is generally limited to the simple addition of adding up the square footage of rooms, adding up the height of each floor to see how tall buildings are, using multiplication to determine what percentage of the property is covered by buildings, and … well, that’s it. You likely do more math in your job or at the checkout stand at the grocery store. On occasion, architects might do more complicated calculations when trying to determine how many lumens of light hit the surface of a desk or in determining how much heat leaks through the insulation in a wall, but this is rarely needed, and consultants are usually used to do these calcs if a precise answer is warranted. Architects routinely do addition and multiplication. Occasionally, we get crazy and do some division.
So who IS doing all the math? It’s engineers. Structural engineers calculate the weight of the walls, floors, roofs, snow, soils, wind, and earthquakes that interact with the structure of a building. They implement complicated safety factors in their calculations to determine how big bolts need to be, how many nails are needed, how big a beam needs to be, how far a beam can span, how much a beam will bend when snow collects on the roof, how much rebar to put in a concrete foundation, and how thick the concrete in a foundation wall needs to be.
Geotechnical engineers dig a few holes in the proposed area of work and take some soil samples for testing in their lab. They determine how much weight the soil can support without compressing too much. The structural engineers use this info to calculate the size of the foundations needed (since they know how much the whole building will weigh).
Civil engineers calculate how much water will be collected by a roof and flow from the gutters and into a downspout. Then, they calculate how to collect that rainwater in gravel trenches or tanks to systematically disperse the water into the soil before it gets collected by sewers.
These engineers are the ones doing all the math. When I went to architecture school, we didn’t even take a full math class. In the entry level college math class that all college students were required to take, the architecture students were actually dismissed at midterms. So, architects actually took less math than everyone else! Surprised?
Here’s a sample of the sort of calculations that engineers do that architects are not qualified (or insured) to do … check the math if you’d like:
Here’s the sort of math an architect does:
2000 sq ft + 500 sq ft = 2500 sq ft.
That’s not a whole lot of math - contrary to what most people think.
If you’d like to learn more about our design process, visit www.josharch.com/process, and if you’d like to get us started on your project with a feasibility report, please visit www.josharch.com/help