Teaching Design

When Ms. Rashmi Baluja, one of my students from MIT, Aurangabad, and now a design teacher, posted a topic on her facebook page titled "What is the importance of Design in Teaching architecture" I could not resist the urge to reply that Architectural education is all about design. I have very high regards for Rashmi - she was one of my brightest students once, and I could not understand why somebody like her in her right mind should put so obvious a question as a topic for discussion.

I then realised that what is obvious to me may not be so in other peoples' eyes. In fact I have not seen teachers in schools of architecture taking any great effort to relate their subjects to design in any way. So if Design is the core subject in architecture, it is probably only the people who made the syllabus (and, of course, the COA) who know this.

And then there are problem with the teaching of design itself. The problem is that we are trying to convert the process of design exclusively into some kind of craft - by taking up basic design, trying to analyse shapes & forms and so on. I have seen many good teachers engrossed in this, sincerely hoping that they are creating the proper foundation for architectural design. I have seen them later frustated by the fact that none of these exercises translate into architectual design in the third & fourth year.

Why should this happen? Is not architecture about for interesting forms & spaces? We all seem to presume that the students have an innate desire to create beautiful spaces, and our job is only to streamline that. But on an everyday basis, I have seen that the students seem to be totally confused as to what is expected of them in the design studio.

The issue is much deeper than the simplistic thinking done presently. Some of the visiting teachers come to the design studio with an idea that their job is only to comment on what is wrong in the design - as if that would somehow make the student better in design. There are others who discuss only the functional issues and building bye-laws and so on, so much so that in a design studio, all the design solutions eventually develop like variations of a singular theme. And then these same teachers complain that the students do not have any originality.

The third approach, giving space to students and relying on their initiative (an experiment I did in the first few years at MIT) has not worked for me, as most of the students (with many activities outside the college) just loiter around, doing nothing, and then try to finish the job hastily in the last few weeks of the term.

How does one go about solving this issue?

I think we can take a cue from other creative disciplines like art. In an art school, you have to teach the students how to hold a brush, the colour wheel and the history of art and so on - but when it comes to a fresh new subject for a painting, the student will respond by creating exactly what he understands about the world around him.

I was going through a lecture on TED by Thelma Golden, an african-american curator of a museum wherein she described how art expanded her vision of the world - in fact that is the ultimate purpose of art in my opinion.

A creative artist is not somebody who knows how to paint, but also what to paint and to do that he has to interpret the world - and create his version of the world as he understands it. He must know his context and must be able to analyse it and put forward his impressions. This can not happen if the artist lives by himself in a ghetto of his making.

This is exactly what is happening to the students of architecture today. Architectural education has become very costly, not everybody can afford it. Those who do, most probably were sepearted from their fellow beings at the stage of kindergarten, going through a very elite schooling till they came to architecture, and their worldview is limited to what can be seen on the TV & the internet.

I am not blaming anybody here, I am just stating a fact. What we need to do is to give exposure of the real world to all these students - India in fact is a great place when it comes to originality in design. But we need to understand our world and try to interpret it - that is how design originates.

So the stress in the design studio must be on the understanding of the issue by the students and his interpretation in text form - a medium we seem to have forgotten in architecture. But about this I think I should delve in in the next blog.