TA: Karthik Nakkana-TATheorising Architectural Production
The studio will examine the relationship between construction practices and the materiality of architectural works in different cities of India in the early 20 century. Through an analysis of making, students will explore how the materiality of an architectural work provides insights into its conception and the various influences that shaped architectural production in that period.
We will begin a detailed study of the construction of individual buildings represented using wall sections. Each building will be read as a primary historical resource and will be studied as a physical object. Construction processes will be traced through archival drawings where available, from interviews with selected practitioners, and through careful extrapolation of contemporary processes that have clear continuity with the past. The aim of this process will be to investigate the relationships between the construction processes and material qualities of a building. This process could be seen as analogous to that of understanding the qualities of a literary work through the identification and consideration of the specific structures of its language.
Studio Unit
In studio HR4000 we analyse the construction of individual buildings and consider the implications of such analysis for wider historical discourse. We seek to understand how a detailed knowledge of how buildings were made, can open new perspectives onto histories written from more distanced perspectives or more abstract viewpoints; corroborating, expanding and challenging the histories already written.
Module 1: In the first module of the semester we use drawing as a pedagogic device, introducing a novel type: the 1:5 scale sectional perspective. These drawings are hybrids which enable the relation between the making of a building and its materiality to be experienced at something close to real scale. We see drawing as an analytical process and the key to finding points of engagement with a building.
Module 2: The second module is an extended reading seminar designed to introduce frameworks in which to contextualise ideas emerging from the process of drawing. Three themes this semester were global modernity, Indian architectural histories and construction histories.
Module 3: The outcome of the studio is a proposal for a research grant, in which students articulate larger projects capable of more fully critiquing the openings offered by their detailed knowledge of individual buildings in the context of established histories.
