Five litres of coffee, 32 GB of music on shuffle, 20 kg of sketching and model making material, computer with hours of battery- just in case of a blackout, and an architecture student ready for a series of all-nighters. Inclusive but fun, architecture course involves long hours and a huge workload, which is challenging, but at the same time, it can be truly enriching and able to expand one’s skill set. Architecture brings with it a distinctive way of working and living requiring a sharp design ability, creativity, imagination, and visual understanding, which defines who architects are as people.
Logic will take you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere
Albert Einstein
Five years of graduation, two years of post-graduation, and 4980 billion sleepless nights later, every architect has millions of stories to tell. All students remember anecdotes from their architecture course like their first redo, forgetting names of files, getting anxiety after professor sketches on your drawing, and studying tours during which it is essential to measure each detail and many more.
Getting prints before discussions and juries is a task in itself that needs immense planning. Sometimes even after re-checking your files and their formats multiple times, the prints for the drawings come out messed up which can be an undetectable pen-drive, faults in the color, wrong sheet sizes, massive file size and missing sheets from the print set. Even if you are ready with everything well in advance, sometimes rather horrifying incidents happen to students, for instance, when a group of friends and I spared ten minutes out of a busy night before the final semester jury to celebrate a friend’s birthday. After the celebration, when we started to resume work, I was somehow unable to find my laptop. After some searching, it was found lying on a chair on which a friend was sitting comfortably for over 10 minutes. Spurge of emotions ran through my body, which was shock, anger, rage, and amazement, and I found myself on the verge of an emotional breakdown. While the others were trying to comprehend the seriousness of the situation, the friend who sat on the laptop tried to remedy it, but the laptop screen would not open. Sometimes there is a rare occurrence and luck works in your favor, in this case, I was able to work on it at a particular screen angle throughout the night and presented my work despite the odds.
Adding to the odds and accidents that architecture students face major episodes happen during learning on a hands-on job in workshops. During the first year of the master’s program as an exercise to make everyone work with combinations of different materials, students were supposed to make a cube structure without any glue or joinery except bolts and rivets. Measuring tape, pencil, sketchbook, and a bag of tools; my partner and I came up with a simple design idea and started working on cutting the wood, cleaning and straightening the sheet metal, and bending the rod. A long week of learning to use new machines and techniques to sand wood, create wooden joinery, students were warned about the accidents that usually happen while working with new tools. After working around and testing each machine, we both started feeling comfortable and things began to work out and flow. Looking at the wounds of our classmates, we began to wonder what they were doing wrong. And then it came to us when my partner decided to ram a drill bit in my hand by accident. With bloody hands, I had to finish the model and submit it the next day. Now I can genuinely say that I put in my blood, sweat, and tears into a project.
We didn’t choose the architecture life; it abducted us from our regular lives and converted us into the zombies we are today. There is never enough time to complete all the sheets and model work. You know you are an architecture student when you decide to call it a night because you have run out of ideas, only to stressfully sleep and try to come up with creative thoughts while sleeping. One pushes beyond their average capacity to match up to work and survive in the university. What could be worse than not being able to see appropriately but still finishing up jury work and showing up at 6 am to get prints? Two days before the final semester jury, after developing an eye infection, the struggle became real. After managing to bear the pain while working continuously on the laptop for countless hours, an honest thought of taking a nap came into mind. After waking up, I had to face the biggest nightmare where my eye wouldn’t open, followed up by an occasional session of anxiety. After trying out various methods and being laughed at, a few worked because of which I managed to see barely and appear for the jury. Presenting my work with a half-open eye was once in a lifetime experience. Now I know how to be prepared for anything and everything.
Someone rightly said that” In architecture, even death is not an option.”
