Sarah Hobday-North

Melbourne, Victoria

How did I decide to become an Architect?

Sarah Hobday-North and a client. Photography by Stephanie Perrins.

I grew up with an architect mum, architect step-dad and aeronautical engineer father. My Great-great grandfather was an architect of some fame in early 1900s Tasmania. Despite this foundation, it was never (to me) a foregone conclusion that architecture is where I would end up.

My first architectural memory is of the drawing board in the front room of my mum’s unit in Werribee, Melbourne. A pale green surface, the slide of the horizontal square and the click-clack as it rotated to change angles. Mum slept in the drawing room in a loft bed above the built-in wardrobe while I slept in the second bedroom. I would have been three or four years old. In later years the whole unit turned into an office and my old bedroom became the print room with an ammonia plan printer in it. I learned to use it and help with document feeding when I was about eight.

Our Christmas holidays were always planned to take in a site inspection here, or a client meeting there. I played in piles of builders’ sand and learned to walk on open floor joists. Most importantly to me now, is that I saw my mum walking over open floor joists, talking with and instructing builders, often in heels. She made being a woman in architecture look commonplace. For all the issues that have challenged me over the years, I have never thought twice about my gender in architecture. Thanks mum.

At 10 I wanted to be a chef. At 15 I thought I should be doctor. But at 16 I had to fill in my university selection form and all the architecture courses ended up at the top. The rest might be history, but it’s never as simple as that. The journey has had some bumps and even derailments.

Today architecture sustains me because I have properly understood that it is about people first, and buildings very much second. It’s an idea that many architects talk about, but that many more architects don’t get to experience from the “back office”. The drafting and specification have to be done and the technical problems have to be resolved, but I come alive with clients.

Thanks to my years in the back office of my mum and step-dad’s practice I have learned technical skills, gained understanding of regulations and the principles of detailing, for example, that help my clients. Thanks Neville. It is since leaving the back office that I’ve learned that architects can have customers, as well as clients. It is since leaving the back office that I’ve been able to create a new kind of practice that allows practically anyone to access architectural expertise. Think of me as your architect friend who loves having their brain picked and answering your most pressing questions. Think of me as your architect GP.

In the early 2010s I fell out of love with architecture and went back to university. Two years later I was a high school teacher in a state school teaching design. Maybe, I thought, I can do more good teaching an appreciation and command of design to young people?! I learned a lot and burned out in 10 weeks. I resigned. 

Now, I get to work with people who appreciate the value of the work we do together and I give them command of their projects through design and specific strategies. Just as a doctor looks at an x-ray or MRI scan and sees things I cannot see, so too I can look at a house or a drawing and see things others cannot see. It isn’t because of any mystery or innate “creativity”. It certainly isn’t “genius”. It is what I have been trained to do and a set of skills I continue to develop.

Architecture makes more sense to me now than it ever did. For me, it’s not about the “famous” architects, it’s about ordinary people. Architecture is for everyone.

P.S. For some thoroughly researched work in the process of "becoming" an architect, see the work of James Thompson, now at the University of Melbourne.