Anecdotes from the life of student of architecture
How often do we as architecture students find ourselves to be posed with the assertion “so, you will be architecture (and not ‘architect’)” from people who do not belong to this profession? This assertion is amusing for two reasons- first, if this definition saves us from further questioning of what the field is about, then why find the need to correct someone and explain. Second, the grammatical structure of the words baffles us and make us take pride in being the ‘entire profession’ which we only at every phase are attempting ‘to figure out’. This brings to the forefront the dichotomy of the words ‘architecture’ and ‘architect’ in our daily exchange of words with someone who is not well-versed with it.
In recent times, as individuals and a part of the architecture fraternity, one constantly attempts to place themselves between ‘Less is more’ to ‘Less is bore’ to anything that challenges either of them or both of them. Whether our design approaches are inclined towards ‘more’, ‘bore’ or anything else, we are constantly under scrutiny and critique. “Why did you do this? You could have done something more “, “What I feel is that you have built too much” – these being few of the instances that highlight our state of constantly being under the grind. As much as the profession and the practices are critiqued, we tend to reflect on our jury days. Juries and reviews have been a headache for all of us. Even after days of planning well before time, making a proper schedule, sleepless nights; one or many things would have always been missing to explain our ‘concept’, ‘site’ or ‘design’ itself. No wonder they take a toll on us yet, here, we sit laughing and sometimes, crying over the days preceding and post it.
With juries/reviews approaching, we find people going into a transcendental zone. Sometimes succumbing under the stress and the scare that it creates, sometimes standing upright thinking that what will jury uproot us for and bursting into laughter. ‘We will go through whatever happens.’ These form the small ecstasies of student life. Countless nights spent on redoing and resubmitting yet somehow the faculties never seem to get tired of demanding work from us. Traces of our work are left behind in the studios with model-making materials and sheets lying all around; fingers getting bruised with painstaking efforts of holding cutter and steel edge or clutch in our hands to make that ‘neat’ cut or ‘crisp’ line. The tireless hours spent working and dreaming about sleep to sleeping anywhere we find place-be it under the ‘blanket’ of corrugated/thermocol sheets on the bed of ‘floor to our ‘desks’, asking our friends to wake us up in ‘some’ time, the night passes by.
The pain of waking up early for morning lectures where eyes are still droopy of previous night’s sleepless encounter. Whatever it be, there is a joy in sleeping in lectures and trying to not sleep- be it structures, services or history. Rare are the days when we find ourselves to be alert throughout, yet we manage. How much ever tedious it is to think before drawing a point or a line, somehow it seems obsolete to someone from the non-architecture profession who claims to do that work within a matter of few minutes which we take hours or days to attain a certain level of clarity. Such is the value and meaning of our lives and efforts to some third person unless explained. Ironically, people be jealous because of the days we get to travel and undermines the efforts and the sleepless nights that we face before we relish our travels. Yet, the days pass by and gradually, the years.
The first day of college as 18years’ old, clueless about what ‘architecture’ and being an ‘architect’ will have in store for us, neatly dressed only to end up spending a fortune on stationeries (parallel bar/T-squares, triangular, set-squares, chakki, mechanical clutch pencil and whatnot). Dirtying our clothes while setting up our studio space, it is here that we realise that the world is just not contained in the knowledge of ‘predefined textual words’ that we had been used to in schools but in conversations that spill all across the campus. Our daily vocabulary transforms to adjust the words that define spaces as we learn to engage or avoid making ‘jugaad’ for it. We find ourselves in these interesting times to make peace with ourselves and our work along with being a draftsperson/model maker to our ‘allied’ senior to help them get through their work while dreaming about the times when we will be in the position to command and distribute work. From falling in love with our preciously collected stationeries to getting into a spat when any of our beloved objects get lost/stolen, waiting for ages and hoping for the AutoCAD/Photoshop or any other software to not get crashed just a day before our submission and chanting in mind that we have miraculously saved the files to always be in search of the ‘North’ and ‘superpower’ to finish our work ‘before time’- we have seen it all. Not long before we reflect and realise that these little anecdotes of the agony of our profession are something that we all have a little laugh over now.
From dedicatedly and collectively deciding to not submit to be responsible for our schedule in the final research semester, we strive to know ourselves better at each stage through these varied, humorous and philosophical (in their ways) experiences of being an architecture student.
