Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Newness

In the first year of architecture, it is so difficult to make students understand the idea of the 'new'. Students gyrate to nake something familiar. Something that they have already seen. Most methods to make them understand or take towards the unfamiliar are resisted. Under such cases, we see cliches. This is where the production of kitsch happens. To imagine the already seen out of some thing that has been a part of the everyday and has been used to create the seen thing earlier produces a kitsch.

The process of instilling the 'new' for us is pedagogically addressed as 'unlearning'. Unlearning is the notion of undoing thinking in the structures in which we are made to think by far in our life. At many instances I have wondered why must architects think absolutely out of the world? In the deep thoughts of our mind, we all want to be different, we all want to create different-'looking' things, we all want to create different things that what already exist. And after doing that, we want to debate about culture.

Culture heavily looks at familiarity and tries to root you in your context. Something that is completely contrasting to the above! These thoughts keep crossing my mind! It's funny, since I want to study culture to offer 'new' solutions! Sometimes, Dushyant's philosophies haunt me. But I have decided for myself that I am going to engage constructively with the material world as far as possible.

Coming back to the idea of new, we force students to create 'new' objects, often from the familiar. This is done through a series of operations from different disciplinary mechanisms. For example, we would take language, then mix it with visuals, then films and then sound and then building - all which have different languages. We basically want students to create uncanny objects - which are strangely familiar. We haven't devised enough methodologies to achieve fascinating results though.

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