How Architects May Improve Their Spatial Intelligence – Check the Exercises

Architects turn spatial ideas into buildings by moving constantly between 2D drawings and 3D space, and the skill behind that, spatial thinking or spatial intelligence, can be trained. A large review of 217 training studies found that practice improves spatial skills, and everyday activities such as map reading, puzzles, construction toys, drawing and some video games all exercise it. This updated guide is for architecture students and young designers. It explains what spatial intelligence is, summarises what the research says about training it, keeps our ten practical exercises, and adds a building-based exercise and a simple weekly practice plan.

What spatial intelligence is and why architects need it

Spatial intelligence is the ability to understand, imagine and mentally manipulate shapes and spaces in three dimensions: to rotate an object in your head, picture how parts fit together, or relate a flat drawing to the space it represents. The psychologist Howard Gardner listed “spatial intelligence” as one of his multiple intelligences in 1983, and researchers usually test it with tasks such as mental rotation, in which you decide whether two drawings show the same 3D object turned in different directions. Remember solid geometry at school? That drew on the same ability.

Maps are a good everyday example. A map is a 2D drawing, while your surroundings are 3D, yet your brain reads the white lines as streets, the blue areas as water and the grey blocks as buildings, and turns them into a route. Architects do this all the time, in both directions.

You have probably heard someone say that architects need a good imagination. That is often a way of describing spatial thinking: the ability to visualise a project before it is built, or even drawn. It is also why some games are especially enjoyable for architects. The work involves constant shifting between 2D and 3D: imagining a form and drafting it in plan and section, changing the drawings and picturing the result, and combining plans and sections into a mental 3D image of the whole building. Doing this for a simple building is one thing; doing it for a large project with complex forms and countless details is much harder, and the best way to get better at it is to practise.

What the research says about training spatial skills

• Spatial skills are trainable. A meta-analysis by David Uttal and colleagues, published in Psychological Bulletin in 2013, combined 217 training studies and found an average improvement of about half a standard deviation (Hedges’s g = 0.47) for trained groups compared with controls, as summarised in the paper’s abstract. The authors also examined whether gains lasted and transferred to other tasks.
• Action video games can help. In a 2007 study in Psychological Science, Jing Feng, Ian Spence and Jay Pratt found that 10 hours of playing an action video game improved spatial attention and mental rotation, with women gaining more than men, while a control group playing a puzzle game did not improve (journal listing).
• Heavy GPS use may weaken spatial memory. Louisa Dahmani and Véronique Bohbot reported in Scientific Reports in 2020 that drivers with more lifetime GPS use had worse spatial memory when navigating without it (full paper). The sample was small and the result is an association, but it supports navigating by map at least some of the time.

These exercises will improve your spatial intelligence

1. Use maps for navigation

Navigating with a map, digital or paper, rather than following turn-by-turn directions, builds your sense of direction and spatial awareness. Try planning a route on the map, then walking it without looking again, or use a compass to check directions.

2. Solve puzzles

When you solve a jigsaw puzzle, you imagine the final picture and fit pieces to it, which exercises visual thinking. A Rubik’s cube works the same way in 3D. Mazes help too, because you build a mental map of the paths to find your way through.

3. Play strategy games

Strategy games need planning as well as visual thinking, chess especially. Players have to picture the board several moves ahead without moving any pieces, which means holding and changing a spatial arrangement in the mind.

4. Play with building bricks

Building shapes and structures from toy bricks such as Lego or Meccano trains spatial awareness. Try making several different forms from the same set of parts, and explore what each size of piece makes possible: it is a small-scale version of designing with a kit of standard components.

5. Take up art

Architects already sketch and draw a lot, and more is better. Drawing something you cannot see means recalling it and visualising it in your head; drawing what is in front of you means judging proportions, spacing and depth. Both build spatial sense.

6. Play video games

You will like this one. As the 2007 study above suggests, some video games can be good for spatial skills, particularly fast action games and games in which you explore and navigate a 3D world: following maps, finding shortcuts and memorising routes all exercise spatial memory.

7. Make shapes from clouds

You probably played this as a child: looking at clouds and seeing shapes in them. The same game works with any group of objects, from a pile of books to tree branches or food on a plate. It trains you to see form and to reinterpret it.

8. See through photographs

Most of us glance at photographs and scroll on. Instead, try to read a photograph of a building or a street as space: where was the camera, how high, which way was it facing, what lies just outside the frame, and how big is the space? Sketching a quick plan of what the photo shows is an excellent test.

9. Create a mind palace

The “mind palace”, or method of loci, uses spatial memory to remember information: you imagine walking through a familiar building and place each item you want to recall in a particular room. For example, you might recall your old classmates by picturing your classroom and walking along the desks. The technique is mainly a memory aid, but it relies heavily on visualising space.

10. Make stories from pictures

Telling a story only through pictures, without text, forces each image to be readable. If you understand what makes a picture readable, you can compose readable drawings, and, taken further, readable spaces and plans.

A building-based exercise: rebuild the Pantheon in your head

The exercises above use everyday activities. The most direct practice for architects is to work from real buildings. The Pantheon in Rome, completed under Hadrian and probably dedicated around AD 126, is ideal because its geometry is simple and well documented: the interior of the rotunda is about 43.3 m in diameter and the same height to the oculus, so a sphere of that size would fit inside it, according to the building’s history. The oculus at the top is about 9 m across.

Try this: from those figures alone, sketch a plan and a section of the rotunda at the same scale, then draw the sphere into the section. Next, imagine standing at the entrance and draw the view you would see. Finally, compare your drawings with photographs and published plans. Repeat the exercise with other buildings whose plans and sections are published, and you will quickly get faster at turning drawings into spatial ideas, and spatial ideas into drawings.

A simple weekly practice plan

The routine below is a suggestion based on the exercises above, not a tested programme. Short, regular practice is easier to keep up than occasional long sessions.

Sources and next step

Most of these exercises are built on everyday habits, so turning them into deliberate practice costs little time. The payoff is faster, clearer design thinking: a growing sense of space helps you plan well-zoned layouts and easy circulation, tasks that are hard but central to architecture. Start this week with the map and sketching exercises, add one building-based exercise, and keep a sketchbook to see your progress.