Sunday, December 04, 2005

Architecture..architect...neither.

When I first heard this term from my mama after torturing him "un office'la yaaru first?" (better understood as "who holds the top position in your construction company?"), I never had a slightest clue that I would be one myself six years from then.

For the first three years we were vaguely familiarising the past and presence of architecture, then on there was a heavy dis-orientation about future.there were many theorists both in my class and at the broader scale my school, who played with form / function metrics. or most designs would be geometric with tesselation of such forms.

For some reason I was never, a favorite as resultant of my disinterest towards passion of such forms and their abstract ideology behind such compositions. so why should the design be complex? why should they be inspirations from design magazines or ching book? why cant you have an obtuse design? or why should it have a concept at the first place when you have a functionality requirement defined?

when you are unable to accept the fact that architecture is complex as perceived, you start to believe that architecture has existed without architects and will exist so.. interest becomes directly proportional to future.

So came late submissions (we were blatant enough to write a sorry note to Maam for being late at one of the submission), no shows for team meetings(even after threatenings of impact on peer grading), negative enthu(when professor rides U51 on a topic, think about gazing at the ceiling fan wondering when it was last cleaned) , lack of seriousness (when the whole class is petrified doing a timed design examination, me and my friend walked down to the lecturer asking a break for canteen) were our popular trademarks that led to a neo thought among fellow architects, "ithellam ennatha panna poguthu"

Stereotypically good schools ail from chronic conservative syndrome. mine was no exception. If your elevation (facade) is blunt and plan is a jumble of rectangles + circles you can be sure to secure an 'E' grade unless you have a talking mouth.

And then we had this prof. who made us derive the end design from free thinking. there was one such project where we had to choose a topic of neo/modern arch and design a space of our choice. He let me design "architecture for blind" where me and my friend, designed a gallery for a popular IT giant and the blackout space inside the gallery treated blind and others as same. the space was differentiated using other senses like touch and feel, sound, fragrance etc. we came up with a never-even-been-able-to-model kinda design.

At the end of the fifth year at school, came the thesis, the opus maximus at school. i took up designing smart space at an IT corridor in bangalore. after 6 months of repeated reviews and crits, when i boasted my space to have intelligent capability of self disaster recovery, performance-safe-auditoria with robotic dampers and asymetric planes, livable space with energy conservative frame, the external crit architect who smirked all the way through my explanation, put up this question...

"athellam sari'pa. intha building sewer tank dimensions ennappa?" (all that is fine boy, what are the sewer tank dimensions?)

Now I work as a software engineer.

1 Comments:

Blogger Arjun.C.N said...

hehehe...

nice post... but i cant believe u did architecture n working in software.

i had been maintaining a low profile for long... just caught up with my blogs. Will update it soon... keep visiting!!!

3:01 AM, December 15, 2005  

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