I myself waited with this project and made my fellow faculty wait for a long time before the final jury could be taken. It was because I was not satisfied with the amount of time the students spent in their process of evolving their design. However, the final jury for the 3rd project of the first year students, I felt, had much more content than discussed in the session.
The project was about making and expression space of a professional (profession) by deriving patterns out of their working conditions (behavioural, habitual, through their objects they use or deal in, etc.). We chose 40 professions to begin with - a variety of them - from the vada pav seller, dabbawala to the Chartered Accountant or the Dancer. To limit the scale/scope of the project for the first year, we restricted the area to 50 sq m. I shall be writing a formal "retrospect" brief for this project later.
Each design had so much potential, and each designer had so much enthusiasm. And so I too got enthused. The above sketches were made as I thought along with the students. Of a postman, a space in the wells of the staircase ringing door bells and looking into interiors of houses framed through keyholes and cut-outs in safety doors, of a barber - looking at multiple hairstyles, almost living in hair. For an astronaut, we thought of the ground plane, which is never flat - rather someone who spent time in undefined plane. So the undulating surface enclosed in a space which would be under constant air pressure. However, the student took a complete different trajectory and made something like pneumatic slabs. He lifted this inhabitable expressive space a feet above the ground, thus it being in space (ungrounded) while the user entered or left the space.
For the tailor, we began with the idea of playing between the 3 critical numbers: shoulders-chest-waist. These numbers define the body and in turn, the garment. The idea could have been abstracted into a series of such hangers sized to people. However, the idea was lost. The pattern in the fisherman's profession was seen to be a daily passage between solid ground to the non-ground. This pattern of transition between surfaces that the fisherman inhabits was what we tried to explore. The idea was abstracted through the symbolic net, which becomes a surface to walk as well as envelop. The movement it induces in the body is similar to the movement from land to sea (and vice versa) by cleverly spacing the structural members of the support. I am not sure if the student brought out this aspect clearly. There was perhaps a little conceptual misunderstanding.
A rigorous process followed for the dabbawala - of analysing the codes on the dabbas to evolving it into a spatial configuration. This was truly the most fascinating project in the class. Others were that of the joker, achieved through the act of juggling, and completely colourful while another interesting one was the magician, where I tried to crack the idea of anti-pattern (that a magician works with). Although it was a tricky profession, if there was a little more rigour in the project, it would have worked brilliantly. But theorizing the whole idea of magic for architectural space was something that I enjoyed in my mind. I didnot discuss it with the student since it would make no sense to her. So I kept myself low-key.
I think the students got an idea of anthropometrics and the process of evolution of space. Since the first two projects were too exploratory in terms of form, we consciously kept this one as an exercise for evolving space. Now, we need to introduce them to function, while the students need to learn how to communicate their designs ideas through their work.
photo titles in order (expression spaces of):
bus conductor
priest
magician
bus conductor
dietician
dermatologist
astronaut
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