It’s 2 a.m. on a Thursday night and freshman architecture major Brian Schaller doesn’t know how long he’s been working.

The surface of his desk is a collection of sketch paper and dozens of toothpick-sized cubes. A bag of Skittles gets shifted around from corner to corner as he hands the candy out to his neighbors and clears a space to work.

Schaller still has to finish two models and write a six-page paper for another class. He stops working for a minute to calculate.

He has been at The Warehouse for 17 hours.

Work hours like Schaller’s and the roughly 20 other first-year architecture students still here at The Warehouse at 2 a.m. give the program its campus-wide reputation as grueling, intense and stressful.

‘As long as I am awake, I am here at The Warehouse,’ said freshman architecture major Jack Solomon. ‘It’s so fulfilling to finish a project here and feel like you’re accomplishing so much.’

The architecture program is a five-year program. After those five years though, graduates are granted a Bachelor of Arts in architecture, equivalent to a professional architecture license.

‘To get that license, you need a certain amount of work experience, on-the-job experience and an intense level of skill,’ said Jonathan Massey, undergraduate architecture programs chair and an associate professor of architecture. ‘The B.A. is intensive, rigorous, demanding and also very inspiring. The program has an incredibly high degree of requirement.’

Those requirements include 18 credit hours for first years, three of which come from the studio drawing class that keeps students working until the sun comes up.

According to Massey, though, the time commitment and hours spent working are due in part to the new skills required of students.

‘It’s different than reading or writing, which we have been doing since first grade,’ Massey said. ‘Successful architects have to simplify many types of data, analyze social patterns and the way people interact with one another. They need incredibly good drawing skills, both manually and digitally.’

And those skills demand intense dedication.

‘Once, I didn’t sleep for 36 hours,’ said Zach Jacobs, a freshman architecture major. ‘All of that time was spent either in the studio or in my architecture classes.’

First-year architecture classes include lectures, history, representation and theory. Each week, students are required to read roughly 300 pages from their textbooks, in addition to keeping up with their projects, homework for classes outside the School of Architecture and any club involvement.

Freshman architecture major Andrew Weigand is involved with the Renee Crown Honors program and club swimming as well. He also runs with his roommate on a regular basis – one of the few times they actually see each other.

‘It’s just time management,’ Weigand said. ‘But I do love coming and working here because you’re always engaged. It’s not boring, and there’s always something to be doing.’

Weigand has a premier desk location: His corner view outside consists of the entire city of Syracuse, with two floor-to-ceiling windows surrounding his desk.

But this view of the city surrounding The Warehouse comes at a cost.

In 2006, because of necessary renovations to the program’s home in Slocum Hall, the school moved to The Warehouse in Armory Square – a 15-20 minute bus ride from campus.

‘The move to The Warehouse adds a certain amount of travel time that we didn’t have in Slocum,’ Massey said. ‘There are the benefits, though, of being downtown and having all of that inspiration around us.

‘We are going to get to return to a state of the art facility in Slocum, as well. If we had stayed in Slocum, occupying half the building one semester and the other the next, the renovations would have stretched out even longer.’

As of now, the renovations are expected to be completed by 2009.

To aid in the commute of students and faculty, a 24-hour bus route was added going to and from campus to The Warehouse every 40 minutes.

‘They’re really devoted students,’ bus driver Joe Lefter said.

Lefter has the graveyard shift, driving from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m.

‘I love getting to hear about the projects they’re working on and seeing them come on the bus carrying all of their supplies and ideas. I rarely see them in the light of day, though.’

And because students come and go to The Warehouse 24 hours a day, security at the building is important. According to an SU Department of Public Safety officer who wished to remain anonymous, The Warehouse is one of the most secure buildings off campus.

Cameras are in every corner, and the building is under constant video surveillance by the officers on duty. The restrooms have alarm systems that will alert the on-duty public safety and armed peace officers.

At the beginning of the year, the SUID cards for architecture students were encoded with a magnet that opens the front door of The Warehouse, operates the elevators and opens the doors to individual floors.

‘This architecture program is intensive and an incredible learning experience,’ the Public Safety Officer said. ‘Our job here is to help these kids out with whatever they need, whether that’s to prevent non-students from entering or giving them a Band-Aid if they need it. It’s our service to them and how hard they work.’

But often the first-year architecture students can’t even find the time to ask for a Band-Aid.

Caitlin Pontrella, a freshman architecture major, can attest to that.

‘I cut myself the other day and my first though wasn’t ‘Ouch” she said. ‘Instead it was ‘Damn it! Did I get blood on my project?”

Luckily, she hadn’t, and continued working on her assignment.

First-year architecture students are currently working on a three-stage project involving cubes. Each had to decide on a verb – such as slant, grow or bend – that they wanted represented in their cube, and then design their models around it.

Each Wednesday, there are checkpoints and critiques with professors and TAs, meaning deadlines are strict for the architecture students and require long nights.

‘It’s tough to get the work done,’ Massey said. ‘But all of that time is with faculty members. Every single first-year student gets to know their professors extremely well in such a short period of time. More so than in any lecture class.’

And in the end, most students think the long nights are worth it. They do take breaks, and if one walks from one side of the studio to the other, music blends of anything from Daft Punk to Architecture in Helsinki can be heard, as freshmen stage a minute-long dance party or simply sit at their desks, talking and eating food from the ever-valuable vending machines.

‘It’s only been three weeks, and already I’ve learned so much,’ freshman Shannon Willing said. ‘I love the design work, the process. I love figuring out new ways to do stuff. There’s nothing else I would rather do. Besides, we all live off of coffee and tea, so we’re awake, and we just have fun here.’

Published on September 17, 2007 at 12:00 pm