“How can someone be so crazy about a paper model?” were my exact thoughts when I used to hear stories of architects just like the people outside the architecture community.
During my initial days of preparing to crack into an architecture school, I remember how my peers and mentors often used the word “babies” to describe their architectural models to portray their utmost affection towards their works.
The talks varied from Studio model to all-nighters to skipping meals to working even on the weekends to omitting all aspects of social life to conclude once you are in an architecture school “nothing else matters” to this notion my thoughts were always unsettling. “How can one someone give up on social life like that for architecture?”, “Saint or Architect?”, “No! I can’t be engulfed by architecture like that” were some of the assumptions I already made where I promised myself that once I get into an architecture school I won’t be like them.
The stars aligned and I started with my architecture school only to hear the same alarming stories about their studio life from my class incharges. I remember during the first year of my studio one of my mentors mentioned how she would lose the storyline of some of the movies as she would be rather concentrating on the structures and landscape in the background and not on the protagonists of the movie or the plot. Still reluctant to this belief of architecture above everyone and everything I thought to myself “Wow! Imagine losing a plot of a movie for the background? No thanks, not me!
Semesters began and so did my journey with architecture and model making. Starting my first year of architecture with the most basic model of making a square-shaped box and calling it my “swag space” which didn’t go quite “swag” for the markings according to the incharges to which my sad response was to scrape out the existence of that model without any emotional attachment towards the model.
The outcome of the marking was pretty obvious. But I wouldn’t understand why at that time. Thus, to solve this mystery like an enigma machine of the process of model making and designing and trying to get good scores. I started sitting more than extra hours in the studio, working all night to be through and through the given assignments.
This core attachment towards the process for the end product changed the way my studio models looked, from a four side unthought-of surface model to a much “aesthetical” looking model and here the outcome was also pretty obvious – markings going well and incharges being happy with the assignment.
Perspective Change
The intensity of the thought process for the assignments was surreal, but what was real was the description of “nothing else matters” but work in architecture schools. The blood, sweat, and tears that went for every model were unmatched.
Though the process of learning at architectural school was overwhelming, I was inadvertently enjoying it and also indeed engulfed by architecture. Where at this point I unknowingly started losing the plot of the movies to the structures and surrounding frameworks behind the actors and then rewinding them again and again to grasp the storyline of the movies.
But I never realized when in time and space my outlook changed towards architecture until the fourth year of school. The day when I was giving my external jury for which I produced a 3 feet tall detailed model that took 4 months of the process work, multiple redos, numerous internal markings, uncounted coffees, and finally at the end of the exercise consumed my 74 hours (without sleep) for the demanded detailing of the model.
It was a Monday morning, the final jury was starting at 9:00 am and here I was at 8:30 am traveling via one of the busiest trains that day. There was no space to breathe inside the train (not metaphorically), forget thinking about an architecture student standing with her oversized portfolio bag while balancing the model with one hand and holding the handle with the other.
Where in this situation it obviously didn’t require a hulk’s force to make me fall but just one slight push from behind to my folio bag and I was “head over heels” for my portfolio. I fell along with my sacred high rise model 30 minutes before the final jury only to hear the loudest crack to which I prayed out loud “GOD PLEASE LET THAT CRACKING NOISE BE OF MY BONE AND NOT THE MODEL”.
That Monday morning I realized I kept the same paper model which I used to laugh about earlier, above me, above my skin and bone, and how the four years of architecture school turned my notion from “not like them” to “being them”.
