Architectural Journalism

architectural JOURNALISM

AAYOJAN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE Jaipur, India

The magazine is an attempt to explore the basics of Architectural Journalism. It aims towards arousing public interest and reception towards the novelties of building design while subtly nodding towards the emerging realm of Architectural Journalism with an emphasis on conveying the right ideas to the right people in an order to equip them with a practical and innovative perspective. The need of the hour is to express thoughts and ideas about the distinctive style of Architecture in India through Architectural Journalism so that our individuality reaches the masses across the globe.

Architectural Journalism comprises of writing or expressing the design and ideas through visuals. The process includes documenting the completed or undergoing works of architects/ students, phrasing opinions or critical appraisals on these works, addressing issues related to architecture and spreading awareness.

The initial assignment involved understanding the layout of an architectural magazine which lead to the designing of this final assignment for the semester. The exercise triggered our imaginations to produce finer presentation drawings and create balanced compositions keeping the content of images equal to that of text. Detailing out the margins and grid helped us understand the criterion for legibility. It also increased the sense of scale and proportions. The magazine presented is a compilation of all the lessons learned and knowledge gained through out the semester.

Editor Sonali Bordia

A monograph is a detailed written study of project documenting its conceptual ideas and drawings. This monograph describes a service apartment located in Siddharth Nagar, Jaipur. It is an academic project which aims to understand the hierarchy and arrangement of various spaces of a dwelling unit combined with commercial and recreational activities. The design is based on categorising and positioning spaces according to the functions or activity conducted in

it. The spaces are broadly divided into the following categories: administration, recreational, accommodation and commercial. The administration consists of the reception cum waiting area along with offices for the managers. The recreational area includes restaurants, gymnasium, swimming pool, spa and sauna facilities. The accommodation area comprises permutation and combination of three unit typologies housing one or two bedroom, kitchen, living room

and facilities. The challenge in this project was to resolve the structure of a high-rise building and deal with the associated building services simultaneously. A grid of 6m x 6m is chosen to support the structure of the towers. The core lies in the center of both the towers. The core constitutes of the elevators, fire exits, fire staircases and shafts serving water supply and drainage services. This reduces the load on external structure and increases the efficiency of services.

The requirements are categorized into zones which are stacked vertically above each other to form a cuboid.

The building is oriented perpendicular to the wind direction and punctures are provided to increase ventilation and the surface area of the building which will aid in max heat loss.

Building form is articulated by adding, subtracting, shifting and rearranging the masses with consideration to the area requirements and functions to be housed.

TENTH FLOOR LVL -Restaurant -Salon and Spa

NINTH FLOOR LVL -4 single occupancy

EIGHTH FLOOR LVL -1 single occupancy -3 double occupancy

SEVENTH FLOOR LVL -2 single occupancy -2 double occupancy

SIXTH FLOOR LVL -3 single occupancy -1 double occupancy

FIFTH FLOOR LVL -3 single occupancy -1 double occupancy

FORTH FLOOR LVL -2 single occupancy -2 double occupancy

THIRD FLOOR LVL -2 single occupancy -2 double occupancy

SECOND FLOOR LVL -2 single occupancy -2 double occupancy

FIRST FLOOR LVL -Swimming Pool -Club Area -Gymnasium

GROUND FLOOR LVL -Reception -Facilities

ARTICLE Wonders and Blunders

By Peter Blundell

I have always loved the element of fantasy in shopping. Maybe that’s why I became a shopkeeper. My favourite store in London is the modernist masterpiece Peter Jones in Sloane Square; it never fails to lift the heart. Designed in 1936, it is a building of beautiful transparency and fluency, perfectly sited and respectful to its neighbours. It is thrilling to see how the steel-andglass construction follows the gentle curve of King’s Road into Sloane Square. Peter Jones was built as a shoppers’ pleasure palace. The setback roof makes you think of a prewar ocean liner and the original

plans included a swimming pool and sun lounge. The dramatic inner vistas and big steel spiral staircase make it a bit like a set for a Fred Astaire musical. Indeed, my wife has childhood memories of watching the tea dances in the rooftop restaurant. Now in the last stages of a £100m refurbishment, Peter Jones has been updated but retains its old sparkle.

In stark contrast is Future Systems’ crass new Selfridges in Birmingham. This is a despicable example of “I am an iconic building” brashness, indifferent to its urban context.

The Bull Ring is by no means an architectural paradise, but the Selfridges building, bulging out over the pedestrianized square like a barrage balloon with eczema, makes it 10 times worse. What more proof of modern architectural hubris than 16,000 useless aluminium discs tacked onto the exterior?

The entrance is abysmal, the interior claustrophobic. While Peter Jones is still inspiring, the new Selfridges is already looking like a bad dream of the 1960s. It is a lost opportunity for Birmingham, and it puts me in a rage. ~

Image 01

Peter Jones departmental store in Sloane Square Source: www.homesandproperty.co.uk Image 02

Selfridges building in Birmingham Source: www.retail-week.com

ARTICLE REVIEW

The article is written by a British architect (also an architectural historian) who calls himself a shopkeeper. It focuses on the contrasting differences of two shopping stores from the same era. The writer compares the buildings based on factors like context, architectural style and elements used in the building.

The first example is Peter Jones, located in Sloane square and constructed in 1936. The writer is intrigued by its transparency, fluency and flexibility of the steel and glass structure. He uses the

term ‘modernist masterpiece’ and describes the building as a shoppers’ pleasure palace. He juxtaposes the image of a pre-war ocean liner to the set-back roof of the building and collocates the inner vistas and steel spiral staircase with a set for a Fred Astaire musical. Even after renovation and refurbishments in the building, the author thinks that it has retained it old sparkle.

The other example is Future systems’ Selfridges, located in Birmingham and constructed in 1960s. According to the writer, the building was constructed to

desperately prove it uniqueness in the urban context. The writer brutally expresses his opinions on the form and structure of building comparing it to a barrage balloon suffering from eczema (condition in which patches of skin become rough and inflated). He tries to justify his opinion by mentioning the purposeless 16,000 aluminium disc that are cladded on the exterior. He also describes the entrances as terrible and the interiors as claustrophobic. In the end, he demonstrates his concerns and rage over the building.

What is a city?

By Lewis Mumford

Source: www.wordpress.com

Most of our housing and city planning has been handicapped because those who have undertaken the work have had no clear notion of the social functions of the city. They sought to derive these functions from a cursory survey of the activities and interests of the contemporary urban scene. And they did not, apparently, suspect that there might be gross deficiencies, misdirected efforts, mistaken expenditures here that would nor be set straight by merely building sanitary tenements or straightening out and widening irregular streets.

The city as a purely physical fact has been subject to numerous investigations. But what is the city as a social institution? The earlier answers to these questions, in Aristotle, Plato, and the Utopian writers from Sir Thomas More to Robert Owen, have been on the whole more satisfactory than those of the more systematic sociologists: most contemporary treatises on “urban sociology” in America throw no important light upon the problem. One of the soundest definitions of the city was that framed by John Stow, an honest observer of Elizabethan London, who said:

Men are congregated into cities and commonwealths for honesty and utility’s sake, these shortly be the commodities that do come by cities, commonalties and corporations. First, men by this nearness of conversation are with-drawn from barbarous fixity and force, to certain mildness of manners, and to humanity and justice ... Good behaviour is yet called urbanites

because it is rather found in cities than elsewhere. In sum, by often hearing, men be better persuaded in religion, and for that they live in the eyes of others, they be by example the more easily trained to justice, and by shame-fastness restrained from injury.

And whereas commonwealths and kingdoms cannot have, next after God, any surer foundation than the love and good will of one man towards another, that also is closely bred and maintained in cities, where men by mutual society and companying together, do grow to alliances, commonalties, and corporations.

It is with no hope of adding much to the essential insight of this description of the urban process that I would sum up the sociological concept of the city in the following terms:

The city is a related collection of primary groups and purposive associations: the first, like family and neighbourhood are common to all communes while the saved are specially characteristic of city life. These varied groups support themselves through economic organizations that are likewise of a more or less corporate, or at lease publicly regulated, character; and they are all housed in permanent structures, within a relatively linked area. The essential physical means of a city’s existent are the fixed rte, the durable shelter, the permanent facilities For numbly, interchange, and forage; the essential social mesas arc the social thVai00 of labour, which serves not merely

the economic life but the cultural process. The city in its complete sense, then, is a geographical plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theatre of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collative unity. The city fosters art and is art; the city creates the theatre and is the theatre. It is in the city, the city as theatre, that man’s more purposive activities are focused, and work out, through conflicting and cooperating personalities, events, groups, into more significant culminations.

Without the social drama that comes into existence through the focusing and intensification group activity there is not a single function performed in the city that could not be acclimated - and has not in fat been performed - in the open country. The physical organization of the city may deflate this drama or make it frustrate, or it may, through the deliberate effects of art, politics and education, make the drama more richly significant, as a stageset, well designed, intensifies and underlines the gestures of the actors and the action Of the piny. It is not for nothing that men have dwelt so often on the beauty or the ugliness of cities: that attribute qualify men’s social activities. And if there is a deep reluctance on the part of the true city dweller to leave his cramped quarters for the physically more benign environment of a suburbeven a model garden suburb! - his instincts an usually justified: in its various and many-sided life, in its very opportunities foe social dis-harmony and conflict, the city creates drama; the suburb lacks it.

One may describe the city, in its social aspect, as a ‘special framework directed toward the creation of differentiated opportunities foe a common life and a significant collective drama. As indirect forms of associations, with the aid of signs and symbols and specialized organizations, supplement direct face-to-face intercourse, the personalities of the citizens themselves become manyfaceted: they reflect their specialised interests, their more intensely trained aptitude, their finer discriminations and selections, the personality no longer presents a more or less unbroken traditional face to reality as a whole. Here lies the possibility of personal disintegration; and here lies the need for reintegration through wider participation in a concrete and visible collective whole. What men cannot imagine as a vague formless society, they can live through and experience as citizens in a city. Their unified plans and buildings become a symbol of their social relatedness; and when the physical environment well becomes disordered and incoherent, the social functions that it harbours become mar difficult to express.

One further conclusion follows from this concept of the city; social facts are primary, and the physical organization of a city, its industries and its markets, its lines of communication and traffic, must be subservient to its social needs. Whereas in the development of the city during the last century we expanded the physical plant recklessly and treated the essential social nucleus, the organs of government and education and social service, as mere afterthought, today we must treat the social nucleus as the essential element in every valid city plan: the spotting and inter-relationship of schools, libraries, theatres, community centers is the first task in defining the urban neighbourhood ad laying down the outlines of an integrated city.

In giving this sociological answer to the question: What is a City?

one has likewise provide the clue to a number of important other questions. Above all, one has the criterion for a clear decision as to what is the desirable size of a city — or may a city perhaps continue to grow until a single continuous urban area might cover half the American continent, with the rest of the world tributary to this mass? From the stand-point of the purely physical organization of urban utilities — which is almost the only matter upon which metropolitan planners in the past have concentrated — this latter process might indeed go on indefinitely. But if the city is a theatre of social activity, and if its needs are defined by the opportunities it often to differentiated social groups, acting through a specific nucleus of civic institutes and associations, definite limitations on size follow from this fact.

In one of Le Corbusier’s early schemes for an ideal city, he chose three million as the number to be accommodated: the number was roughly the size of the urban aggregate of Paris, but that hardly explains why it should have been taken as a norm for a more rational type of city development. If the size of an urban unit, however, is a function of its productive organization and its opportunities for active social intercourse and culture, certain definite facts emerge as to adequate ratio of population to the process to be served. Thus, at the present level of culture in America, a million people are needed to support a university. Many factors may enter which will change the size of both the university and the population base; nevertheless one can say provisionally that if a million people are needed to provide a sufficient number of anthems for a university, then two million people should have two universities. One can also say that, other things being equal, five million people will not provide a more effective university than one million people would. The alternative to recognizing there ratios is to keep on overcrowding and overbuilding a few existing institutions, thereby limiting, rather than expanding, their genuine educational facilities.

What is important is not an absolute figure as to population or area: although in certain aspects of life, such as the size of city that is capable of reproducing itself through natural fertility, one can already lay down such figures. What Is more important is to express size always as a function of the social relationships to be served ... There is an optimism numerical size, beyond which each further increment of inhabitants creases difficulties out of all proportion to the benefits. There is also an optimum area of expansion, beyond which further urban growth rends to paralyze rather than to further important social relationships. Rapid means of transportation have given a regional area with a radius of from forty to a hundred miles, the unity that London and Hampstead had before the coming of the underground railroad. But the activities of small children are still bounded by a walking distance of about a quarter of a mile; and for men to congregate freely and frequently in neighbourhoods the maximum distance means nothing, although it may properly define the area served for a selective minority by a university, a central reference library, or a completely equipped hospital. The area of potential urban settlement has beat vastly increased by the motor car and the airplane; but the necessity for solid contiguous growth, for the purposes of intercourse, has in turn been lessened by the telephone and the radio. In the Middle Ages a distance of less than a half a mile from the city’s center usually defined in utmost limits The block by block accretion of the big city, along its corridor avenues, is in all important respects a denial of the vastly Improved type of urban grouping that our fresh inventions have brought in. For all occasional types of intercourse, the region is the unit of social life but the region cannot function effectively, as a well-knit unit, if the entire area is densely filled with people - since their very presence will clog its arteries of traffic and congest is social facilities.

Limitations on size, density and area are absolutely necessary to effective social intercourse; and they are

therefore the most important instruments of rational economic and civic planning, The unwillingness in the past to establish such limits has been due mainly to two factors: the assumption that all upward changes in magnitude were signs of progress and automatically ‘good for business,’ and the belief that such limitations were essentially arbitrary, in that they proposed to ‘decrease economic opportunity-that is, opportunity for profiting by congestion -and to halt the inevitable course of change. Both these objections are superstitious.

Limitations on height are now common in American cities; drastic limitations on density are the rule in all municipal housing estates in England: that which could not be done has been done. Such limitations do not obviously limit the population Itself: they rarely give the planner and administrator the opportunity to multiply the number of centers in which the population is housed, instead of permitting a few existing centers to aggrandize themselves on a monopolistic pattern. These limitations an necessary to break up the functionsless, hypertrophied urban masses of the past. Under this mode of planning, the planner proposes to replace the ‘mononucleated city,’ at Professor Warm; Thompson has called it, with a new type of “poly-nucleated city,” in which a cluster of communities, adequately spaced and bounded, shall do duty for the badly organized mass city. Twenty such cities, in a region whose environment and whose resources were adequately planed, would have all the benefits of a metropolis that held a million people, without its ponderous disabilities its capital frozen into unprofitable utilities, and in land values congealed at levels that stand in the way of effective adaptation to new needs.

Mark the change that is in process today. The emerging sources of power, transport, and communication do not follow the old highway network at all. Giant power strides ova the hills, ignoring

the limitations of wheeled vehicles: the airplane, even more liberated, flies over swamp and mountains, and terminates its journey, not on an avenue, but in a field. Even the highway for fast motor transportation abandons the pattern of the horseand-buggy era. The new highways, like those of New Jersey and Westchester, to mention only examples drawn locally, are based more or less on a system definitively formulated by Benton MacKaye in his various papers on the Townless Highway.

The most complete plans form an independent highway network, isolated both from the adjacent countryside and the towns that they bypass; as free from communal encroachments as the railroad system in such a network no single motet will, like the metropolis of old, become the focal point of all regional advantages: on the contrary, the ‘whole region’ becomes open for settlement.

Even without intelligent public control, the likelihood is that within the next generation this dissociation and decentralization of urban facilities will go even farther. The ‘Townless Highway begets the Highwayless Town in which the needs of close and continuous human association on all levels will be uppermost. This is just the opposite of the earlier mechanocentric picture of Roadtown, as pictured by Edgar Chambless and the Spanish projectors of the Linear city. For the highwayless town is based upon the notion of effective zoning of functions through initial public design, rather than by blind legal ordinances. It is a town in which the various functional parts of the structure are isolated topographically as urban islands, appropriately designed lot their specific use with no attempt to provide a uniform plan of the same general pattern for the industrial, the commercial, the domestic, and civic parts.

The first systematic sketch of this type of town was made by Messrs.

Wright and Sean In their design for Radburn in 1929; a new type of plan that was repeated on a limited wide - and apparently in complete independence - by planners in Koln and Hambug at about the same time. Because of restrictions on design that favoured a conventional type of suburban house and state architectural forms, the implications of this new type of planning were nor carried very far in Radbum. But in outline the main relationships an clear: the differentiation of foot traffic from wheeled traffic in independent systems, the insulation of residence quarters from through roads; the discontinuous assets pattern; the polarization of social life in specially spotted civic nuclei, beginning in the neighbourhood with the school and the playground and the swimming pool. This type of planning was carried to a logical conclusion in perhaps the most functional and most socially intelligent of all Le Corbusier’ many urban plans: that for Nemours in North Africa, in 1934.

Through these convergent efforts, the principles of the poly-nucleated city have been well established. Such plans must result in a fuller opportunity for the primary group, with all its habits of frequent direct meeting and face to face intercourse: they must also result in a more complicated pattern and a more comprehensive life for the region, for this geographic area can only now, for the first time, be treated as an instantaneous whole for all the functions of social existence. Instead of trusting to the mere massing of population to produce the necessary social concentration and social drama, we must now seek these results through deliberate local nucleation and a finer regional articulation. The words are jargon; but the importance of their meaning should not be missed. To embody these new possibilities in city life, which come to us not merely through better technical organization but through acute sociological understanding, and to dramatize the activities themselves in appropriate individual and urban structure forms the task of the coming generation.~

ARTICLE REVIEW

The article is an attempt by the writer to describe what a city is with respect to its social, cultural and economic aspects. It also focuses on the unidentified problems, their causes and fundamental propositions about the city planning to create an improved and efficiency functioning city.

The writer initiates by criticizing the town planners for having a poor perception and understanding of the social functions of the city. He inculpates them for deriving the functions from a hasty survey and not contemplating other factors. He then mentions different definitions of a city as a social institution by philosophers like Aristotle, Plato, Robert Owen and Elizabeth London following by his own impression of a city as a collection of primary and purposive associations of family, neighborhood, lifestyle and socioeconomic factors. He compares the functioning of a city to a theatre with

social drama. The art, politics and education contribute to this drama. He also addresses the citizens for personal disintegration and need for re-integration for wider participation as the city creates opportunities through a special framework to reflect their interests, aptitudes, discrimination and selections.

The article further unfolds towards the importance of physical organizations like industries, markets and lines of communication and traffic. The writer brings forth his concern about the social aspects like organs of government and education (schools, libraries, theatres and community centers) not being treated as an essential element while laying down the outlines of an integrated city. He then questions the factors considered while deciding the desirable size of a city. He states that the size should depend on the social relationships to be served and opportunities offered by the city.

According to the writer, limitations on size, density and area are necessary for effective social intercourse. The following could not be achieved or implemented due to assumptions like verticality is a sign of progress and such limitations decrease economic opportunities. These limitations encourage planners and administrators to break through the monopolistic pattern.

The writer then describes the applications and advantages of well connected transport network and talks about a unified plan for the city considering factors like industries, infrastructure, transport and sewage. He also mentions a systematic sketch by Messers. Wright and Stein made such a town whose plans may result in further opportunities for primary concepts. He concludes by pleading for sociological understanding with technical organization.

Five new cities but zero new ideas. What a capital shame!

By Gautam Bhatia

Source: Times Of India

It is hard to understand the Indian obsession with new capital cities. Since Independence, five states have chosen to build capitals at unimaginable expense, hardship to farmers and at a colossal waste of material resource, energy and manpower. Nowhere in the world do countries build whole cities from scratch when all that is required is a place to conduct the affairs of government. Countries that were born out of the breakup of Yugoslavia merely moved their capitals to places that had a long history and enough space to accommodate government functions. Zagreb became the capital of Croatia, Sarajevo of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Slovakia, born out of Czechoslovakia in 1993, shifted its capital to the medieval

town of Bratislava, while the Czech Republic retained Prague. The 2011 split of Sudan turned the county government of Juba into a national capital for South Sudan, without expense or fuss. If countries can accommodate their capitals within existing cities, why do Indian states insist on constructing new ones? After the division with Telangana, try asking a state like Andhra to adopt a small town or village for its administrative needs, and all hell will break loose. Chandigarh as the first, was understandable. Between Nehru and Le Corbusier, the city was not just a capital for Punjab, but an urban symbol for the new India. That the job was awarded to an artist, was part of the risk Nehru took in the hope that the product

would be altogether original, and not conform to tried and tested formulas. Since then, Gandhinagar, and New Bhubaneshwar were drawn in the lazy repeat of Western planning models — endless stretches of forlorn buildings bathed in dust, but conceived on paper as English garden cities. The most recent such experiment at Naya Raipur, the new capital for Chhattisgarh, demonstrates outmoded planning ideas at a monumental scale. Built over 8,000 hectares that displaced over 40 villages, the bloated exercise of state expenditure and land grab — despite newer models of land pools — was a shameful criminal act.

Image 01

Proposed planning for Amravati Source: www.avenue.in

Sixty years after Chandigarh, shouldn’t state governments be constructing models of thrift that demonstrate altogether new forms of governance?

Yesterday Naya Raipur, today Amravati. The Andhra government has staked out its planned territorial intent right at the beginning, proposing secretariats, offices, housing and public structures in the most desirable locations. The undemocratic nature of this first stage of design is in sharp — and ironic — contrast to the entirely democratic and uncontrolled free-forall when the city eventually opens its gates to migrants. Still, the gigantic effort is not without its problems. Besides agitation by angry farmers, missing land records and a site untested for long-term habitation, the cumbersome procedure that involved chief ministers, bureaucrats and foreign architects has quickly descended into farce. Ideals of

planning have had to be realigned to suit ancient beliefs of vaastu; the foreigners were entirely unaware that structures in Andhra could not be approached from the north-east; at the insistence of the chief minister, a ‘Kuchipudi’ bridge will also be built on the river to reflect Andhra culture; the wholly traditional structure would ironically be designed by a Chinese firm. If the ridiculousness of multiple cultural and technical collaborations makes you laugh, the statistics of expense and logistics will make you cry. Twelve million people are expected to move into a city built on 218 square km of land at an expense of one trillion rupees.

Because of the physical atrophy of most cities, their state of utter dereliction and despair, the Indian heart lives in perpetual hope that something new and shining, something wholly unIndian, may still be possible. So the messages are always filled with

stock phrases: sustainable ecoconscious design, green concept, mixed-use neighbourhood, peoplefriendly technology, solar energy, wind farms, smart-city, world class, iconic..

How do you even begin to apply this cascade of borrowed and untested pretensions to vague, unmade places? What would it take to get India’s new capitals to downsize? Can in fact state governments reconsider their standard call for elaborate structures — of the kind the Mughals and the British built — to places humbler? Sadly, in the seven states that have been added by subtraction into the Union, none has seen the capital as a potential for new ideas. Without an innovative model of the city, handing over large chunks of disputed land to foreign designers is the ultimate sign of hopelessness and despair. ~

Gautam Bhatia is a Delhi based architect who is startled by the Indian obsession with new capital cities. He is addressing the unthoughtful approach of the government for building new capital cities at colossal expenses, hardship to common man and waste of resources, energy and manpower. He highlights the fact that five states in India have already chosen to build capitals whereas other countries just move their capitals to places with historical importance and enough space to accommodate all the functions. According to the writer, the city of Chandigarh as a capital for Punjab can be justified as it was an urban symbol of new India. But Gandhinagar and New Bhubaneshwar are unreasonable efforts to imitate western planning models. He upholds his argument

by explaining the drawbacks in the planning of Naya Raipur, also known as, Amravati. The writer senses irony, in creating a city over 8000 hectares by displacing 40 villages, incorporating vaastu in a design by foreigners and constructing traditional structures designed by Chinese firms.

The writer thinks that people live in a perpetual hope of something new and un-Indian but are deceived by phrases like sustainable, mixeduse neighborhood, people friendly technology, smart city etc. He concludes by expressing despair for lack of innovation in the city model.~

Image 02 Conceptual plan of Chandigarh by Le Corbusier

Source: www.image. slidesharecdn.com

Our commitment to the commonwealth

By Gautam Bhatia

Source: The Indian Express

01

city’s long-term legacy. Who are the real beneficiaries of these continual interventions? Those who need the upgrade of living standards? Or those who need the convenience of a flyover?

It is an image few forget: an opening day ceremony with Rajasthani dancers: turbaned men and choliclad women, painted faces from Kerala, Vedic chanting as diyas float on an artificial lake. An old culture, captivating the new ones from Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Yet when the games begin another India takes over. At the Games Village the shower issues puffs of air; the stadium entrance lies unpaved; during the evening high diving event the lights short circuit; the diver peers down into the darkness hoping there is water in the pool. Meanwhile athletes move about the city, caught in traffic jams, victims — like its citizens — of mismanagement, incompetence, and a civic apathy they have learned to recognise as truly Indian.

From the very outset the Commonwealth Games project was

Image 01

The opening ceremony for Commonwealth Games 2010 at Delhi, India Source: www.wordpress.com

mired in risk and controversy. Unable to locate suitable land, buildings were sited in far flung areas of the city, sometimes on the flood-prone Yamuna, some within heritage zones. Naturally, connections between facilities so spread out needed due consideration. An 800-crore tunnel link between the games village and Nehru Stadium was proposed under Humayun’s Tomb; it was rejected by the Archaeological Survey of India. Then a raised highway link was suggested along other monuments in Nizamuddin. Its alignment was duly struck down by the Delhi Urban Arts Commission. In the last few years the congested city, teeming with history, has been under siege by the CPWD, the Metro and the other agencies on the Commonwealth bandwagon. Flyovers, metro stations, new roads, tunnels, underpasses and bus lanes, the daily torment to its residents has raised a larger question about the

conditions within it— its lack of services, sidewalks, tree cover or public life — many have summoned the will to save Delhi from further ruin. Environmental groups raised doubts about the proposals and the dubious intentions of its agents. Public protests were staged against the cutting of trees; PILs were filed against roads endangering forests; reports on riverbed ecology and flood planning were issued. The idea was not to convert the city into a two-week sporting event, but to save Delhi for its permanent residents. At the time the Commonwealth Games were awarded to Delhi, the 2010 World Cup of Football went to Johannesburg. If ever there was a parallel between places, it was between the two cities. Lacking infrastructure, set in an urban sprawl, high crime, a racist town plan filled with elitist malls and unsightly tenements, a description of the South African city could well describe India’s capital. Yet in the four years that Johannesburg has set about readying itself for 2010, it has enacted monumental changes: the parks departments’ plantation drive has greened the entire town, even creating plantations on wasteland. New roads, parks and housing have replaced many of Soweto’s tin shacks. In an effort to correct the inequality of its housing divisions, businesses and restaurants have sprouted in the inner city. The ten billion dollar upgrade may have

originally been granted for a two week sporting event, but its effect is being felt much beyond the playing field.

By comparison, Delhi’s preparations border on the lackadaisical and the absurd. A recent survey categorically placed 13 of the 19 sports venues under construction to be seriously mismanaged and flawed. Incomplete plans and construction delays have put not just the building quality in doubt, but also risk projects being finished on time. With more than 40 per cent of the work remaining in some of the key training venues — athletics, swimming, weightlifting, tennis — and most already overbudget, the government has long since given up hope of earning revenues from the games. Then why host the games at all? India would doubtless be a commendable host to the world conference on religions, but how

does a country with no sporting ability, no genuine feel for sport and few training facilities host an event of international dimensions? Would Sweden host the world Kabbadi Championships? Doesn’t the host have an obligation to actively participate?

Such trivial philosopthical questions are of little concern to a government transfixed by fears of losing the games altogether. Given the current state of delays, the panic that the games may be moved out of Delhi to a more seasoned host is now well and truly justified. In the corridors of power, where large-scale construction projects are squalid with graft, this would be the ultimate national humiliation. Doubtless there would be questions in Parliament. But with bids for the 2024 Olympic city starting up, they too would be quickly forgotten. ~

02

Image 02 Games village in Delhi constructed for Commonwealth

Source: www.mgfcommonwealtvillage.com

ARTICLE REVIEW

The writer commences the article describing the memorable day of the Commonwealth Games’ opening ceremony. It the old culture of the country which draws attention of the people arrived from various continents to participate in the games. But when the games began, this image of India transformed into a non-functional and problematic India creating chaos during the games.

The writer supports his argument by mentioning that the shower issues puffs of air, the stadium entrance lies unpaved and during the evening high diving event the lights short circuit.

The people have to have unending traffic jams, mismanagement and incompetence just like the citizens.

According to the writer Commonwealth Games project was mired in risk and controversy. The facilities were spread out as the buildings were situated in far flung

areas of the city due to unavailability of suitable land in the city. This lead to proposal like- an 800-crore tunnel link between the games village and Nehru Stadium under Humayun’s Tomb, risking the architecture of the great monument. After its rejection a highway link was proposed.

The city and its residents have undergone torment due to continuous construction and expansion of flyovers, metro stations, new roads, tunnels, underpasses and bus lanes raising the question of who are the real beneficiaries of these continual interventions- Those who need the upgrade of living standards or those who need the convenience of a flyover? The writer brings into light the initiatives taken by people to save the city from further ruin despite its lack of services, sidewalks, tree cover or public life.

The article further unfolds towards a comparison between two cities Delhi and Johannesberg which were chosen to host the Commonwealth Games and the World cup for Footbal respectively. He draws parallels like lacking infrastructure, set in an urban sprawl, high crime, a racist town plan filled with elitist malls and unsightly tenements. Yet in four years, Johannesburg has been able to create a city not only suitable to host the event but also provides future opportunities for its residents. Whereas Delhi has failed to achieve the same.

The writer concludes the article by questioning whether the country hosting the event should have participation in the activity or not. Also hosting the event in the fear of losing it completely may lead to ultimate national humiliation. ~

ARTICLE Why Don’t the Rest of Us Like the Buildings the Architect Like?

By Robert Campbell

Source: Informal talk was given at the House of the Academy on April 2, 2004.

Perhaps I should enlarge a bit on Jim Carroll’s gracious introduction. Besides being an architecture critic, I’m also an architect, and was part of the client team that built the Academy’s House many years ago. Since then, I’ve done a fair amount of that kind of work. I’ve been an architectural advisor to the Boston Symphony for more than twenty years now. I’m currently doing similar work for the Gardner Museum.

I was working in a Cambridge architectural office called Sert, Jackson & Associates when I started writing for The Boston Globe. I started writing for the Globe because I went to a party in the Riverside neighbourhood of Cambridge. Brendan Gill, another

journalist with a strong interest in architecture, used to say, “Everything happens at parties.” It’s true: I ran into a friend at this party and he said, “Oh, River-side is such a pleasant little neighbourhood–treeshaded streets, and small houses, and all that–except for those three ugly concrete towers that Harvard has just built.”

Well, those three towers were part of Peabody Terrace, a group of apartments for graduate students on the bank of the Charles River in Cambridge. My firm had designed those towers, although I wasn’t involved in them.

Peabody Terrace is a building beloved by architects and disliked

by almost everyone else. It is built of raw concrete, relieved by accents of brightly coloured panels and white balconies. It won a national Honour Award from the American Institute of Architects. The senior partner in the architectural firm won the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, the highest U.S. accolade for architects. And the firm won the Firm Award of the American Institute of Architects.

No building could have had more praise heaped upon it by the architectural community than Peabody Terrace. It’s still greatly admired by architects, including myself. But more or less everybody else did, and does, hate it. That encounter at the party was a wakeup

call for me. I said to myself, for the first time, consciously, “Nobody likes what we’re doing.” And so I started writing. The first article I ever wrote for the Globe was about that party, that comment, and that building. And ever since then, I think I’ve been trying to build a bridge of mutual understanding between the larger culture and the subculture of architects.

I should perhaps say a word in defence of Pea-body Terrace. It does have a number of qualities. First, it is porous to the neighbourhood. When he designed it, Josep Lluis Sert said that he didn’t want it to be like Dunster House and the other Harvard houses, which created a barrier between the neighbourhood and the Charles River. And, in fact, you can walk through Peabody Terrace. What Sert didn’t foresee is that the people in the neighbourhood would act as if they’re wearing electronic dog collars. When they step onto Harvard land, they feel uncomfortable.

Second, it’s a much denser development than anything around it, but it steps down in height to match the heights of lower buildings along the street. The towers are in the center; at the edges, Peabody Terrace comes down to the scale of the neighbourhood. I don’t think it’s over-whelming. The towers are very slim.

And the whole complex is ingeniously organized. There’s a corridor only on every third floor, which means that the apartments above and below the corridor run all the way through the building, so that you can enjoy ventilation and views in both directions. And the corridors are lined with windows. They’re not the usual so-called double-loaded corridors, running in darkness down the middle of the building. The balconies double as ½re escapes: Sert was particularly pleased by that because he realized that if there were a budget problem, nobody would be able to cut the balconies. The pattern of balconies, sunshades, and brightly coloured, operable panels, set against the

It’s easy to invent new shapes. Children do it all the time. So do cartoonists. What’s hard is to give those shapes and forms any meaning.

raw concrete of the walls, makes for a very rich façade in the modernist manner. Sert loved Paris and liked to talk about it as “elephants and parrots”: long greyish buildings enlivened, at street level, by the bright colour accents of the shops and cafes. Peabody Terrace is inventive and fun; to me, it seems to handle the issues of scale–of putting a big building in a small place–very well. But its architectural language remains, for most people, unfamiliar and offensive.

What I’m going to do now is synopsize a talk that I gave at the Boston Public Library a couple of months ago. I called it “Memory and Invention.” I like the phrase because of its assonance. “Memory and Invention”–the rhyming “e” is the memory that lurks within invention. All art and all periods must work within this spectrum. There is always memory. There is always invention. The question is the relation-ship between the two. The tension between them is where the energy comes from.

There is no energy in architecture if it is only a memory of the past. There is no energy if it is only invention. And I find as a critic of architecture writing for the Globe, for a general news-paper, that the connection between memory and invention has been severed in our culture. The readers who send me email fall into one of two groups. Either they hate modernism and love everything old–and that’s by far the majority–or they think it’s boring to imitate the past, and they want everything to be new and daring and experimental. I call them the “rads” and the “trads”–the radicals and the tradition-lists, the “pastists” and the “futurists.” They need each other. They are equal and opposite. They live in each other’s eyes. If one were to disappear, the

other would have to disappear too. They need each other just as the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. needed each other to define who they were during the Cold War.

The trads want everything to look beautiful. That is to say, they want it to look like the buildings of the past they have learned and been conditioned to love. Picasso pointed out, as others have, that anything new is ugly. Our perception of what is beautiful is a learned response. Some-one has noted that there is no record of anyone having said that the Alps were beautiful until the eighteenth century. Until then, the Alps were dangerous and frightening. But a taste for the sublime came in and made them beautiful. A new response was formulated and learned.

The rads among my readers take the opposite view. They can’t believe that citizens of Boston are building imitations of nineteenth-century architecture, wrapped in thick blankets of red brick and topped with hats of phony mansard roofs, all in an attempt to “½t into” a historic neighbourhood. Why can’t we live in our own time, they say. Or better yet, why can’t we live in the future? Why can’t we use computers to make groovy new shapes–there must be some more contemporary new term than groovy: awesome new shapes–that will broadcast our daring, our boldness, our march into the future. We’ve seen examples of that in recent months in the many idiotic proposals by famous architects for the World Trade Center site.

Here’s my main point. The rads and the trads are the same. They’re much more like each other than they are different. That’s because they both seek to substitute a utopia of another time for the time we actually live in. The trads find utopia in the past; the rads find it in the future. The utopia of the trads is a world of beaten copper and weathered wood and small paned windows and genteel manners. It is a world that, of course, never quite existed. It is a false utopia, a fiction about the past created by the present.

The utopia of the rads, by contrast, is a fiction about the future. This is avant-gardism, the curse of the twentieth century in my opinion. Going back to Hegel and Marx, this view judges the value of anything by its novelty, by whether it’s helping to bring into existence a future that is struggling to be born. This kind of futurism expresses itself in the work of my architecture students as a love affair with the unpredictable shapes and collisions they can generate on their computers. You see buildings now that look like an abandoned game of Pick-up-Sticks. The architect of some of those has just won the Pritzker Prize, the highest international award in architecture. Or they may look like inflated muffins that didn’t rise quite properly in the oven. That’s called “blob architecture”–bio-morphic shapes. Or they may look like frozen explosions. Avant-gardism usually rides on some new wrinkle of technology, whether it’s the speeding cars of the Italian futurists in the early twentieth century, or the public health and hygiene movement that underlay so much of early modernism. Now it’s computers.

What both the rads and the trads ignore, in their love of utopias of the past and the future, is the present. They both try to elbow aside the real world we live in and substitute a world of another era. It’s a lot easier to design a utopia than to deal with the complex reality of a present time and place. You don’t have to deal with the tension between memory and invention. You just take one or the other. If you do that, you inevitably create architecture that is thin, bloodless, weak, and boring. An example of bad trad is the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia by Robert Stern–a kind of cardboard model of Thomas Jefferson blown up like an inflated Michelin Man. All memory and no invention. An example of bad rad would be Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project in Seattle, which is little more than a meaningless freeform sculpture that jumped off a computer screen. Its shapes appear arbitrary and thus lack meaning and

significance: it’s all invention and no memory.

The dirty secret of avant-garde architecture is that it’s easy to invent new shapes. Children do it all the time. So do cartoonists. What’s hard is to give those shapes and forms any meaning. You can’t do that without referring them to some kind of tradition. You can say, I’m within the tradition and I’m innovating within it. You can say, I’m breaking out of the tradition. But if there isn’t a tradition, your forms lack an Essential frame of reference.

I’ve spent my life as a critic trying to bridge the rad-trad gap. I’ve failed so far and I think it’s getting worse. So my influence has probably been negative.

I want to give you a couple of quotes–I love to quote people more eloquent than myself. This is from J. M. Richards, a great British architectural scholar and critic:

Architecture cannot progress by the fits and starts that a succession of revolutionary ideas involves. Nor, if it exists perpetually in a state of revolution, will it achieve any kind of publicfollowing,sincepublicinterest thrives on a capacity to admire what is already familiar and a need to label and classify.

I think he got that exactly right. If you think of a teenager learning for the first time about baseball or rock music, that’s how you move into any new subject, by admiring what’s familiar and by labelling and classifying.

Lewis Mumford said that what he valued in architecture is what he valued in life itself: “Balance, variety, and an insurgent spontaneity.” But you can’t have insurgent spontaneity unless there is some stable frame against which to be insurgent.

Here is a contrasting quote from another architectural theorist, Charles Jencks:

The architect proceeds as the avant-garde does in any battle, as a

provocateur. He saps the edges of taste, undermines the conventional boundaries, assaults the thresholds of respectability, and shocks the psychic stability of the past by introducingthenew,thestrange,the exotic, and the erotic.

I’m so tired of that kind of-language. Every time I pick up an art magazine I read that the latest artist is “challenging my preconceptions.” What the artists and the editors don’t realize is that my only remaining preconception about art is that my preconceptions will be challenged. Where do you go from there?

My own definition of architecture is simpler: Architecture is the art of making places. Places can be corridors or rooms. They can be streets and squares. They can be gardens and campuses. These are all places for human habitation. Architecture is not primarily an art of self-expression, nor is it primarily an intellectual activity. Buildings are not dramatic sculptures or amazing site installations. They exist to create places. And you appreciate a work of architecture in only one way, by inhabiting it. It is an art, but it is not an art of painting or sculpture. You can’t appreciate it like a painting, by looking at it. You can’t appreciate it like a sculpture, by walking around it. You must inhabit it. You don’t have to do that physically with your body; you can do it with your imagination. You can look at a building and see a window and imagine yourself inside looking out and imaginatively inhabit that building. That is how you experience architecture.

It’s interesting that people have no problems with the contemporary or avant-garde designs of their cars or their sound systems. Those things come and go in our lives. Of architecture we ask, I think, that it provide us with re-assurance of stability, that it not change too quickly.

Kenneth Frampton, another great architectural historian at Columbia, once compared the Italian futurists and their love of fast automobiles with architecture in our own time:

Nowonceagain[asatthetimeofthe futurists] we live in an age in which speed and cybernetic disposability areadvancedastheorderoftheday. But it must be seriously questioned whether speed and ephemerality ever had anything to do with architecture. And further,whether architecture is not, to the contrary, an essentially anachronistic form of art whose fundamental task is to standagainstthefungibilityofthings and the mortality of the species.

I think we have to accept the fact that architecture, like any other language, like the English language, is a language of conventions. We don’t write poetry in Esperanto because no-body would understand it. If we invent a new architectural language–and it was the architect Charles Moore who said that “modernist architects designed in Esperanto”–we are separating ourselves from the larger culture. Conventions are arbitrary. A blue rug could perfectly well be a red rug in some other language. The language, the terms, are entirely arbitrary.

Creativity in the absence of convention is a meaningless concept. When Robert Frost said, “For me, writing free verse would be like playing tennis without a net,” he was saying, “With-out a net and a court and a book of rules, how would I know whether I had made a good shot?”–without iambic pentameter, without some tradition, without some framing. Another favourite quote is from Erik Erikson: “Play needs firm limits, then free movement within those limits.” You need both those things. Or as Van Quine, a professor of philosophy at Harvard, once said: “We cannot halt the change of language, but we can drag our feet.”

Going back to the tension between memory and invention. I lived in Lowell House at Harvard for three years, and I’ve never been able to persuade myself that it would have been better if Walter Gropius had come to Harvard ten years earlier than he did and insisted that all the houses be modern. The conventional language did reinforce a sense of

place and of time at Harvard, just as does the conventional language of all those little red Veritas emblems. Harvard is a stage set, just as is any city. Now it is so into its brand image–red brick, Georgian, all that kind of iconic imagery–that every time Harvard renovates the Faculty Club, it looks older.

At Princeton, the board of trustees and its planners have divided the campus into four quad-rants. The old part of the campus is brand-image Princeton, where they’re building a Gothic Revival dorm. Princeton existed for 150 years be-fore it ever did any Gothic Revival; that didn’t come along until about 1900. Gothic Revival was seen as the Anglophile tradition that America should be following, instead of all those other foreign things. That’s brand-image Prince-ton. Then they’re doing another quadrant that opens to the future with buildings by Frank Gehry and other current stars. So at Princeton, the rad-trad conflict is now immortalized by stylistic zoning. It’s a new invention.

I’d like to add another point about architecture and the university. Very often, architects build for their peer group, and the hell with the rest of the world. I think that some of my fellow architecture critics–for example Herb Muschamp at The New York Times who is brilliant in many ways–believe that architecture is something that is practiced by fifty people around the world for an audience of maybe three thousand. I don’t see how you can make that case about architecture when we all have to live in it and experience it; it’s got to be part of our lives. This kind of error happens, I believe, partly be-cause architecture schools, which are a new invention–the first one was at mit in the 1880s– are in universities. University professors

of architecture tend to believe, falsely, that architecture is primarily an intellectual activity, just like, say, philosophy. They dream up totally unreadable theories. I don’t know what the poor kids do when they come to school to study architecture and run into some kind of buzz-saw verbiage like this:

Acoherentanddifferentiatedspecial paradigm overlays both the natural andhistoricaldeterminationofplaces and the homogeneous construction of modern space. Such changes in the nature of contemporary space giverisetothereplacementofalong lastingepistemologyofconservative systems by non-isolated complex models that approach reality as an unstable set of vaguely delimited locations crossed by flows of energy and matter.

That’s a quote from the prospectus of a prominent school of architecture. If you read it over ten times, you can sort of figure out what the author is trying to say, but he has no idea how to say it. Why would someone write this way? I think you all know as well as I do: to send smoke signals to your peers in other places. These bizarre words are tokens that tell everybody that you’re in the same in-group that they’re in, a kind of international cult of appreciators.

I want to say a bit about architecture critics. You may ask yourself, why are there architecture critics? Other critics are consumer guides, telling you whether to buy a ticket. Nobody buys a ticket to see a new building, unless it’s a very heavily hyped art museum. Architecture critics merely try to stimulate a conversation about how we should build our world.

I think architecture critics go wrong when they behave like other critics. The experience of works of art other than architecture is normally a framed experience. When you look at a painting, you see it in a frame. It is framed off in space. When you go to a movie, it begins and ends. It is framed off in time. Buildings, however, are framed neither in time nor in space.

Is it the image or the house that is the end product of the design process? I believe you have to say it’s the image. The house becomes merely a means to the image.

They exist in a relatively stable relation to their spatial context, especially the context of other buildings. And they exist indefinitely in time.

What makes this easier to understand is that this used to be true of painting too. Before the Renaissance, a painting always existed in some permanent relationship to time and space. It was an altarpiece, or it was a mural, or it was something that was locked into a particular place and had the purpose not of being an art-work to be appreciated, but that of explaining the meaning of Christianity or whatever else. Then it dawned on someone in the Renaissance that you could take the painting off the wall, frame it, sign it, and send it out into the market-place where it could be sold. Painting changed forever. Now you could talk about an Ucello or a Kandinsky as a commodity, as a brand-name

product. What I’m arguing is that the same thing has happened to architecture. It has become frameable and signable. We’ve found a way to rip the building out of its context in time and space. And that, of course, is the result of the arrival of photography and other visual media. Photography is the removal of context. You can’t define it any better than that. A photograph of a work of architecture frames it off from the world and freezes it at a single moment in time; it frames it in both time and in space.

We now live in a media culture so pervasive that we barely notice it. It is a world of framed visual images in our magazines, on our screens, and increasingly in our imaginations. We have come, therefore, to think of buildings as we think of paintings, not as existing in a specific time and place but in the worldwide stream of images.

ARTICLE REVIEW

Campbell starts the talk with introducing himself and work done by him as an architect and a writer. He narrates the incident using dialogues that forced him to write architecture, description of a part has been mentioned in his speech where he met a friend from whom he got to learn how unpleasant an architectural marvel was to the public. These buildings Peabody Terrace, were designed by his firm and he realizes how a building is adored by architects is not liked by everyone else. He proves that by naming the awards that the building brought to the firm but still people at parties complain about those buildings. He quotes “Nobody likes what we’re doing” and that’s how he started writing.

Next he names few qualities of the building i.e., step down height to match the neighborhood, well lit corridors on front façade, balconies doubling as fire escapes; and how

the architect Josep Lluis Sert created a blend between the Charles river and the neighborhood through the building. He compares the people in neighborhood as the ones wearing “electric dog collars” as they are very uncomfortable as soon as they step out of their neighborhoods. He expresses his likeness for the building but has valid points for people’s dislike as well.

He talks about the speech that he gave at Boston Library earlier. He has given a name to his talk, “Memory and Invention” and the reason for that being the ‘e’ syllable in both the words ‘memory’ and ‘invention’. Campbell has his opinions on the phrase, the relationship between these two words is what he feels is necessary for all art and all periods. Memory or invention alone cannot create energy. He tells that majority of his readers who write to him hate modernism and love old things and some want everything new.

A building that always reminds me of the change brought about by photography is a house that I’ve never seen (and nobody I know has ever seen it) by Richard Meier, called the Smith House in Darien, Connecticut. Every architect of my generation knows the Smith House be-cause of the famous colour photographs by the great photographer Ezra Stoller. Here is the question: is it the image or the house that is the end product of the design process? I believe you have to say that it’s the image. The house be-comes merely a means to the image. The image is a far more potent and influential presence in world culture. Once that’s realized, architects begin to design with an eye to the eventual photograph, an eye to the media world, not the physical world. But I’m wandering off my topic. ~

He then differentiates his readers into 2 categories i.e., the ‘trads’ who hate modernism and love everything old, and the ‘rads’ who think its boring to imitate the past and want everything to be new. The writer describes them as equal and opposite forces who need each other. They are more like each other than they are different. That’s because they both seek to substitute a utopia of another time for the time we actually live in. The trads find utopia in the past; the rads find it in the future.

The writer wants a combination of past and the future in the presents. He supports his words by criticising a building from rad and one from trad. He says its easy to design shapes for futurist architecture but they dont mean anything without tradition. The writer started with a question but subsequently deviated from the topic.

ARTICLE Pedagogical Tradition in Architecture

Architecture is where form, space, place, time, experience, context, art, technology and society are integrated. The profession influences changes in technology, globalization, sustainability, society, economy etc. Hence the students of architecture should be cultured not only with technical acquaintance but should be equipped with soft skills, design aids and moral and ethical values.

The term architectural education means different things to different people and each person approaches the design or teaches the design based on his/her set of ideologies and beliefs which are distinct from others. The current academic system for architectural education depends on student-teacher relations and repetition exercises or on the technical and systematic knowledge of drawings and software. The studio becomes the main medium and the conversation between student and the teacher is the only means of his education. The student learns by doing. However the critique conversation which follows in the form of a jury or a discussion may be misinterpreted by students and result in anger, hurt feelings or resistance. On the other

hand, many students get dependent on their tutors and make progress only after approval and guidance for their projects. Therefore, it can be easily stated that there is nearly no theory of design pedagogy and also very limited number of educational experiments. This type of setup for architectural education results in lack of students’ taking responsibility and possession of the project. The students are deprived of self confidence and make no further efforts or take initiatives for the projects. The teachers become slothful and ignorant about their contribution to the education system and use previously fabricated work to teach as a pedagogical tradition. The learning outcomes of this model are questionable.

Pedagogy in architecture is based on the principles of motivation, exposition, criticism and imitation. The blend of these in the right proportions leads to a flexible academic system where there is progress of every individual on the basis of their respective capabilities. This can be implemented by allowing the students to select anyone of four teachers that are appointed to the studio. However the student will be obliged to receive criticism

from all four of them during the design problem. The teachers can overview the projects together and suggest different design approaches to the students. The following will eliminate the pairing of student with a single tutor which creates a barrier in creating the students’ own architectural approach and a studio and team culture will be achieved. With this new technique, the student will take the responsibility of his/ her project and would share his/ her project not when the teacher asked for it but when it is ready. The outcome will be studio is an open environment giving opportunities to the student to make choices, experiment and learn with the support of the teacher’s guidance.

Instead of criticizing and finding solutions to the existing pedagogical traditions, efforts should be made to practice experimental education approaches and analyze the response of students and teachers to improvise the results.

“A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.” – Frank Llyod Wright.

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