What is a School?

We never really asked that question over the semester. And how do we ask it architecturally? When we ask "what is a school?" in an architecture studio, what are we really asking? Or, what do they really ask, when architects ask "what is a school?" Are they asking how a school functions as an organization, or are they asking questions about pedagogy, or are they asking about the process of education, or the way in which knowledge is transferred? Or are they asking about the way in which knowledge is a spatial function - that to do with the design of the surroundings and its knowledge, and how the structuring of space aids a certain kind of educative process, or how the building environment teaches you, inculcates a rhythm or discipline amongst its learners, or how a good environment impacts the process of learning...
What when the question of designing a school is inscribed within the urban question? What is a school in an urban area? What schools does urbanity need? How does urbanity school us? Is school a function of urbanity? Do schools shape up through forces of the city? Does the urban mould knowledge differently? 

How does the urban, after all, influence architecture? How does the experience of the city find way into an individual, and further the built form? Are the users of city space conscious of the constructed experiences they live in? How do we even ascertain that and map such subjectivities? How are these processes relevant for design processes, and who validates them?

Teaching architecture within the question of the urban almost always ends up in an obsessive reproduction of the city. What is the obsession of urban designers to represent and draw the city as close to it as possible? What is the joy of doubling up the city through its reproductions like drawings, models and diagrams - those which also begin to turn life into an object - the pretty looking portraits and models?

There is a moment when the drawing makes the city more pretty than it actually is. This imagined prettyness soon takes over the reality of design processes, rather takes the reality of design into an imaginary space where laws of the land no longer stand valid. The personal morality works thereby, defying and destroying existing buildings and forms that do not follow the logic of the self created order. However, only those working on the field will be able to say how knocking off buildings, even if hypothetical, is non ethical. A faculty quite rightly pointed out: "These are the crises of the urban context. We have to understand them instead of defying them."

What position do you take when you actually choose to ignore the difficulties of the urban condition? In a "what-if" scenario, isn't one actually escaping the urban condition. In such a situation, the city studio focus becomes almost pointless, because in the first place, you have tweaked the city into your own personal imagination, which in effect makes you work as if you are working on a blank slate. Is the studio about creating real life solutions or imaginary engagements? This dilemma can be answered in many ways. However, what we have to decide is whether we want to engage with the difficulties of the city as it is, or as we would like the difficulty to be? (Yes, I am hinting that we begin to imagine our difficulties too, a hypothetical problem for a hypothetical solution).

Do we want to use the city merely as a backdrop, an artefact for our architectural projects; or do we want to engage into its conditions that pose a unique problem? Until the end, I was not able to to figure if we did really want to engage with the difficulties at all. It was not clear if we were testing the real or experimenting the imaginary... What after all was the "thrust" of the "city" studio? 

Is the city just studied to give us theoretical and physical handles for one;s design methods even if these designs may clearly be insular for the city dynamics? Can the final design, evolved from a "method of the city" be called "urban" and serving the city? What after all do we make of the urban context?

What do we mean when we talk of a city studio? Is a city studio about different kinds of urban responses? For example, in a dense fabric, you can

• clear the site and build
• build with/over existing fabric
• redesign the existing building
• create and intervene with a "what-if" scenario
• just propose a program
• create a temporary structure
• change laws
• rework circulation
• change character of buildings

and so on.

All the above are different design responses, and all of these seem equally pragmatic - some executed within the framework within the bye laws, other for which laws are released or eased. There could have been an academic inquiry within these different methods of urban intervention. The studio did not delve into any of these. I would like to pose, finally, what are the ethics of urban intervention?

Students made designs, ending up into an engagement in architectural form, and further how they can be theoretically read to respond to the city. We teach them story telling, most of the time. It takes much more courage to build architecture that is pragmatically possible but also theoretically tight. But theory can not become a matter of convenience, or a handle for story telling. Every one bought something from the process. Of course. But does it make them into a better architect, or a story teller? I wonder!