Pedagogy on Making
Studios at the
School of Environment and Architecture
Note on pedagogy :
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The intent of the studio is to identify the shifts in the use of material in the process of object and space making. Its cultural and scientific relevance in the act of engaging with materials. What would be the new contexts that we are dealing with? What does the newness offer?The act of making a material as compared to the act of procuring a material, the resource context differs here, and hence the production of form is investigated in this studio. The maker and the skill that parallels science and scale of industrial production in today's context collapsing the intent of form and its production into processes that shift from the current default of imagination of matter and form. Architectural form, material and labour are all at a convergent point that think together and operate to work in assemblies and apparatuses of material and formal productions. Smaller groups of students take part in this course that generates a community of makers and not just experimental projects, as a knowledge group that shares and makes and imagines material form and making techniques.
Technological Sensorium
The most evocative examples in architectural history are those that demonstrate a unique balance between spatial and technological economies, where both “work out” each other in meaningful and desired ways. Intimate interdependencies between the structural and spatial aspects of an architectural endeavour produce distinct environments that are not simply functional but technological artefacts in themselves. In more recent building processes, however, there is a tendency that the container and its support infrastructure share a master-slave relationship, alienating these two aspects from each other. These have resulted in imagining the (building) envelope and its (resultant) sensation separately, producing a schism in techno-sensorial dimension which was once held together in the artefact of the building. In order to address the above schism, as well as to further explore the techno-spatial and sensorial possibilities that may be explored within building envelopes, this course works through three ideas / propositions:
1. Building as an apparatus - How can the apparatus that produces the building thus, be integrated as well as emphasized within the schema of its formal construct and spatial experience more meaningfully?
2. Phenomena as environment - Can the body be programmed in space and time in a way to experience the rhythms of phenomena not just for comfort, but also for curiosity of experience?
3. Space as sensorium - How can a building sensorium allow us to experience and interpret the environment around us afresh helping towards its critical appraisal?
This course draws attention to the act of mediation of phenomena through the building as an apparatus, and how it may allow us to conceive new typologies in order to become critically curious about the environment around us.
