As a beginner, first diving into and around the field of architecture feels like creating a piece of art with rhythm. You keep pursuing the same inner play, and professors help you break your biases and bring out your creative nature. As in, when you progress, the same spirit is given a structure that is blended with reality and can be given a real form. From the first year itself, colleges start sowing the seeds of sustainability by introducing subjects that make us familiar with sustainability, understand its importance, and integrate its principles into their projects. Sustainability as a core encourages us to indulge in new materials and give projects a sense of earthiness.
Romanticizing Architecture
As students, being reminded of history and theories learned throughout the course, you tend to adhere to Hegel’s narrative, where architecture is art closest to the raw form of nature. Catering to fictional clients and first-world spatial challenges, keeping in mind the current trends. There is a soft conversation going on between new, developing ideas and integrating concepts that excite you. Gradually, as the years progress, with technological advancement, you tend to learn software that helps you dive deep and explore more of the newly formed ideas, giving a visual form to the plans. It brings life to the project. Just like how the true essence of architecture submerges with its surroundings, when you enter, you start to feel inside. In a similar sense, ideas submerged with planning and software help to ‘feel’ the space, making you part of the project.
While software is a great tool, initial iterations often require old-school pen and paper to keep up with the flow of ideas. Following the line, of course, enhances observational skills as you move around space and appreciate finer details; it evokes identification to define the purpose and functionality of the space. You tend to realize that architecture submerges beauty and function together, either in harmony or opposition. The professors will push you to see beyond building four walls, introduce surroundings, and bring practicality to the projects.
Nostalgia and Critics
The first thing you, as an architecture student, critique and truly understand about space is where you study—the college. From spending endless hours in the building and going through a bunch of emotions every single day for years, you truly build a connection with the space. There is a dedicated place for every emotion you feel, whether it is pre-defined by the form or naturally defined. From there, every place you visit will talk to you and move you. You consciously understand space and its impact on humans at large, and eventually, as time progresses in this field, you realize why humans feel certain emotions the way they do in the context of space. From light entering the space to shadows, the structure casts the spatial context concerning culture and society around the space; the architecture either narrates a story or breaks away from the pre-existing cultural continuity.
Architecture is not just a tactile memoir of a city but also a showcase of the development and progress of society. With a long-lived history of architecture being practiced and taking inspiration from nature quite directly to now biomimicry, humans have come a long way. So have methods of teaching architecture, with diving into a bundle of knowledge to brush up on the unexplored territory of technology and recent advancements in artificial intelligence, the possibilities are just limitless.
Concluding Thoughts
In conclusion, the projects paved the way to open student’s creative mindsets and break norms, later with live projects humans filling up spaces with a bunch of memories and evoking emotions is what truly architecture is all about. Architecture binds living to nature, from a bird building a nest on a branch of a tree for its offspring to humans building a home amidst a picturesque landscape. There is no definite answer as to whether the architects are artists or not, but they definitely create a piece of art and give gifts to humankind.
While there is still a need to be kinder to nature by being mindful of the nature around us, the initiatives have begun right from college itself. Time and again, architecture not only respects the old but paves the way for the future. Architecture brings humankind together by finding ways to resonate with each other and enhance the feeling of belongingness.
Photographic Citations:
- Julien Lanoo. (2016). Versus. [online] Available at: https://www.julienlanoo.com/galleries/versus [Accessed 1 Jan. 2024].
- Julien Lanoo. (2016). Galleries (Title). [online] Available at: https://www.julienlanoo.com/galleries/swiss-national-museum?pgid=knxh8uhx-db6c21_28eaba7c028f4ad5af29c4c889d7fb4bmv2 [Accessed 1 Jan. 2024].
- Julien Lanoo. (2016). Collège Ultrillo. [online] Available at: https://www.julienlanoo.com/galleries/coll%C3%A8ge-ultrillo [Accessed 1 Jan. 2024].
- Huftonandcrow.com. (2023). Hufton + Crow | Projects | Køge Nord Station. [online] Available at: https://www.huftonandcrow.com/projects/gallery/kge-nord-station/ [Accessed 1 Jan. 2024]
