Our entire journey that is life is made up of a zillion moments; instances; accrued.
Every instance, a byte stored somewhere in the nuclei of our mind.
When these instances and their experience are combined with an emotion, they become a memory. When we recall these memories of our experiences, we call it nostalgia.
Our lives are all interconnected one to another; animate to inanimate; into one large universe of everyone's memories, making all of our histories into one, in a manner of speaking.
We build subconsciously, on this palimpsest of historicities, an architecture upon an architecture, building upon a building, where instances are borne as we experience them in some environment; in a place, in a space. Moreover, to make these instances pleasurable, we must build beautiful places and spaces.
But our lives, whilst an accrual of instances are defined by nuances; unspoken words, body language, a closed fist , a flutter, a gesture, a breadth, a tone, a glint in the eye; an indication- a nuance.
An architecture of nuances:
Monumentality represents power. However, what of the power of fragility?
The studio intends to look at the architecture of nuances, of the subtle tectonics that make the spatial experience beautiful, resilient, and powerful.
Studio Unit
The studio began with a recollection of memories from childhood and connotations of space attached to it. The students drew our various abstract drawings extracting experience from these memory narratives. They also dismantled old objects to make new queer objects and form that in some sense related to these memories.
The students were asked to pick a site within the city of their choice or on its periphery. The sites had strong urban context or a historical context around it making the site a starting point to make an argument for its planning and then for the architectural insert. The students devised a larger strategy for the site and then studied immediate context to derive a program for the urban insert they were eventually asked to make.
Subsequent exercise included studying the nuances on site. Studying texture, light, density, air, wind, smell, a larger poetic that we often ignore in an attempt at being pragmatic. A variety of form models were then explored from the objects made earlier to develop a strong responsive form for the architecture on site
The projects were developed through a rigorous method of model making and drawing options through hand. This lent a method of constant making and negating to move forward. The students made architecture that was sensitive, responsive, logical, sustainable and most importantly beautiful in their own sense.
The projects were also explorative of a variety of representational styles to explain the nuances incorporated in the architecture. Drawing experiences through the building and spaces was one such tool.
