An architecture college is a parallel universe that does not abide by the norms and rules of this one. Walking into a design studio you will see, flying buildings, designs inspired from shedding of snake skins, houses built on Mars, a goldmine of ideas, and of course lots of misplaced stationery. It is a guaranteed five-year adventure starting on the very first day, that helps you to look at the world in peculiar ways.
Once you enter an architecture college, you practically start living in and around the studio. Studios are places where you work, make friends (with all creatures around), survive on all sorts of caffeine, spend nights to make your ideas work and if they get rejected, you sleep covering yourself with your sheets as a blanket. Studios are full of life, 24 by 7, with music blaring from a speaker at one end to a band playing songs at another; students discussing designs in one corner to juniors pulling all-nighters to get work done. Basically, you work, eat, think (while sleeping of course) and repeat. The architecture education makes sure you end up loving the profession so much so that you can spend hours on it.
Most architects strive for perfection in their drawings and designs. Well, a lot more than just ‘drawings’; fonts, size of fonts, composition, alignment, color, nameplates, ‘north’, a line that may be skewed by 1mm and others. We’d rather face apocalypse than see a 2mm slanted switchboard. These quirky OCDs come naturally as a result of the numerous ‘re-dos’ and severe jury events. The first year is entirely about doing ‘re-dos’ of assignments – not less than a million times each—and making trees of pride out of a sponge. It is only when the third year begins, that you are hit with a big wave of internal juries, external juries, quarter-sem juries, mid-sem juries, final juries, and some more juries. It is then that the individual warriors come together in a rebellion to say ‘we will NOT submit the assignment’.
Juries are meant to gear future architects with the skill of handling pressure. The most interesting sight to see one week before the final juries are at the print cum stationery cum snack shop that stays open all night. It is advisable to go to these joints between 3 AM to 6 AM because of the queues for getting prints to turn into mini-party and gossip sessions at this hour. You can see students diligently working on their laptops, a few on the floor drawing on sheets, cribbing about the amount of work to be done while the others run around rolling the mammoth sheets. Another jury night reunion happens at the ‘chai’ and snacks vendor who opens at 4 AM to cater to the sleep-deprived to-be architects. These sessions are strictly reserved for deciding how much of the drawing checklist will the batch satisfy.
Most architecture colleges offer a six-month or year long internship period in the fourth year. By then, you tend to convince yourself that you are here to create buildings and spaces that will change the world and eradicate its problems. You go into an office to take a step closer to building your utopian dreams only to realize that you have entered a world of technical drawings (majorly of toilets), construction details, and client presentations. An internship, a.k.a. reality-check gives ground to your wings while teaching you to deal with your boss, their boss, and the ultimate boss. Architecture office resembles studio environments where you discuss everything from designs to art films, sometimes paint walls, make ‘office’ jokes and get obsessed with tea.
Fourth-year and onwards architecture becomes an independent process of self-exploration, formally known as a thesis. Little black people – by black I mean dressed in black, literally and always – bring together all they have learned from their experiences, to pull off a cycling trip, an expansive travel expedition, and sometimes a hardbound thesis. A final year thesis project is the last chance for an almost architect to elope with their alien ideas and built fantasies, so they tend to make the fullest out of it. Grades and architects are not always the best of friends since ideas need their own space and time to grow (well, at least that is what they say).
Architecture as a course grooms you to find yourself, dig deep into your soul, and discover your passion. We all come out of architecture colleges with our own set of OCDs, ways to conquer the world, and thriving personalities. The magic of the journey lies in how in the end, there is no winner but a chef, a photographer, an actor, a blogger, a fashion stylist – all flying their grad hats as they are conferred the degree of architecture (and much more).
