Excerpts from post-jury conversations

External Jury Panel

Day 1-04/12/2020: Uday Andhare

Day 2-05/12/2020: Mausmi Andhare

The structure of the program and the initial exercises were just incredible; because the manner in which the notion of an institute being amalgamating but also having individual characteristics within it, as components that can be understood as each entity as a stand-alone entity and which is often the case that it amalgamates and I think it opens up a dialogue between the four components of the institution their diverse characters (at some point these characters overlap and mingle into each other and you almost don’t see a division between them, but at the same time – the architectural potential always remains open-ended and at that level the conception of the whole program of Studio V was too exciting and fully loaded for the students to move in certain directions; so I thought that that was the fun part of the studio…

…and also the manner in which the studio exercises happened in absence of person to person contact; through digital mediums and certain orientations that the students would absorb; like watching films and videos and looking at plays and other material which they would normally not look into … I think that has pushed that understanding into a very different dimension which came in through some of the sketches and interpretations of how they were trying to imagine spaces and translate them into possible diagrams to then consolidate into some sort of built expression. So I thought that exercise was really VALUABLE TO the process…

…and in the end out of the 11 we saw today, I thought 6-4 really excelled the way in which they took the exercise forward; such that when the hand-holding stopped, they were able to glide on their own and then other 6 could understand the individual characteristics of the four elements that were given at the outset but they were not able to visualize the centrality of the institution.

I really enjoyed it Uday Andhare

The process of the studio was really interesting; to involve students and hand holding and going from the sequence of understanding scale, space making, formalities, ways of putting things together, was quite enriching. However, when there as a shift from the initial studies to their own work; I found that there was a schism that it didn’t work. In some of the works the learning translated but in others it got lost. There was a strict adherence to rationality and lack of process drawings that gives a clue of the shift from initial learning to the final design.

…I loved the site and the context and all the knitting that it should have for a nice level 5 studio. It would have been fun to do it myself!

Studio opened up different discussions. The exercises became the starting point for a lot of explorations – each one explored it in their manner (they need to do these explorations by themselves!). Third year is very important in the ‘sociology of the school’; the translation of the learning of History and Construction learnt in first and second year to designing institutions.

The studio (program and process) and students’ work provoked important aspects worthy of contemplation. Interestingly, the conversation started with the observations by the reviewers on students work, led to opening up interesting provocations and ended with the sharing of learning experiences of the faculties and reviewers. Listening to the recordings of these conversations made it rewarding for me as it added various dimensions and meanings to the aspects stated.

Riddhi Shah