The basic of all architectural drawing starts with the scale, north, and the labeling, and then comes the layout and the context. It might be almost every second student’s experience during college day to have been scolded, at one point or another, for missing these on the submissions. It even becomes quite an unforgettable memory for a few whose sheets were torn and put into the shredders. But what would happen when the plans made by the professors would miss it all. Will that be acceptable? What would be their reasons behind doing so?
With our college setup moved to a new campus, and each floor with different circulation patterns, it was very much obvious to have floor plans been put up in the lift lobbies. It was the first and the most prominent graphic, seen by everyone who enters the lobby. It too was the exact spot where many of the students would gather for informal discussions and small chit chats, from time to time throughout the day. It was not much later that the plans got their attention. Might it be just for a few minutes, but there was an interchange of roles within faculty and students. With colored pens, and markers in their hands, and a mind full of determination to correct the scenario started a mini-revolution. A revolution towards drafting an impeccable drawing, revolution named as ‘The perfect plan’. This gave the students the authority to correct and comment, and with this authority was an unusual sense of satisfaction attached to it.
Big red circles marked over the sheets. The plans were filled with comments on the missing scale and north. Detailed comments of missing levels and legends as well as incorrect line weights were spotted and marked over a few panels. Many of the comments got even a step further to critique the color composition, rendering preferences, and graphical presentation skills.
All the remarks which were being heard, and at times yelled, in the classrooms, this time got their way out of it in the passages and atriums. Students started having hopes, of it’s just a matter of time, that the sheets would soon be changed, a fresh new set of print out would be on the display. A hope for the classic redo scenario, and this time it was for the faculty to do it. Never did it happen though, all hopes redo failed. This even got many getting quite critical, thinking about the hypocrisy of the submission requirements from the students, against the display of the work in the architectural school itself.
‘The perfect plan’ revolution started as a humorous rebellion, lasted for a few weeks, and disappeared as soon as it served its purpose, as soon as the remarks were done taking up the place over the panels. It was not for much of the time after that, that the panels mattered much to anyone. The remarks would just get a random smile or two towards it, as it reminded many of their determinations. There was still this one thing which remains unnoticed; how were all the sheets got completed in an evolving manner!
With a viewpoint to the same incident, from the other end of the spectrum, it might look like it was the faculty itself who might have pinned up the incomplete sheets on purpose. Well, the reason behind it can be justified as to test our skills and attentiveness towards detailing. To get us all neatly set to the default ‘perfect graphics’ mode before we aimed to learn and design any further.
Fascinatingly, the thing about this one though was how correctly the course had managed to slip into us to do things the correct way. In the end, all that it taught us was to recollect and practice, all that we had learned, about the fraternity, within and beyond the classrooms.
