The 5 years of Architecture school can be summed as one exhilarating yet exhaustive journey. Every student goes through a personalized roller coaster ride, where the ups and downs are just moments apart. To an outsider, it might seem like an attempt to reach the conclusion at a very slow rate. What one can only muster from the inside are the multiple loopholes, the counteracting circumstances, and the accumulation of ideas. The journey reforms the thinking, idealization, and virtue of an individual.
A student can easily be influenced and shaped by the school and its Professors. I remember one particular incident where our senior professor spoke to me regarding how to identify successful buildings while going for case studies. He believed that a design is only as successful as the happiness of the janitor of the building. He told me that unless the services of the building are perfectly designed and placed, the design remains unsuccessful or leaves the scope of improvement. Also to understand the built form and the space around it, one must follow the gutters lined around the structure.
Another experience that has completely shaped my understanding and helped me learn beyond the textbooks is traveling. Traveling, or rather exploring, holds a completely different meaning for an Architect. We aren’t just students trying to understand the city, or the photographers trying to capture the moment but the analysts that try to understand the spaces, appreciate the aesthetics, identify the material and joinery and capture every aspect of the form and the ideologies of the designer. It’s almost like how we just had one perspective of space, and after joining architecture, twenty more tabs open in our minds as soon as we enter a space like our vision is trying to identify as many details as possible.
As I recall, during one of our study trips to Central Europe, we were in Berlin, Germany and it was raining heavily. All of my batch mates decided to go back to the hostel to avoid getting sick and spoil the rest of the trip. I had grown affection for the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag building as they were my case study for the last semester. Brandenburg Gate is one of the oldest structures of the city, dividing into two different parts as East Berlin and West Berlin. Reichstag is the parliament building of the country. It was partially destroyed during the second world war. It was later redesigned and revamped by Ar. Norman Foster. He was selected to do the project through a competition held by the government. We were in Berlin during the weekdays, which meant that the entire city would close around 6 PM. With all the study that I had been doing, I was extremely excited to visit the Brandenburg Gate at different times of the day.
When everyone decided to resort back to the hostel, I convinced a couple of my friends to join me and visit the plaza, adjacent to the Reichstag building and near the Holocaust memorial. It was a cold rainy evening and the entire area was deserted. We weren’t prepared for the cold night but decided to go anyways. To our astonishment, the entire plaza was slightly lit by the yellow lights of the buildings surrounding it. It homed the most prestigious banks and hotels of the city, with the Brandenburg Gate as the gateway. The plaza was empty, except for a few guards. The structure of the gate seemed majestic yet more powerful at night. One could see all the six columns without any visitors passing through. The yellow lights enhanced the smooth edges and dignified the ‘Quadriga’ above. The plaza looked much bigger and serene with no people and children screaming all around. Many events are organized in the plaza as it is the city center, yet on that night the plaza seemed chilly and ghosted.
Completed in 1791, the Brandenburg gate was designed by Architect Carl Gotthard Langhans and sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow. The sandstone structure reflects the Neoclassical style of Architecture. The structure is made up of 12 Doric columns, six on each side with the total height of the structure as 20 meters. These columns formed 5 pathways, each of these are 11 meters wide. The central pathway was broader and was dedicated to the courthouse, whereas the outermost pathways were used by the general public. The gate is decorated using bas-relief inspired by the adventures of the Greek mythological figure Hercules, whereas the ‘Quadriga’ which is a sculpture of Erinee, the goddess of peace riding the chariot lead by four horses.
During the Second World War, the Brandenburg Gate became a major target due to being the center of the city. It suffered a lot of damage during the war, yet it survived. As we see today, only one of the horses’ heads survived the war, the Gate was restored and remains one of the most iconic structures. After the war, the Berlin wall was set up to separate the Communist East Berlin and the Federal Republic of West Berlin. The Gate was used to mark the boundary to mark the two sides of the city. Later on, the two sides reunited and the wall was taken down. The Brandenburg Gate remains as a perfect reminder of the divided nations.
Much to our dismay, the guards caught us mesmerizing and enjoying the scenic view of the Brandenburg Gate in front of us and asked us to leave immediately. They refused to allow us to exit through the gate, leaving us clueless about how to reach our hostel. Without arguing any further, we decided to leave from the other exit of the plaza, trembling in due to the cold. Tired and hungry, we reached the other end only to be stopped by a couple of policemen. They started speaking to us in German, we didn’t know whether our faces were white because of the cold or because we were terrified of the policemen. Luckily, there was an Indian cab driver, who saw us struggling with the language and decided to help us out. He explained to the policemen how we were students traveling from India and how we were lost and were looking for a cab to reach back to our hostel. They looked at us, like we were a bunch of drenched lunatics, trying to pull a funny prank. Eventually, they helped us find a cab and warned us to not roam around alone after 6 o’clock in the city.
The journey of five years of Architecture has allowed us to not only learn but to experience and explore as well. Traveling helps us gain more perspective, understand different styles and forms of Architecture, explore different cultures, and experiences different lifestyles. From getting lost while looking for the remote workshop, to missing the flight because of mesmerizing the Airport, from getting everyone late by an hour, to understanding routes and system of European metro rails, from trekking for 6 hours to visit a Dzong to following a stranger to see the beautiful streets of the city, I have learned way more about Art, Architecture and city planning, adding to my learnings of the lecture rooms. It is rightly said that one can never stop learning in Architecture and one can learn a lot by traveling and exploring and maybe by breaking some rules.
