On academic spaces

I have spent the past week writing an essay for the college magazine, where I was asked to talk about the academic orientation of the school. Writing elaborate notes, explanations, incidents, I felt I would never be able to express something in the given word limit. I have been a voracious recorder of AOA on my blog and felt repeating any of it would not be helpful for me or my readers. Three things that I went ahead with in my head with was - my audience, my opinion and the practical constraints like the word limit given to me. I defined my audience as students, faculty and management of AOA, my opinion as critical and my word limit stretched to 1500.

Although I would publish the write-up on my blog here in some time, Here I present the edited substantiation on the essay. The original essay has already been criticized by the Principal (AOA-UA), saying that I "could have used my 1000 words more effectively" and that I "should have constructed the article without any reference to the Institution's history". This according to me is highly political. However, I do not have any more time to dwell on the essay. Here are edited excerpts of the article that is (hopefully) soon to be published in "Rachana Evergreen" magazine.

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Generally, the academia is constructed and projected as something that would aid the building industry. But the academia has to critically address the building industry so that new directions are opened up for pursuits of the act of building. The academia has been a product of the act of building buildings.

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over a facebook conversation on 'relationship between practice and academia', Prasad Shetty says:

"Why is only the architectural academia expected to 'bridge the gap' with the act of building buildings (I think the term practice is too broad to be used here as being in the academia is also a practice). Can we find ways where the act of making buildings becomes sligtly more academic."

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Over the last year, during an intense academic meeting, some one assertively said, "Whenever someone comes to me with a confused mind thinking over the choice of his / her career, I suggest him/her to do architecture."

This statement has merits as well as demerits. I will be glad to believe that architecture exposes a person to a range of things in the course of its study and enables and individual to engage with a range of conditions. However, it is the failure of our academic space if it is not able to cater to the dilemma of ‘choice’ that every student faces in this vast range of subjects that are available today. Nor do our universities allow any cross pollination of ideas between various departments. That is something I leave for a larger discussion later. 

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Should the role of academic space be to critically address such changing mode of production or should it become a default function of such demand? In other words, should architectural schools enable its students to think of possible new ways of emerging practices or should they reduce themselves to become vocational centres which equip students with skills to work in offices?

An attempt to answer the above question posits us to an existential predicament – whether education is meant to satisfy the hunger of stomach or satiate the restive mind? It is only societal hegemony that separates the two. A learned individual uses his / her education to negotiate the real world and invents new tools while struggling to placate his / her existential needs. We are made to believe that the academy is supposed to equip with tools. But ideally, one must develop one’s own tools in the way one chooses to use one’s education.

In my opinion, academic spaces need to help students to get interested in themselves, with their immediate environment and become sensitive as well as critical to these conditions. Such conditions have to be located in a larger cultural, social and political environment.

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The first year studio’s intention has, for us, been about leaving the baggage that the student has always been carrying with him/her. We place our understanding of architecture in a broad social, anthropological and critical episteme, where students understand the ‘self’, look at things around critically, and understand their own social construct.

Thereby, we attempt at drawing our architectural problems from social conditions, notions of history (institutional and personal) and certain set clichés in perception which are brought to the class and followed by a rigorous process of deconstruction. In the process of this deconstruction is the building up of the project.

Architectural Design studios are about CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING in contrast to the skill based exercises of Basic Design. Students are forced to understand the meaning of architectural forms, the way things function, and why are they the way they are. We try to delve in this meaning through various forms of media like films, readings, essays and critical discussions.

from Academic Report 2009-10, Architectural Design, AOA

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Four very important, misunderstood words:

Glossary:

Practice: Learning to do a job by repetition.

Profession: The aspect of using practice as a service. The exchange of service for money. 

Discipline: Critical reflection on the way on practices and executes in real world.

Institutionalization: the term is used to denote the process of making a mode of behaviour as an established custom or norm within a system

-this section to be elaborated over an independent post

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look forward for

"In Search of Academic Space"

at Dagagiri

and Rachana Magazine (if it's not opposed)