We speak more of drawings than the words we need, the line makes its impression before we frame a sentence to address the topic. A powerful tool devised for architects to assemble the visions on a mere piece of paper, an elemental subject of how lines can change void into an abode of the living. The experience brought it all together, the tenuous work hours and having the stubbornness to learn more had made us the professionals that we are today.
We all had our breakthrough as a fresher in architecture by stumbling on a method of learning, it didn’t have guidebooks or step procedures, to ensure a method of stepwise drawings. We were facing our drawing boards and pulling the scales to understand the language that we would be using from now onwards, heard a faint voice from behind that said ‘For every line, you pull on paper, speak differently to us’. That was the time when we learned about line-weights and expressions the drawings give away. The studio has happened to be a place of sanctuary for us, teaching us in every aspect of how a project should be determined. A period of contemplation ran across the students that said,
“Running hastily won’t make it the process fast”
Often we tend to speed up the tasks and feel it’s accomplished sooner, yet we miss out on the crucial details of the project, with deadlines, taking shape and the pressure of work being fulfilled we tend to rush into ticking things off the list and proving to be efficient. Until the very end, we don’t recognize the mistakes and it’s a REDO all over again. It’s smart to overlook things as a whole, rather than its by-parts. The activity from the design brief to the completed design takes a long-long time, design can’t be contained but only comprehended.
Reading and visualizing an architectural drawing had most of us vexed in the early learning stages, looking at the technical signs on the sheet and why is the ‘NORTH’ important for all the drawings to be marked on with, the sign worked as a trademark on every sheet of paper. A customary practice to read drawings had hardwired us to visualize 2-D representation into a 3-D picture in our mind, enabling us to rebuild and mend the faults in drawings real soon, though it was for a very brief time that we had all worked on paper until the digital frontier rolled in to make the drawings more precise and accurate for presentation and examination of the drawings. This roll-up feature has gotten into so many forms of styles and displays to virtually enable us to portray the project on a screen inclusive of 3D modelling, texture and, graphical analysis of the built project. With the reduced time in executing the project the work had scaled up, not knowing what to prioritize and line up the tasks.
“Manage your time or you’ll be running like a hamster in a wheel”
That’s the recurring sentence you’ll always hear around, as we moved through the 3rd Year of architecture, the assignments got us hooked on the work, surging the hours behind the table. Managing the time had got gruesome, working tirelessly on every subject wasn’t the solution to it. Here, we had learned how to focus on the weightage of the subject and nearing importance to the relevant topic.
That worked as a game-changer for the time-frame, making us stretch through the table to work on the dire importance. Yet, procrastination has a few quirks up its sleeve. ‘There’s still time, I’ll look into it’ and then the time withdraws its hands and we lay back at the very last minute hush for the submission. That’s one thing that nearly changed at the end, though it had a few loopholes it works well.
‘Work in teams, you’ll find a greater good’
At the Architecture school, you usually put yourself up in a group and patch with the same for a long while, that brings in the skills and exchanging a few ideas that might change your perspective on designing spaces and executing tasks in a worthwhile, but it also puts you in a system which adheres to the working style. For a while, you alter the group and find incompatibilities rising. That’s the spot where you grow as an individual and represent a firm point, not only for work-related topics but you bond over similarities with them. Working outside your comfort zone has never been, I would myself longing to return to the old set of people I had to work with yet I found this challenging to adjust and comply.
Been the 5 years of studying architecture that has pushed your limits to some certain levels, every hour spent mindlessly looking into a blank wall has derived a new design possibility. As we draw today the lines are speaking well for us. Learning on either side won’t be different; we’re making changes in ourselves, constantly.
