“… and God spoke to me…”, What? Quit that look on your face, the one that says ALERT: CRAZY FEMALE AHEAD. I am not bonkers! You have my word. Well, maybe your demeanor is fair, after all, this is not the beginning.
So the inception! Now that began 42 hours ago!
The genesis was the announcement of the D-day, not doomsday silly! No, oh no, it’s not doomsday it’s “DESIGN DAY”, what? You thought to admit to your faults in front of God and a bunch of other strangers was hard? In that case, you have probably never been through Design day or more formally known as DESIGN REVIEW or JURY. Now every person who just took a deep jolting breath, hello again nice to meet you, colleague! For those who didn’t understand that was a shout out to my fellow Architects and Architects in making.
While you might have seen many people complain about the Jury, I promise you, it’s all a lie! Okay, maybe not completely, but that in all likelihood depends on the extent of the deception. But don’t blame us, the Jury makes us muddled. On the one hand, a Jury means the prospect to work on every architect’s undeniably favorite course of the semester but the other hand, it signifies the start of SLEEPLESS 48 and the commencement of BINGEATHON along with the UNINTERRUPTED CONSUMPTION OF CAFFEINE! How is it too bad you ask? What can I say we are good fabulists!
Jokes apart, the Jury is the singular most astounding experience of every architecture student. It has every architect swarming with nostalgia, feeling smacked with an onset of memories! The jury is a committee put together bi-annually for the review of our Architectural designs. The jury is almost like Architects’ half-yearly fest of bedlam, colors, and delineation.
Getting back to the narrative at hand, the announcement sends our entire batch on a shopping spree for all the requirements, now this is personally my favorite part.
Okay, think, 50 students, 500 requirements, 5 attendees, and 1 shop on the campus, the place literally turns into a squabblers ballyhoo! In the end, the retail looks like it was hit by an earthquake. But you need to appreciate the students, no matter the state of affairs, not one of us would buy a thing without haggling the price down by a few pegs! Now that’s what I call an accomplishment.
After all the excitement dies down, it is time to get down to actual bone wreaking work. Usually, the Jury consists of two parts for the students, the model, and the mood board. Conventionally, we start with finalizing the design before we begin the drafting of the mood board, an arrangement of the sheet presentation followed by the physical three-dimensional model of the project. The work customarily begins two nights before the day of the Jury.
To set the scene for you, a dorm floor filled with architectural students animatedly chatting with one other, belting tunes loudly and completely out of sync, in front of huge A2 sheets and indefinitely surrounded by paints, pencils, markers, and any form of stationary existing, and oh! Did I forget to mention high on chick-flicks and ice-cream! So, when does all this get over you ask? It doesn’t. At least not until the day of the review and every piece of work is crafted to perfection. This is also incidentally your only chance to meet God; I mean who else is awake at 4 in the night morning to a bunch of half-conscious zonked undergrads!
HALT! The fun ain’t nearly over. No, the fun continues to the review, where u present these works that we have done over the last 48 hours to your Professor, the Guest Faculty, and blitzed on brew batchmates!
Now, this is a typically perfect concoction of disaster, and the jittery nerves certainly don’t help. Sometimes the feedback we get makes us think that the sleepless 48 ain’t nearly worth it, I mean if you haven’t gone through that stage of Architecture that makes you want to throw all your work out the window en passant yourself as well, then you are either a Prodigy or not an Architecture student! While poor comments could be highly discouraging, braving through it would be groundbreaking. It is just a part of growing up and after all that is a masterpiece to us could be refused to others, but hey! Cheer up! Not everyone has good taste!
Remember to see the glass as half full, consider the comments for your next design followed by a short hibernation to catch up on all that lost sleep because essentially you are going to be under the onset of assignment after assignment, there is no other way to go through university if not deadline to deadline.
As a note for the future, Juries are amazingly fun because we might not remember the remarks pelted at us, but we will reminisce the restless (literally!) nights in the company of our friends, filling our memories with nostalgic laughter and vivaciousness! Hopefully, you might have your own story to give down in the future.
Here’s to your bumfuzzling, lollygagged, and thoroughly wabbit version of the D-day!
