A humorous experience in the world of architecture; I’ve been laughing at myself for failing to recall a single humorous experience in the last 3 years I have been an architecture student; although I am sure I have been making memories. Reflecting, it is quite evident that the life of an architecture student either falls under the genre of tragic comedy or comic tragedy. What might have been a morose experience in the first year would turn out to be hilarious in hindsight. Moreover, it would make you all the more nostalgic of how those times were; all the all-nighters you pulled to get through the submission but ended up having fun instead; every time you cringed over getting a mark less only to realize later that marks don’t matter, the times when you started going totally off track during your jury blurting out nonsense because you were sleep-deprived and the times you wished AutoCAD just understood you better and the renders didn’t betray you.
A few days ago, me and my friends laughed out a lot remembering the good old days; where our ignorance and innocence got the better of us. During the initial days, we were all trying to make friends and the ice-breaker question was always this. ‘Why did you take up Architecture?’. We all had amusing answers, some would say they wanted to get into creative fields, engineering was really not their type. There were others who said that they were really passionate about buildings right since childhood. Some took it up because they were good at sketching and Arts was a way too low a field for them. Then there were rich kids who took up architecture for showing off because being an architect was really ‘cool’. And there were ample few who took up architecture because their parents were architects. People naming famous architects as their inspiration and influenced by the historic architecture movements brought me horrors as to how am I even here if I don’t know these basic things?
The naivety of these answers is what got us to laughing and we started sharing our ‘remember when’ stories. Little did we know then, that in the coming weeks we would all be just trapped in the clutches of REDO. A friend of mine started with the one when she found me crying because I was told to redo my sheets during the first week because I had been an excellent student throughout school and I was so embarrassed of getting a redo. However, it was not too long before we all married the concept of redo and submitting past deadlines.
The transition from school to college is not smooth and to top it all, the exposure to architectural fraternity might be maddening at times. To begin with, it’s just a series of surprises, mostly shocks; like the crazy amount of workload. The first time we were asked to bring ‘x’ number of sheets the next morning we were all speechless. The next week, we had all these college clubs meeting to be a part of and we marvelled over how people who attended clubs managed to complete the amount of work given to them. And now we do know how architecture students develop a rich taste of music and theatre and literature after ourselves being a part of a club. The next surprise/shock was that college was open till 12 am and we could stay out till then. This was after a friend of mine inquired about the studio hours, which were officially till 5:30 pm for our school. However 2 weeks into it, and we realized that whatever the official studio timings might be on paper, the unsaid reality is that architectural studios go on 24*7; if not physically then in your heads. Now every time we come across the seniors we asked the question to, especially when we are roaming on campus after 5:30 they tease us asking as to what work do we have post 5:30 in college?
Also, there was this illusion that architecture means no more physics and chemistry, only to realize later that construction technology majorly dealt with the loads and stresses of physics and the material palette had close ties with chemistry. The history was still there too, now through an architectural lens. One had to know politics as to know how it affected architecture. The geography and climate were governing concerns of design. And there was academic essay writing involved as well. The hard realization however was that it was our notion that we might have chosen architecture over something and eliminated the rest; but the truth is that we chose everything instead of eliminating anything and as a result we have an eye for graphics, can talk about history, aren’t ignorant about construction technology, and are really aware of what is it that we are really interested in.
However, over time; it’s now us asking ourselves, “Why did I take up Architecture? Why did I choose to endure all the suffering of sleepless nights, crashing computers, waiting till eternity for renders, getting thrashed in jury, and above all not having a life?’. This was the tragic comedy that might have not made us laugh then but sure does now that we sit and recall those moments. Then, it really did seem more like a tragedy that had occurred to us when we saw our friends from other fields living ‘the life’; dating, going to movies, partying and everything we couldn’t afford to with our time and money that was mostly spent on stationary. But then, all those missed fun is compensated by the more happening and enriching moments of architecture school where the definition of ‘fun’ might be slightly different.
