Houme India
Five skills to learn in five years of architecture college.
Sourabh listed them in the reel. This page is the rest of it — where to actually learn each one, for free, without buying a single course.
Everything below is a real link we have checked. Where something costs money, we say so instead of hiding it.
Links last checked September 2026.
Year 1
Sketching
Not to make pretty drawings. So that when you are standing on site and the carpenter has not understood a word you said, you can draw it in thirty seconds and he gets it.
30X40 Design Workshop
FreeA practising architect who films his own sketching, model-making and design process. Start with his sketching videos, then the model-making playlist. American practice, so ignore the licensing and contract content — the hand skills transfer completely.
YouTube channel
ArchDaily's roundup of drawing tutorials
FreeA short curated list of channels that teach architectural linework, hatching and quick perspective. Useful as a map so you are not lost in YouTube search results.
ArchDaily
Seven free architectural drawing tutorials
FreeUrban sketching and perspective basics from working illustrators. These are the free tutorials on the site — the full courses are paid, and you do not need them yet.
Domestika blog
The only habit that matters. One building a day, ten minutes, in a cheap sketchbook you are not scared to ruin. A year of that beats any course. Sketch the building, then sketch the joint where two materials meet — that second one is what site work actually needs.
Year 2
Learning with AI
The skill is not typing prompts. It is being able to take a two-hundred-page building code, a lecture recording and three case studies, and understand them in one evening instead of one week.
NotebookLM
FreeUpload your own PDFs, notes and lecture recordings and ask questions only about those. It answers from your material and cites the page, so it will not invent a bye-law that does not exist. Best single tool on this page for studio and thesis research.
Google's free year for students
Free for studentsRelaunched in August 2026. Students in India get twelve months of Google AI Plus at no cost, which raises your NotebookLM limits considerably. You have to redeem it before 31 December 2026, verify with a college ID, and it auto-renews at full price after the year — so put a reminder to cancel.
Claude
FreeStrongest of the three for long writing and for arguing with. Paste your design rationale and ask it to attack the weak points before your jury does. Free tier has daily limits.
Anthropic
Gemini and ChatGPT
FreeFor fast answers during studio. Both have free tiers that are enough. Do not use them for anything factual about Indian codes or local bye-laws without checking the source yourself.
Google / OpenAI
Wispr Flow
PaidSpeak instead of type, anywhere on your laptop. Genuinely changes how fast you work once you are writing long reports and thesis text. It is a paid subscription with a limited free trial — worth it in fourth and fifth year, skip it in second.
Search "Wispr Flow" — note the spelling, there is no "h"
Year 3
Interiors
You will graduate as an architect and then discover that almost every residential client hands you the interiors too. Learn kitchens, wardrobes and one product properly and you become the person a firm actually wants to hire.
Modular kitchen design — full playlist
FreeOur own playlist in Hindi. Layouts, work triangle, carcass and shutter materials, hardware, common mistakes, and real installed projects. Start here for kitchens.
Houme India
Project of the Week
FreeCompleted Indian homes walked through room by room, with the reasoning behind each decision and what it cost. Watch these the way you would do a case study — note what was compromised and why.
Houme India
Appliance and material buying guides
FreeChimneys, finishes, hardware. This is the part college never teaches — how to read a spec sheet and tell a real difference from a marketing difference. You will use this in your first client meeting.
Houme India
SketchUp Free
FreeRuns in the browser, nothing to install. Fastest way to model a kitchen or a wardrobe and check whether the shutter actually opens. Free version is for non-commercial use only, which is fine for college work.
Trimble
National Building Code of India 2016
FreeBoth volumes, complete, legally hosted as a public document. Nobody reads it end to end — treat it as the thing you search when a jury asks about staircase widths, ventilation or fire. Load it into NotebookLM and ask it questions.
Bureau of Indian Standards, via Internet Archive
One thing we will not link. Neufert and Ching are floating around as pirated PDFs. Buy a used copy or borrow the college library's. Your studio runs on other people's drawings — start the habit of paying for them.
Year 4
Revit and BIM
BIM is not another modelling software. It is the file where the architect, the interior designer, the structural engineer and the project manager all work at once. Firms hiring for international projects filter on this line in your CV.
Revit, free for one year
Free for studentsAutodesk gives enrolled students a full one-year education licence, renewable each year while you are still eligible. You verify with your college email and enrolment details. Files carry an education watermark and cannot be used on paid work — that is the trade.
Autodesk India
Full beginner Revit course, one video
FreeA complete project start to finish. Do not watch it — open Revit on the other half of your screen and build along. The project files are free from his site.
Balkan Architect
Balkan Architect, full channel
FreeClose to a thousand free tutorials from a working BIM manager. When you get stuck on one specific thing — families, schedules, worksharing — there is almost always a short video that solves exactly that.
YouTube channel
Blender
FreeFree forever, not a student licence. For rendering and walkthroughs when your portfolio needs images that do not look like coursework. Steeper to learn than the rest of this list, so only start once Revit is comfortable.
Blender Foundation
Year 5
Soft skills
You can design brilliantly and still lose every project, because the client hires whoever explained it best. This is the shortest list on the page for an honest reason — nobody has built a good free course on this for Indian students. It is learned by doing.
Watch how a design gets explained
FreeNot for the design content this time. Watch Sourabh explaining a decision to a homeowner who does not know the vocabulary — the order he puts things in, what he leaves out, how he handles the budget question. That is the actual skill.
Houme India
How a small practice actually runs
FreeFree templates, fee-structure thinking and business basics from a solo architect. The legal and tax pages are American — ignore those. The parts about pricing your work and talking to clients apply anywhere.
30X40 Design Workshop
The ninety-second drill
FreeOnce a week, record yourself on your phone explaining one of your own designs in ninety seconds, to someone who is not an architect. Watch it back. You will hate the first ten. By the tenth you will be better at this than most people in your batch, and better than plenty of people already working.
Do this one. It is the whole year.
And the rest of it. How you dress, how you sit, how you shake a hand, what you do when a client says the budget is half. Nobody teaches this. Watch the seniors in your office who get given the client meetings, and copy them.
That is the whole list.
Twenty-one things, five years. If you only do three of them — sketch daily, learn NotebookLM properly, and record the ninety-second drill every week — you will still be ahead.
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