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.
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
Four very important, misunderstood words:
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)
